The Concept of Ecotechnologies and Ecocommunities

The expression “human habitat” contains a paradox that should be examined if it is not to lead us into a certain measure of confusion. Clearly any man-made structure, indeed, any artifact that figures in an environment is “human” and part of a “human habitat.” Viewed in terms of this all-embracing definition, a human habitat could include the scarring towers of New York City’s World Trade Center and the low-slung town houses of Boston’s Beacon Hill or the steel mills of Pittsburg and the artisan shops of Williamsburg. What is man-made in a habitat is “human,” strictly speaking, and many serious writers see ‘no discordancies in juxtaposing towers and town houses or mills and shops as components of a human habitat.

But this definition, while obviously secure in its technical accuracy, is somewhat disquieting. It seems to preclude the basis for judging whether certain man-made things are desirable or not — and it has been used to achieve this exclusion with telling effect. More than one horrendous urban design has been force- fed to the public on the grounds that it is no less “human,” technically speaking, than a Florentine neighborhood square, and no pains have been spared to remind irate citizens that they are exercising inexcusable “value judgments” in describing the one as “inhuman” and the other as eminently “human.” Yet we tend to resist the notion that the man-made origin of a thing suffices to characterize it as “human.” We press the point that the word “human” should have considerably more than a technical meaning, that it should reflect deeply felt moral needs and ends.

This vexing paradox by no means confronts conventional technologists and planners alone. Even the new, so-called “countercultural” technologists and communitarians have confused technique with values or, more strictly speaking, the dimensions of a structure with its ethical or “human” qualities. It does not always improve our insight into this paradox to declare that small is beautiful” or to decribe “small” technologies as “soft,” “intermediate,” or “appropriate.” Such adjectives are more neutral morally than E. F. Schumacher (who coined most of these terms) would have us believe.[5] As a critic of Schumacher has recently observed; if big is not good, small is not necessarily beautiful.[6] Indeed, much that is small — such as a suburban tract, a back-breaking plow, a tiring handloom, or the modest office of a local real estate broker — may be downright repellent and dehumanizing by any standards. Dimensions are no more substitutes for values than the technical origins of a particular thing, although they may certainly be a factor in launching an individual on a particular ethical trajectory that rejects “big” for one reason or “small” for another.

That social philosophers, researchers, and popular writers who identify “small” with “human” have touched a nerve in a sizable segment of the American public seems to be one of the more obvisous facts of our times. Practical efforts to create a human habitat based on comparatively small communities, horticultural techniques of food cultivation, modest-sized complexes of solar-wind-methane energy installations, and craft technologies are widespread today and derive directly from the “countercultural” upsurge of the sixties. The constituency for these alternate technologies and communities is, in fact, much larger than the casual observor is likely to realize and its underlying philosophy, even if largely intuitive, has a coherence that has rarely been articulated in the conventional literature.

Nor can this movement be dismissed as episodic. Aside from the likelihood that it will have an existential impact comparable to the “counterculture” from which it derived, it has already pioneered in new technologies, service organizations, and community forms that have a tangibility, a reconstructive character, and a justly earned public recognition that can scarcely be compared with its almost formless and erratic antecedents of the lastdecade. Far from being episodic, this new quest for a “human habitat” articulates, even more than it fully recognizes, a well- formed and far-reaching historic tradition. Classical Hellenic thought initiated this tradition with its view of the polis as an ethical community; later, anarchist theorists such as Peter Kropotkin were to give it modernity with their concepts of face- to-face democracy and popular self-administration.

“Human” as Human Scale

It is important to emphasize the Hellenic (and largely western) origins of the new quest for a “human habitat” if only to place in c earer perspective the mystical Asian ambiance that surrounds it. Despite the tendency of so many new technologists and communitarians to slight science as spiritually desiccating, they retain closer affinities to the western scientific outlook than they are hkely to admit.[7] Quite often, in fact, the much-despised mechanical materialism associated with Newtonian science is simply replaced by an equally mechanical spiritualism that satisfies neither the needs of the new technologists for systematic research nor the needs of the new communitarians for a human- oriented value system.[8]

At the risk of seeming heretical, I would like to suggest that the Indian and Chinese philosophical works so much in vogue today provide no satisfactory melding of the disciplined rationalism, technical sophistication, social activism, and personalistic ethics t at actually vitalize this quest. One must grossly misread Asian literature to find the rational, technical, and ethical inspiration for developing human-oriented technologies and communities.[9] Despite the widely expressed need for a sense of unity with nature that Asian philosophy is said to satisfy, the primacy this philosophy gives to “cosmic” concerns over mundane social and individual needs tends to conflict with the intense subjectivism of its western acolytes, their activism, and the practical wisdom they exercise in designing their technologies and communities.

If we , must anchor the new quest for a human habitat in philosophical traditions of a pre-industrial era, it would seem that Hellenic rather than Asian thought is more relevant, even if it tends to receive scant attention. The fascinating Hellenic blend of metaphysical speculation with empirical study, of qualitative with quantitative science, and of natural with social phenomena is rarely equaled by Asian thinkers and religious’teachers. We still “talk Greek,” as it were, when we speak of “ecology,” “technology,” and “economics.” We also “think Greek” when we impute^“good” or “evil,” “just” or “unjust,” “human” or “inhuman in short, an ethical dimension — to data that conventional science views as hard facts. Although modern science can justly claim its origins in Hellenic philosophy, so too can the new technologists and communitarians who seek a human habitat, perhaps with even greater validity. For Greek “science,” if such it can be called in the modern sense of the term, is rarely free of an ethical stance toward reality and experience. To Plato and Aristotle, the analysis of phenomena at all levels of reality is never exhausted by the strictly descriptive query, “how.” Analysis must include an acknowledgment of functional interrelationship, indeed, of a metaphysical telos, which is expressed by the intentional query, “why.”[10] Despite the high degree of secularism and factual systematization that Greek thought (expecially in Aristotle’s extant writings) introduced into the western intellectual tradition, its center was eminently ethical and its orientation was human and social.

“Human,” in Greek thought, means scaled to human dimensions, at least as far as social institutions and communities are concerned. Although it has been observed that Plato in The Laws computes the most satisfactory number of households in his “best polis” on the basis of Pythagorean numerology, a close study of that dialogue shows that his motives are strikingly pragmatic. The number, 5040, enjoys the alluring advantage that it contains the “largest number of consecutive divisors” and yet comprises a number that suffices “for purposes of war and every peacetime activity, all contracts and dealings, and for taxes and grants.”[11] No figure could be so all-inclusive. In blending Pythagorean mysticism with pragmatic considerations, Plato affords his contemporaries a bridge to span the gap between the archaic world of the mythopeic and the practical world of social organization, a characteristic example of “cosmic” and social parallelism that has proved so appealing to the new technologists and communitarians of our own time.

Aristotle is more secular: he replaces Plato’s mysticism by strictly ethical premises. But these very premises provide him with his uniquely Hellenic stance — a moral conception of what we (borrowing our social terminology from zoology) designate as a “habitat.” In a widely quoted passage, Aristotle tells us that the “best polis” must be one that “can be taken in at a single view.”[12] His reasons for this scale, although rarely cited, form what is perhaps one of the most compelling arguments in social theory for decentralization. The population of a polis must suffice to achieve not only the “good life” and “self-sufficiency” in a “political community,” but must be limited to a size which renders it possible for citizens to “know each other’s personal characters, since where this does not happen to be the case the business of electing officials and trying law suits is bound to go badly; haphazard decision is unjust in both matters, and this must obviously prevail in an excessively numerous community.”[13]

“Small” in Aristotle’s view, is human because it allows for

individual control over the affairs of the community and the exercise of individual human powers in the social realm. A “big” community may be more efficient for economic or military purposes, but it would be “unjust.” Its citizens would be incapable of making decisions of profound social importance and would thereby fail to realize their distinctive human capacities for rational social judgment.[14] Hence the polis must be large enough to meet its material needs and achieve self-sufficiency, but small enough to be taken in at one view. Only in such a polis would human beings be able to realize their humanity, that is to say, to actualize their potentialities for rational judgment.

The Hellenic interpretation of “human” as self-consciousness and self-realization in the private sphere of life recurs throughout western thought from Descartes to the contemporary existentialists. A highly individualistic subjectivism is the intellectual hallmark of philosophy in the modern era. The Hellenic interpretation of “human” as self-activity and self-administration, in the public sphere, however, is surprisingly rare. The Protestant sects which were to gather together under the ample rubric of Puritan Congregationalism seem to have articulated perhaps the earliest modern attempts to establish the administrative autonomy of small decentralized groups as opposed to the centralized hierarchies of the Catholic and Anglican clergy. In colonial America, the Puritan congregation was to be extended from the religious to the political sphere — if, indeed, Puritan ideology established any distinction between the two — by vesting considerable civil authority in town meetings.[15] The theme is picked up again by Rousseau in his critique of deputized power and representative government. His praise of the Greek popular assembly based on face-to-face democracy is all the more remarkable if one bears in mind that it was written at a high-point in the development of the centralized nation-state.[16] Finally, the concept of a human habitat as a modern polis acquires its clearest coherence and multidimensionality in the work of Peter Kropotkin, one of the major theorists of nineteenth-century anarchism and a distinguished biogeographer in his own right.[17] In Fields, Factories and Workshops, a classic that has exercised immense direct and indirect influence since its publication as a series of articles in the late 1880s, Kropotkin formulates the most impressive case for decentralized communities.[18] His concept of a human habitat is based on an ecological integration of town and countryside, a highly flexible technology and communications system, a revival of artisanship as a productive form of “esthetic enjoyment,” and direct local democracy freed of the social ills, notably slavery, patriarchialism, and class conflict, that subverted Greek democracy.

The revival of interest in Kropotkin’s work, a revival that has been nourished by The New Ecologist in England and by what Victor Ferkiss describes as the “eco-anarchism” of many new technologists and communitarians in the United States, could well serve as a valuable point of departure for formulating an ethical dimension to the word “human.” If our values are not to be entirely arbitrary and relativistic, they must be rooted in certain, objective criteria about humanity itself. What clearly unites an Aristotle with a Kropotkin, despite a historic span of more than two millenia, is their emphasis on self-consciousness as the most distinctive of human attributes, notably, the capacity of human beings to engage in self-reflection, rational action, and foresee the consequences of their activities. Human action is not merely any action by human beings, but action that fosters reflexivity, rational practice, and foresight. Judging a habitat by this criterion, we would be obliged to look beyond the mere presence of human artifacts and inquire into whether or not the habitat promotes distinctively human traits and potentialities.

Clearly a habitat that is largely incomprehensible to the humans who inhabit it would be regarded as inhuman. Whether by reason of its size, its centralization, or the exclusivity of its decision-making process, it would deny the individual the opportunity to understand key social factors that affect his personal destiny. Such a habitat, by closing to the individual a strategic area for the formation of consciousness, would challenge the integrity of consciousness itself. That this trend, so apparent in the years following World War II, can evoke popular resistance is suggested by the often violent social unrest, particularly among American youth, of the 1960s. The official “habitat,” marked by a formidable degree of centralization and bureaucratization, seems to have generated, in reaction, the “subhabitats” or “subcultures” of the last decade from which so many of the new technologists and communitarians were to emerge.

But the same trend toward gigantism and centralization can produce a mind-numbing quiescence. An inhuman habitat tends to produce a dehumanizing one — dehumanizing in the sense that the degradation inflicted on the public sphere eventually invades the private sphere. The individual who is denied the opportunity to exercise self-administration in the public sphere suffers an attrition not only of self-consciousness but also of self-hood. The primacy of subjectivity, which philosophy since the Renaissance placed above all other considerations in the western intellectual tradition, is vitiated by the erosion of the ego. The shriveling of the public sphere is followed by the shriveling of the private sphere — that inviolable area which is presumably the last refuge of the individual in an overly centralized and bureaucratized society. The ego, increasingly desiccated by the aridity of the social sphere, becomes fit material for mass culture, stereotyped responses, and a preoccupation with trivia.[19]

A human habitat minimally presupposes human scale, that is to say, a scale that lends itself to public comprehension, individual participation, and face-to-face relationships. But a caveat must be sounded: it is not enough to deal with such a habitat exclusively in terms of its artifacts or their dimensions. Even the most delicately wrought “garden cities” do not make a human habitat if the term “human” is to mean more than pleasant vistas, comfortable homes, and efficient logistics. The “big” literally dwarfs the ego, but the “small” does not in itself elevate it. Beyond “big” or “small” are the compelling problems of the “just” and “good” in the Hellenic and libertarian sense of these terms: the “good life” as a materially secure and reflexive one, the “good society” as an ethical community based on justice, public participation, and mutual concern. It is patently impossible to describe such a habitat strictly in terms of its physical attributes, however important they may be. Eventually, any such description must include the political infrastructure, institutions, interpersonal relations, and guiding values that justify the use of the word “human.” In the absence of these political, institutional, psychological, and moral elements, the description becomes a mere inventory of things and structures, an artifactual aggregate that may secure the individual’s self-preservation and creature comforts, but explains nothing about the development of his selfhood and moral outlook.

Ecology and Environmentalism

The extent to which a designer accepts this multidimensional notion of human scale generally tells us whether his work can be regarded as qualitatively “new” or merely an extension of the conventional technical wisdom into new fields of research.

A considerable amount of research is currently underway in non-nuclear “alternate” sources of energy such as solar, wind, and methane installations, in food cultivation, and in energysaving dwellings and communities. From a strictly artifactual standpoint, this research is often difficult to distinguish. To cite a few examples: it is not unusual to read accounts of the new technology” that contain fast-and-loose comparisons between the Meinel design for monumental “solar farms” and Steve Baer’s small, delightfully playful solar-heated “drumwall”- house. One finds William E. Heronemus’s scheme for stringing large windmill installations across prairies and stretches of ocean juxtaposed with Hans Meyer’s 12-foot-high wind generator. R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Tetrahedral City,” a soaring pyramidal structure designed to accomodate a million residents may be found together with a description of Moshe Safdie’s compact modular “Habitat,” both of which are adduced as evidence of “organic” design and structural growth.[20]

But can such sharply contrasting proposals and projects be grouped together because they employ similar technical principles or profess adherence to an “organic” design concept? The Meinel, Heronemus, and Fuller proposals differ not only in their physical dimensions from the installations designed by Baer, Meyer, and Safdie; they differ even more significantly in their conceptualization of a human habitat, whether this difference is explicitly stated, presupposed or, in Fuller’s case, grossly misstated. The habitats that would emerge from the Meinel, Heronemus, and Fuller proposals would differ from a New York City, a Chicago, or a Pittsburgh primarily by virtue of their capacity to use inexhaustible resources such as solar and wind power, and an inexhaustible form of “real estate,” notably the upward reaches of space. None of these proposals involves any appreciable structural modifications of existing habitats; none of them is likely to arrest the trend toward urban gigantism, political and economic centralization, bureaucratic manipulation, and the ethic of brute self-interest. Perhaps the only significant claim they can make is long-run efficiency in the use of key resources — a claim that has been seriously challenged by friendly critics as well as opponents.[21]

Such an approach might well be described as “environmental- istic” if, by this term we mean a morally neutral but more efficient technical administration of nature for concrete pragmatic ends. Environmentalism can thus be regarded simply as a form of natural engineering. The objectives of the environmentalist presuppose no uniquely beneficient relationship between man and nature that is implicit in so many statements of an “ecological ethic,” notably a respect for the biosphere, a conscious effort to function within its parameters, and an attempt to achieve harmony between society and the natural world. Indeed, it is doubtful if words such as “nature” and “harmony” have any meaning for the environmentalist. “Nature” would be regarded as an inventory of “natural resources” and “harmony” as a poetic metaphor for “adaptation.” Environmentalism advances the goal of using these resources efficiently and prudently, with minimal harm to public health and with due regard to the conservation of raw materials for future generations.

Although Baer, Meyer, and Safdie are likely to agree with the environmentalist emphasis on efficiency and prudence, they can hardly be regarded as mere technicians. It is fair to assume from their designs and sense of human scale that they are committed to an ecological ethic, not merely involved in the concerns of technical proficiency. Baer’s sense of outrage over the social indifference of some of his colleagues, Meyer’s almost rhapsodic commitment to a naturalistic sensibility, and Safdie’s organic and communitarian vision, despite its puzzling eclecticism, reflect a decentralistic concept of habitats, a fervent regard for human beings as ends in themselves, and a holistic attitude toward nature. In their quest for technologies and communities that will serve to harmonize man with man and human society with nature, they might well be called “social ecologists” rather than designers, a term the late E.A. Gutkind coined a quarter of a century ago in a masterful discussion on community.[22] Their technologies and communities, in turn, could be described as “ecotechnologies” and “ecocommunities,” terms that are meant to impart an ecological ethic to conventional notions of technics and urbanism.[23]

If Baer, Meyer, and Safdie seem to reflect a largely intuitive commitment to social ecology, The New Alchemy Institute and urban service groups such as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance exhibit a high degres of ideological sophistication. The assumption that John Todd, director of The New Alchemy Institute, is guided by a “practical, how-to-do it approach” (as a journalist recently reported in a major New York daily) is grossly misleading.[24] The New Alchemy Institute, which Todd did so much to establish, scores a major advance over many new technologists by integrating ecotechnologies into functionally interrelated systems that stand in marked contrast to the mutually exclusive units one so often encounters at other research installations. The Institute’s windmills, solar collectors, aquacultural units and, very significantly, its extensive gardens — all taken together — could be described as a highly unique ecosystem. Todd, it is worth noting, explicitly acknowledges the influence of Kropotkin and other libertarian thinkers on his decentralistic and integrative outlook. He views his work as a project to alter social consciousness and human sensibility as well as technical practice.[25]

This emphasis on the integration of small-scale ecotechnologies acquires a distinct communitarian thrust in the work of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The Institute, while occupied with more modest installations than New Alchemy, promotes rooftop gardens, solar energy units, waste recycling, and retrofitting projects in the very midst of Washington, D.C. Ecotechnologies are expressly viewed by the Institute’s members as a means for achieving a new kind of urban community based on popular control of the resources and institutions that-affect the urban dweller’s life. They stress full public participation in local governance and finance, neighborhood control of food and energy resources, decentralization, and mutual aid. Accordingly, technology is not the sole focus of the Institute but rather one of many means for achieving active participation in community life. Like New Alchemy, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has been consciously influenced by Kropotkin and libertarian ideas. The tendency to report the approach of The New Alchemy Institute and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance as a “practical, how-to-do it” one reflects the intractability of the conventional mind to notions of a human habitat as an ethical community.[26] Even when these notions are cast in a familiar ecological jargon, they tend to be debased to technical “nuts-and-bolts” terms.

Ecotechnology, in fact, can scarcely be exemplified by a statuesque solar collector or a dramatic wind generator reared in splendid isolation from the ecosystem in which it is located. If the word “ecotechnology” is to have more than a strictly technical meaning, it must be seen as the very ensemble itself, functionally integrated with human communities as part of a shared biosphere of people and nonhuman life forms. This ensemble has the distinct goal of not only meeting human needs in an ecologically sound manner — one which favors diversity within an ecosystem — but of consciously promoting the integrity of the biosphere. The Promethean quest of using technology to “dominate nature” is replaced by the ecological ethic of using technology to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature.

Human consciousness, in effect, is placed in the service of both human needs and ecological diversity. Inasmuch as human beings are themselves products of the natural world, human self- consciousness could be described in philosophical terms as nature rendered “self-conscious,” a natural world guided by human rationality toward balanced or harmonious ecological as well as social ends. This philosophical vision has a historical pedigree in the western intellectual tradition. It reaches back to Hellenic philosophy as the concept of a world nous, a concept which, in Fichte’s stirring prose, envisions consciousness “no longer as that stranger in Nature whose connection with existence is so incomprehensible; it is native to it, and indeed one of its necessary manifestation.”[27]

Ecocommunity, in turn, could scarcely be exemplified by any urban aggregate or, for that matter, any rural houshold that happens to acquire its resources from solar and wind installations. If the word “ecocommunity” is to have more than a strictly logistical and technical meaning, it must describe a decentralized community that allows for direct popular administration, the efficient return of wastes to the countryside, the maximum use of local resources — and yet it must be large enough to foster cultural diversity and psychological uniqueness. The community, like its technology, is itself the ensemble of its libertarian institutions, humanly-scaled structures, the diverse productive tasks that expose the individual to industrial, craft, and horticultural work, in short, the rounded community that the Hellenic polis was meant to be in the eyes of its great democratic statesmen. It is within such a decentralized community, sensitively tailored to its natural ecosystem, that we could hope to develop a new sensibility toward the world of life and a new level of self-consciousness, rational action, and foresight.

Just as we are warned by many scholars that merely structural terms like “city-state” do not fully capture the meaning of a civic fraternity like the polis, so morally neutral words like “intermediate technology” and “environment” do not capture the meaning of ethically-charged concepts like “ecotechnology” and “ecocommunity.” A blending of ecotechnologies and ecocom- munities would more closely resemble a balanced, rationally- guided ecosystem than a passive ensemble of physical surroundings with the “appropriate technology” to sustain it. Indeed, until our estranged species with its increasing sense of alienation toward any earthly surrroundings can achieve this balanced, rationally guided ecosystem, it is doubtful if we can meaningfully describe any environment as a suitable habitat for people, much less a truly human one.