What is an ecologically imaginative perspective?

Techniques arise from our approach to objects. And that approach is contingent on how we see the world. The perspective we use to envison our place among things, places and events is either informed by nature or misinformed by our bias.

This is a rough checklist of some of the ingredients that might be said to comprise an ecologically imaginative and environmentally oriented work, invention or device:

The technique sustains some necessary function without degrading the surroundings or harming people's health or livelihood in the process.

The device works with natural systems to enhance existing feeedback cycles rather than diminish the capacity of the surroundings to biodegrade wastes.

The process uses wind, water, thermal or solar assisted sources of energy to provide goods or services without creating wastses that persist for time in the surroundings.

---

These above processes are informed by ecologically imaginative texts such as Ian McHarg's, Design with Nature and Arnold Pacey's Meanining in Technology. Sim Van der Ryn has suggested that the design process can actually enhance the relation opeople to their surroundings instead of creating dysfunctional barriers.

Lawrence Buell has argued that there are four attributes of an ecologically imaginative work of literature.

Solar Cookers

Four attributes are • human history is implicated in natural history • human accountability is to nature • legitimizes non-human interests • the ecological process is primarily dynamic

• human history is implicated in natural history 1. The non-human environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. E. M. Forster’s, Passage to India W. Faulkner’s, The Sound and the Fury • legitimizes non-human interests 2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest. Aldo Leopold’s, A Sand County Almanac Round River Land Ethic Annie Dillard’s, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek • human accountability is to nature 3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation. Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain Aldo Leopold’s, "Extension of Ethics" _____________, "Thinking Like Mountain." Karel Chapek’s, The War with the Newts E. M. Forster’s, The Machine Stops,

• the ecological process is primarily dynamic 4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than a given is at least implicit in the text. Terry Tempest William's, Unspoken Hunger Michael Crichhton’s, The Andromeda Strain Kurt Vonnegut’s, Galapagos or Cat’s Cradle Bill McKibben, The End of Nature Sim Van der Ryn, Ecological Design Walt Whitman's, Leaves of Grass

Adapted from (Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination,)

By Dr. J. Siry;

Cross-disciplinary issues in Ecological Criticism

August 2, 2000