Ecological Design - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 358

cultural context. Industrial societies, in contrast, operate in the conviction that “if brute
force doesn't work you're not using enough of it.” But when humans have designed with
ecology in mind, there is greater harmony between intentions and the particular places in
which those intentions are played out that
Preserves diversity both cultural and biological
Utilizes current solar income
Creates little or no waste
Accounts for all costs
Respects larger cultural and social patterns
Second, ecological design is not just a smarter way to do the same old things or a way
to rationalize and sustain a rapacious, demoralizing, and unjust consumer culture. The
problem is not how to produce ecologically benign products for the consumer economy,
but how to make decent communities in which people grow to be responsible citizens
and whole people who do not confuse what they have with who they are. The larger
design challenge is to transform a society that promotes excess consumption and human
incompetence, concentrates power in too few hands, and destroys both people and land.
Ecological design ought to foster a revolution in our thinking that changes the kinds of
questions we ask from “how can we do the same old things more efficiently” to deeper
questions such as
Do we need it?
Is it ethical?
What impact does it have on the community?
Is it safe to make and use?
Is it fair?
Can it be repaired or reused?
What is the full cost over its expected lifetime?
Is there a cheaper and better way to do it?
The quality of design, in other words, is measured by the elegance with which we calibrate
means and worthy ends. In Wendell Berry's felicitous phrase, good design “solves for
pattern” thereby preserving the larger patterns of place and culture and sometimes this
means doing nothing at all. 17 In the words of John Todd, the aim is “elegant solutions
predicated on the uniqueness of place.”* Ecological design, then, is not simply a more
efficient way to accommodate desires as it is the improvement of desire and all of those
things that effect what we desire.
Third, ecological design is not apolitical, but is as much about politics and power as
it about ecology. We have good reason to question the large-scale plans to remodel the
planet that range from genetic engineers to the multinational timber companies. Should
a few be permitted to redesign the fabric of life on the Earth? Should others be permitted
to design machines smarter than we are that might someday find us to be an annoyance
and discard us? Who should decide how much of nature should be remodeled, for whose
* The phrase is John Todd's, see Todd and Todd. 18