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I am writing this review in my studio
in Chicago, IL, a city that has been the beneficiary of the extraction
of the great natural wealth from the immense prairie ecosystem of
middle America. Chicago continues to be a center of technology,
business and culture because its success is deeply rooted, quite
literally, in the prairie earth from which it was born. History
and the environment have been very kind to Chicago in spite of the
way we have traditionally developed our technologies without regard
to the needs of our native prairie or our small piece of Lake Michigan
shoreline.
The concept that technology and the natural environment be treated
in a holistic manner is the unifying idea of a fine collection of
essays entitled Inventing for the Environment. The book looks at
history and innovation in a search for a new definition of environmentalism.
The editors, Arthur Molella and Joyce Bedi, are director and historian,
respectively, at the Smithsonian Institution’s Jerome and Dorothy
Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. This
book is the result of an interdisciplinary program series held at
the Lemelson Center.
The universal development of the city throughout history, technological
innovation and its effects on nature are the main themes that unite
the specific environmental issues of landscape architecture, urban
planning, green architecture, clean water, alternative energy sources
and industrial ecology. Each of these topics has its own section
consisting of three essays, one by a historian, one by a practitioner
and a third that is a biographical sketch of an innovator in the
discipline.
Even though many environmental histories are presently being written,
most center on a single technology or social issue. This book presents
for the first time a multidisciplinary approach using history and
technological innovation to light a pathway through the environmental
maze we have created for ourselves. The idea to include essays from
both historians and practitioners is inspired because they each
address the concept of time and change from their own perspective.
Time and change are inherent in both history and ecology. In the
opening essay, Richard White writes that history and ecology are
the two disciplines that most appreciate contingency. Because the
events of history or the components of an ecosystem are connected,
when something happens it affects all the following events and remaining
components. To insure positive results, the writers believe we must
broaden our definition of society to include all species and treat
nature and technology as integrated components of the ecological
community.
The essays are all well written with some minor exceptions. The
“Straw Bale Building” essay is a bit long and too detailed
for the purpose of this book and “The Negawatts, Hypercars
and Natural Capitalism” essay contains familiar pieces from
other of the authors’ articles. The most engaging of the essays
is the concluding one. In it Roderick Nash and Martha Davidson speculate
about the year 3000. To create a one thousand year plan, or even
just to set the goals and parameters of where we want to be in a
thousand years, is heady stuff. The simplest and perhaps most difficult
goal to attain is to still be around one thousand years from now.
As Paolo Soleri writes in his essay, the American dream of a single
family home in the “open space” of suburbia is so entrenched
in our psyche that we are unwilling to change our behavior, no matter
how destructive it becomes.
However, we are a nation of technological optimists. The writers
of Inventing for the Environment believe that as we understand our
environmental history and begin to successfully integrate our technologies
with the natural world we will be capable of meeting any challenge
with inventive solutions.
Richard Walthers is founder of PRAIRIE Fish, a Chicago, IL-based
consulting firm dedicated to design and sustainability issues. He
can contacted at: rwalthers@ prairiefish.com. |
