Find one line, quotation or statistic within the first two chapters that impacted the way you think about the environmental issues that our world is facing. Hopefully, the reading challenged you and/or introduced you to new ideas, but if not you can write about that as well. There is no word or page requirement because those are the worst, so just write as much as it takes to get across what you want to say. We look forward to reading and discussing your thoughts and insights!
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." - Howard Thurman
I was taken aback by the concept of a "technopoly" and how accurately it resembles our current system. Aldous Huxley was quoted, stating, "eliminates alternatives to itself...by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements" (19). Currently, the system that the first world runs on has become solely dependent on technologies. Transportation of both people and goods requires cars, planes, trains, boats, etc. Even doing simple school assignments requires a computer (this blog post for example). By becoming so dependent on these technologies, we are loosing the ability to see other alternatives that may be healthier for us and the environment. As Orr suggests, reducing our dependencies on technology and simplifying the system may lead to a sustainable world.
ReplyDeleteI've never previously heard of a "technopoly," but it makes perfect sense. We're stuck in a technology trench; failure to reduce our dependency on technology may loose us the ability to climb out of it.
Once I began reading The Nature of Design, I couldn’t stop and ended up reading through Chapter 10. I would keep reading if it weren’t for the other homework and studying that I feel obliged to do. This book came into my life at a time when I am trying to better articulate the world view and self view that I am suddenly much more rapidly developing. I find myself agreeing with everything Orr writes and feeling like the content is information that we all already know but cannot yet put into words, let alone practice. I do think that the ideological framework he establishes with the arguments he makes is the framework that we have no choice but to embrace if we want to change the course of human history for the better.
ReplyDeleteThere are quite a few individual lines within the first two chapters that struck me as worth writing more about. Having just returned from a fall break spent participating in the urban farming movement in Kansas City, however, I am compelled to explore the notion that we must live in smaller, settled communities in order to practice ecological design and to live sustainably. Orr provides examples of such communities that have already existed such as Amish communities. He describes how in Amish culture, the horse functions as a control on human activities. I love the quote, “A horse-drawn buggy has a radius of about eight miles in hilly country, and if you have chores to finish by suppertime, you cannot conveniently shop until you drop” (5). Seriously though, in response to his questions on page 6, I think modern societies do also need some functional equivalent of the horse in order to become sustainable, and I think that it could be food.
It is probable that with the exhaustion of fossil fuel resources, humans will have no choice but to be reduced to smaller, settled societies. I don’t think that this will happen soon enough, however. And if we do not make an attempt to make some kind of transition from fossil fuel resources to more local, renewable resources, the consequences will be disastrous. Part of the transition that we can begin now is changing our means of producing food. Conventional industrial agriculture is obviously not sustainable, and in many ways, it is unethical. By engaging on individual and community scales in the local and organic food movement, we can place a control on modern society as a whole and in other words, limit the continuation of large-scale industrial agriculture and the consequences that come from it.
In Kansas City, I visited five different urban farms, each slightly different in its layout, farmers, and way of serving the community around it. The common thread, however, was the human community. Growing a diversity of vegetables and livestock on a small scale and without the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers results in a healthy supply of food for a local population of people. The food is distributed to the population within a limited radius via farmer’s markets and CSA programs. The local economy is stimulated, and people have less of a reason to go to grocery stores that are part of large corporations that sell non-organics and produce that come from thousands of miles away. Once people are engaged in this kind of smaller food system, they become more aware and appreciative of where their food comes from and how it is grown. For the items that they do feel the need to go to the grocery store to buy, they will probably be less likely than the average person to buy something produced unsustainably.
The essence of smaller, settled societies is community, i.e. positive human relationships at the most basic level. People speak face to face; they know each other; they hold each other accountable; they help each other. Producing and consuming food locally is a way to form community, and it is a way to change modern society and the frightening direction in which it is moving. Making this change will require a much greater investment, individually and collectively, in the communities in which we already live. I used to think that I wanted to get as far away from the Midwest as possible and go out and change the world, but then I realized that the Midwest, particularly east-central Illinois is where my family is. It is where three generations of my family have lived and worked the land. It is where I grew up and learned all that I know. It is where I feel my deepest connection with the natural world, the earth itself. It simply makes the most sense that I stay here and use what I am learning to enrich the community that I live in. In fact, I think that it is my moral responsibility to do so.
ReplyDeleteThis brings me to my final point that I think education is one of the single most important aspects of modern society and will continue to become critically important. The problem is that we do not treat it as so. As a society, we value the “health” of the economy and fast-paced mass consumption more than making sure our youth receive the best possible education. We do not put our money where our heart is. In reality, we are simply preparing future generations to perpetuate the same cycle of large-scale production and consumption and what I think is misery in the long run. Orr makes a telling point on page 26: “…the average college graduate would flunk even a cursory test on local ecology, and stripped of technology most would quickly founder.” I know this is true, because I know myself and my peers. I find it highly disturbing. If we do not understand the land we live on and the ecosystem that we are a part of and that we depend on to survive, then what do we know? Local ecology, creativity, communication and practical skills like how to grow food and prepare and preserve it for example, should be top priorities in education at every level.
Lauren, I think we got many of the same things out of this reading. I loved and agree with your observation that we, as a society, do not value nature and hardly know anything about our local environment. While there will always be exceptions to this mentality we approach education and ignore what is around us, I think it is necessary we become more aware. The author illuminates the potential human society can obtain by learning about nature. Environmental systems are more honest, natural, and successful than any piece of human technology. The proof is the success of organisms living within the environment and the time in which they have survived. By exploring and researching Earth systems, we can discover so much more about ourselves and about the way in which we should live in order to obtain the most efficient and sustainable lives.
DeleteThank you Juniors for sharing this book! The first chapter reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Ishmael (a quick and easy read if you all have some time!). It is about a gorilla who teaches his student, a human, the ways in which humans should think about their world and the living organisms they share it with. I think the idea that human beings are not exempt from the rules that govern all organisms on the Earth is very revolutionary, but one that is simplistic. It is pertinent that we change the way in which we think about our world. Like the author points out, by exploring natural systems and the environment, we learn so much more about sustainability and efficiency. We become a race more productive and self-sufficient. While we may have to give up some unnecessary items that make little difference in the selfish lives we lead, we gain so much more as a world, community, and individual.
ReplyDeleteWe cannot reach transcendence of an "environmental conscience" without making sure humanity will benefit from it. Although we have green technologies at our disposal, companies refuse to utilize many methods of sustainability due to cost. Humans are, by nature, selfish, competitive beings and we do what we need to to get ahead of others. Cost efficiency is pertinent in changing the ways in which we live and purpose is necessary if we expect a type of transcendence.
Many parts of our readings resonate with the readings I do for Environmental Ethics class. I will not go into those ideas here and just strongly encourage you all to take the class.
ReplyDeleteBefore my first trip to the US, I was warned, "Don't talk about religion or politics. These are touchy subjects." With all respect to religious and political views, I am still going to bring up some points in relation to both taboo topics. With this, I do not intend to hurt anyone, but just would like to share some of my thoughts and reflections about our reading.
An idea that stood out to me was the view of healthy environment in connection to spirituality. "The standard for ecological design is...health... The etymology of the word "health" reveals its connection to other words such as healing, wholeness, and holy." (p.29) I did not know the etymology of the word "health" and its connection to such words as "holy" or "healing" was a new amazing concept. "It [ecologic design] grows from the awareness that we do not live by bread alone and that the effort to build a sustainable world must begin by designing one that nourishes the human spirit." (p.30)
One way to grow spiritually is through religious affiliations. The quotes presented above made me think of how religious views in the Western society can be tied to maintaining environment. Many people from the western civilization believe in God. Because of that I decided to look into the book that makes foundation for Christian beliefs - the Bible - and see what it says about interaction between a human being and his environment.
One of the first scenes in the Bible is creation of a human being from dust, or from resources that were present on Earth at that moment. Then, when it comes to the first interaction between Adam and his environment, God asks Adam to take care of Eden - the garden that God put him into. These two very first scenes show the basic connection between a human-being and his environment: a human being comes from its environment and uses its resources to grow, and in return, the human being should take care of its environment.
I did not have any religious classes and can't compare this story with stories in other religions. Neither I can present further ideas on how Christianity views the interaction between the environment and a human. However, the first 2 chapters of the Bible clearly show to me the importance of the environment for a person and importance of caring about the environment.
ReplyDeleteThese two points are particularly curious to me when I think of the US government. When I went to the Indiana statehouse, I was surprised to see that every session either in the House or Senate started with the prayer to God. At the same time, I saw lack of support for bills that protect the environment or promote care for the environment. Sacrifices of the environment's health are made in order to create businesses--> to create jobs--> to promote consumption--> to ensure that economy is running at the full speed. Such chain damages and even destroys the environment and goes completely against the healthy interaction between a human and the environment.
The discrepancy, or hypocrisy, between asking God to bless the work of legislators and ending up making decisions that hurt the environment, which goes against the initial God's command to take care of the environment, surprised me. Idealistic me craves for elimination of such hypocrisy. Realistic me understands that many more factors have played into shaping legislative traditions and work style and neither one blog post, nor one book, can go deep enough to discuss those factors. However, I do not want be silent about this observation either.
Such hypocrisies should be acknowledged and taken into consideration during the ecologic design. If ecologic design foundation is based in spirituality, then one needs to rethink about their values, their religion, and how these values should be used in relation to responsible treatment of the environment.
Like Oksana, I also saw many connections between this book and my classes, both to my science classes and with environmental anthropology, which I highly recommend if you're interested in learning more about the "settled" communities Orr compares to Western society. I think the fact that we can see so many connections between this book and our other experiences shows that many people recognize the need to change our mindset. I think the desire is there, for many at least, but the question becomes how we can do that.
ReplyDeleteThis type of change is difficult to achieve because people generally resist change, and something to the scale Orr describes is likely unfeasible in our existing structure. Because we live in a wifi-enabled, globalized world--a kind of global technopoly--it's practically impossible to create a culture based on the local environment. We have access to so many different places and times that we almost don't know where our culture separates from that of other places. One of the things people often criticize the Peace Corps for, which Orr parallels in his conversation about Bali, is that they often tell people what they do locally is wrong and that another way is better. People often borrow from other cultures or try to use parts of a local system in places the systems weren't designed for. Our society doesn't often make distinctions about place or appropriateness for the locality because we lack this type of boundary. We have the attitude that if it works in one place, it'll work in another. That's part of the mindset we need to change. We will have to alter the fundamental definition of culture and create boundaries for ourselves. We can create an expectation for individuals to be responsible for their environment. I care much more about central Indiana, where I've lived my entire life, than I care about other areas. It makes sense that I would be more willing, and better able, to work with this environment rather than against it.
I want to now draw attention to another connection between this book and the novel Ishmael (Sarah's right, it's a great book--here's the link to the Wikipedia page if you want a quick summary before continuing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)). In that novel, there is a particular image that can help us understand our faith in technology that prevents us from seeing what we need to change. Ishmael, the gorilla, describes human, particularly Western, society as a flying machine. He says we've gone off a cliff and a crash is inevitable, but we keep pedaling harder and faster to try to keep flying. All the people in powerful positions tell us not to look down because they know you won't see how close we are getting to the ground if you don't look. They tell us, the passengers in the machine, that pedaling more and having faith will get us across. This connects to Orr's passage on page 16: "The regnant faith holds that science and technology will find a way to meet human needs and desires without our having to make significant changes to our philosophies, politics, economics, or in the way we live." People with power are generally comfortable in their positions and want things to continue as they are, which is why several people and groups deny climate change. They don't want to admit that things aren't working because they don't want to change anything, regardless of the consequences. Technology may find a way to fix everything, but we can't count on that to happen because it's unlikely at best. Changes have to come from the people who look down anyway; they can see the ground getting closer.
I almost feel like I would be lying if I simply said this book is comparable to my First Year Seminar “Campus Climate Action”; we are reading David Orr’s other book Earth in Mind. Needless to say, my FYS and our discussion of this book will go hand in hand. Earth in Mind was published nearly a decade before The Nature of Design, and, therefore, there are several overlapping ideas that I noticed from reading the first two chapters of The Nature of Design. The current failures in education are a major topic, if not the main topic, in Earth in Mind, and toward the end of the second chapter of The Nature of Design, Orr discusses the need for reform in education. He stresses the importance of the classroom,
ReplyDelete"...[T]hey instruct in more fundamental ways because they structure what we see, how we move, what we eat, our sense of time and space, how we relate to each other, our sense of security, and how we experience the particular places in which we live. More important, by their scale and power they structure how we think, often limiting our ability to imagine better alternatives” (Orr 2002, 31).
Also if we have drab, boring classrooms, students will not be as apt to engage in learning and participating. According to Orr, biophilia is a term that describes how humans are naturally drawn to nature. “We heal more quickly in the presence of sunlight, trees, and flowers than in biologically sterile, artificially lit, utilitarian settings” (Orr 2002, 25). Like classrooms—your stereotypical “utilitarian” places. No wonder so many students around the country dislike attending school. It’s like a prison, locked up for eight hours a day, maybe getting a “recess” depending on what age you are. Children cannot flourish in this atmosphere. This is why Orr proposes a change toward more sustainable designs, in order for the U.S. to keep up with the rest of the world in test scores and intelligent graduates.
In my opinion, this is why we currently have such a failing economy. The students are not up to par in competing with their counterparts in other countries. Though this is not solely to blame on the design of classrooms, it plays a role in how easily and effectively we can learn. For example, if we have a dark classroom setting where all the students are facing one direction, staring at a chalkboard, listening to the instructor, they will learn less than their fellow schoolmates who get to actively engage in discussion by sitting in a circle and have the outside light pouring in through the large open windows. These latter students will be the ones who graduate with a goal and the ability to change the world for the better. They will catch wind of the nature of design idea and further the transformation from drab, closed in classrooms to discussion-based classes encouraging open minded students who will then lead the reformation toward a more sustainable design. This is Orr’s proposed nature of design in terms of education.
David Orr's analysis on ecological design challenged my preconceptions of minimizing our environmental impacts. In past readings I have learned about all the mainstream problems of our current environmental situation along with vague descriptions about combating these problems. Orr makes a case for environmental design as a plausible combatant against environmental problems that we have created. "We need a deeper change of the kind that Albert Einstein had in mind when he said that the same manner of thought that created problems could not solve them." This quote from the book is isolating humans as the cause of the problems; furthermore, it is specifically stating that a change in mindset could stimulate successful ecological design. Many of human’s greatest innovations were created to make our lives easier while neglecting the impacts of those innovations. Now that we are becoming more aware of our impacts, we can no longer think about solving environmental problems by making our lives easier.
ReplyDeleteI would like to dedicate this blog post to the very beginning of the introduction to David Orr's book The Nature of Design. Orr writes,"environmentalist are often regarded as people wanting to stop one thing or another, and there are surely lots of things that out to be stopped. The essays in this book, however, have to do with beginnings."
ReplyDeleteIn here lies a great lesson that all aspiring environmentalists should take to heart: it is so easy to get caught up with what we as a planet are doing wrong (i.e. various forms of pollution, deforestation, non- sustainable consumption of natural resources, etc.) that sometimes it is easy to forget that progress requires advancement, not just correction. It is not enough just to speak of the issues, or to continue with old ways of fixing them that have not yielded results. From my perspective, two main negative effects come from falling into this trap. Fist, it turns people off of the cause. If someone keeps hearing about how we need to stop something or how something is wrong, but is not educated with any reasonable means to actually solve the problem at hand, he/she is likely to become disenfranchised, further dividing environmentalists and non-environmentalists. Second, it hinders the formation of solutions to the issues themselves.
This is not to say that taking actions through new beginnings is mutually exclusive to fixing past mistakes; on the contrary, they are intrinsically linked. To alleviate the effects of deforestation, for example, we must give life to new trees trees by planting them wherever it is sustainable to do so. The trap is not talking about past mistakes, but rather talking about past mistakes and failing to come up with new and innovative ways to correct them. It is incredibly easy to speak poorly of climate change, but incredibly difficult to come up with ways to improve carbon efficiency.
Through new beginnings, we as a race will eventually find a cure to old problems and ensure, or at least help to ensure, the prevention of future ones.
As I was reading through the assigned chapters, the following quote caught my eye; "The standard for ecological design is neither efficiency nor productivity but health, beginning with that of the soil and extending upward through plants, animals, and people. It is impossible to impair health at any level without affecting it at other levels." (Orr, 29) I really liked the way this standard is defined because so often people don’t reflect on the health of things such as soil in their considerations of design and the environment in general. Before this semester, I don’t think that I would have thought of ‘small contributors’ such as soil health as an imperative consideration of ecological design. I have recently become better educated on this topic. In Environmental Geology, we spent a great deal of time considering dirt. We considered the lithosphere as a whole and soil as a critical component of the lithosphere. The health of a soil has to do with its constituents, which in turn affect the soil’s cohesiveness, fertility, and overall effectiveness. Many different processes factor into this overall soil health, and let’s face it; soil health is of little concern to the majority of the population. That said the intricacy of ecological design is far greater than many people would believe. If dirt alone is so complex, when we factor in biota we are facing a monumental task. Not to mention the ethical implications of this standard for design. When we say that our standard is not productivity, but rather health, we are saying that we will commit ourselves to the environment over economic pursuits. This is rather obvious to us as Environmental Fellows, but I am interested to see how the author proposes we go about such a huge undertaking and how we are to get others on board with our environment-over-economics perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed this first reading and am excited to see how the proposal develops.
ReplyDeleteFor me, one of the most resonant ideas from these chapters was the idea that the health of the environment and the health of the people are inextricably linked. People fail to realize that clear-cutting forests (for example) has a much greater impact than simply being ecologically harmful. It also has negative implications for individual and community health, both physically and spiritually. This is also an example of how we don’t really see the “true cost” of our actions. This is a large-scale example, but it is also evident every time we buy something from Wal-Mart. The cheap costs are so attractive in the short-term (especially for college students like ourselves) because we’re not immediately “paying” for the long-term damage, which comes in the form of environmental harm (unsustainable factories, exponential generation of waste, etc.), human rights violations (overseas factories in EPZs, lack of a living wage for employers), and the spiritual and economic weakening of communities.
ReplyDeleteTo come back to my original point, Orr emphasizes that “it [ecological design] grows from the awareness that we do not live by bread alone and that the effort to build a sustainable world must begin by designing one that first nourishes the human spirit” (p. 30). As a psychology major, and especially due to my interests in both health and ecological psychology, I found this concept very powerful. The idea he presents is not only, ‘how can we save the environment,’ but also ‘how can the environment save us.’ He acknowledges that we are ‘natural’ beings, who thrive in and crave a natural environment. Prioritizing the natural world not only benefits us abstractly, but also in a very tangible way. Further, these tangible benefits have been explored from geological and economic perspectives, but the fact that humans benefit psychologically and spiritually from a healthy and sustainable environment/habitat is often overlooked, at least on a macro level. Interestingly, I think that it is fairly common knowledge that spending a little bit of time in nature can brighten your mood and has overall positive health benefits, but this adage is not usually applied to collective health. This coincides with another concept that he brings up- the “deprivation of ecstasy,” which is essentially the idea that humans have to find alternative ways to satisfy their primal instincts due to our increased alienation from nature, and that these alternatives (the distractive and addictive behaviors that we turn to) are detrimental to society as a whole (p. 32). Overall, I am fascinated by the viewpoint that the health of our communities and ourselves will benefit, and that the ills of our society may even be cured, by ecological design.