What
is Ecotecture?
continued...
By
contrast to natural systems, human systems have rarely been sustainable.
Nor have they had to. During most of humanity's tenancy on earth,
dating back to our origins in Africa several million years ago,
resources and space aplenty have been readily available. Starting
as tiny, wandering bands of hunter-gatherers, eventually settling
down to become small-scale farmers and finally establishing cities
and complex civilizations, humans have simply been able to take
what they needed for their sustenance and pleasure. The earth's
riches, relative to humanity's population and expectations, were
more than sufficient to provide not only for our survival but, as
we have become increasingly efficient at manipulating nature and
extracting her resources, for the doubling and redoubling of our
population to the point where we have occupied the entire planet
and become its dominant consumer.
During the entire course of our spread across the earth, we have
rarely bothered to replace or replenish any of the resources we
have used. In almost every instance, the means which humans have
thus far devised to provide their food, clothing, shelter, transportation,
and luxuries are dependent on a one-way flow of energy, materials,
and living substance from nature toward human society. Today, most
of the materials which humans do return to nature are true waste,
in the sense that they are either so degraded or concentrated that
they are toxic or that they will not biodegrade in a reasonable
length of time and simply pile up, hoarding their stored energy
rather than releasing it back into the environment for reuse. When,
as often happened, our exploitation of local resources ecologically
degraded an area to the point where it became uninhabitable, we
moved on. Now, there is nowhere left to run.
Nature, as we shall see, has evolved a much more sustainable survival
strategy of balancing its production and consumption by recirculating
resources within local ecosystems and throughout the biosphere,
or global ecosystem. In ecosystems there is no "waste," but only
the by-products of biological processes which, when they are expelled
by one organism, become the sustenance of another. Waste equals
food.
Although
the human strategy of providing for ourselves at the expense of
the planet's well being has generally worked until now, it is clear
that our ecological bank account has almost run out. It is said
that we have been living on the non renewable principle of nature's
savings account- guzzling oil, destroying forests, soils, and oceans-
rather than the renewable interest of biofuels and sustainable forestry,
fisheries and agriculture. Humanity's well being, and possibly our
survival, not to mention the survival of hundreds of thousands of
our kindred species, depends entirely on our ability to adopt nature's
sustainable ways and integrate our systems with hers. As human and
natural systems co-evolve toward full integration, the artificial,
perceptual distinction which has separated the two will fade, and
the recognition will grow that there is in fact but one planetary
ecosystem which includes humans among its many interrelating and
cooperating species.
How the integration of human and natural systems can be achieved
(particularly through the design or redesign of our habitation systems)
is the subject of this book. The vision of ecotecture- a world in
which humans dwell in sustainable harmony with nature- and the general
approach to manifesting that vision are discussed in this chapter.
As sustainability is the standard by which all human designs and
activities will be judged in the coming decades and centuries, we
will begin by inquiring into its nature.
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