Proceedings of the Third Biennial International Linear Parks Conference 1989 Appalachian Consortium Press Conference Presentation by Thomas Berry And Marnie Muller
Designing with the Whole Life Community in Mind,
Marnie Muller, Katuah Bioregional Journal, Marshall, North Carolina
The solely human-centered approach to design, in which the environment acts as inanimate backdrop to human activity, is no longer possible. It has resulted in the disruption of the wider life community of the planet and has begun threatening our entire biological life support system.
We are finally beginning to realize that we are part of the natural world, not apart from it. Advances in sciences are teaching us that we are literally in the planet, not on it, and that our human activities are intimately interwoven with the water cycle, the air cycle, the carbon cycle. We are beginning to realize that the ways we form our settlements, our transportation routes, our commerce, and other human functions not only affect human culture, but the whole ecological community of which we are a part.
At present, our contemporary capacity for acceleration and exponential growth has brought the question of human impact on the natural world out of the realm of "a nice thing to consider" in design and placed it squarely in front of us, as a question of survival. Yet, our ability to re-constellate our human systems in response to direct feedback falls short of what is required.
One consideration in understanding this dilemma is to realize that we as culture may not be fully registering the feedback we are receiving about the devastation of the planet. The information coming in may actually be outpacing our comprehension of it. It may also be that our perimeters of reality have become so limited that we are not fully "hearing" the natural world speak to us about this crucial information. Our insular urbanization, including concrete pathways, processed nutrition, and televised reality, may be blocking us from this information. We may simply be recording whatever is coming in as "noise" or "static" and may not, in fact, be fully noticing the drastic diminishment in quality of life.
What now? Those of us who are catching glimmers of the vibrant, functioning life community that surrounds us and co-exists with us need to revive our capacities to see, hear, taste, and feel beyond the "broadcasted" boundaries of the contemporary world. We need to discern what is superficial to our life-support system and what is elemental. We need to begin insisting on design models that describe to us the full reality of our situation—both human as well as ecological.
In our modeling we need to acknowledge natural boundaries, not just human- made boundaries, and to take into full account ecological systems such as watersheds, wind patterns, geological formations, etc. Our models need to integrate ecological principles such as entropy, renewal, biological exchange, carrying capacity, and appropriate scale. We need to be factoring in real costs of projects, not just the set "prices." Real costs include environmental considerations, health considerations, as well as cumulative effects and long-term consequences.
A primary aspect of the ecological model is circulation. Human routes need to be designed in the context of other kinds of routes and patterns of circulation. The water cycle, the air currents, even the Earth in its orbit and the moon in its orbit, all circulate and have a bearing on each other. Migration routes of animals; routes of seeds in the wind; pathways of the sand-sharing dune system; animal routes for access to water, food, and for returning to breeding grounds; routes of bees pollinating flowers—all are aspects of the circulatory pattern of the wider life community. Human routes exist in the context of this symphony of movement.
In this culture we tend to think of the Earth as a noun, but actually a great deal of Earth functions as a verb and our models need to reflect that. When we design our human systems, we need to be sure that we are not disrupting this flow of life, a flow integral to our own life.
Interestingly, with our culture's overall design promoting excessive mobility, our civilization is becoming verb as well, whether we like it or not. Our access to work, school, social activities, and so forth requires that we "circulate." The fact is that many of us are coming to dwell in our automobiles as well as in our homes. Poor or nonexistent urban planning, as well as other physical and psychological factors, have created forced mobility and diminished the quality of life not only of humans but also of the rest of the life community.
When conditions reach such proportions as they have now, with the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants in such condition, what is required in our modeling and our problem-solving?
In order to develop comprehensive models, we need to be in touch with what values we want to nurture as a culture. No culture is value-free. Form informs. The forms that we craft to encompass and facilitate our human activities inform and shape us at every turn. Form reflects values, whether we intentionally subscribe to them or not. It is important that we bring into consciousness the values we want to nurture and let them become an integral aspect of our design of human systems.
In describing what is superficial and what is elemental to our life-support system, we need to prioritize in terms of optimal use and encourage policy-making and incentives to support these priorities. We also need to develop comprehensive indicators for ecological health.
In our modeling, it is essential that we employ more than linear logic. Linear logic gives us solutions such as "add a lane" to deal with population increase and the rise in motor vehicles on the highways. Relying on this kind of logic, we end up with “44 lanes” of interstate traffic. Multidimensional logic is required. Such logic encompasses questions of scale, cumulative effects, appropriate use, multilevel interplay of factors, and so forth.
And logic is only one facet of our neurophysiological capacity for perception and problem solving. We have available to us whole ranges of perception and creative interplay for interacting with the life community in which we live. We have the capacity for in-depth perception and imaginative reflection on how our human designs would interact with and affect the whole, spatially-physically, developmentally, and psychically. We have the capacity to kinesthetically perceive rhythms as well as the disruption of rhythms, and we have the imagination to envision restoration.
It is important that we understand and embrace the importance of accurate perception of the natural world and the power of design in relating to it. Design can serve to obfuscate or reveal the natural world to us. It can heighten or reduce our capacity to synchronize with other life rhythms besides our own. A culture can actually design for symbiosis, cooperation, integration, and inclusion with the wider ecological community. What is important in design is the reliance on fresh, attentive perception regarding the nature of our multidimensional reality rooted in the natural world.
This is a pivotal time in our planet's history. We have the capacity to witness whole ecological systems at work and to design our human systems to interface comprehensively with these wider processes. It is up to us to renew our inherent capacity to "listen" to the natural world . . . and to act in concert with it. Only when we let its full reality be present to every aspect of our senses are we capable of designing for our own well-being in relation to the rest of the life community.
Editor's note: This paper was part of a conference presentation by Thomas Berry, PhD and Marnie Muller, MLA