Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
environment, nurturing an ecological identity and literacy, and feeding the world
upon which we depend. The sensuous world of place is more interactive, immediate
and local than the world of inanimate machines. For McGinnis (1999: 75), we must
embrace 'home place', through sharing our abilities to unwrap and draw on the
inner expressions and experiences that expressively make up our cognitive maps of
place. Returning home requires a restoration of the self. For the UK Green Party
economist Molly Scott Cato (2012), it is about localization, self-reliance, land reform,
the abandonment of economic growth, the recovery of craft skills and the integration
of nature into economic thinking. For Berry (1990), it is about listening to the stories
of the land. For Sale (1991), it is replacing the globalized abstracts and intangibles
with the seen and felt, which can only be properly apprehended on a human scale.
And for Peter Berg, founder of the bioregionalist organization Planet Drum Foundation
and lead author of the Green City Program for San Francisco Bay Area Cities and
Towns (Berg
et al
., 1989), it is about putting regional and urban design on a natural
foundation, creating and enhancing a firm sense of place, local ecology, community,
culture and history through engagement, dialogue and participation. In 1986 repre-
sentatives from a wide variety of green groups met to develop proposals for an
overarching programme of changes that would have general appeal and which could
stop and reverse the increasing ecological deterioration of the Bay region. For
bioregionalists, our biggest challenge is to make cities sustainable, for city dwellers
to become nature seekers and creative urban pioneers. As Berg (1992) writes:
The first step towards reconceptualizing urban areas is to recognize that they
are all situated in local bioregions within which they can be made self-reliant
and sustainable. The unique soils, watersheds, native plants and animals, climate,
seasonal variations, and other natural characteristics that are present in the geo-
graphical life-place where a city is located constitute the basic context for securing
essential resources of food, water, energy and materials. For this to happen in a
sustainable way, cities must identify with and put themselves in balanced reciprocity
with natural systems. Not only do they have to find nearby sources to satisfy
basic human needs, but also to adapt those needs to local conditions. They must
maintain the natural features that still remain, and restore as many of those that
have been disrupted as possible. For example, restoring polluted bays, lakes or
rivers, so that they will once more be healthy habitats for aquatic life, can also
help make urban areas more self-reliant in producing food.
Traditional ecological knowledge: the wisdom of the elders
Increasingly, the cultures, spirituality and ways of knowing of aboriginal peoples
throughout the world are offering models showing that alternative ways of living
and being, more in tune with the Earth, are possible. For some, this appreciation is
a romantic longing for a world that the Western way of life has not so much lost
but wilfully destroyed. For others in affluent post-industrial, postmodern societies,
there is a rightful sense of guilt and shame. Many of those who take a more ecocentric
view are therefore becoming increasingly interested in traditional ecological knowledge
(TEK). The lives, cultures and well-being of many indigenous peoples have been
destroyed by the relentless search for raw materials, markets, power and dominance.
Part of the Western civilizing mission was aimed at deliberately disconnecting
