Exploring the History of Ecological Design
Human ingenuity may make various inventions …
but it will never devise any invention more beautiful,
nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting and nothing is superfluous. — Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519 (in Schneider, 1995, p.189)
Much can be written on the history of ecologically conscious design. Human pre-history and history is full of examples of appropriate and of disastrous environmental management and resource use. The oldest written record of humanity is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a remnant of the Sumerian civilization, which inhabited the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia around 4000 BC.
The epic tells the story of a king defying the warning of the forest-god Humbaba and cutting down the sacred cedar forests of Lebanon in a vain project to build ever-bigger palaces in the ancient royal city of Ur. The result was the fall of a civilization and the fertile land between Euphrates and Tigris changed into the dry and barren landscape of modern Iraq.
The first surviving written message to posterity warns — in its own mythopoetical way — of the effects of bad design that ignores its context. King Gilgamesh cut down the forests and killed Humbaba. The result was a revenge of the gods or what modern science would explain by describing how deforestation alters regional climate by reducing the vegetation-driven local hydrological cycles and leads to down-wind desertification, soil erosion and salination (Hartmann, 1999, pp.85–86).
Despite ancient warnings like this — and humanity’s myths, sagas, and the world’s religious scriptures are full of them (see e.g. the work of Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Joseph Campbell, or Baird Callicott, 1994))- neither examples of sustainable (ecologically conscious) design nor unsustainable design that ignores natural, social, and cultural context are hard to find.
Human history provides numerous examples of localized civilizations outstripping their own resource base, which led to environmental catastrophes, wars for resources and ultimately the decline of those civilizations. First the Etruscans, then the Greeks and later the Romans, all contributed to the deforestation of North Africa and the Mediterranean coastlines — peaceful trading turned to aggressive imperialism and war, as resources declined.
But we don’t have to look to ancient history to find examples. The decades of conflict between Israel and Palestine have many historical and political causes, but most of the confrontation about the territories occupied by Israel is fundamentally about access to water supplies.
Likewise, the recent neo-imperialist wars of the current US administration in Afghanistan and Iraq are examples of the world’s most resource-hungry and oil-dependent nation asserting its right to secure access to resources by force. As long as the current resource gluttony of the USA, is an integral part of what George Bush senior referred to when he emphasized that “the American way of life is non negotiable,” then by implication an equitable, peaceful and sustainable future for humanity remains non-negotiable.
There is no point in deferring responsibility and demonising anybody or any nation. Most people in the, so-called, developed world are currently living above the planet’s ecological means. Gandhi was right, and still is, in emphasizing: “There is plenty to meet everybody’s need, but not enough to meet everybody’s greed.” A more sustainable civilization will have to be a more ecologically conscious civilization and this includes being a more socially equitable civilization.
It is a sign of bad, not sufficiently ecologically conscious design that the world’s most developed and economically powerful nations are putting the biggest strains on the world’s resources and planetary life support systems. The dominant life-style design in the industrial growth society is still dangerously disregarding ecological limits and contributing to the destruction of the planet’s life support system.
Through economic globalisation, such unsustainable life-style design has now been exported to the whole world. It is an ecological and planetary impossibility for all Chinese and Indians to live the life-style and follow the patterns of production and consumption of the average US American, British, or German citizen. [This is an excerpt from my 2006 PhD Thesis in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’. This research and 10 years of experience as an educator, consultant, activist, and expert in whole systems design and transformative innovation have led me to publish Designing Regenerative Cultures in May 2016.]
The transformation towards a sustainable and equitable human civilization will require global collaboration and important life-style changes for people everywhere. To maintain human, ecosystems and planetary health (and wealth) we need to fundamentally re-design life-styles in the developed world and enable people in the global North and South to meet their needs sustainably and equitably within the ecological limits of their local environment.
There are many historical and modern day examples of how human beings, all over the world, have managed to meet the needs of locally adapted, place-based communities within the limits of their local environment. Many traditional cultures prove that it is possible to sustain locally adapted, place-based communities for centuries and even millennia through prudent and ecologically and socially responsible resource management and sustainable ways to meet human needs within the limits and opportunities set by the natural conditions of their particular region.
Such ecologically conscious resource management and design practices have been employed by locally adapted cultures found on most continents. Traditional sustainable land management can be found in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Americas. For example, Joseph Needham, an expert on ancient China, explains:
In the Chinese worldview … the harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were part in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern, and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own nature. — Joseph Needham (in Capra, 1982, p.289)
This worldview places human beings and their designs within the holarchy of natural processes. It recognizes human design to be part of nature. When considered along evolutionary time- scales, human beings will not, in the long run be able to create things that are disruptive to natural process. Such cultures will ultimately not survive. Cultures that do survive in the long term succeed in adjusting their design strategies to the underlying natural process in which they participate. Nature’s own pattern of creation and transformation was referred to under the concept of Li in ancient China.
In its most ancient meaning, it [Li] signified the pattern of things, the markings of jade or fibre in muscle … It acquired the common dictionary meaning ‘principle’, but always conserved the undertone of ‘pattern’ … There is ‘law’ implicit in it, but this law is the law to which parts of wholes have to conform by the virtue of their very existence as parts of wholes … the most important thing about parts is that they have to fit precisely into place with the other parts in the whole organism they compose. — Joseph Needham (in Capra, 1982, pp.289–290)
To conform to the natural design principle, Li was to act in accordance with the true nature of things, in accordance with the Tao. Such a worldview, such meta-design principles, integrates human beings into the transforming holarchy of the self-sustaining and self-healing patterns of natural process. Aldo Leopold described a very similar kind of ecologically conscious meta-design exists in the cosmology of Native American tribes:
The implicit overall metaphysic of American Indian cultures locates human beings in a larger social as well as physical, environment. People belong not only to a human community, but a community of all nature as well. Existence in this larger society, just as existence in a family and tribal context, places people in an environment in which reciprocal responsibilities and mutual obligations are taken for granted and assumed without question or reflection. — Aldo Leopold (in Palmer, 2001, p.293).
Traditional cultures, their belief systems and place-based knowledge — their cultural meta- design — can teach us a lot about how to participate appropriately in natural process. Simply the existence of such cultures implies that exploitation, domination, and competition are not inevitable expressions of a pessimistically interpreted human nature. Traditional cultures provide a rich diversity of examples of humans in cooperative reciprocity with their natural environment. Tribes like the Hopi have been the human expressions of natural process in the territory they inhabit for approximately ten thousand years (Wahl, 2002b, p.93).
“The modern mind-set must integrate understanding of Indigenous peoples’ traditional relationship with the land in order to achieve long-term sustainability, not only for Native communities, but for everyone everywhere” (Cajete, 1999, p.vii).
Professor Gregory Cajete, of the Tewa tribe suggests: “Implied here is the essence of the conflict between worldviews: non- anthropocentric (Indigenous) versus anthropocentric (Western industrial). The former is grounded on the interconnectedness of humans with the land and natural forces in general, as well as with all other living creatures. In contrast, the latter tends to separate living creatures and nonorganic matter into hierarchies with humans at the centre or pinnacle of all” (Cajete, 1999, p.viii).
Cajete explains how, for Native people throughout the Americas, the relationship between humanity and nature was not one of separation but of participation. Human culture was the human expression of the local environment.
While the actual terms and concepts like ‘ecology’ and ‘design’ are admittedly part of the Western intellectual tradition, it is nevertheless evident that Native people had, and to some extent still have, a tradition of ecologically conscious design. Their design of artefacts and their patterns of production and consumption are aimed at appropriate participation in natural process and the maintenance of a healthy community within a healthy ecosystem.
The environment was not separate or divorced from Native peoples’ lives, but rather was the context or set of relationships that tied everything together. They understood ecology not as something apart from themselves or outside their intellectual reality, but rather as the very centre and generator of self- understanding. As a centre, that environmental understanding became the guiding mechanism for the ways in which they expressed themselves and their sense of sacredness (Cajete, 1999, p.6).
By ignoring the wisdom contained in traditional cultures of appropriate participation, humanity is trading the fleeting experience of possessing power over nature (in the form of modern science and technology) for the collective treasure of our ancestral wisdom of appropriate participation in nature. The diverse cultural, indigenous traditions of the world hold crucial knowledge of specific conditions of places over time, knowledge reflecting changes in the environmental variables of a particular place and of appropriate local adaptations to those changes.
As Christopher Day rightly points out: “Culture, though bounded with place, is handed down through living continuity. If generational links are broken, traditional practices no longer seem relevant” (Day, 2002, p.148). This is the great danger inherent in the loss of traditional knowledge and social community cohesion everywhere in the world.
David Orr emphasizes that traditional knowledge, rooted in local culture “is a source of community cohesion, a framework that explains the origins of things (cosmology), and provides the basis for preserving fertility, controlling pests, and conserving biological diversity …” (Orr, 1992, p.32). To illustrate, Orr refers to a study by Norgaard linking the loss of traditional knowledge directly to an increase in the rate of species extinction in a particular area.
Orr suggests that the growing un-sustainability of modern civilization has gone hand in hand with the loss of traditional, place-based and ecologically conscious design practices: “The crisis of sustainability has occurred only when and where … [the] union between knowledge, livelihood, and living has been broken and knowledge is used for the single purpose of increasing productivity” (Orr, 1992, p.32).
“Local knowledge is valuable because it is appropriate” (van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996,p.63). Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan argue that local knowledge is built up through the “steady process of cultural accretion,” which reflects the collective sum of individual experience with, for example, local soils, crops and weather. They suggest that this kind of knowledge is “an irreplaceable design resource,” since it represents the condensed knowledge of a diversity of people experiencing and adapting to environmental change over time — knowledge of place- specific constraints and possibilities (van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.64).
In a sense, ecological design is really just the unfolding of place through the hearts and minds of its inhabitants. It embraces the realization that needs can be met in the potentialities of the landscape and the skills already present in the community. Sustainability is embedded in processes that occur over very long periods of time and are not always visually obvious. … Without local knowledge, places erode (van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.65).
Traditional cultures all over the world, guided by worldviews that integrated them into nature and made the ecologically conscious, have co-evolved a wealth of knowledge and practical ways of appropriate participation in natural process that are delicately matched to their local environment. More often than not, we only begin to understand the subtlety of their designs once we have destroyed them, like in the example of the intricate irrigation systems on the island of Bali, which fell victim to attempts to improve their design — without ecological awareness — during the so-called ‘green revolution’ driven by trans-national agribusiness in the 1970s (see Jack-Todd & Todd, 1993).
It is often overconfidence in the ability and efficiency of modern technology and scientific solutions that promote such destruction of careful and subtle designs that have evolved over centuries. These ecologically conscious designs are so successfully matched to the scale — linking processes of the local place that in some cases, like the forest gardens of the Kogi, in Columbia, it is difficult to recognize that what seems to be virgin cloud forest is actually a productive agriculture system co-created by humans and their natural habitat (Wahl, 2002b, p.95).
Recent discoveries suggest that as much as 12% of the Amazon Rainforest may actually be a human made artefact. Indigenous tribes may have created an actively regenerating soil type, called ‘Terra preta’, that can return fertility to impoverished soils (Mann, 2002).
David Orr believes that traditional, place-based cultures, “without using the word ‘ecology,’ have designed with ecology in mind, because to do otherwise would bring ruin, famine, and social disintegration.” He argues: “Out of necessity they created harmony between intentions and the genius of a particular place that preserved diversity, both cultural and biological capital; utilized current solar income; created little or no waste; imposed few unaccounted costs; and supported cultural and social patterns” (Orr, 2002, p.9).
It is possible to be ecologically conscious without the use of the concept of ecology. A participatory awareness of fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence between the individual, the community and the natural cycles has led Native people all over the world to create ecologically conscious, place-based design.
For the majority of human history, human communities followed such locally adapted design practices that respected ecological limits. In the long run, failure to do so is a biological and evolutionary impossibility that leads straight to extinction.
The historic and still existing examples of traditional and indigenous design practices that are informed by a more ecologically conscious design process could fill many volumes over, but the prerequisite for accessing and revealing all this wealth of knowledge is to understand and admit that indigenous and traditional cultures have a lot to teach us in the transformation of modern humanity into a truly sustainable global civilization. Despite the undeniably impressive achievements of modernity, to refer to such cultures as ‘primitive’ is yet another manifestation of our industrial growth society’s short-sighted hubris.
The prime differences are that the ‘primitive’ people generally have more leisurely lives, less poverty, virtually no crime, … a more diverse healthy diet, less degenerative disease, better psychological health, and a culture which olds as its primary values cooperation (rather than competition), and equality (between people between sexes, and between human and nature) rather than power (Hartmann, 1999, p.153).
Clearly there are exceptions to the general description offered by Hartmann, and many ancient cultures have by now been eroded into poverty and alcoholism by the impact of colonialism and economic globalisation. Nobody is trying to create a picture of an idealized ‘golden’ past or suggesting a return to a previous chapter in human evolution.
Nevertheless there are important design lessons to be learned from traditional and indigenous cultures; and if they are integrated appropriately, modern science and technology will synergistically be applied along side the contribution of such traditional, place-based design wisdom.
To explore, in detail, examples of ecologically or environmentally conscious natural design expressed by the world’s indigenous cultures would certainly overextend the already substantial scope of this thesis. Obviously. there is a rich pattern of relationships and interactions to be explored with regard to the possible lessons that ecologically conscious design and local craft based traditions of manufacture offer to a re-thinking of modern product design.
This field of research has to await further exploration at a different time. Victor Papanek explored some design lessons based on his suggestion that the Inuit people, who had to adapt to a particularly resource limited environment in a taxing climate are “the best designers in the world” (Papanek, 1995, pp.224).
Scope not permitting, it is impossible to trace the rich tradition of ecologically conscious design through a detailed introduction of all its contributors, particularly within the context of the greatly expanded definition of design adopted in this thesis.
There is a rich tradition within the history of Western intellectual discourse over the last two and a half millennia of people who reminded their contemporaries of the importance of designing and acting in accordance with nature, and who emphasized fundamental interconnectedness and a holistic worldview.
Among the philosophical, spiritual and intellectual roots of this ecologically conscious, holistic vision of humanity’s relationship to natural process as a whole were amongst others: Heraclitus (c.500 BC); Virgil (70–19 BC); Saint Francis of Assisi (1181–1226); Hildegart von Bingen (1098–1179); Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1328); Leonard Da Vinci (1452–1519); Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677); Paracelsus (1493–1541); and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). To substantiate this claim with historical and scholarly evidence goes beyond this thesis. The idea of meta-design as cultural transformation based on changes in organizing ideas and worldview (see chapter one) clearly invites an investigation into a new kind of design history — a fruitful area for future research.
Especially during the course of the last two and a half centuries, partially in response to the increasing transformation of nature and society since the Industrial Revolution, an ever-richer pattern of voices heralding the emergence of the natural design movement can be found. Again, it pays to keep in mind Goethe’s admonition that any formulation of something new, always caries remnants of the old within it.
People and their ideas have to be placed within their cultural and historical context. It is thus possible that various of the people expressing early formulations of the ideas behind the natural design movement might have simultaneously held a number of other beliefs which now seem at odds with an ecological awareness and a more holistic point of view.
Among the people that would merit a more detailed investigation with regard to their work’s relevance to the history of the natural design movement, I would name the following: William Blake (1757–1827); William Wordsworth (1770–1850); John Claudius Loudon (1783- 1843); Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–82); Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862); John Ruskin (1819–1900); Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903); William Morris (1834–1896); Ernst von Haeckel (1834–1919); John Muir (1838–1914); Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1931); Nikola Tesla (1856–1943); Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925); Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941); Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959); Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948); Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958); Aldo Leopold (1887–1948); Richard Neutra (1892–1970); Lewis Mumford (1895–1990); R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983); Gregory Bateson (1904–1980); Rachel Carson (1907–1964); E.F. Schumacher (1911–1977); Ian L. McHarg (1920–2001); Frederick Vester (1925–2003); Victor Papanek (1927–1998); John Tillman Lyle (1934–1998); and Donella Meadows (1942- 2001).
This list only includes those people, who have passed on. There are a much larger number of very crucial contributors to the emerging ecological or natural design movement, who are fortunately still actively engaged in their life’s work of helping to give birth to a more sustainable and ecologically conscious human civilization. They are introduced throughout the course of this thesis.
Nor is the list above complete by any means. There are various important contributors mentioned in this thesis who are not specifically listed here. I have italicised those people whose influence on the formulation of a new and more ecologically conscious approach to design, I regard as particularly important. Five of them will be introduced in greater detail during the remainder of this subchapter; others are introduced in different chapters within the context of their specific contributions.
… [what follows are examples, which I have previously published as excerpts on Medium]
[This is an excerpt from my 2006 PhD Thesis in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’. This research and 10 years of experience as an educator, consultant, activist, and expert in whole systems design and transformative innovation have led me to publish Designing Regenerative Cultures in May 2016.]
