Professor Lonnie Gamble | HandsOnCourseInSustainableTechnologies / David Orr Quote On Design Amish Quote

(Note form Lonnie - I was a student of David Orr in 1979 - He is head of the environmental science program at Oberlin College and the driving force behind the Adam Lewis center building. Designed in 1995, it is one of the first college buildings to "walk the talk" on environmental design.)

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

David W. Orr

Fourth, ecological design at all levels has to do with system structure, not the rates of change. The focus of ecological design is on systems and “patterns that connect” (Bateson 1979, 3-4). When we get the structure right, “the desired result will occur more or less automatically without further human intervention.” (Ophuls 1992, 288). Consider two different approaches to the need for mobility. The Amish communities described in chapter 4 are structured around the capacity of the horse, which serves to limit human mischief, economic costs, consumption, dependence on the outside, and ecological damage, while providing time for human sociability, sources of fertilizer, and the peace of mind that comes with unhurriedness. In the Amish culture, the horse is a solar-powered, self replicating, multifunctional structural solution that eliminates the need for continual management and regulation of people. Most of us are not about to become Amish, but we need to discover or own equivalent of the horse.

In the larger culture we expect laws and regulations to perform the same function, but they seldom do. The reason has to do with the fact that we tend to fiddle with particular symptoms rather than addressing structural causes for our problems. The Clean Air Act of 1970, for example, aimed to reduce pollution from auto emissions by attaching catalytic converters to each automobile- a coefficient solution. More than three decades later with more cars and more miles driven per car, even with the lower pollution per vehicle, air quality is little improved and traffic is worse than ever. The true costs of that system include the health and ecological effects of air pollution and oil spills, the lives lost in traffic accidents, the degradation of communities, an estimated $300 billion per year in subsidies for cars, parking and fuels, including the military costs of protecting our sources of imported oil, and the future costs of climate change. The result is a system that can only work expensively and destructively. A design solution to transportation, in contrast, would aim to change the structure of the system reducing our dependence on the automobile through the combination of high-speed rail service, light-rail urban trains, bike trails, and smarter urban design that reduced the need for transportation in the first place.

The same logic applies to the structures by which we provision ourselves with food, energy, water, and materials, and dispose of our waste. Much of our consumption, such as excessive packaging and preservatives in food, has been engineered into the system because of the requirements of long-distance transport. Some of our consumption is due to built in obsolescence designed to promote yet more consumption. Some of it, such as the purchase of deadbolt locks and handguns, is necessary to offset the loss of community cohesion and trust caused in no small part by the culture of consumption. Some of our consumption is dictated by urban sprawl that leads of overdependence on automobiles. We have, in short, created vastly expensive and destructive structures to do what could be done better locally with far less expense and consumption. Redesigning such structures means learning how politics, tax codes, regulations, building codes, zoning, and laws work and how they might be made to work to promote ecological resilience and human sanity.