Saving The Planet By Design

Reinventing Our World Through Ecomimesis

Ken Yeang

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317495796
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture générale

Can we 'save the Planet'? For a resilient, durable and sustainable future for human society, we need to repurpose, reinvent, redesign, remake and recover our human-made world so that our built environment is benignly and seamlessly biointegrated with Nature to function synergistically with it. These are the multiple tasks that humanity must carry out imminently if there is to be a future for human society and all lifeforms and their environments on the Planet. Addressing this is the most compelling question for those whose daily work impacts on Nature, such as architects, engineers, landscape architects, town planners, environmental policy makers, builders and others, but it is a question that all of humanity needs to urgently address.

Presented here are two key principles as the means to carry out these tasks – 'ecocentricity' being guided by the science of ecology, and 'ecomimesis' as designing and making the built environment including all artefacts based on the emulation and replication of the 'ecosystem' concept.

Designing with ecology is contended here as the authentic approach to green design from which the next generation of green design will emerge, going beyond current use of accreditation systems. For those who subscribe to this principle, this is articulated here, showing how it can be implemented by design. Adopting these principles is fundamental in our endeavour to save our Planet Earth, and changes profoundly and in entirety the way we design, make, manage and operate our built environment.

1

Reinventing the human-made world to address the sustainability equation

PROPOSITION

Can we save the Planet by design? – For a resilient, durable and sustainable future for human society, we need to repurpose, reinvent, redesign, remake and recover our human-made world so that our built environment is seamlessly biointegrated with Nature and functions synergistically with it. These are the multiple tasks that we must carry out and must be carried out imminently if there is to be a future for human society and all lifeforms and their environments on the Planet.

Why are these tasks critical? Addressing these is the most compelling question for all those whose daily work impinges on Nature, such as architects, engineers, landscape designers, urban planners, environmental policy makers, builders, real estate developers and others, but it is also a question that all of humanity needs to urgently address. Whereas addressing the issues of environmental impairment had in the immediate past been a question of preventive action to avert further impairments, the progressive state of environmental impairment has advanced such that repairing the existing degradation already done becomes a priority, besides averting further impairments that has now become a ‘race and rescue’ mission.

Virtually all aspects of the human-made world and its built environment need to be addressed in this way – beginning with humanity’s synthetic and semi-synthetic artefacts and systems, including all urban conurbations from mega urban areas and cities to enclosures (such as buildings), as well as engineering structures and infrastructures for urban utilities, including transportation, movement and routing systems, energy production and transfer systems (sometimes referred to as ‘grey infrastructure’) and all of humanity’s artefacts. The list extends to our biotic production systems for generating goods such as food, wood and medicines, among others. Of course, of high priority is our method of energy production from non-renewable sources and industrial systems for the design, fabrication and packaging of the multitude and variety of artefacts that serve both our commercial and our personal needs. The ‘remaking’ of the above requires that we transition the material flow of systems from the present day’s throughput flow of ‘take-make-dispose’ linear economy to a circular economy of ‘take-make-reuse-recycle-replenish-reintegrate (back into the natural environment)’.

How can we carry out the mission outlined above? Our response needs to be based on two key principles presented here – ‘ecocentricity’, meaning to work guided by the science of ecology, and ‘ecomimesis’, meaning working, designing and making the built environment, including all artefacts, to become Nature-like based on the emulation and replication of the attributes of the ‘ecosystem’ as a concept.

What is the significance of these principles? The contention is that adopting these values profoundly changes the way we design, make, manage and operate our built environment to achieve our goal of saving and reclaiming the Planet for Nature.

ACHIEVING EFFECTIVE BIOINTEGRATION

The crux in carrying out this multiple set of directives successfully at all instances is effective ‘biointegration’ – that is, the seamless and benign connecting and fusing of our human-made world and its technological systems, with its machines and its built environment, with Nature – that is, the natural environment upon which we are completely dependent for resources, from food, water, air and materials to energy. Moreover, this biointegration as reconnecting with Nature must be as seamless and as benign as possible, both physically and systemically.

Biointegration is defined as the state of being combined or the process of combining into a complete and harmonious whole of the physical and systemic connection between the abiotic and the biotic in Nature. An analogy of effective biointegration can be found, for instance, in the medical and dental practice of orthopaedic implanting that effectively combines human-made artificial components with the biological. However, we must aspire to do even better, as many of the current orthopaedic implants are made of unsustainable materials. The aim is to create implants that are harmless even after they disintegrate, which must similarly extend by analogy to our built environments, which are in effect implants in Nature, where the materials used must similarly become harmless even after they are dismantled or disintegrated.

This reintegration is crucial, as the current environmental impairment is due to our disconnection from Nature. This broken link needs to be replaced by a synergistic reintegration, which is the complete fusion of the human-made built environment, including not just its artificial but its semi-artificial components, systems and processes, with Nature, and particularly with the Planet’s ecosystems, its constituents and its biogeochemical cycles.^1,2,3

Biointegration can be both physical and systemic. Physical biointegration means minimising and reversing the physical displacement and fragmentation of natural and semi-natural habitats and populations of species by our urban and industrial and infrastructural developments. Systemic biointegration is where the flows and fluxes of energy,⁴ materials, water and biota associated with the systems of manufacture, operation and recovery of both artefacts and the built environment are combined and fused together with Nature’s ecosystems’ and cycles’ processes and flows. One of the key aims of effective biointegration must be to avoid the situation whereby we create a mostly inert human-made world and built environment, made from materials taken from various localities over the Planet that are reassembled to be distinctly and physically separated from its surrounding ecosystems and remain and accumulate in this inert state at the end of their used lives.

In effect, if we are able to effectively repurpose and achieve effective biointegration in everything that humans do, build and make in Nature on the Planet, including its built environment and all of its systems, then there will be no environmental problems. Successfully accomplishing this biointegration is then the fundamental challenge in our endeavour to save the Planet.

‘SAVING THE PLANET’ AS ECOLOGICAL DESIGN

The term ‘Ecological Design’ here refers to a broad strategic approach that is firstly guided by the science of ecology (see Chapter 2) and secondly affected by the process of ‘designing’, where the term ‘design’ is used not as the sole domain of designers, but as an efficient and systematic problem-solving process applicable to all related disciplines, as will be explained later.

What is the purpose of Ecological Design? Ecological Design is pivotal to our mission of saving the Planet. Its purpose and role are to address the issues caused by the millions of artefacts and structures, particularly the extensive urban structures humans design and construct, that make up our ‘built environment’. While other species in Nature can make new structures, such as termite mounds and coral reefs, no other species manufactures enduring artefacts from materials that cannot be broken down easily into organic constituents or will only biodegrade over extended timeframes. Many of the artefacts that are for humanity’s daily use, together with their packaging, after a short period of use or partial consumption become wastes that are in most instances thrown ‘away’ rather than being usefully and circularly absorbed back into the environment. In many instances, the packaging of single-use items lasts longer than the contents themselves. It has been estimated that some 80% of the artefacts we produce become problematic waste. The high degree of discarding of unwanted and unrecyclable artefacts and packaging, and the resulting emissions caused by their production, reflect not only the rapid development of human technology and society, but also the profligate and wasteful lifestyle of human society (see Chapter 8).

The waste we emit into the environment includes the voluminous emissions from the production of energy from fossil fuels, waste from the production of food in our animal agriculture and ineffective industrial agricultural systems, wastes from our manufacturing processes, and beyond. Essentially all activities of human society are conducted with total disregard of the consequences of their outputs on the Planet and its natural systems. The Planet, being a ‘closed system’, is being used as an environmental sink.⁵ However, there is currently no other place that becomes the ‘away’ into which most of humanity’s wastes can be ‘thrown’. This misuse of the Planet as a sink for humanity’s unwanted solids, liquids and gases has reached a level at which this misuse has actually started to change global processes, particularly changing global climate as a result of the gases emanating from the burning of fuels to meet our energy needs, from industrial agricultural and food production from rearing animals, and other urban and semi-urban related activities.^6,7,8 We have similarly begun to affect through our own activities and technologies real changes to other global cycles such as the water cycle, carbon and nitrogen cycles.⁹ The scale of these effects has led to the coining of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to refer to the current geological era in which Planetary processes are being dominated by the actions of humankind.

Human society may not be immediately be aware of the environmental impacts of these on the Planet, as many of the consequences of our actions are not immediately visible to the human eye. Many require a longer timescale to become visibly evident to humanity, and generally even longer to reach the point where humanity can collectively acknowledge that crucial restorative action needs to be imminently taken. This is because the Planet’s ecosystems and biogeochemical systems have inherent limits in terms of capacity and speed of process. Being aware of this is a crucial aspect of Ecological Design

Trends are particularly clear in the world’s oceans, where temperature increase is evident. Impacts include changing weather conditions, an increase in the intensity and frequency of storms and droughts, and rising sea levels.^10,11 With increasing and constant carbon emissions, Earth’s atmosphere traps more heat. As polar ice caps melt, more water enters our oceans, causing rising sea levels. Increased carbon in the atmosphere also means increased carbon in the ocean, causing ocean acidification. Threats appear greatest in coastal areas where so many key human conurbations are located.

When a major climatic phenomenon such as a hurricane or an earthquake creates a ‘high-level event’ like a storm surge or a tsunami, the effects may be dramatically amplified by combination with background anthropogenic climate change. It is also undeniably evident that humanity is causing a huge acceleration in the loss of biodiversity, both in terms of the loss of tangible components of ecosystems such as habitats and species and in terms of ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and ecological succession (see Glossary). This is a trend that needs to be halted and reversed. The loss of species has been such as to lend the name of humankind to a mass extinction process – the ‘Anthropocene Extinction’ – equal in scale and significance to previous mass extinctions caused, for example, by tectonic shifts or meteorite strikes on Earth millions of years ago.

Our impact on the ecosystems is such as to push many ecosystem processes to the point of imminent collapse, threatening humanity’s own survival in the process. The devastating events by Nature on human communities are not Nature’s retaliation (as implied by some in the popular press). The rest of Nature is indifferent to humanity’s motivation. These devastating events are just Nature’s physical and chemical reactions to changes that affect the health, resilience and integrity of ecosystems and changes to biogeochemical cycles.^{12,13,14,15,16}

Homo sapiens has shown great adaptability through history, adapting quickly to new circumstances when environmental catastrophe strikes and support systems disappear. We move to new areas and find new technological solutions, including substitutes for materials that may end up in short supply or become environmentally problematic. Nature too, given the chance, can be similarly adaptable.^17,18 Species that were in small number or in another area can move in, or whole new species can evolve to adapt to the new conditions. New societies and new Nature can then form ...