I propose a marriage among design, politics and spirit. If design is going to be a robust concept, it has to be about much more than making things. It has to deal with systems and context.
In this larger sense, design was very much on the minds of the founders of the American republic. The Federalist Papers is a design manifesto. Toward the end of his life, James Madison, one of its chief authors, thought that the founders had figured things out for the new nation for about a century, after which, he thought, it would come undone. In large measure, it has. 
Nineteenth century European socialists were designers of sorts. They were trying to design a better world. And they divided themselves into factions with bitterly competing viewpoints and all kinds of little movements inside the big movement. David Brower quipped about them, “Their strategy was to draw the wagons into a circle and shoot inward.” To some extent, this failure paved the way for the disastrous triumph and later collapse of bolshevism.
By our time the world is finally ready for a better approach to organizing human affairs in a mass technological industrial society, and undoubtedly there is a new, multifaceted, more benign design revolution under way. What Janine Benyus calls “biomimicry”—remaking the way we make things based on how nature works—has inspired a new generation of designers. John Todd’s work of ecological engineering has flourished. There’s definitely a heartening design revolution under way, but unfortunately, as of now, we’re not winning the revolution. We’re losing, and losing badly. We will lose the war despite being right if we don’t begin to combine our concepts of design with savvy politics and a deeper sense of spirit.
The design questions we need to pose are these: What’s the organization of a society that is capable of doing ecological design? What does such a society look like? How could we design institutions, whether colleges or corporations, that would be capable of doing ecological design? And what’s the point, the ultimate object, of ecological design? It’s not just about houses or water or any particular system. It has to be about how we think. The ultimate object of ecological design is the human mind. The object is to overcome those parts of the human mind in the culture that give rise to illusion, greed, and ill will.
This recognition brings us to a crucial juncture, a fork in the road at which serious matters need to be thought out and discussed before we choose a path. Wendell Berry tells us we have two broad approaches to the way we make the human presence in the world. One is industrialism. That’s the world we live in. We’ve been shaped by that world, its dependence on cheap fossil fuels and its extractive economy, much of which we take for granted and don’t think about critically.
Some believe that industrialization done more cleverly would be sufficient to solve our problems. I don’t believe that way will work. I don’t think there’s any way we can take a reformed industrial society, run the film fast-forward, and wind up with anything like a sustainable or spiritually sustaining society. I can’t prove that proposition, but I think that if ecological design is to mean anything at all, it has to go deeper. Simply to be smarter about our greed leaves greed and illusion in the center of our world. It leaves corporations in control. I don’t trust a world designed for the convenience of corporations. I don’t trust a world in which we leave self-interest so firmly in place. I don’t think that world can be made to work, not with six to nine billion of us on the planet.
But that choice leads us to a real conundrum, because, as Berry says, “The only alternative is agrarianism.” But when I say the word “agrarian,” I suspect most of us—those who have never farmed—get a warm, fuzzy feeling and picture a white, crinkly-eyed farmer with a white picket fence, a red barn, a silo, and cows grazing in the pasture—an image of something cute, quaint, rustic and long-gone.
Can we bring some sort of agrarian world back? Can the reality of being connected to the natural world become a basis for a design revolution? Perhaps, but it will take some stretching and a redefinition of what we consider agrarian. It means, for one thing, beginning to understand how the city, reclaimed as authentic community, can also be part of a neo-agrarian world. Can we make real cities part of an agrarian vision? We may have to rethink the dichotomies of rural and urban. We may have to contemplate ruralized cities and urbanized countrysides. Maybe we will have to find ways to coalesce the sustainable agricultural movement with the urban sustainability movement, the slow food movement, urban gardening, the environmental justice movement, and so on. Maybe that way we’ll get to a world where the pieces begin to fit together.
If we don’t achieve something like this synthesis, I fear that ecological design will be easily co-opted. Greener Wal-Marts don’t do it for me. Greener Nike corporate headquarters don’t do it for me. Greener buildings in which we still do brown things don’t do it for me. In the 1970s, some of the founders of modern computer science saw how it was likely to be pressed into service supporting the most entrenched and militaristic elements of the current society. My fear is that ecological design might end up that way.
True ecological design requires not just a change in our conceptual capabilities, but also a change in our language capabilities. As humans, what makes us so distinctive is our remarkable facility with complex language. I propose that we must begin to reclaim words, to understand how important they are and how they’re used politically. Today we have “resources,” not “nature,” which is very convenient if you’re an economist of the neo-classical mode. We have “human resources,” not “people.” We talk about “producing” energy, rather than using the more accurate “extracting.” And the word “patriot” seems to describe someone who drives an SUV festooned in American flags with a “God Bless America” bumper sticker. I find it hard to understand why God would want to bless this country at this moment, and even harder to understand how the word “conservative” came to apply to people willing to run risks with the entire earth. Education ought to begin with the power of language, appropriately and carefully used.
The problem we face is a problem of mind, which makes it particularly important to places that purport to improve minds. Educational institutions are good places to begin. We can begin to change minds and the world not only abstractly, through what we teach students, but by embodying what we teach through how we design, how we actually build and run campuses as microcosms of the larger society.
Ultimately I see no way out of our predicament unless design and spirit and politics are merged. We must learn to become effective politically in ways we haven’t yet dreamed of. In contrast to the 19th century European socialists, we need to merge around a vision and a worldview. I don’t know whether the word ‘sustainability’ captures the notion, but the idea of ecological design in its largest sense is a good place to start. If we can figure out how to blend design and spirit and politics and a renewed connection to the earth in a lasting form, future generations will look back and see this as our finest hour.
Excerpted from Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies, edited by Kenny Ausubel and J.P. Harpignies. David Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College and chair of its Environmental Studies Program. A leading scholar in the sustainability movement, he is author of books including Ecological Literacy and The Last Refuge.
