Conversation on Sustainability
I Don’t Want To Hear About Green Buildings Any More
December 2003
MAGGIE: How
would you say your work relates to sustainability, and the ways in which people
have been working toward sustainability for the last 10 or 15 years?
CHRIS: I
think I’m going to start on a rather negative note because, as you know from
our conversations, I don’t really like the way sustainability has been
considered. What is currently dreamed of and spoken about and carried out is
hardly a beginning. It is simply an extension of the technocratic society we
find ourselves in, not what it pretends to be. I find this quite upsetting. I
think sustainability has become more and more of a buzz word. Everybody wants
to get on the bandwagon by saying that what they’re doing is sustainable. And
even at the best of times, what it means is using certain kinds of products and
materials while leaving the social, ecological and emotional structure largely
unchanged. Maybe that’s not quite so with regard to ecology. There are efforts
being made there to deal more seriously with wetlands and forests and so forth,
but it’s so much one little thing at a time, completely missing the larger
context of life on earth.
Financial
arrangements, for example is a major issue that has not been dealt with. Any
serious treatment of sustainability would have to deal with money flow.
Although you occasionally see it referred to in the literature, people who are
touting sustainability as the hallmark of their big new development projects
have not carefully considered how prevailing financial systems compromise these
efforts, and they may well not wish to.
A case in
point: the whole thing reminds me of a very similar movement that existed
around the late 1960’s – people became very interested in solar energy. This
was, of course, perfectly reasonable: trying to get energy from the natural
circumstances of the earth rather than having to burn up non-renewable
resources. Very, very sensible as an idea, but what was the consequence of it?
It was a
bonanza for manufacturers of certain kinds of high tech panels to jump in, sell
solar panels, selenium and so forth at high cost. That’s arguable: maybe the
high cost was OK because that’s just the first stage in the development of a
new idea. But the form these panels took were very rigid pre-fabricated panels
which crucified the roofs of the buildings they were put on. First of all they
are incredibly ugly, a significant issue in itself, which ought to be addressed
within the boundaries of sustainability but isn’t. More important, they
interfere grossly with adaptation. In other words, the more high tech the panels
and materials are, the less possible it is to fine tune the shape, geometry,
slope, modifications and extent of any given roof that they are put in.
Suddenly you’ve got the very ugly and biologically dangerous phenomenon of the
part driving the whole, rather than vice versa, wherever those roofs are built.
However, it became a social statement –
if you were “with it,” you had to have solar panels.
It died away
in large part, I think, because people began to understand intuitively the kind
of thing I’ve just said. In the sustainability movement, though, people at the
forefront are still talking about high tech solar panels, only these are bigger
and better and more expensive and more rigid. That kind of earth is not a
sustainable earth. This is incredible to me: they don’t understand that they
are being co-opted by the very thing they view as the enemy, and that people in
a world-wide movement of this sophistication can be so short-sighted. That’s
just a cameo of what I object to about sustainability as it is practiced today.
Another
example is the very interesting experience that I had at Fairview in Salem,
Oregon. The project, that I had some
small role as an adviser to, began by saying that this was going to be the
first massively wonderful demonstration of sustainability from soup to nuts.
They had incredible aims including the idea of economic sustainability which
was sophisticated. This is one of the first times that I know of where it was
really being thought of seriously. But when it came down to it, the idealists
who created this company put the company in the hands of people who were not
idealists. They just didn’t understand sustainability as an idea, in my view.
They began thinking about around 1200 houses or dwellings. Instead of considering
the land and working out, from the point of view of the land, how to distribute
these dwellings so that people had a natural relationship to land, to small
town agriculture, to the natural flow of water on the land, to the naturally
beautiful sacred spots on the land, and so forth, instead it was absolutely
business as usual. They wanted to “preserve the land” in some pointless
fashion, and then build all the buildings close together entirely for economic
reasons, though they pretended that it was for architectural reasons. They
handed the whole thing over to large-scale developers to try to work out what
would have become simply another big post-modern bunch of buildings tied
together on the land, pretending to be like an Italian hill town, but not in the
least bit like an Italian hill town.
They
requested my assistance. The first thing I did when I visited was to spend a
day walking about on the land. The director/originator of the project, to my
astonishment, said he had never walked about on the land before to that extent.
It’s not a very big bit of land. He was amazed by what I pointed out that
needed to be protected and repaired. Every few hundred feet, I’d talk about
that in detail. I said a proper plan, that has respect for the earth and
nature, needs to weave what is built into what must be protected in the
land itself. He acquiesced completely with his lips and in his actions did
nothing about it – forgot about it virtually as soon as it had been discussed.
Here again
you’ve got technology driving a deeper sense of things. The one thing which I
believe they were doing correctly in that project, at least in part, was the
issue of wetlands. They were being very careful to protect the small riparian
area on that land. It just so happens that wetlands and the ecology of riparian
areas is something that can be studied from a purely technical point of view.
Therefore it’s OK to introduce it. All of the things that I observed on the
land and showed them – this little level spot is a wonderful place to put a
building, this piece of land just next to it is a wonderful place to leave
absolutely alone, etc. – which I did yard by yard, was completely inaccessible to the technical
discussion that revolves around wetlands. Therefore it had no place in the
sustainable plan as all those wise and intelligent people saw it. Again, this
illustrates how extremely narrow, and often quite wrong headed, the
sustainability movement is. That kind of thing can once again be co-opted even
though it has a sound moral and scientific basis. Wetlands encompass I would
say about 3 or 4 percent of what is important about land. But because wetlands
happened to be the bit they could technologize, that’s the bit that found its
way into their plan.
If the
promise of a sustainable earth – that is, a living earth and the construction
and continuous re-construction of a living earth in and around habitats – is to
be taken seriously, it needs to start over. You cannot start from a
technological base like that and expect to get anywhere sensible. Such a base
doesn’t have anything to do with the human heart. It doesn’t have anything to
do, really, with the precious nature of the land. It violates by its very
definitions the right kind of relationship between buildings and land in which
the sacred nature of both is preserved and protectable.
MAGGIE: So,
it seems we have lost our sensibility about the land to the degree that
technology can overwhelm whatever intuition we might have about it. That would
seem to connect with what you said we’ve not attended to – the societal issues
and the emotional issues relative to land. Can you say more about each of
those, first the social?
CHRIS: Well,
one of the first things that I did when I was invited to Fairview was to meet
with a group of people who were excited about being part of such an important,
genuinely sustainable thing. We had an evening together. I explained what it
was like to build houses so that they had a real relationship to one another
and to the land they were on, and how I would do that by working with them, in
small groups and individually, to place each house with care. The emerging
neighborhood they themselves would essentially fashion by walking on the land
and choosing spots. Some of them were very moved by this approach, which was
then presented to the hierarchy of this organization, who again ignored it
completely. The enthusiasm that people had felt was essentially whacked on the
head. This was reported by several disappointed people who called me
afterwards. What I was talking about was a form of organization of construction
where people had the ability to find their spot on the land the way a cat finds
its spot in a room when it wants to go to sleep. That ability was offered to
every household, every family, every individual. In a realistic and practical
way, that can be done without increasing the cost of houses, and without
increasing the cost of infrastructure. This is a social revolution because it
creates genuine fibers of connection between people, human groups, community
and the land.
What a
developer does is wholly unlike this – well, I should say a standard,
commercial developer as we know that term today. Such a developer has no model
of operating to make it possible to do this. The models exist. They’re
feasible. They’re cheap. But they don’t fit into the current models of
sustainability. The sustainability movement, as far as I know, has not
attempted to grapple with these models or to point the way to making the huge
changes that must gradually be made.
MAGGIE: I
was there that night. I agree that many of the people in the room were moved,
including myself. There were also people who intended to build homes at
Fairview who raised the technical issues almost immediately. “Will you use
composting toilets? You haven’t mentioned that. What about solar energy? You
haven’t mentioned that.” It’s so easy for us to land on the technology aspects
of sustainability without looking inside ourselves to find what we long for,
which leads to the emotional connection that you mentioned. I’ve now learned
something about this because we’re here at Meadow Lodge (West Sussex, England),
and I feel an emotional connection to this land. I don’t know how to express
it, though.
CHRIS: It’s
not very difficult to express actually. Of course this place that we’re sitting
in has been here for a long time. This particular bit of land is not now so
different from the way it has been for about a thousand years. What happens
during a long period of time like that, if things are being taken care of, is
that the sanctity of every hedge, hummock in the land, fence post, and chestnut
tree is cherished. A relationship of respect between the person and the hedge
develops. You don’t necessarily do very spectacular things, but gradually that
respect makes itself felt in ecology and sustenance and surroundings of the
hedge, and then the hedge plays the respect back to you so you feel it in your
bones. You feel love for the hedge and you feel well- being in yourself because
you have that relationship with that hedge. If you multiply what I just said by
10,000 in a place like this, you have a massive connection to the land which
can only really be achieved in that way.
MAGGIE: If
we were serious about sustainability, we’d be attending to all of these things.
What you just described means healing myself in connection with healing the
land. The practice of generating life is all that could really achieve
sustainability. Otherwise it and we will die.
CHRIS:
Right. Yes, and the most basic lesson in biology is that no system is isolated,
so a person cannot be healed if the world around that person is not being
healed, and vice versa. It’s a completely cooperative phenomenon among the
different levels of a systems that exist, of which we’re one level, our organs
are a lower level, and the room in which you sit, or the field that you are
next to are larger levels. All of the levels have to be healed in order to have
any part of it be healthy. So it’s a perfectly straight forward biological and
probably medical idea. It’s just that
no one is really paying attention to it.
I think it’s
OK to talk about what you just said because it has to do with the healing of
people. I think it’s very important not to put too much weight on that
expression of it because it really is the healing of the earth that is the most
significant aspect of it, of which we are only parts. It wouldn’t be good to
subscribe to the view that man is the most important entity on the planet – a
Judeo-Christian ethic which has ruled commerce for so long and isn’t all that
helpful. I think the sustainability movement knows that.
MAGGIE: You
say there are models for doing this. There are some old models that have not
been very successful – sustainable. One was something we used to call
back-to-the-landers where people formed communities and did without technology
in order to recover something more wholesome in terms of relationship with the
earth, food, health and so forth. They have not been especially successful. Would
you say that’s because they did not embrace technology?
CHRIS: Well,
it’s just not realistic. There something quaint -- annoyingly quaint -- about
it. In buildings, for example, which is my profession, I’m not generally very
interested in using ancient techniques of construction because, for very good
reasons, ancient techniques are not consistent with the state and emerging
state of our society. I think they cannot be. One reason is simply labor cost.
It used to be the case 1000 years ago and 500 years ago that labor was
typically about one tenth of the cost of a building. When a building was built,
only 10% went to pay labor and 90% went to pay for the materials. Under those
conditions where labor is that cheap, you can do all kinds of things that are
labor intensive and it’s not a problem. A few decades ago labor cost – just
taking a very rough average – was about 60% of the cost of the building.
Introducing labor intensive methods, let’s say of laying out stone walls,
cannot be done in the way it was done in ancient times. You can very carefully
isolate a few operations which are so labor critical – where the human touch must be there – as
long as it is within the budget of a particular building or development project
or neighborhood. But to go for it wholesale – it’s just a funny idea which
warms the cockles of your heart, but is out of touch with economics and
technology, so it’s not really helpful.
Most of my
own building uses rather advanced techniques, although they resemble the
adaptive capacities of ancient techniques to be able to make continuous small
course corrections while a building is being built. But they do it by methods
that respect technology, and do not rely on labor intensive processes. In fact
on the contrary, I try to use high speed techniques to save labor so as to
permit more time for making subtle decisions. That’s a very different approach.
It’s an entirely new configuration in the relationships between money,
technology, speed, process and adaptation.
MAGGIE: How
would you advise us to work with technology and make it useful so that it
doesn’t overwhelm our need to get back in touch with land, or the need that
most of us have to be connected socially? How can we work with technology and
find a way of life that is satisfying?
CHRIS:
That’s a huge question. I don’t think there’s any one principle that answers
that question. But, I can show you how dramatic the issue is by means of an
example. If you’re laying a new neighborhood or community on a greenfield site,
the current conventional wisdom is to put in subdivision roads and sewers first
across the board, and then make everything else fit that flat. It fundamentally
does not work. It has a very expensive up-front cost. It’s intended to save
money for the developer in the long run, but actually it’s a very expensive way
to do it. More significant, it’s putting things first that are not first. I
mean no one in their right mind thinks that a sewer is the most important thing
in a community. Few people in their right minds would say that the road was one
of the most important things, not unless someone has been technologized out of
all proportion.
Of course,
the most important thing for community are places where people go, stay and
connect. Those places are essentially pedestrian. The proper way to start a
development like that is to settle the pedestrian places by reference to the
land first. Give the pedestrian places and paths, lines of movement, priority
over everything, so that already – at the moment you’re doing that – your heart
is connected to the land directly through the medium of these decisions about
what is going to be pedestrian and how the pedestrian structure is going to be.
And then put cars, trucks, ambulances and fire equipment in second place, not
in first place. Then say, OK, how can we now move cars, park them, and allow
emergency vehicles access in such a way as not to violate that precious thing
that has already been established? This is a huge change. If you talk to a
conventional developer about this, they just about fly off the handle because
it challenges everything they know. What it does from the start is create a
solid relationship between human emotion, concern, respect, and healing, to use
your word, and puts the cars in second place. We all love our cars and benefit
from them; the economy benefits from them. Our access to people not within
bicycling distance is colossal and most people wouldn’t give it up for
anything. I’m not advocating removing cars or reducing their role. I’m simply
saying their role is vital, but it must be kept in balance. It cannot be
allowed to disturb the far more critical organization of pedestrian space that
actually becomes the glue that binds the houses and other buildings together.
My guess is
that if we were to embark on a number of examples like this, they would all be
different, but in every case it would turn out that the thing which is
emotionally precious comes first, and the thing which is less emotionally
precious comes second. This is very often the clue to making these changes
correctly.
MAGGIE: For
the sake of readers who may be in the following situation, I’ll ask you for one
more example. What if I have a bit of land that I love and I’m going to build
on it – a house or an outbuilding, or whatever. The first thing I do is
understand what is emotionally precious to me there and then, as I proceed, I
can still use green building materials, technology, etc., that the
sustainability movement loves. But I would do this putting first things first.
CHRIS: I would
say largely so. I’m not against any of the…well, I can’t say that. I was going
to say I’m not against any of the technical changes being advocated by
sustainable thinking, but actually I am to some degree because of the
technological twist they have taken. But I would say in general straw bales,
earth walls, solar collectors, rainwater collectors, all these things have
their place. I think many of them are positive. Small scale food production
very close to the home has its place. I think these things make tremendous
sense. For each one you have to be watchful that the technological version
doesn’t take over on the one hand, and on the other hand, that archaic
reconstruction of ancient techniques doesn’t take over. Because both those
things have their dangers. But in principle I think the answer is yes. These
things will weave together quite successfully. There are no inherent
contradictions at all.
MAGGIE:
Given this critique of the sustainability movement, how do you think we can
develop a sustainable world?
CHRIS: The
too highly technological view of sustainability, the inadequate view of
community and human emotions, and the real quality of the land – all that isn’t
going to be corrected unless it’s done within the framework of the whole thing
as a living system. Even that cannot be conceived, I believe, in the current
view of what a living system is. People feel that it is getting more
sophisticated, which it may be, but it is still very far from the actual
essence of a living system. Without having a foundation in that, I don’t think
the whole sustainability movement could become anything except just an appendix
to technology. And I think there is a serious danger that that will happen.
People who care so much about these things could wake up 25 years from now and
find that they’ve been betrayed: the place where they wanted to go has been
taken over by technological corporations, and the beauty of the land, the
actual sustainability of the land, water, cash flow, and human community has
been really left to one side. That would be a pretty sad awakening, but it very
easily could happen unless people begin now to build an adequate platform from
which to do this kind of work. That is very, very hard to do.
I don’t
think it can be done unless we have a picture of the world in which every part
is personal. Why I have come to believe this is a very long and complicated
story that is developed in Book 4 of The Nature of Order. I am quite certain
of it, not the least bit doubtful. My problem is not Is that true?, but How do
you actually achieve this? It means building a picture of the living fabric in
an ecological way, but where it’s not just a bunch of machines that are
transacting energy flows, water flows, and nutrient flows. Rather, it’s a
question of having that picture, those things that have been learned, built on
a foundation in which every sheep, every fence post, every blade of grass is
viewed as a personal thing. In other words, it’s a huge revision in cosmology
to recognize that this is so. And it’s only when that has been done that you
can then achieve a view of the whole which is even faintly what people are
dreaming about now when they talk about sustainability. I don’t think people
have realized, yet, that this is where it has to go.
There’s
another way of describing the whole thing, a complementary way. The current
view is extremely fragmentary. You’ve got various fragments that people have
thought about, whatever they may be – solar energy, animal and plant life
around water – fragmentary things that have become somewhat understood as
popular bits and pieces of the sustainability movement. They are not the whole.
There is no such picture. People talk about the whole. There was a very
ambitious attempt to treat the earth as a whole with Lovelock’s Gaia Theory.
But it is actually an equation system. It’s an attempt to put scientific
reliability on an intuitive idea. Even that was thought to be too wacky an idea
to be entertained by science when it was first put forward, though the
equations that have been put in place to make it understandable are quite
respectable. What I’m talking about is far more dangerous, and far more likely
to be viewed as wacky. But it’s also much more true.
There was, also, the idea that in a whole, you perceive parts which resemble the
whole. That idea became popularized in a bit of mathematics surrounding the
idea of fractals. So you have self-similarity at differing scales. That is
interesting, but again it is not the essence of what wholeness means – that
each part resembles the whole. It is still deeper. If you understand what the
whole is, it is congruent with the self, the human person, and each person is
participating in that whole because it really is there. Then of course, the
fence post which resembles the “ I ”, which deeply contains it, is the same as
a field which does so, or as a region which does so because there is only one “
I ” (reference Book 4 of The Nature of Order). It’s not as if there are
millions of them. Only one. Then you have a foundational idea in which pure
unity is the basis of everything. Everything is understood to be a reflection
of that one thing, the I, the whole,
which is coming through or taking form in its particular way.
Well, these
poetic ramblings, which is I suppose is what they sound like, can very easily
be dismissed because the fragmented and technology-oriented view of the world
that we have is so far removed that it sounds silly. So, there’s a fairly sharp
divide, because I’ve got absolutely no doubt that the real issues of
sustainability cannot be dealt with except in the framework of a view of land,
people, individual, animal, plant as a reflection of the underlying “I”.
That’s a
pretty big mouthful to swallow. Whether the proponents of sustainability will
have the nerve to address this and take it on, I have no idea. What I can say,
as a scientist, is that when you do, you do finally get a picture that makes
sense. I believe that is what I have to offer in The Nature of Order. It
provides a view in which all these things do make sense together. Therefore you
have a platform from which you can go on, and in which the human being matters,
and all the other things matter. You don’t have to be apologetic about the fact
that things matter. You don’t have to cook up vague techno reasons as to why
they matter. They matter because it’s in the essence of this picture of things.
The
scientific understanding of the situation is enormously increased when you take
this apparently daring step which will appear insane to some. It is a huge
step. Understanding what is loosely termed sustainability at the moment must
reside on the large idea of creating life on the planet and that every action
has the responsibility to add to that created life, never to detract from it.
MAGGIE:
Something you can count on from the sustainability community is that they feel
a responsibility to do something very personally, very deeply. Now, that’s
different than the way you describe making it personal, but it’s something to
work with. I also think that in the sustainability community in general, when
they experience nature, they feel very much a part of it. For instance, going
into the forest, watching a river, realizing that you’re in an ecosystem and
that it’s enveloping you. At those moments, when we have that consciousness, it
is very personal and how it connects to our well being is obvious. When we go
back to the regular world where technology reigns, it’s easy to loose sight of
that. Then we long to go back because we miss the personal connection. I wonder
if there’s a way to build on what is already a felt personal connection and
help us make steps toward what you describe.
CHRIS:
There’s a problem with the word “ecosystem,” which the language itself tells
you. You say ecosystem when you’re talking about flowers and raindrops and
trees. The moment you call it an ecosystem, you’ve technologized it. It’s apart
from you. So although you described a situation that intuitively many people in
the sustainability movement have rejoiced in – the feeling of being one with
some place or some part of nature – the form of description tears it down
rather than builds it up. One does it in desperation because ecosystem is the
only kind of word at the moment that even vaguely points in that direction. But
it’s a crooked finger that’s pointing. Let’s say a concept like ecosystem that
wants to give an orderly picture of how things interact to reveal the nature of
the thing, that concept has to be rebuilt so that it is built out of things
that are person-connected -- all the elements are person-connected. The tree
and the raindrop need to be person-connected. This tells you how big a leap it
is because one’s first reaction to that is, Well, that’s fine but how is it
going to help us study the interactions, which led us to use the word ecosystem
in the first place? I think this is a very hard task. I’ve made some steps
toward a solution, but they are by no means adequate. It would need many people
thinking about how to make this work.
MAGGIE:
Another word that comes to mind is “belonging.” Somehow I feel closer to the
tree and the raindrop when I’m in a place that I feel I belong to, or
that belongs to me. That also holds true when we think about a community
that we want to live in, or a society that we want to be a part of – that we
belong to it, or it belongs to us. That’s a very personal connection. I wonder
if that is another step toward what you’re talking about.
CHRIS: This
is a huge topic. As you know, Book 3 of The Nature of Order, starts with
exactly that idea: that we’ve lived in a world where what pervades is not
belonging. It provides a description of belonging, in the sense that you just
spoke about it. So what does it mean to create that in buildings, streets,
fields, gardens? I completely agree that there is a need for that. I think it’s
a very important clue because it’s so
intuitively clear if one hangs onto it. You say, We’re just not going to
let anything into this model unless it is clearly rooted that way. You might
say that the elements of the whole model, if I could use that word, are bits of
belonging. If you have a picture of all these elements and systems, all of them
rooted in our own belonging right at the forefront so that it’s extremely
visible in every single description that is given, plus the paraphernalia that
describes the interactions, then I think you have the beginning of a viable
model that will not play tricks on us and not deceive us and not allow it to be
co-opted.
MAGGIE: How
do we add this most recent part about being personal and belonging to what we
do now, which we talked about earlier in a more step-wise fashion. If I go from
the way you were describing what ecosystem is, to the idea that belonging is
the first thing, then I’m looking at a system I’m part of and my assumption is
that everything belongs here. The task isn’t to describe an ecosystem that’s
different from me. The task is to understand how everything that belongs here
fits together, including me.
CHRIS:
Right.
MAGGIE: I
think that very much describes a lot of people in the sustainability movement.
It certainly describes me. I’m part of a system that I don’t like, and I know
it. I’m trying to figure out how I behave differently in that system to
influence it in a direction that seems to be better, though I don’t understand
an lot of what’s going on or how to influence it, or what’s good and what’s
bad. My intuition is still telling me to do whatever I can do, and that’s one
of the ways it’s easy to fall into technological traps. For instance, I can
recycle if I learn enough about how to recycle well. At least I’m doing something.
Basically, the need – the longing – to do something to move toward healing, not
only the system I belong to but also myself, finds forms that I can grapple
with. That’s one of the reasons we end up in that trap. Suppose you say to me,
You belong in this town or this neighborhood or this house, and I try to
grapple with what to do. What direction does that give me? If I let myself live
in that question for a while, I do get answers that don’t come to me from
technological solutions, green building, or various latest and greatest
sustainability initiatives. It becomes extremely personal. And doing
that – allowing myself to live in that
question -- also puts me in touch with the ache I have, the sadness I have,
because I am a part of this system, and it needs – I need – healing so desperately. I wouldn’t want to overlook that
part of what’s going on in people who care about sustainability. I think that
is a huge motivation, and also worthy of acknowledgment.
CHRIS: I
think it’s incredibly worthy of acknowledgment. My point throughout what we’ve
been speaking about here is that exactly: the mismatch between the inner
knowledge, or longing or intuition, about how things are and ought to be,
compared with the models and tools that people have grasped at like straws in
the hope that these straws will save us from drowning. My point is simply, so
long as the tools are of the type that exist at the moment, they will not save
us. That frustration you are describing and that sadness, almost desperation of
sadness I would say, will continue unless these models are replaced. The fact
that such models are possible is very important. As long as a person does not
know that good models are possible, that person will grasp at, as you say,
green building, solar panels, or wetland flows, as ways of satisfying that
inner yearning. It’s the only kind of model currently available so you’d be
stupid to pass it up. It’s better than nothing, or seems that way. I’m not sure
it is. But if, as a result of just reading this conversation, people begin to
see that there might be a model of a different kind that covers the territory
in a unifying way, which leads directly to the human heart and is linked to the
human heart, it doesn’t pretend not to be in order to get credibility in
science (which isn’t going to give it credibility for very much longer if I am
any judge), if they see models that are capable of going that much deeper and
reconnecting them to the earth, not in this mechanistic fashion, but in terms
of inner knowledge of who they are, then they will be much quicker to say, I
don’t want to hear about green buildings anymore unless it is expressed in this
way. Or even as sensible as it is to talk about fish and water birds and
riparian areas, they might say, I don’t want to hear about it anymore unless it
is directly connected to what I feel about those things when I’m there, and
what my part is in them. Then you have the chance to really change the world,
and by definition, it will be something that can’t be co-opted. If it has its
anchor in the individual human heart and that commonality of feeling that we all
experience at that level about these matters, it would be very, very difficult
to co-opt it.
MAGGIE: The
words that label the great departure that you describe is “generating life.” As
I look at different sustainability initiatives and am aware of technologies
that have come to the forefront, I’ve begun to ask myself, do they generate
life? I think that’s the way The Nature of Order can help redirect our
energies, because its purpose is to show us how to generate life. The terrain
is vast. There are so many things that each individual could choose to do. It’s
hard for me to imagine what that looks like in motion on a grand scale. But at
least for now it’s a way for me to double check myself about my assumptions. Do
the solutions that have been put forth in the last 15 to 20 years contribute in
that way? If they don’t, they are highly suspect.