Ecological Design - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 359

convenience, and by what standards? In an age when everything seems to be possible,
who decides on the lines that should not be crossed? Where are the citizens or other
members of a biotic community who will be affected by the implementation of grandiose
and self-serving intentions? The answer is that they are now excluded. At the heart of the
issue of design, then, are procedural questions that have to do with politics, representa-
tion, and fairness.
Fourth, it follows that ecological design is not so much an individual art practiced by
individual “designers” as it is a community art that involves an ongoing negotiation
between the community and the ecology of particular places. Good design results in com-
munities in which feedback between action and subsequent correction is rapid, people are
held accountable for their actions, functional redundancy is high, and control is decentral-
ized. In a well-designed community, people would know quickly what's happening and
if they don't like it, they know who can be held accountable and can work to change it.
Such things are possible only where livelihood, food, fuel, and recreation are, to a great
extent, derived locally; when people have control over their own economies; and when
the pathologies of large-scale administration are mostly absent. Moreover, being situated
in a place for generations provides long memory of the place and hence of its ecological
possibilities and limits. There is a kind of long-term learning process that grows from the
intimate experience of a place over time.* Ecological design, then, is a large idea but is most
applicable at a relatively modest scale. The reason is not that smallness or locality has any
necessary virtue, but that human frailties limit what we are able to comprehend, foresee, as
well as the scope and consistency of our affections. No amount of smartness or technology
can dissolve any of these limits. The modern dilemma is that we find ourselves trapped
between the growing cleverness of our science and technology and our seeming incapacity
to act wisely.
Fifth, the standard for ecological design is neither efficiency nor productivity, but
health beginning with that of the soil and extending upward through plants, animals,
and people. It is impossible to impair health at any level without affecting that at other
levels. The etymology of the word health reveals its connection to other words such
as healing, wholeness, and holy. Ecological design is a healing art by which we aim to
restore and maintain the wholeness of the entire fabric of life increasingly fragmented by
specialization, scientific reductionism, and bureaucratic division. We now have armies
of specialists studying bits and pieces of the whole as if these were, in fact, separable.
In reality it is impossible to disconnect the threads that bind us into larger wholes up to
that one great community of the ecosphere. The environment outside us is also inside us.
We are connected to more things in more ways than we can ever count or comprehend.
The act of designing ecologically begins with the awareness that we can never entirely
fathom those connections and with the intent to faithfully honor what we cannot fully
comprehend and control. This means that ecological design must be done cautiously,
humbly, and reverently.
Sixth, ecological design is not reducible to a set of technical skills. It is anchored in the
faith that the world is not random but purposeful and stitched together from top to bottom
by a common set of rules. It is grounded in the belief that we are part of the larger order
of things and that we have an ancient obligation to act harmoniously within those larger
patterns. It grows from the awareness that we do not live by bread alone and that the
* George Sturt, once described this process in his native land as “The age-long effort of Englishmen to fit
themselves close and ever closer into England…” (Sturt, p. 66).