Sustainable Design (22)

Human welfare depends on using the Earth's physical resources, material cycles, and biological processes, but current human techniques, understanding, decision-making, and perceptions of need are blind to their destructive effects on these essential functions of the Earth. The reverse is also a problem: current attempts to protect the Earth are often blind to how they influence human welfare. Consider each building or product as a double intervention—in the Earth's cycles and processes, and simultaneously in the human culture of needs and techniques. Make use of available understanding, innovative and traditional, natural and social, to gauge the proper balance of human and non-human effects for each intervention. Remember that present culture builds from work of the past, and future culture will have to build from what the present provides. The ethic of Sustainable Design is not only that future existence should be possible, but that it should exhibit justice and beauty for humans and for the rest of nature.

Text: Rob Knapp