Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary EditionEcological Design is a landmark volume that helped usher in an exciting new era in green design and sustainability planning. Since its initial publication in 1996, the book has been critically important in sparking dialogue and triggering collaboration across spatial scales and design professions in pursuit of buildings, products, and landscapes with radically decreased environmental impacts. This 10th anniversary edition makes the work available to a new generation of practitioners and thinkers concerned with moving our society onto a more sustainable path. Using examples from architecture, industrial ecology, sustainable agriculture, ecological wastewater treatment, and many other fields, Ecological Design provides a framework for integrating human design with living systems. Drawing on complex systems, ecology, and early examples of green building and design, the book challenges us to go further, creating buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes that are truly restorative rather than merely diminishing the rate at which things are getting worse. |
Common terms and phrases
agriculture Andy Goldsworthy architects architecture Berkeley biodiversity biological bioregional California Center chemical City climate complex compost privy Conservation context conventional create culture cycles design process Design with Nature diversity E. O. Wilson ecological accounting ecological design economic ecotone effect energy and materials environment environmental impacts epistemology farm flows forests fractal geometry global grow habitat human Ian McHarg industrial ecology industrial ecosystems Institute Island Press John Todd kind knowledge land landscape levels of scale linked living machine living world manufacturing marsh natural capital nature's nutrients organic P. O. Box patterns percent Permaculture plants pollution pond principles problems recycling region resource response restoration rich San Francisco self-designing systems sewage soil solar solutions species structure sulfur sustainability tainability technologies tion Todd toxic ture Univ Vandana Shiva waste wastewater treatment Wendell Berry wetlands wildlife wildlife corridors York
Popular passages
Page 157 - Nature, many have begun to believe, is fundamentally erratic, discontinuous, and unpredictable. It is full of seemingly random events that elude our models of how things are supposed to work. As a result, the unexpected keeps hitting us in the face. Clouds collect and disperse, rain falls or doesn't fall, disregarding our careful weather predictions, and we cannot explain why. Cars suddenly bunch up on the freeway, and the traffic controllers fly into a frenzy.
Page 111 - When we look at a chair, we see the wood, but we fail to observe the tree, the forest, the carpenter, or our own mind. When we meditate on it, we can see the entire universe in all its interwoven and interdependent relations in the chair. The presence of the wood reveals the presence of the tree. The presence of the leaf reveals the presence of the sun. The presence of the apple blossoms reveals the presence of the apple. Meditators can see the one in many, and the many in the one (1992: 90). The...
Page 109 - People do not want electricity or oil, nor such economic abstractions as "residential services," but rather comfortable rooms, light, vehicular motion, food, tables, and other real things. Such end-use needs can be classified by the physical nature of the task to be done. In the United States today, about 58 percent of all energy at the point of end use is required as heat, split roughly equally between temperatures above and below the boiling point of water.
Page 84 - A story of where we are and how we got here and the characters and roles that we play. Tell me a story, a story that will be my story as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings us together in a valley community, a story that brings together...
Page 105 - Just as every act in an industrial society leads to environmental degradation, regardless of intention, we must design a system where the opposite is true, where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism
Page 64 - ... very few of us have been paying attention to the environment's trunk and branches. They are deteriorating as a result of processes about which there is little or no controversy; and the thousands of individual problems that are the subject of so much debate are, in fact, manifestations of systemic errors that are undermining the foundations of society. In his analysis, Robert realized that in nature the utilization of energy and resources is circular — one species' waste product is another's...