Ecological Design - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 357

that we need to create communities and places that resonate with our evolutionary past
and for which we have deep affection.
Fourth, for all of our considerable scientific advances, our knowledge of the Earth is
still minute relative to what we will need to know. Where are we? The short answer is
that despite all of our science, no one knows for certain. We inhabit the third planet out
from a fifth-rate star located in a backwater galaxy. We are the center of nothing that is
very obvious to the eye of science. We do not know whether the Earth is just dead matter
or whether it is, in some respects, alive. Nor do we know how forgiving the ecosphere
may be to human insults. Our knowledge of the flora and fauna of the Earth and the
ecological processes that link them together is small relative to all that might be known.
In some areas, in fact, knowledge is in retreat because it is no longer fashionable or
profitable. Our practical knowledge of particular places is often considerably less than
that of the native peoples we displaced. As a result, the average college graduate would
flunk even a cursory test on their local ecology, and stripped of technology most would
quickly founder.
To complicate things further, the advance of human knowledge is inescapably ironic.
Since the enlightenment, the goal of our science has been a more rational ordering of
human affairs in which cause and effect could be empirically determined and presumably
controlled. But something like the opposite has happened. After a century of promiscuous
chemistry, for example, who can say how the 100,000 chemicals in common use mix
in the ecosphere or how they might be implicated in declining sperm counts, or rising
cancer rates, or disappearing amphibians, or behavioral disorders? And having disrupted
global biogeochemical cycles, no one can say with assurance what the larger climatic
and ecological effects will be. Undaunted by our ignorance, we rush ahead to reengineer
the fabric of life on Earth! Maybe science will figure it all out, but I doubt it. We are
encountering the outer limits of social-ecological complexity in which cause and effect
are widely separated in space and time and in a growing number of cases no one can say
with certainty what causes what. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, every answer generated
by science gives rise to a dozen more questions, and every technological solution gives
rise to a dozen more problems. Rapid technological change intended to rationalize human
life tends to expand the domain of irrationality. At the end of the bloodiest century in
history, the enlightenment faith in human rationality seems overstated at best. But the
design implication is not less rationality but a more complete, humble, and ecologically
solvent rationality that works over the long term.
Who are we? Conceived in the image of God? Perhaps. But for the time being the most
that can be said with assurance is that, in an evolutionary perspective humans are a
precocious and unruly newcomer with a highly uncertain future. Where are we? Wherever
it is, it is a world full of irony and paradox, veiled in mystery. And for those purporting to
reweave the human presence in the world in a manner that is ecologically sustainable and
spiritually sustaining, the ancient idea that God (or the gods) mocks human intelligence
should never be far from our minds.
20.3 Ecological Design Principles
First, ecological design is not so much about how to make things as it is how to make
things that fit gracefully over long periods of time in a particular ecological, social, and