Organic Agriculture and Local Food

Green Building & Retrofitting

1.Whole Systems Approach to Ecological Design
Ecological Designs	Master Planning	Climate Change & Peak Oil

Industrial Ecology

The old motto "Natura mater et magistra" - nature is both mother and teacher - applies. The basic idea is that our industrial and development processes can be modelled on natural ecosystems. This is the field of ecological design and engineering and industrial ecology.

The UN University calls this approach “Eco-restructuring”. The fundamental idea is to move beyond the typical industrial production and consumption models, which are linear and mechanistic, to close loop systems, which are similar to natural ecosystems. So we design an industrial plant or a new town or an ecovillage as a living system, which is an integral part of the larger bioregion. The inputs and outputs of the human engineered facilities are seen as typical of natural ecological sub-systems and the wilderness is taken as the greater whole in the design process.

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"It is the wilderness come back again, a lagoon with our city reflected in its eye." - William Stafford.

At present, our industrial processes emphasize the moving of materials and energy from nature through the economic system as the primary way we “create value”. The main economic activities are, therefore, producing and consuming. We might contrast this to a mature forest or pond. In these natural systems the processes of production and the consumption, including recycling of wastes and nutrients, are balanced processes. On the forest floor the decomposing organic matter recycles the nutrients and nurtures the trees. The limnology of a pond is a wonderful example of many interacting natural systems, with constant changes in the ecology, but a stable overall effect on the environment. The system balance and stability is only disturbed when we overload the pond with pollutants or too many nutrients from human systems.

Natural ecosystems have a large number of pathways and so can be called distributed systems. Species diversity reinforces the stability of these systems with redundancy in function. The result is self-organization, self-repair, self-reproduction, and a great ability to adapt to perturbations in external conditions. If industrial processes can have these same attributes, they will be highly effective and often restorative. A paradigm change happens as we begin to think about industry as part of, and not separate, from nature, that is human, economic and industrial activities are living systems participating in the Earth's natural systems.

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"Model the systemic design of industry on the systemic design of the natural system ... industrial ecology involves designing industrial infrastructures as if they were a series of interlocking human-made ecosystems interfacing with the natural global ecosystem ... The aim of industrial ecology is to interpret and adapt an understanding of the natural system and apply it to the design of the human-made system, in order to achieve a pattern of industrialization that is not only more efficient, but which is intrinsically adjusted to the tolerances and characteristics of the natural system." - Tibbs, 1992

The International Society for Industry Ecology promotes industrial ecology as a way of finding innovative solutions to complicated environmental problems.
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