by sp on December 18, 2008
Alberto Rodriguez at Agriflora nursery, from whom we ordered the vetiver plugs we used in the Wister Lake floating wetlands last spring, recently asked for info on how the Quarry Island Demonstration Project was going. I sent him a brief writeup and he has published it on his “Vetiver Solutions Blog.” You can view it here. Alberto has been great to work with and the plants we received from him were in excellent condition. Both his nursery and his blog are highly recommended.
by sp on December 10, 2008
In describing the four domains of ecosystem design, I mentioned that I was taking Bateson’s “ecology of mind” as the name for my fourth domain. I want to expand on that a bit. Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind was first published in 1972. Bateson died in 1980, and while the effects of his thinking still reverberate through many fields, I don’t hear much discussion of his work anymore. Nevertheless, some of the lessons he taught are still profoundly important and the pathologies of thought he sought to uncover and replace with better thoughts are still dominent.
While a later book, Mind & Nature–A Necessary Unity (publisher 1979), is probably a easier introduction to his thinking, the seminal expression of those key ideas can be found in the essay “Form, Substance, and Difference” in Steps.
Bateson liked to tell stories, kind of parables, to get at the roots of the ideas he was exploring. In contrast to my friends in ecology and ecological engineering who, following Howard Odum, believe that “energy” and “the quality of energy” are concepts on which to build explanations, Bateson’s view was that “energy does not explain.” [click to continue…]
by sp on December 1, 2008
There are four domains of design (“changing existing conditions into preferred ones”) where the science of ecology plays a major role:
1. The restoration & management of natural systems–restoring a prairie, for example
2. Constructed ecosystems–with a treatment wetland as the prototypical example
3. Human habitats–the design of human habitats as ecosystems
4. Ecology of mind–I use Gregory Bateson’s term, but with a meaning different than his–specifically I mean the “ecology of mind” that lets us live in our ecologically-designed human habitats, and stay sane and connected to the “natural world”
by sp on December 1, 2008
If the science of ecology is one strand of ecosystem design, then “design” is the other. So just what is design? The most inclusive definition I have found is that of Herbert Simon:
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing conditions into preferred ones.