Designing Minds

David Orr

As homo sapiens’s entry in any intergalactic design competition, industrial civilization would be tossed out at the qualifying round. It doesn't fit. It won't last. The scale is wrong. And even its apologists admit that it is not very pretty. The design failures of industrially/ technologically driven societies are manifest in the loss of diversity of all kinds, destabilization of the earth's biogeochemical cycles, pollution, soil erosion, ugliness, poverty, injustice, social decay, and economic instability.

Industrial civilization, of course, was not designed at all; it simply happened. Those who made it happen were mostly single-minded men and women innocent of any knowledge of what can be called the "ecological design arts," by which I mean the set of perceptual and analytical abilities, ecological wisdom, and practical wherewithal essential to making things that "fit" in a world of trees, microbes, rivers, animals, bugs, and small children. In other words, ecological design is the careful meshing of human purposes with the larger patterns and flows of the natural world and the study of those patterns and flows to inform human purposes.

Ecological design competence means maximizing resource and energy efficiency, taking advantage of the free services of nature, recycling wastes, making ecologically smarter things, and educating ecologically smarter people. It means incorporating intelligence about how nature works, what David Wann (1990) called "biologic," into the way we think, design, build, and live. Design applies to the making of nearly everything that directly or indirectly requires energy and materials or governs their use, including farms, houses, communities, neighborhoods, cities, transportation systems, technologies, economies, and energy policies. When human artifacts and systems are well designed, they are in harmony with the larger patterns in which they are embedded. When poorly designed, they undermine those larger patterns, creating pollution, higher costs, social stress in the name of a spurious and short-run economizing. Bad design is not simply an engineering problem, although better engineering would often help. Its roots go deeper.

Good design, begins as Wendell Berry (1987) stated, by asking, "What is here? What will nature permit us to do here? What will nature help us to do here?" (p. 146). Good design everywhere has certain common characteristics including the following:

* right scale,

* simplicity,

* efficient use of resources,

* a close fit between means and ends,

* durability,

* redundance, and

* resilience.

Good design also solves more than one problem at a time. They are often place specific or, in John Todd's words, "elegant solutions predicated on the uniqueness of place." Good design promotes

· human competence instead of addiction and dependence,

· efficient and frugal use of resources,

· sound regional economies, and

· social resilience.

Where good design becomes part of the social fabric at all levels, unanticipated positive side effects (synergies) multiply. When people fail to design carefully, lovingly, and competently, unwanted side effects and disasters multiply.

By the evidence of pollution, violence, social decay, and waste all around us, we have designed things badly. Why? There are, I think, three primary reasons. The first is that while energy and land were cheap and the world relatively "empty," we simply did not have to master the discipline of good design. We developed extensive rather than intensive economies. Accordingly, cities sprawled, wastes were dumped into rivers or landfills, farmers wore out one farm and moved on to another, houses and automobiles got bigger and less efficient, and whole forests were converted into junk mail and Kleenex. Meanwhile, the know-how necessary to a frugal, well-designed, intensive economy declined and words like realistic or convenience became synonymous with habits of waste.

Second, design intelligence fails when greed, narrow self-interest, and individualism take over. Good design is a community process requiring people who know and value the positive things that bring them together and hold them together. Old-order Amish farmers, for example, refuse to buy combines not because they would not make things easier or more profitable but because they would undermine community by depriving people of the opportunity to help their neighbors. This is pound wise and penny foolish the way intelligent design should be. In contrast, American cities with their extremes of poverty and opulence are products. of people who believe that they have little in common with other people. Suspicion, greed, and fear undermine good community and good design alike.

Third, poor design results from poorly equipped minds. Good design can only be done by people who understand harmony, patterns, and systems. Good design requires a breadth of view that leads people to ask how human artifacts and purposes "fit" within the immediate locality and within the region. Industrial cleverness, however, is mostly evident in the minutiae of things, not in their totality or in their overall harmony. Moreover, good design uses nature as a standard and so requires ecological intelligence, by which I mean a broad and intimate familiarity with how nature works. For all of the recent interest in environment and ecology, this kind of knowledge, which is a product of both local experience and stable culture, is fast disappearing.

As an example of this kind of knowledge, George Sturt (1984), one of the last wheelwrights in England, described in The Wheelwright's Shop what he called "the age-long effort of Englishmen to fit themselves close and ever closer into England." Sturt built wagons crafted to fit the buyer's particular habits, needs, and topography. To do so, he needed to know a great deal about how his customers used a wagon, whether they drove fast or slow, whether their land was rocky or wet, and what they hauled. As a result,

we got curiously intimate with the peculiar needs of the neighborhood. In farm-waggon or dung-cart, barley-roller, plough, water barrel, or what not, the dimensions we chose, the curves we followed, were imposed upon us the nature of the soil in this or that farm, the gradient of this or that hill, the temper of this or that customer or his choice perhaps in horseflesh.

Furthermore, the wheelwright needed to know what kinds of trees gave particular parts extra strength, or flexibility, or weight, where these trees grew, and when they were ready to harvest. And finally he needed to know the traditions and skills unique to his craft that were passed down as folk knowledge:

What we had to do was to live up to the local wisdom of our kind; to follow the customs, and work to the measurements, which had been tested and corrected long before our time in every village shop all across the country.

The kind of mind that could design and build a good wagon depended a great deal on time-tested knowledge and intimate familiarity with place. The results were wagons that fit particular people and a particular landscape.

A contemporary example of ecological design can be found in John Todd's "living machines," which are carefully orchestrated ensembles of plants, aquatic animals, technology, solar energy, and high-tech materials to purify wastewater, but without the expense, energy use, and chemical hazards of conventional sewage treatment technology. According to Todd (1991),

People accustomed to seeing mechanical moving parts, to experiencing the noise or exhaust of internal combustion engines or the silent geometry of electronic devices, often have difficulty imagining living machines. Complex life forms, housed within strange light-receptive structures, are at once familiar and bizarre. They are both garden and machine. They are alive yet framed and contained in vessels built of novel materials.... Living machines bring people and nature together in a fundamentally radical and transformative way. (pp. 335-343)

Todd has created several working examples of living machines, each resembling a greenhouse filled with exotic plants and aquatic animals. Wastewater enters at one end; purified water leaves at the other. In between, the work of sequestering heavy metals in plant tissues, detoxifying toxics, and removing nutrients has been done by biological systems driven by sunlight. A decade earlier he designed and built structures that similarly used aquatic systems to process waste, grow food, and store heat. Living machines and biologic imply changes in the way we process wastewater, grow food, and build houses and in the ways we integrate

these and other functions into systems patterned after natural processes to do what industrial technology can only do expensively and destructively.

Ecological design also applies to the design of governments and public policies. Governmental planning and regulation require large and often ineffective or counterproductive bureaucracies. Design, in contrast, means

the attempt to produce the outcome by establishing the criteria to govern the operations of the process so that the desired result will occur more or less automatically without further human intervention. (Ophuls, 1977, pp. 228-229)

In other words, well-designed policies and laws get the macro things right like prices, taxes, and incentives while preserving a high degree of micro freedom in how people and institutions respond. Design focuses on the structure of problems as opposed to their coefficients. For example, the Clean Air Act of 1970 required car manufacturers to install catalytic converters to remove air pollutants. Twenty-two years later emissions per vehicle are down substantially, but with more cars on the road, air quality is about the same. A design approach to transportation would lead us to think more about creating access between housing, schools, jobs, and recreation that eliminate the need to move lots of people and materials over long distances. A design approach would have led us to reduce dependence on automobiles by building better public transit systems, restoring railroads, and creating bike trails and walkways. A design approach would also lead us to rethink the use of urban land and to reintegrate agriculture and wilderness into urban areas.

The Liberal and the Ecological Design Arts

Ecological design requires the ability to comprehend patterns that connect, which means getting beyond the boxes we call disciplines to see things in their ecological context. It requires, in other words, a liberal education, but nearly everywhere the liberal arts have tended to become more specialized and narrow. Design competence requires the integration of firsthand experience and practical competence with theoretical knowledge, but the liberal arts have become more abstract, fragmented, and remote from lived reality. Design competence requires us to be students of the natural world, but the study of nature is being displaced by the effort to engineer nature to fit the economy instead of the other way around. Finally, design competence requires the ability to inquire deeply into the purposes and consequences of things to know what is worth doing and what should not be done at all. But the ethical foundations of education have been diluted by the belief that values are relative. All of this is to say that from an ecological perspective the "liberal arts" have not been liberal enough. I think this is evident in four respects.

First, the liberal arts have not been liberal enough in their response to the rapid decline in the habitability of the earth. Global and national policy change are necessary but insufficient to reverse downward trends in the earth’s vital signs. It is also essential that we educate a citizen constituency that supports change and is competent to do the local work of rebuilding households, farms, institutions, communities, corporations, and economies that (1) do not emit carbon dioxide or other heat-trapping gases; (2) do not reduce biological diversity; (3) use energy, materials, and water with high efficiency; and (4) recycle wastes. In other words, a constituency that is capable of building economies that can be sustained without further reducing the earth's potential to sustain life. At a minimum this will require a modification of the skills, aptitudes, abilities, and curriculum by which we learned how to industrialize the earth.

Second, the liberal arts have come to mean an education largely divorced from practical competence. Inclusion of the ecological design arts in the liberal arts means bringing practical experience back into the curriculum in carefully conceived ways. The reasons, in Alfred North Whitehead's (1967) words, are straightforward: "First-hand knowledge is the ultimate basis of intellectual life. . . . the secondhandedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity"

(p. 51). In contrast to the distinction that John Henry Newman once drew between desirable and useful knowledge (Newman, 1982, pp. 84-88), Whitehead argued that there is a "reciprocal influence between brain activity and material creative activity" essential for good thinking. In other words, good thinking and practical experience are mutually necessary. Accordingly, he thought, "The disuse of hand-craft is a contributory cause to the brain-lethargy of aristocracies." J. Glenn Gray (1984) has argued similarly that the exclusion of manual skills from the liberal arts is dangerous "because it first divorces us from our own dispositions at the level where intellect and emotions fuse" (p. 85). Purely analytical and abstract thinking “separates us from our natural and human environment” (p. 85). Genuinely liberal education, in contrast, cultivates the full person, including manual competence and feeling as well as intellect.

Third, the liberal arts have come to include any number of fields, sub-fields, issues, and problems excepting those that are closest at hand in the local community. Inclusion of the ecological design arts suggests a symbiotic relation between learning and locality. Here, too, the reasons are part of an older tradition going back to John Dewey. In 1899 John Dewey wrote that "the school has been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary conditions and motives of life" that children cannot "get experience—the mother of all discipline" (Dewey, 1990, p. 17). His solution required integrating opportunities for students "to make, to do, to create, to produce" and ending the separation of theory and practice. Dewey proposed that the immediate vicinity of the school be a focus of education, including the study of food, clothing, shelter, and nature. Through the study of these things, students might learn "the measure of the beauty and order about him, and respect for real achievement." Gray (1984) has likewise argued that liberal education is "least dependent on formal instruction. It can be pursued in the kitchen, the workshop, on the ranch or farm" (p. 81). It can also be pursued through the study of energy, water, materials, food, and waste flows on the campus.

How can competence in the ecological design arts be taught within the conventional curriculum? There are at least two broad possibilities. The best, but most difficult, approach is to make over entire institutions so that their operations and resource flows (food, energy, water, materials, waste, and investments) become a laboratory for the study of ecological design. There is a strong case for doing this for economic as well as pedagogic reasons (Orr, 1990). A second possibility follows the suggestion of Herman Daly and John Cobb to establish separate centers or institutes within colleges and universities with the mission of fostering ecological design intelligence (Daly and Cobb, 1989 pp. 357-360). Ecological design arts centers, would aim to (1) develop a series of ecological design projects that involve students, faculty, and staff; (2) study institutional resource flows; (3) develop curriculum; and (4) carry out studies on environmental trends throughout the region. Ecological design projects could include, for example,

* design of a building with no outside energy sources, using locally available environmentally benign materials, that recycles all waste generated by occupants;

* development of a bioregional directory of building materials;

* inventory campus resource flows;

* restoration of a degraded ecosystem on or near the campus;

* design of a low-input, sustainable farm system;

* economic survey of resource and dollar flows in the regional economy; and

* design of solar aquatic wastewater systems for campus effluents.

The list could be easily extended, but the point is clear. The functions of ecological design institutes are (1) to equip young people with a basic understanding of systems and to develop habits of mind that seek out "patterns that connect" human and natural systems; (2) to teach young people the analytical skills necessary for thinking accurately about cause and effect; (3) to give students the practical competence necessary to solve local problems; and (4) to teach young people the habit of rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work.

Sources

Berry, W. 1987. Home Economics. San Francisco: North Point Press.

Daly, H., and Cobb, J. 1989. For the Common Good. Boston: Beacon Press.

Dewey, J. 1990. The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Originally work published 1899.)

Gray, J.G. 1984. Rethinking American Education. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Newman, J.H. 1982. The Idea of a University. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

Ophuls, W. 1977. Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

Orr, D. 1990. The Campus, the Liberal Arts, and the Biosphere. Harvard Educational Review 60, 2, pp. 205-206.

Sturt, G. 1984. The Wheelwright’s Shop. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1923).

Todd, J. 1991. Ecological Engineering, Living Machines and the Visionary Landscape. In C. Etnier and B. Guterstam, eds., Ecological Engineering for Wastewater Treatment. Gothenburg, Sweden: Boksgaden.

Wann, W. 1990. Biologic. Boulder: Johnson Publishing Co.

Whitehead, A.N. 1967. The Aims of Education. New York: Free Press.

“Designing Minds” is a chapter of Earth in Mind: On Education, the Environment and the Human Prospect [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1559634952/qid=1122463749/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-2493488-3229433?v=glance&s=books&n=507846] (Washington: Island Press, 2004). It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.