April 1982 RAIN Page 9 offer us a rational, humanistic, and ecological trajectory has not yet been fulfilled by "high" or by "low" technology. In sum, "high" technology must be used by serious social ecologists to demonstrate that, on rational grounds, it is less desirable than ecological technologies. "High" technology must be permitted to exhaust its specious To create a society in which every individual is seen as capable of participating directly in the formulation of social policy is to instantly invalidate social hierarchy and domination. claims as the token of social "progress" and human well-being—all the more to render the development of ecological alternatives a matter of choice rather than the product of a cynical "necessity". . . . We share a common organic ancestry with all that lives on this planet. It infiltrates those levels of our bodies that somehow make contact with the existing primordial forms from which we may originally have derived. Beyond any structural considerations, we are faced with the need to give an ecological meaning to these buried sensibilities. In the case of our design strategies, we may well want to enhance natural diversity, integration, and function, if only to reach more deeply into a world that has been systematically educated out of our bodies and innate experiences. Today, even in alternate technology, our design imagination is often utilitarian, economistic and blind to a vast area of experience that surrounds us. A solar house that symbolizes a designer's ability to diminish energy costs may be a monument to financial cunning, but it is as blind and deadened ecologically as cheap plumbing. It may be a sound investment, even an environmental desideratum because of its capacity to use "renewable resources," but it still deals with nature merely as natural resources and exhibits the sensitivity of a concerned engineer—not an ecologically sensitive individual. An attractive organic garden may well be a wise nutritional "investment" over the quality of food obtainable in a shopping mall. But insofar as the food cultivator is preoccupied only with the nutritional value of food on the dinner table, organic gardening becomes a mere technical strategem for "foodwise" consumption, not a testament to a once-hallowed intercourse with nature. All too often, we are flippantly prepared to use hydroponic trays as substitutes for actual gardens and gravel for soil. Since the object is to fill the domestic larder with vegetation, it often seems to make no difference whether our gardening techniques produce soil or not. Such commonplace attitudes are very revealing. They indicate that we have forgotten how to be organisms—and that we have lost any sense of belonging to the natural community around us, however much it has been modified by society. In the modern design imagination, this loss is revealed in the fact that we tend to design "sculptures" instead of ensembles—an isolated solar house here, a windmill there, an organic garden elsewhere. The boundaries between the "organic" world we have contrived and the real one that may exist beyond them are strict and precise. If our works tend to define our identity, as Marx claimed, perhaps the first step in acquiring an ecological identity would be to design our "sculptures" as part of ensembles—as technical ecosystems that interpenetrate with the natural ones in which they are located, not merely as agglomerations of "small," "soft," "intermediate," or "convivial" gadgets. The principal message of an ecological technics is that it is integrated to create a highly interactive, animate and inanimate constellation in which every component forms a supportive part of the whole. The fish tanks, "sun tubes," and ponds that use fish wastes to nourish the plant nutriment on which they live are merely the simplest examples of a wide-ranging ecological system composed of a large variety of biota—from the simplest plants to sizable mammals—that have been sensitively integrated into a biotechnical ecosystem. To this system, humanity owes not only its labor, imagination, and tools but its wastes as well. No less important than the ensemble is the technical imagination that assembles it. To think ecologically for design purposes is to think of technics as an ecosystem, not merely as cost effective devices based on "renewable resources." Indeed, to think ecologically is to include nature's "labor" in the technical process, not only humanity's. The use of organic systems to replace machines wherever possible—say, in producing fertilizer, filtering out sewage, heating greenhouses, providing shade, recycling wastes, and the like—is a desideratum in itself. But their economic wisdom aside, these systems also sensitize the mind and spirit to nature's own powers of generation. We become aware that nature, too, has its own complex "economy" and its own thrust toward ever-greater diversity and complexity. We regain a new sense of communication with an entire biotic world that inorganic machines have blocked from our vision. As production itself has often been compared with a drama, we should remember that nature's role is more than that of a mere chorus. Nature is one of its principal players and at times, perhaps, the greater part of the cast. Hence, an ecologically oriented technical imagination must seek to discover the "Way" of things as ensembles, to sense the subjectivity of what we so idly call "natural resources," to respect the attunement that should exist between the human community and the ecosystem in which it is rooted. This imagination must seek not merely a means lor resolving the contradictions between town and country, a machine and its materials, or the functional utility of a device and its impact on its natural environment. It should try to achieve their artistic, richly colored, and highly articulated integration. Labor, perhaps even more than technics, must recover its own creative voice. Its abstract form, its deployment in the framework
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