Ecological Design - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 360

effort to build a sustainable world must begin by designing one that first nourishes the
human spirit. Design, at its best, is a sacred art reflecting the faith that, in the end, if we live
faithfully and well, the world will not break our hearts.
Finally, the goal of ecological design is not a journey to some utopian destiny, but is
rather more like a homecoming. Philosopher, Suzanne Langer, once described the problem
in these words:
Most people have no home that is a symbol of their childhood, not even a definite mem-
ory of one place to serve that purpose. Many no longer know the language that was once
their mother-tongue. All old symbols are gone… the field of our unconscious symbolic
orientation is suddenly plowed up by the tremendous changes in the external world
and in the social order. 19
In other words, we are lost and must now find our way home again. For all of the techno-
logical accomplishments, the twentieth century was the most brutal and destructive era
in our short history. In the century ahead we must chart a different course that leads to
restoration, healing, and wholeness. Ecological design is a kind of navigation aid to help
us find our bearings again. And getting home means remaking the human presence in the
world in a way that honors ecology, evolution, human dignity, spirit, and the human need
for roots and connection.
20.4 Conclusion
Ecological design, then, involves far more than the application of instrumental reason and
advanced technology applied to the problems of shoehorning billions more of us into an
Earth already bulging at the seams with people. Humankind, as Abraham Heschel once
wrote, “will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation… what
we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.” 20 The ultimate object of ecological
design is not the things we make but rather the human mind and specifically its capacity
for wonder and appreciation.
The capacity of the mind for wonder, however, has been all but obliterated by the very
means by which we are passively provisioned with food, energy, materials, shelter, health-
care, entertainment, and by those that remove our voluminous wastes from sight and
mind. There is hardly anything in these industrial systems that fosters mindfulness or eco-
logical competence let alone a sense of wonder. To the contrary these systems are designed
to generate cash which has itself become an object of wonder and reverence. It is widely
supposed that formal education serves as some kind of antidote to this uniquely modern
form of barbarism. But conventional education, at its best, merely dilutes the tidal wave
of false and distracting information embedded in the infrastructure and processes of tech-
nopoly. However well intentioned, it cannot compete with the larger educational effects of
highways, shopping malls, supermarkets, urban sprawl, factory farms, agribusiness, huge
utilities, multinational corporations, and nonstop advertising. The lessons of these things
are human dominance, power, speed, accumulation, and self-indulgent individualism. We
may talk about how everything is ecologically connected, but the terrible simplifiers are
working overtime to take it all apart.