Ecological Design

ADVERTISEMENT

Ecological design, also called eco-design, enables environmental engineers to conserve nature while serving people. Ecologically designed structures follow these four principles:

1. They allow nature to be visible.
2. Their design works with nature rather than trying to reconstruct nature.
3. Design planning grows out of the characteristics of a location.
4. Designs conform to ecological accounting.

The principles of ecological accounting work similarly to a balance sheet in business accounting. Businesses develop balance sheets to assure that all of their expenses, or cash outflows, can be covered by the business’s assets and cash inflow. Ecological accounting also will reveal whether a community’s consumption and waste production can be covered
by technologies that reuse, recycle, or reclaim materials. In environmental science, natural capital is equivalent to financial assets; resource depletion corresponds to financial expenses. An example of a financial balance sheet and an example of an ecological balance sheet are shown in the following table.

On the ecological balance sheet shown below, natural capital represents any natural resources that the planet holds and that are available for human use. Of course, unrestrained use of natural capital will quickly deplete resources so that these resources cannot be available for future

Passive solar homes use sunlight for natural lighting and heat. This house in Pennsylvania
uses horizontal light shelves to reflect light into the rooms’ interiors. The solarium that
extends beyond the outer wall receives sunlight and reflects it. This serves the purpose of
lighting the interior and providing heat. (Cusano Environmental Education Center, John Heinz
National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum)

generations. In order to make up the deficit, society must rebalance the accounting sheets in the following ways: (1) conserve natural resources; (2) produce new types of resources; or (3) combine conservation with new resource technology. The table on page 12 provides an example of balancing ecological accounts or, put another way, living sustainably. In all cases, the existing natural capital never changes because these values are set; the planet holds only a finite amount of natural resources that are gone forever once people have used them up.

In the example shown in the table on page 12, unrestrained resource depletion is solved by combining conservation with new technologies that provide alternative resources. Environmental engineering takes part in all of these options by making sustainable buildings, and it also develops new forms of resources, such as solar or wind energy, to help conserve nonrenewable coal and oil energy sources.

Environmental engineering helps balance ecological accounts in four specific ways. First, it uses construction materials that spare nonrenewable

or slow-renewable materials such as wood harvested from old-growth forests. Second, environmental engineering maximizes the use of passive energy, which is energy generated by nonmechanized means. Third, if a design must include active or mechanized energy, it employs it in its most efficient option, as, for example, replacing an older, energy-demanding refrigerator with an energy-efficient model. Fourth, environmental engineering
balances production and consumption by working with the natural systems in the environment. For example, an ecologically designed house in northern Australia can make use of natural airflow for cooling and forgo air-conditioning. By contrast, a house on a Swiss mountain reduces wind exposure with a partially subterranean design that lets wind flow over it.

New structures develop in three phases: planning, design, and implementation. The best plans take into consideration all facets of the local environment. People have for generations built houses, barns, roads, and dams as if to battle nature rather than work with it. Expensive beachfront homes often slide into the waves during storms; roadways continually
wash away in landslides. Better planning would allow the coast to change naturally in storms and keep homes secure by building them farther inland. Roadways that require continuous repair and support should probably not lie on unstable land in the first place. Designing with nature in mind also follows a ready-made blueprint: nature itself.

Ecological design brings a new philosophy to almost every aspect of conventional design that has been used in cities and towns since the Industrial Revolution.

A person who has lived a lifetime in a metropolis such as New York City might find it hard to understand the idea of ecological design because this person has grown accustomed to conventional design. Ecological designs follow few of the preconceived notions of an office or a house; they bring nature back into places that have been missing nature for  generations. The Yale University professor Stephen Kellert explained in a 2004 interview
that one of ecodesign’s challenges is to incorporate nature in all places, not just in a garden outside a massive skyscraper. “One of the difficulties of the urban environment is that especially the large urban mega-cities around the world tend to rely ever increasingly on vertical structures,” he said. 

“Most of our evolutionary experience of the natural world has been on a horizontal plane, so how do you build into a sixty-five-story office building an experience of nature that is any more than superficial or vicarious?” Ecological design intends to answer that question.

New ecologically designed structures, especially office buildings and housing, must overcome two challenges: the process of mimicking natural designs and the challenge of overcoming people’s attitudes. Kellert has developed a classification system, shown in the following table, that describes nine attitudes toward nature that any person in industrialized
society likely holds. The categories are listed in order from the most nature-aware attitude to the least nature-aware attitude. When perusing these categories, it becomes clear that many people will probably take a long time to accept ecological design.

Negativistic and dominionistic views of nature lead to conventional designs; greater appreciation of nature favors ecological designs. Sometimes ecological design means throwing out all previous notions of engineering to study the ways in which nature creates simple solutions to complex problems. The University of California professor Robert Full described to the San Francisco Chronicle magazine in 2008 his team’s experience on

one difficult project: “They wanted to make a robot that maneuvered in the surf zone. This is really hard! It’s a terrible environment to maneuver in, but of course crabs can do that very well.” Full’s colleagues had invented a complicated robot that needed at least eight motors on each leg to simulate a crab’s joints. The entire blueprint became so unwieldy that the engineers decided to return to studying crabs to discover how these animals made  locomotion so simple. “When we did that we found that all these different joints, many of them actually work together as one—synergistically, and so we could collapse those into a single leg.” The Chronicle writer Mark Simborg said of Full’s new approach, “They constructed a basic leg with two motors, and sure enough, it worked.” The mantra less is more seemed to supply the answer.