Below, Saleem Ali answers the second of our three questions.
The connection between ecology and engineering will need to be strengthened in coming years to see how natural systems can help with some of our most challenging development issues. Foremost among these challenges will be to supply fresh drinking water to the world. Organisms are far more efficient at cleaning and purifying aquatic systems than most human technologies and we will need to focus on harnessing such efficiency. For example, plants or bacteria that can help with desalination as well as for more efficient treatment of sewage and removal of toxins from waterways would be vital to finding renewable paths to dealing with water scarcity. The field of ecological design has evolved to some degree to provide this cross-disciplinary pathway, but it still needs far more investment to be scaled up for wider application.
University programs in environmental science and those in civil engineering and architecture are generally still quite separate in terms of administrative structures. Although the growth of "green buildings" has increased the market for more ecological design, most of these projects tend to be insular and speak more for branding and vanity of particular companies or households. Instead, the market for ecological design will need to reconfigure itself to consider larger issues of infrastructure and smart growth in developing countries, which must follow a more efficient trajectory in order to operate within the carrying capacity of ecosystems.
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I just found this blog and I want to say this entry is absolutely right. I work as an ecological consultant and deal all the time with the interaction of infrastructure design and the local environment. This is a field that has been around for decades but in my opinion we are only now realising the need to do more than propose minor changes to road routes or existing designs.
Excellent perspectives here. The contributions and potentials of natural systems frequently dwarf what we expect and are overlooked when solutions are sought. I would add that as well as the engineering aspects, the aesthetics of nature as presented in E.O.Wilson's concept of biophilia should be considered integral to making our utilization of these systems manageable and embracable by the humans who ultimately will be living with them. Cheers.
I think that ecological designers should, from the start, be less reliant on waiting for approval from existing instituions and instead be more "guerilla" in implementing their goals.
I'm thinking along these lines: Infrastructure installation and changes are approved permitting processes, a highly political way of doing things. Since "corporate" housing road building, sewage-treament activities have the most money to influence the political process, things will generally tend to go their way though the permitting agencies.
Eco-design is meant to be an alternative way of taking care of the impact of humans on the ecosphere, so why rely on the mainstream approval process to get things going?
Yes, there should be peer review and checks and balances, even eco-design should not be implemented willy-nilly, but implementing eco-design on a small scale, at first, on private land would provide evidence of how effective it is at re-integrating human activities into the "natural" environment.
Dang. I'm having a hard time expressing what I mean, here.
Let's look at the issue of clean water. In the "developed' world, water is cleaned by collecting wastewater at large, centralized plants that use chemicals, biology and lots of electricity to take your poop water and transform it back into your tap water. The physical and political infrastructure to install and maintain such a system is pretty vast and easily taken over by whoever has the most cash.
Eco-friendly water treatment, in order to be most effective, has to be free from control of "big money" interests. Therefore, it needs to not be reliant on large, centrally located plants, but needs to be as decentralized as possible. The trip from my toilet to my tap has to be as short as you can make it in order to have the least impact on the environment and be as independent from the government and the "big money" interests who control the gov't as you can make it - in my opinion.
The water cleaning system you install in my house, or in my local neighborhood needs to be tested against objective standards developed by scientists and engineers, of course, but what I'm trying to get at is that just as eco-design provides alternatives to the mainstream physical way of installing and maintaining civil-engineering infrastructure, it should also devote some time to figuring out alternatives to the mainstream way of providing the regulatory oversight for the whole process.
Does this make sense at all?
I'm thinking along these lines: Infrastructure installation and changes are approved permitting processes, a highly political way of doing things. Since "corporate" housing road building, sewage-treament activities have the most money to influence the political process, things will generally tend to go their way though the permitting agencies.