APPLIED SYSTEMS THINKING
In this regard, the news is guardedly optimistic. The art and science of high performance
building is growing. The result is a new generation of buildings that require a fraction of
the energy of conventional buildings, use mate rials screened for environmental effects,
minimize water consumption, and are landscaped to promote biological diversity,
moderate microclimates, and grow foods. The best of these are highly efficient, powered
substantially by sunlight and feature daylight, water recycling, and interior green spaces.
They are a finer calibration between our five senses and the built environment and tend
to promote higher user satisfaction and productivity.
The costs of building green, as it turns out, are not necessarily higher than conventional
buildings while having lower operating costs. The goal is to design buildings as whole
systems, not as disjointed components. The green building movement is now a worldwide
movement and is transforming the practice of architecture, landscape architecture, and
engi neering. It could, in time, transform the design of communities and cities as well.
Business, too, is beginning to go green. The best exam ple of a well run environmentally
sensitive business is that of Interface, Inc., a global manufacturer of carpet tiles and raised
flooring. In the mid 1990s, company founder and CEO, Ray Anderson, decided to
transform the company to eliminate waste and carbon emissions. Interface launched a
pioneering effort to develop carpet products that were returned to the company as a
‘‘product of service’’ not otherwise discarded in a landfill.
Interface now leases carpet to its customers and takes it back to be remade into new
products, thereby eliminating much of the petrochemical sources at one end and waste
at the other. In the past decade, the company has eliminated 56% of its carbon emissions
and is on track to becoming carbon neutral. The model for the company is consciously
that of ecology all the way down to carpet products that mimic a forest floor. Interface is
not alone. Other compa nies like Wal Mart and DuPont are beginning to transform
themselves as well. Some day, perhaps, all business will be powered by sunlight with
materials cycles that mimic the circular flow of nutrients in ecosystems.
In agriculture, Wes Jackson, co founder of the Land Institute, is pioneering the
development of natural systems agriculture. The goal is to model agriculture on ecological
systems such as forests and prairies. If successful, the end product will be agricultural
polycul tures of high yield perennials, long thought to be a biological impossibility. The
early results, however, have confirmed Jackson’s hypothesis that the two can be stitched
together, thereby eliminating a great deal of fossil energy and soil erosion. Materials
science is a fourth area in which ecology is being taken seriously. Nature, as chemist Terry
Collins has noted, uses only a relatively few ingredients while industrial chemistry uses
virtually the entire periodic table, creating ecological havoc.
The field of biomimicry has grown in response by studying how nature works in fine detail.
Natural systems are a carnival of color, for instance, but nature does not use paints. To
answer such questions, Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry, is devel oping a database of
the ways nature works to filter, reduce, recycle, color, purify, form, and join – all done
without the use of toxics and fossil fuels and all of it biodegradable. The result could be a
transformation of materials and industry that dramatically reduce pollution and energy
use. In these examples and elsewhere, the science of applied ecology has begun to
seriously influence decisions and behavior and the evolution of architecture, engineering,
materials science, agronomy, urban planning, and econom ics. The driving force is partly
economic (to reduce the costs of unnecessary energy, materials and water use) and partly
a matter of conviction (that it is wrong to leave a legacy of ruin behind us). While
promising, such measures are necessary but insufficient. Ecological thinking, in one way
or another, must become a more central part of global society and this is the task of
education.
Environmental Education
The idea of specifically environmental education entered the public discourse in the late
1960s. Among the recom mendations of the Stockholm Conference in 1972 was to
‘‘establish an international programme in environmental education.’’ UNESCO and UNEP
subsequently under took to prepare curricular materials, establish priorities, develop pilot
projects, and organize meetings. The result was a UN sponsored Conference at Tbilisi,
Georgia, in 1978 that produced a consensus statement including the words.
The Tbilisi Conference produced 41 recommendations spanning the needs for
environmental education between developed and less developed countries. In the
subsequent decades, initiatives, including those spawned by Agenda 21 and discussions
about the Earth Charter, have advanced the discussion of environmental education into a
major part of the dialog about the role of education relative to the human prospect. There
is no serious discussion about the transition to sustainability launched by the Brundtland
Report in 1987 that does not include changing the goals and methods of education.
From Tbilisi (1978), Talloires (1990), and subsequent international gatherings, a strong
consensus about the importance of environment in higher education is clearly apparent.
Despite considerable progress, both conceptually and practically, there are serious
differences about the goals and methods of environmental education that reflect and, in
some ways, amplify larger disagreements about educa tion. At the lowest level, there is a
general consensus that the young ought to know something about how nature works as
a physical system – the rudiments of biology and planetary science.
There is considerably less agreement about how this should be incorporated into the
standard curriculum or at what level. Most elementary schools include curricular
components such as ‘Project Learning Tree’ or ‘Wet and Wild’ that introduce children to
what was once called natural history along with some field experience and practical
outdoor skills. But the later inclusion of values or discussion about the causes of
environmental ills has often been controversial, especially when it has led to questions
about conventional economic or political wisdom. In important respects, all education is
environmental education, that is, by what is included or excluded stu dents are taught
that they are part of or apart from ecological systems. The standard, discipline centric cur
riculum may have contributed to a mindset that helped to create environmental problems
by separating subjects into boxes and conceptually by separating people from nature. As
a result, graduates are often ignorant of ecolo gical relationships or why they are worthy
of consideration. Not surprisingly, the first response to pro posals for environmental
education attempted to accommodate environmental issues and ecology into for mal
education as a kind of add on.
More radical critics proposed that formal education ought to be reformed along ecological
lines, raising another and no less con tentious issues. From either perspective,
environmental mismanagement and the larger discussion of sustainability raise questions
about the meaning of human mastery over nature, or more accurately as C. S. Lewis once
put it: what does it mean for some men to control other men through the mastery of
some parts of nature? What is the core knowledge of the environment that ought to be
standard in an educational curriculum? At the heart of such
