front cover of The Ecological Design and Planning Reader
The Ecological Design and Planning Reader
Forster O. Ndubisi
Island Press, 2014
From Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, writers have long examined the effects of industrialization and its potential to permanently alter the world around them. Today, as we experience rapid global urbanization, pressures on the natural environment to accommodate our daily needs for food, work, shelter, and recreation are greatly intensified. Concerted efforts to balance human use with ecological concerns are needed now more than ever.

A rich body of literature on the effect of human actions on the natural environment provides a window into what we now refer to as ecological design and planning. The study and practice of ecological design and planning provide a promising way to manage change in the landscape so that human actions are more in tune with natural processes. In The Ecological Design and Planning Reader Professor Ndubisi offers refreshing insights into key themes that shape the theory and practice of ecological design and planning. He has assembled, synthesized, and framed selected seminal published scholarly works in the field from the past one hundred and fifty years——ranging from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow to Anne Whiston Spirn’s, “Ecological Urbanism: A Framework for the Design of Resilient Cities.” The reader ends with a hopeful look forward, which suggests an agenda for future research and analysis in ecological design and planning.

This is the first volume to bring together classic and contemporary writings on the history, evolution, theory, methods, and exemplary practice of ecological design and planning. The collection provides students, scholars, researchers, and practitioners with a solid foundation for understanding the relationship between human systems and our natural environment.
[more]

front cover of Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan
Island Press, 2007
Ecological Design is a landmark volume that helped usher in an exciting new era in green design and sustainability planning. Since its initial publication in 1996, the book has been critically important in sparking dialogue and triggering collaboration across spatial scales and design professions in pursuit of buildings, products, and landscapes with radically decreased environmental impacts. This 10th anniversary edition makes the work available to a new generation of practitioners and thinkers concerned with moving our society onto a more sustainable path.
Using examples from architecture, industrial ecology, sustainable agriculture, ecological wastewater treatment, and many other fields, Ecological Design provides a framework for integrating human design with living systems. Drawing on complex systems, ecology, and early examples of green building and design, the book challenges us to go further, creating buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes that are truly restorative rather than merely diminishing the rate at which things are getting worse.
[more]

front cover of A Safe and Sustainable World
A Safe and Sustainable World
The Promise Of Ecological Design
Nancy Jack Todd
Island Press, 2005

In the late sixties, as the world was waking to a need for Earth Day, a pioneering group founded a small non-profit research and education organization they called the New Alchemy Institute. Their aim was to explore the ways a safer and more sustainable world could be created. In the ensuing years, along with scientists, agriculturists, and a host of enthusiastic amateurs and friends, they set out to discover new ways that basic human needs—in the form of food, shelter, and energy—could be met. A Safe and Sustainable World is the story of that journey, as it was and as it continues to be.

The dynamics and the resilience of the living world were the Institute's model and the inspiration for their research. Central to their efforts then and now is, along with science, a spiritual quest for a more harmonious human role in our planet's future. The results of this work have now entered mainstream science through the emerging discipline of ecological design.

Nancy Jack Todd not only relates a fascinating journey from lofty ideals through the hard realities encountered in learning how to actually grow food, harness the energy of the sun and wind, and design green architecture. She also introduces us to some of the heroes and mentors who played a vital role in those efforts as well, from Buckminster Fuller to Margaret Mead. The early work of the Institute culminated in the design and building of two bioshelters—large greenhouse-like independent structures called Arks, that provided the setting for much of the research to follow.

Successfully proving through the Institute's designs and investigations that basic land sustainability is achievable, John Todd and the author founded a second non-profit research group, Ocean Arks International. Here they applied the New Alchemy's natural systems thinking to restoring polluted waters with the invention and implementation of biologically based living technologies called Ecomachines and Pond and Lake Restorers. A Safe and Sustainable World demonstrates what has and can be done--it also looks to what must be done to integrate human ingenuity and the four billion or so years of evolutionary intelligence of the natural world into healthy, decentralized, locally dreams hard won--and hope.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter