A Quarterly Journal from McLennan Design. Rediscovering our relationship to the natural world. Volume 2 Issue 3
ASPIRE What can we learn from the leadership of Greta Thunberg and the youth-led Fridays for Future movement?
DESIGN What role do relationships with nature play in our well-being and how can biophilic design support?
MCLENNAN DESIGN
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s the summer ended and fall kicked in I noticed a change in public awareness of the state of the world. This was the season that a young girl took a long boat journey from Europe to North America to deliver to us and the entire planet the stark reality that our tone deaf stance on climate change had to come to an end – and the youth of the world agreed. Around the globe thousands of children helped spark protests, joined by many of us who have been trying to share the same message for years. Greta Thunberg is my new hero! We are at the end of a decade and an era – and beginning to look nervously towards 2020 as a new year. Close to home fires burned out of control in California and the political rhetoric got crazier in the United States tied to Trump and the subversion of democracy for political gain. This month the United States pulled out of the Paris Accord officially – in the same week that 11,000 senior scientists around the globe joined together to send to the world yet another dire warning of the immediacy of the global situation we now find ourselves in. We seem to be torn between a path of destruction and path of regeneration. Which will we choose? I spent a great deal of time on the road helping to share a positive vision for the future – one where we reconcile our relationship to nature and build living buildings and living cities. My travels took me to Sydney, Capetown, Ottawa, Sudbury and back again. Everywhere I went I felt the same energy and same tension. We are at a precipice and significant moment of change. And soon it will be 2020 – the Year of Perfect Vision. What will it bring? Will we finally turn a corner in the right direction, or waste yet another decade? In this issue we celebrate Greta and her amazing voice of reason and compassion. We discuss further the incredible importance of nature relationship as a missing core component of Biophilia. We showcase the biomimetic approach and philosophy of collaborator and partner Christine Lintott, another perspective on regeneration by Marcus Sheffer and John Boecker, and a discussion of the correlation between biodiversity and sustainability by Mary Anne Constable, our friend and the editor of +Impact—a publication of the Green Building Council South Africa. We hope you enjoy and share this issue of Love + Regeneration. Warmly, Jason F. McLennan
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF EDITORIAL DIRECTOR GRAPHIC DESIGN CONTRIBUTORS
JASON F. MCLENNAN KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI MICHELLE HENRY MARCUS SHEFFER, JOHN BOECKER, ROBIN WALL KIMMERER, MARY ANNE CONSTABLE
SOCIAL MEDIA
McLennan Design respectfully acknowledges the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples, who, throughout the generations, stewarded and thrived on the land where we live and work. November 2019, Volume 2, Issue 3 LOVE + REGENERATION is a quarterly publication of McLennan Design, LLC. © 2019 by McLennan Design. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Content may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission and is intended for informational purposes only. 4
Cover Photo/Shutterstock
NAVIGATE
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ASPIRE
What can we learn from the leadership of Greta Thunberg and the youth-led Friday’s for Future movement? Our appreciation for the voices that have made Climate Change impossible to ignore.
LEAD
What role do relationships with nature play in our well-being and how can biophilic design support? The second in our three-part series on Biophilia: Nature Relationships.
CELEBRATE
What opportunities exist to infuse our work with the power and presence of place and principles of biomimicry? A conversation with MD partner, Christine Lintott.
CONTRIBUTE
What is required of humans to right the imbalances we have created in this world? A view of REGENERATION by Marcus Sheffer and John Boecker.
EMULATE
What do we have to learn from the Northwest’s most iconic species? A closer look at Salmon.
EDIFY
Who? What? When? Where? Why? A recap of the ways and roles in which McLennan Designers are showing up in the field.
ELEVATE
How can a shift in how we view the collection and consumption of food inform our lives beyond sustenance? An excerpt from “The Honorable Harvest” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
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CONTRIBUTE
Rebuilding Biodiversity Rethinking what we can do to support and nurture the natural world so that it can continue to support us. 5
ASPIRE
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Greta Thunberg
FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE
Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old climate activist who has captured global attention and is credited with sparking the Fridays for Future movement in schools across the world, was initiated into the world of climate activism via a solitary demonstration in front of the Swedish Parliament in August 2018. For her second demonstration—one week later in the same place— she had company and the movement has grown from there. In an impassioned address to the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23rd, 2019, she challenged the assembled world leaders with the words “how dare you” four times in four minutes. After calculating both the urgency of the situation in overwhelming figures and the bewildering lack of response, she concludes with the direct remark, “There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us.” 6
In her 2018 TED Talk, Greta discusses her depression stemming from environmental stress and despair, and her ensuing diagnosis with Asperger’s Syndrome, obsessivecompulsive disorder, and selective mutism. “That basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary,” she explains, “Now is one of those moments.” The first international student led climate strike, orchestrated through Fridays for Future, was held on March 15th in over 2,000 cities across 125 countries and boasted over 1.6 million strikers. The Global Climate Strike that took place September 20 - 27, 2019 saw 7.6 million strikers across 6,135 actions in 185 countries between the two Fridays that fell in that week. The student run fridaysforfuture.org is a hub for the youth climate activism started by Thunberg and includes resources such as communication channels, suggested language and form letters, school absence permission slips penned by climate scientists and psychologists, sign-up forms, and the like. It also acts as an aggregator of Thunberg’s and the movements’ various social media profiles. “I want people to panic,” Greta has been known to say. If the world wasn’t awake to the urgency of climate change before Greta Thunberg sat alone in front of the Swedish Parliament last August, they are now. Her dedication to an honest, global reckoning of the climate crisis has inspired an entire generation and has the attention of the world. Go Greta.
Photo/shutterstock
“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.�
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This is the second article in a series of three entitled The Foundations of Biophilia. To read the series overview and first article, Nature Immersion, see the Spring 2019 issue of Love + Regeneration.
Biophilia and Nature Relationship When reviewing the literature on Biophilic Design, I have often found it interesting that having a relationship with other species is missing from the conversation. Nature is always described in the abstract as something to be exposed to, but no attention has been paid to a much deeper level of contact between ourselves and other forms of life in this emerging field. I believe this to be a huge oversight and one that discounts the most direct benefits that can occur from a focus on biophilia in design. It is my belief that one of the most important aspects of biophilic design is allowing for the cultivation of relationship with nature—a very critical type of interaction with the natural world, distinct from nature immersion explored previously in this series. I believe we have an inherent need to live in relationship with life in order to be holistically—psychologically and physically—well. Exposure to nature and various life forms has its own positive effect as discussed in the last article, but here I’m delving deeper, exploring what it means to develop a deeply felt relationship, sense, and knowledge of a particular entity within a particular place. People undoubtedly have close relationships with animals; I believe they can also have relationships with specific
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plants, insects, and other life forms, ultimately forming familial or friendship bonds that elicit emotional responses that are positive and knowable. Over time, this kind of highly personal and individual connection can also extend to a specific place—one’s home or another location that holds special emotional and relational significance and personal meaning. This article explores two important areas of inquiry: relationship with specific life forms and relationships with specific places. It goes on to examine their benefits and ultimately looks at the richness of opportunities to meaningfully allow for and reference nature relationships in biophilic design. Researchers have distilled what I’m talking about when I say “nature relationship” into two distinct categories; nature connectedness describes the extent to which individuals include nature as part of their identity1, and place attachment describes the personto-place bonds that evolve through emotional connection, meaning, and understanding of a specific place.2 I believe deep nature connectedness can be attributed to a sum of specific personal relationships with life that form a concentration of experiences unique to the place we associate as being home.
The future in my mind is not one where people are not needed and are replaced – and we should be looking to harness technology in ways that fundamentally change and improve how we do the work that we do. 1. For many decades over the last couple centuries the rapid rise of technologies have seen the end of era’s and displacing of work… examples – loom, horse and buggy etc. For most of modern history, the majority of humanity have had terrible lives and working conditions in servitude… slaves, soldiers, laborers. Technology and invention have freed us in many ways from the worst of things we have had to do. Perhaps this is the kind of progress we should continue to welcome. 2. But this is not to say that it is hard work itself that we should move away from – that while we certainly should avoid things that are dangerous and debilitating or degrading – that it is healthy and good to work hard, to use our bodies as well as our minds and to take pride and dignity from creating something out of our efforts and toil. 3. With new technologies however - there are always winners and losers and things tend to shift out… sometimes things are lost we might regret – often what we lose is good to have lost. When new technologies arrive we should ask - Who suffers? Typically it is the Unskilled – the young – the rite of passage through jobs – where skills are learned… but increasingly nearly everything could be done by artificial intelligence and automation – so every year we inch closer and closer to the line where what people have to do is shorter and shorter until
In every walk with nature one receives far more than one seeks. John Muir, July 1877 9
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Life Relationship: A Guide by Fox Let’s begin to unpack this idea as we look at what it means to be in relationship to another form of life. To this we turn to my favorite author—Antione de Saint-Exupery. His classic work The Little Prince describes unique relationships between the Prince and a fox as well as between the Prince and a rose. In the parable, the wise fox explains what it means to have relationship with another species, which he describes as taming.
The Little Prince, who has no concept of poetically sums up the effects of nature what it means to tame a thing, is tutored relationship to the Little Prince in three by Fox, who desperately craves a sense statements: “what is essential is invisible of belonging. What develops is a deep to the eye”; “it is the time you have bond. Without taming, Fox says, the wasted for your rose that makes your Prince will be “nothing more than a little rose so important”; and “you become boy who is just like a hundred thousand responsible, forever, for what you have other little boys.” And Fox to the Prince tamed.” will be “nothing more The Little Prince than a fox like a hundred leaves this interaction thousand other foxes.” with Fox changed— The taming of Fox by what is essential is invisible wiser and with a the Prince results in lived understanding to the eye”; “it is the time them becoming unique of what relationship for each other. you have wasted for your means. This is The Prince realizes significant and rose that makes your rose that his love of Rose defines the heart of so important”; and “you is similarly unique this biophilic principle. and special to him. He become responsible, forever, We need to develop is initially dismayed relationships with for what you have tamed. at his discovery of a specific, individual bed of thousands of life forms to get the roses, each one just like his rose that most benefit from their presence—not he thought so unique. But aided by merely trees, generically considered in Fox’s insight, he tells these roses, “To be their myriad forms and locations, but a sure, an ordinary passerby would think specific tree that is special to us for a that my rose looked just like you… But specific reason. Not just animals or birds in herself alone she is more important en masse, but the ones we encounter than all the hundreds of you other roses: over and over, whose personalities and because it is she that I have watered… habits we learn with time and exposure, because it is she that I have listened the ones we find ourselves naming and to when she grumbled, or boasted, tracking and with whom we might even or even sometimes when she said interact. nothing. Because she is my rose.” Fox
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Human-Animal Relationships Human-animal bonds are some of the strongest relationships we develop— including those with people. In fact, many go as far as to claim that the relationships of primary importance and greatest strength in their lives are those with their pets. The strength of these bonds is evidenced by the fact that over 50% of US households have pets.3 Most pet owners cite companionship (i.e. relationship) as their reason for owning a pet, and 80+% of these pet owners credit their furry friends (yes, research shows this to be especially true of dogs and cats) as bringing significant, beneficial impacts to their lives.4 Relationships with dogs specifically, while they’re not a replacement for social interaction with a human community, provide a demonstrable decrease in feelings of loneliness for people who have supportive human communities but live alone.5 For the elderly, caring for pets provides a sense of purpose, and the mutual dependency provides benefits in terms of physical, mental, and emotional health.6 Surely, given this importance it deserves focus in biophilic design! The power of human-animal interaction (HAI) in therapeutic settings lies in the clear feedback animals provide. Horses in particular provide unconditioned responses to humans to powerful results; since they are not apex species and rely on their keen ability to assess their safety in every situation and interaction, horses clearly mirror the emotional states with which they are approached. That feedback can concretize concepts that are difficult to identify in talk therapy alone.7 However, like dogs, they have been domesticated, and require the care of humans for their survival. Gaining the trust of a horse requires one to bodily communicate trustworthiness, and from there the relationship grows, to great effect. While simple activities like grooming and feeding horses reduce
12 Alex Mondau image:
quantifiable measures of stress, including blood pressure and heartrate, the implications of a sustained relationship with a horse are more far-reaching, and, depending on the aims of the therapy, might include improved social behavior, reduced fear and anxiety (both selfreported and measured), improved physical health (both self-reported and measured), improved pain management, reduced aggression, and improved learning.8 A person might get some benefit from horses on an abstract level—through pictures or seeing random horses on farms—but another level of connection with deeper benefits is possible with the introduction of relationship with a specific horse. And of course, this can be extrapolated to many (if not all) animals. The perhaps surprising statistics that annual attendance at zoos surpasses all professional sporting event attendance and that more than 90% of the characters in children’s counting and language acquisition books are animals, are further testament to the deeply felt connection humans have with animals.9 In many cases people return again and again to visit specific animals in zoos that have been named (a key component of relationship) and who can provide a reoccurring and reassuring presence.
Relationships with Other Life Forms As a child growing up in Sudbury, Ontario, I spent a great deal of time outdoors and loved that time in nature. And while I loved all of the natural world on a general level, I soon developed specific relationships with organisms that I’d visit and learn from again and again. For example, in my yard was one particular tree that I loved to climb and hang out in. It was my tree. The time I spent climbing it and sitting in it through multiple seasons, year in and year out made me aware of everything about it: the touch of the bark in specific places, its wounds, and the unique features it possessed. Even though the entire block had the same species of tree, it made me happy to climb my tree, and, like the Little Prince, I had tamed it. Even small species close to my home became part of my relationship circle; there was a colony of ants that had numerous ant hills on my patio. For whatever reason, I began to study them—drawing maps of their colony locations and watching them harvest food and adapt to the various seasons. For a period of several years I watched them and witnessed their changes. I sometimes provided them with food that they seemed to like. When an adjacent colony attacked them one
summer, I swiftly came to their defense and saved them from destruction! Who had tamed who? Though I didn’t pursue a career as an entomologist as a result, thanks to this specific relationship, I appreciate even the smallest of life forms more. I can also now recognize that the attention I paid this ant colony as a child likely had profound effects on my mental health, ability to focus, calm myself, and exercise empathy.10 Nature relationship isn’t restricted to life forms with heartbeats, either. Relationships built with trees and plants have an impact all their own. Closely watching a tree as I did, one outside your office or kitchen window for example—noting how it changes through the seasons, pushes out new leaves or needles or blooms in the spring, fruits in the summer, produces cones, sap, and pollen, attracts birds or pollinators, drops its leaves in the fall, and withstands environmental traumas throughout the year—begins to bond you to that specific tree, you begin to care for it and are drawn into its subtle cycles of life. It becomes your tree. You might even assign a name to it. And undoubtedly, with the accumulation of time, you begin to find meaning in the ways the cycles of the tree in observation correlate to your life. 13
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In the introduction of Nalini Nadkarni’s Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connection to Trees, she writes, “We have a clear affinity—the word comes from the Latin affinis, indicating relation by marriage—for trees. Although we are not of the same family, trees and humans are in a sense married into each other’s families, with all the challenges, responsibilities, and benefits that come from being so linked.”11 The reciprocal nature of human-tree relationships is foundational to the existence of each: trees create the oxygen we breathe; we create the carbon dioxide trees “breathe.” Nadkarni’s book chronicles the ways in which human needs are met by trees, using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a loose framework, comprehensively illustrating the intimately intertwined nature of our two life forms. Gardening provides a more handson approach to relationship building with nature than careful observation
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alone. Tending and stewarding plants throughout a growing season not only ultimately provides you with food or flowers, but also with a close tie to cycles of life, and a pride in the mutually beneficial relationship you can build with a life form so superficially unlike your own. A meta-analysis of 22 studies researching the effects of gardening on human health found positive outcomes ranging from reductions in depression, anxiety, and body mass index to increases in life satisfaction, quality of life, and sense of community in research subjects who gardened recreationally or as part of a therapeutic course of treatment.12 Gardening qualifies as a means of nature connectedness— finding its way to the identities of its subscribers—and requires the same formulaic components as strong place attachment. There is little surprise then that gardening’s benefits also span the human wellness spectrum.
Place Relationships When we zoom out on our relationships with specific plant or animal species and begin to put these relationships in the context of the ecosystems in which they and we are held, we see the emergence of place as a factor of our identities. This is perhaps due to the quantity of specific species relationships we have in that place as well as overall familiarity and an accumulation of time spent there. As nature-connectedness describes an individual’s expanded definition of self to include nature, place attachment is an expansion of one’s identity to include the place they love and in which they live. Nature connectedness says, “I am part of this specific nature, like the trees, rocks, and water of this place.” Place attachment says, “I—along with the trees, rocks, and water—am of and defined by this specific place.” “I am a northern Canadian,” “I am a Midwesterner,” or “I am from Bayou Country,” are all different ways of saying that the place you are from is inextricably linked with who you are. That the unique set of circumstances in which you live—the climatological conditions, array of flora and fauna, and the physical features of the land—have shaped you as a person. Like nature connectedness, a strong sense of place attachment requires time spent with the place in question, ideally through many seasons and completed cycles. Place attachment is an intimate familiarity that grows over time, especially from our formative years and as contextual backdrop for all our relationships and experiences. In a qualitative study conducted by the Forest Service in partnership with the University of Colorado in Rocky Mountain National Park, researchers found a strong correlation between place attachment as observed in life-long visitors to the national park and the reported habit of self-reflection and introspection.13 The researchers report a blurring of the lines between self-identity and place-identity in their research subjects. They write, “Interpersonal relationships, place relationships, and the benefits to society realized from wildland recreation and leisure can become intertwined. For some visitors, these relations and benefits became increasingly difficult to isolate as bonds with the place developed and strengthened into unified and committed relationships.”14 15
While the upside of place attachment and nature connectedness for humans is in all the demonstrated positive wellness implications of achieving this aspirational level of self-actualization, as in any good relationship, there is reciprocity. In the concluding chapter of Between Earth and Sky, Nadkarni writes, “Perhaps it is a professional mistake to admit to such intense feeling for my subject of study… By studying the ecology of trees, and perhaps even more by exploring their myriad links to the cultural, aesthetic, and social aspects of humans, I have become more mindful of my responsibilities to them, whether in my family, in my community, or on my planet.” Her sentiments succinctly sum up the findings of research—that the resulting good for society of its members nurturing relationships with nature is that these same members are then compelled to provide protection and care to the places and life forms with which they are in relationship.15 In light of these findings, the role of nature relationships becomes critical to larger concepts of regeneration and a living future. And the result is love. The responsibility of care for the non-human life with which we are in relationship is not only
required as reciprocity for all the benefits the relationships bring, but is in fact the mechanism by which we receive those benefits. The loss of global biodiversity saddens us so deeply because of our longing for and love of relationship with nature. The depth to which we care about all of life is in proportion to the depth we’ve cared about the life we are exposed to on a daily basis. Watching news segments and documentaries on species and ecosystem decline elicits visceral responses because we understand at some level how closely connected we are to these life forms and how diminished future generations’ potential for nature relationships become with each passing year. This longing to interact with and benefit from the presence of other life forms goes on to explain why people keep fish (even though they typically don’t do all that much), fill their homes and offices with plants, and visit the same botanical gardens and parks again and again throughout the year. A sophisticated understanding of this human inclination should inform biophilic design, with a specific and important focus on how we can create conditions conducive for relationship.
Biophilic design is about creating the conditions conducive to nature relationships. Jason F. McLennan
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Nature Relationship in Design
AVERAGE NEED FOR BIOLIPHIC RELATIONSHIP CURVE As research on these subjects continues, attention should be paid to understanding who most needs and benefits from nature relationships. My hypothesis, as illustrated by this series of graphics, is that for the general population, the need for nature relationships is at its highest in early, formative years, then decreases in middle life and begins to climb again in old age. This general rule changes quite a bit as we focus on specific individuals of course, but probably holds true as an average.
PERSON A
For instance, I believe an unstable early childhood would increase one’s lifelong need for nature relationships; the arc of that need would mimic the arc needed in the general population just at a higher general level.
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PERSON B In periods of acute aloneness, no matter where they might occur in life, the need for nature relationship would spike, as shown in this third diagram. But if that same person develops strong familial and friendship bonds with others, the need would decrease proportionately, and at some point, for someone particularly rich in human connection, the need for nature relationships may be less than that of the general population.
PERSON C trauma event
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Finally, I believe those suffering from extreme trauma (such as a veteran returning from war or someone who lived through an intense personal tragedy), are most in need of nature relationships. These are the people for whom therapyfacilitated nature relationships are most necessary and impactful. I believe trauma elevates one’s need for nature relationships throughout life.
How do we bring this understanding of the nature relationship component of biophilia into our designs? How can our buildings support and remind us of these relationships so significant in their implications to our wellbeing as individuals and collectively as a society? As discussed in “Opportunities for Nature Immersion,” increasing the amount of time people spend in nature via designs that connect the occupant with the outdoors at every opportunity is a first step. As we’ve seen, time is one of the ingredients for nature relationship, and each minute spent immersed in nature is a factor in the equation that results in the kinds of connections I’m writing about, with all their associated benefits. The biophilic designer should also remember that the responsibility of care is not a burden, but a means of connection. This ethos can inform natural design elements that require the engaged participation of the occupant. By way of example, a green wall that needs watering, and in return provides a means of air purification, beautification, and connection makes clear the value of relationship. Plants that don’t belong to anyone are less impactful than plants that require individual attention and perceived ownership. Nature relationship requires a recurring and repeated relationship of interaction and transaction. Integrating the needs of pets in the design of spaces demonstrates an understanding of this concept. Relationships with pets are some of the first and most formative nature relationships children experience, teaching them responsibility, empathy, and kindness. Fish tanks provide a calming, biophilic effect in spaces, even to the casual visitor. And for whomever cares for the life it contains, it provides a means of nature relationship, gifting the caregiver with a tangible connection both to specific living creatures and the places from which they come. It follows that designs that accommodate and integrate the needs of our pets support a critical opportunity for nature relationship.
Even building systems can serve as touchpoints to a relationship with place, drawing building occupants into a quality of attention to the natural rhythms of the place that affect a given system, like HVAC or rain catchment systems that both directly respond to the conditions of place and, depending on those conditions require the occupants’ involvement and thereby their own connection to the conditions of place. The Beauty + Spirit imperative of the Living Building Challenge’s Beauty Petal— though “beauty” is intentionally loosely defined in the petal overview—requires “the project must meaningfully integrate public art and contain design features intended solely for human delight and the celebration of culture, spirit, and place appropriate to the project’s function.”16 The requirement’s vagueness is purposeful and works to engage the creativity of the client and the design team in the way they choose to meet it—in a way that can be personalized in other words. Perhaps this is accomplished with materials that come from the site, and therefore provide a tangible and delightful connection to place while providing some other practical use to the design. The biophilic designer’s attention is needed outside as well as in. At my personal home, Heron Hall, we chose to use the trunk of a local tree as a supporting pillar of a porch that opens onto a private garden off the master bedroom. The tree provides a practical service: it holds up a roof. But an architectural pillar would have done the job as well. The choice to use this tree trunk was biophilically driven; the local Western Red cedar that supports the ceiling of this small porch reminds me of the ecological place in which I live and of which I am part. The roof is planted, and in the growing season the effect is of a green canopy—a whimsical touch that further references our relationship to the cyclical nature of life. This tree is just one component of a design that took many opportunities to subtly remind my family and me of our relationship to our place in its embellishments and materials. 19
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Photo/Dan Banko
20 Biophilia at Heron Hall.
Photo/Dan 20 Banko
On the other side of the house, there is a small ash tree where I planned my porch that I didn’t have the heart to tear down even though it was technically “in the way.” At the last minute I changed the porch design, incorporating a notch in order to keep the tree, carefully bridging over its roots so they weren’t damaged. The ash is now right up against the porch where I let my dogs out, so every time that task falls to me, I can touch the tree and the moss on it and I imagine this tree guarding the west side of the house. Our design planned for a literal relationship with this specific tree and we all now have that sense—that this tree is an intrinsic part of our family and home, along with the dogs, chickens, bird, and lizard. Designing opportunities for caring for outdoor or rooftop garden spaces provides strong nature relationship opportunities, as seen. If specific species of plants and trees hold importance for the people for whom a space is being designed, incorporating and highlighting those species in landscape design becomes especially impactful. Providing for these relationships in urban environments is especially critical to biophilic design. In particular, children in dense urban environments often miss the opportunity to spend time around trees and certainly lack time enough to develop the kind of relationship with one that my childhood afforded me. A courtyard or pocket garden space in which a tree is prominently featured— the same species that the building’s occupant was surrounded by in their youth, or is surrounded by when they make it to a nearby forest—will serve as a strong nature-connection and reference. To the extent that it is applicable, designing opportunities for relationship with animals likewise supports nature
Biophilic design.
relationship. This might vary in application from a koi pond in a carefully curated garden scape to landscaping with native vegetation for the fauna it attracts. Increasingly, designers are identifying opportunities in materials selections to use design to authentically reinforce nature relationships by literally and referentially incorporating specific place based natural elements into a variety of materials. In McLennan Design’s product design work, this has resulted in the creation of regionally curated color palettes with Ecos Paints and a Mohawk carpet line that mimics the intricate layering of lichen in a forest setting. Subtle references like these—while perhaps lost on most—can be subliminal reminders of a strong connection to a specific place when honed to the person for whom a space is designed.
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The possibilities for meaningfully referencing and making space for nature relationships in design will differ from person to person, company to company, and family to family, so a checklist approach on the part of the designer will be ineffectual. How then does the biophilic designer proceed? As we saw in the last article, design deepens in its biophilic impact the more opportunities it seizes to immerse its occupant in nature. Though the distinction is subtle, the same is true of nature relationship and design; the more a design seizes opportunities to connect its occupants to their place and remind them of their varied and unique relationships with nature, the bigger its impact. The more opportunities provided to have occupants relate to and develop a specific relationship with a specific organism even better. This requires a dialogue between designer and client, carefully curated on the part of the former to draw out the richest possibilities. “Tell me about a place you love,” is one avenue into this conversation. Drawing clients out on their nature relationships, particularly with pets or other animals, will illuminate ample opportunities for a design that supports those relationships. The keen designer will draw upon these inspirations in their design, repeating, underlining, and highlighting, in as many ways as possible, these elements in the creation of spaces that allow nature relationship to flourish.
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Designers are identifying opportunities in materials selections to use design to authentically reinforce nature relationships by literally and referentially incorporating specific place based natural elements into a variety of materials. Jason F. McLennan
JASON F. McLENNAN is a highly sought out designer, consultant and thought leader. Prior to founding McLennan Design, Jason authored the Living Building Challenge – the most stringent and progressive green building program in existence, and founded the International Living Future Institute. He is the author of six books on Sustainability and Design including the Philosophy of Sustainable Design, “the bible for green building.”
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Bibliography Nature Connectedness.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_connectedness. Shumaker, S.A., and R.B. Taylor. “Toward a Clarification of People-Place Relationships: A Model of Attachment to Place,” Environmental Psychology: Directions and Perspectives. New York, 1983: Praeger. 3 Institute of Medicine (US). “Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment: A New Vision of Environmental Health for the 21st Century.” Human Health and the Natural Environment, 2001, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK99584/ 4 Osten, Caren. “How Dogs Drive Emotional Well-being.” Psychology Today, April 18, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-right-balance/201804/how-dogs-drive-emotional-well-being 5 Osten, Caren. “How Dogs Drive Emotional Well-being.” Psychology Today, April 18, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-right-balance/201804/how-dogs-drive-emotional-well-being 6 Pychyl, Timothy A, Ph.D. “Living Alone? Can Canine Companionship Help Beat Loneliness?” Psychology Today, February 5, 2010, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dont-delay/201002/living-alone-can-canine-companionship-help-beat-loneliness 7 Scharff, Constance, Ph.D. “The Therapeutic Value of Horses.” Psychology Today, August 23, 2017, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ending-addiction-good/201708/the-therapeutic-value-horses 8 Beetz, Andrea et al. “Psychosocial and psychophysiological effects of human-animal interactions: the possible role of oxytocin.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 3 234. 9 Jul. 2012, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00234 9 Institute of Medicine (US). Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment: A New Vision of Environmental Health for the 21st Century. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2001. 3, Human Health and the Natural Environment. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/ NBK99584/ 10 Beetz, Andrea et al. “Psychosocial and psychophysiological effects of human-animal interactions: the possible role of oxytocin.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 3 234. 9 Jul. 2012, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00234 11 Nadkarni, Nalini, “Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connection to Trees. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008. 12 Masashi Soga, Kevin J. Gaston, Yuichi Yamaura. “Gardening is beneficial for health: A meta-analysis.” NCBI, available online 14 November 2016, https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5153451/. 13 Brooks, Jeffry, G. Wallace, D. Williams. “Place as Relationship Partner: An Alternative Metaphor for Understanding the Quality of Visitor Experience in Backcountry Setting.” US Forest Service, February 2006, https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2006_brooks_j003.pdf. 14 Brooks, Jeffry, G. Wallace, D. Williams. “Place as Relationship Partner: An Alternative Metaphor for Understanding the Quality of Visitor Experience in Backcountry Setting.” US Forest Service, February 2006, https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2006_brooks_j003.pdf. 15 “Green Cities: Good Health.” Urban Forestry Department, University of Washington, August 16, 2018, https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_Place. html. 16 “The Beauty Petal.” International Living Future Institute, 2019, https://living-future.org/lbc/beauty-petal/. 1
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UPDATE
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In the Office | The Plant Experiment
The Plant Experiment at the McLennan Design Studio: each of us has planted a spider plant in an 8” terra cotta pot and it’s on each of us to nurture this plant and keep it healthy. It’s a workplace wellness experiment that we expect will result in modest but demonstrable improved levels of comfort and biophilia in the office by providing time for each employee to develop a relationship with each specific plant – even naming them. We’ve always had a handful of plants in the office, but we’ve never placed the responsibility for care on each of us individually to tend a plant in our workspace, and in this way the plants in our office transition from mere backdrops to individual species to specific and individualized relationships.
Article Update | Autumn Issue 2019 In the ongoing discussion of biophilia in the pages of Love + Regeneration, we’ve pointed to areas where we just need more information Our Autumn 2018 edition included, “Biophilic Design: A New Scale Emerges”—an article that references a broad range of research, at one point highlighting a study called “The Relationship Between Trees and Human Health: Evidence from the Spread of the Emerald Ash Borer.” The article paraphrases the study’s primary researcher, Howard Frumkin, noting that a primary challenge in this field of study remains—it is still unclear how to define a dose of nature. In “Opportunities for Nature Immersion,” the first article in this biophilia series from our Spring 2019 issue, the conclusion begins, “The biophilic designer has another role to play as well. It’s important to understand what we need most as a baseline.” In our ongoing research on the subject, we were excited to come across a study, led by Mathew P. White of the European Centre for Environment and Human Health at University of Exeter Medical School, published in June 2019 that found “spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing.”
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The study’s abstract reads: Spending time in natural environments can benefit health and well-being, but exposureresponse relationships are under-researched. We examined associations between recreational nature contact in the last seven days and self-reported health and wellbeing. Participants’… weekly [nature] contact was categorized using 60 minute blocks… Compared to no nature contact last week, the likelihood of reporting good health or high well-being became significantly greater with contact greater than or equal to 120 minutes. Positive associations peaked between 200300 minutes per week with no further gain. The pattern was consistent across key groups including older adults and those with longterm health issues. It did not matter how 120 minutes of contact a week was achieved (e.g. one long vs. several shorter visits/week). Prospective longitudinal and intervention studies are a critical next step in developing possible weekly nature exposure guidelines comparable to those for physical activity. We’re excited to see how this new information shapes health and design conversations going forward! View the full report here.
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CELEBRATE
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The Christine Lintott Way
Meet Christine, McLennan Design’s newest partner and founder of Christine Lintott Architects (CLA) in Victoria, BC. In her nearly 30 years in the architecture industry, Christine has consistently advocated for the most progressive, low emissions strategies across her portfolio and within the industry broadly.
Her interest in pushing the boundaries of the profession prompted her to accept an invitation for deeper collaboration with MD earlier this year. “Our ability to scale up and expand our impact through the renowned reputation and global reach of McLennan Design is profound and represents an alignment of strengths across all aspects of design through project implementation,” said Christine in a press release announcing the partnership in the spring. “This combined team is about game-changing troublemaking, and we are excited to formalize our collaboration.” You’re a biomimicry expert—what are the implications of applying the principles of biomimicry to design? Can you point to a specific instance of biomimicry informed design that you find particularly impactful? First and foremost, biomimicry is about alignment with place, requiring us to really understand the operating condition of a place and really the genius of place—those adaptations that the natural world has in response to the operating conditions. The plants and animals have evolved to respond to those environmental conditions. If we pay attention and quiet our cleverness, we can notice the genius of place and learn a lot about how our buildings can similarly adapt to place. Think about a polar bear with a big heavy coat—seeing that bear in his place—the arctic—should signal that buildings in that place also need a big heavy coat. When you begin to really examine a place, design solutions become much more tuned to their place than they might otherwise be. What’s fascinating to me is we used to do this very well. Think about vernacular architecture—how first peoples all over the world crafted buildings in place, and how they mitigated whatever the operating conditions were. I suspect that actually people who were native to place paid attention to the creatures of the natural world and what they were doing. For me that’s the real opportunity. The real implications are really finely tuned design to place. The design solution we’re inviting here is to pay attention to what the ecosystem is doing.
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We have some beautiful examples of biomimetic solutions. Michael Pawlyn’s work in building skins—they really are this, a membrane, mitigating inside and outside—is one example. The Eden Project is another one of his projects, in which he uses this bubble skin that emulates soap bubbles— it’s lightweight and performs, its shape is optimized, it does many things in one singular approach—in a way that is really elegant and beautiful. Michael has such a fluency in what he’s seeing and an ability to interpret that into built solutions, even when the scale is so divergent. He can understand a living organism’s essence and translate that into a built solution.
Is it too big of a leap to assume that, as a biomimicry enthusiast, you’re also a nature-lover? Where do you find inspiration in the natural world? Everyday. Everywhere. If you could see me in my office, it’s full of plants. We have this amazing inventory of every kind of plant you can imagine. And all around me are vessels and bowls and jars that hold artifacts, from shells to rocks to feathers to bits of plants. Sitting here at your desk, having that access to seeing something that comes out of the natural world, keeps me going. My favorite places are ecotones, those edge conditions. The edge of field and forest for instance is an edge I love. The ocean, the shoreline, the intertidal zone, to me are vibrant with inspiration, especially here on Vancouver Island. Those edge conditions are often transitions between one type of environment and the next. If you look along the shoreline and read how the trees respond to the wind condition, you can understand a lot about the prevailing winds. You can look at that and know how to orient a structure by seeing how the forest arranges itself. Arbutus (menziesii, the Pacific madrone) is always reaching out from under the other trees for sunlight. Simply paying attention can tell you a lot about solar orientation, wind conditions, moisture—how it moves and makes its way between land and sea. Water has a beautiful way of carving itself, and land has a beautiful way of managing flow, it’s a beautiful way to think about storm water management in the built environment.
Talk about place and how you bring this concept, understood expansively, to your work as an architect. This is where biomimicry comes in again. I probably didn’t always understand place to the breadth I do now, as a natural system perspective. The operating conditions of place—these are the prevalent conditions that really inform everything: sunlight, water, gravity. Operating conditions also include that constant state of dynamic non-equilibrium: how organisms respond and adapt to this non-equilibrium is one of life’s principles in the Biomimicry DesignLens (a resource by Biomimicry 3.8). The other thing to notice when looking at those operating conditions are cyclical processes. The moon and the different phases of the moon, which affect tides and people. Seasonality is another cycle where we live— and our designs have to manage seasonal fluctuation, and the changes are dramatic, and very much of place. I’m always interested in locating the limits and boundaries. Where are the edge conditions? At what point have you moved from one condition to another? We map the human inhabitations, flows, building footprints, solar orientation, but we don’t always think about the underlying conditions that produced the temperature regimes we’re designing in. Many don’t think about wind and solar opportunities. I’m really always thinking about those fixed conditions, those operating conditions of place. None of the environments I’m designing in are untouched by humans. There are always those land ownership issues, road locations, power distribution, location of sewer and water—these are all realities, or human caused operating conditions, we have to incorporate into our thinking. The human layer is obvious to us. How do we make the operating conditions of place equally obvious and bring those two parts to work in harmony and evolve together over time rather than independently?
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Every property in town is seen as a canvas. “If we just cut down the trees or take out the buildings…” But what if we had to work with what’s there as an operating condition of the place? Think about how interesting our urban ecology would be if we didn’t tear down and rebuild. What if we made a rule that you couldn’t knock any buildings down, you had to, in some way shape, or form, keep the bones and attributes as effectively part of place? Can you imagine how creative we’d be? We’d eliminate waste flows, we’d allow for more life, nutrient paths would be undisturbed, etc. We’d get much better at dismantling what can’t be used and repurposing it if we couldn’t keep blasting everything down and starting anew. The secret sauce is time. We’re not very patient. We’re not good at time, but we’re starving for the things that only time can produce. Everyone wants to live on a beautiful, tree-lined street. Trees take 100 years to grow! Why would you ever cut down a tree in an urban environment? The essence of place: what makes for a good city? The cities we love are tight, vibrant, full of different, interwoven pieces. You can’t achieve that by knocking everything down. You need layers. You need infill that creates more interconnection, more connectivity.
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What excites you most about being an architect today? From your perspective, what unique opportunities for change exist within this industry? For the first time in 30 years of practicing, there seems to be some growing consensus that the system has to change—every aspect of it. Humans, at a very accelerated rate, are recognizing the interrelationships between all things: politics, environmental impact, social justice—all are interrelated. The climate crisis is a perfect example, you can’t talk about what’s happening to the planet without it trickling into these touchy areas of politics and social justice. The atmosphere has never been more difficult, never more exciting. The experts we surround ourselves with in this work are more than ever excited to talk about all aspects of the design. We finally realize we have to be all in on this change. We have to all roll up our sleeves and systemically rethink everything. I find that hugely inspiring. It’s also really hard, and I have to say it’s debilitating sometimes. Friday is a hard day for me, the accumulation of all this. I use the weekends to take huge long walks with my dogs, plug into life.
The level of engagement I have to have at work is tenfold maybe 100-fold what it was when I got into this business. It’s the hardest thing and also the most important thing. I know I have something to offer. I have a huge skillset and I continue to development that skillset, because I’m a learner, but it comes at an expense. But by and large we are shifting to rolling up our sleeves, being present, and part of the change.
Describe a dream project and client: Who is the client and what are they trying to accomplish with the design? What’s the relationship like? What innovative opportunities exist in a dream project scenario? Power to Be is totally on its way. And lots of the thinking that has shaped that project is transferring to a new client, Lakefield College School. At the end of the day, these clients understand the systemic nature—it’s not about the building, but the people in place. They each work with learners. We know if we design with human curiosity in mind, we can get it right.
These clients have a real willingness to go through an engagement process where they suspend disbelief, and through conversation and understanding of their community in all its facets, we actually are empowered to create something that is of that community. There is this wonderful harmonious content that emerges and gets distilled down into something that is very concentrated. I’m a designer, so I often jump to the deliverables, but where we’ve landed is in a process that is an entirely new kind of deliverable. We were musing that that deliverable might be a website, like a dashboard of a living, dynamic, interface that allows all the shareholders of the school to have a relationship with the school and in particular the learning outcomes and the meaningful interface this environment creates for the young people. Never assume anything— maybe we’re not designing buildings at the end of the day, maybe we’re designing an interface. We’re thinking systemically about the big picture: about cultivating learners who are leaders in regenerative thinking. How do we do that? We’re not limited to designing buildings. 29
CONTRIBUTE
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REGENERATION By Marcus Sheffer with contributions from John Boecker
The entirety of our world is alive! We are a part of, and integral to this living, breathing, moving, speaking, listening, touching, defecating, squirming, decomposing, growing, interacting, complex whole of Life. We are surrounded by, immersed in, and a part of the living world. We co-inhabit a living planet in reciprocal relationship with all other living beings. Without our fellow beings we would not long survive. We depend on other beings to pollinate plants, produce food, provide air to breath, clean water, regulate climate, decompose waste, make edible matter from sunlight and living soil, manifest beauty, and soothe our souls. It seems, though, that we have forgotten this, as if we are trying to remake our living world into one almost bereft of life, one we are not even sure can survive. This invites pause to acknowledge the implications; over the past 40 years, more than 50% of our fellow beings on the planet have disappeared. During the same time period, our human population has doubled. Trees, insects, birds, and animals of countless species are in decline or have ceased to exist. We are practicing ecocide at a global scale. Our agriculture, rangelands, suburbs, and cities appear purposely designed to reduce – or virtually eliminate – the diversity of life that embraces and sustains us. Agriculture, for example, is increasingly dominated by largescale monocultures dowsed in herbicides and pesticides designed specifically to kill competing plants and all insects, including those who are beneficial. Organic agriculture often simply replaces these chemicals with others that may not be quite so lethal or persistent. Our rangelands and pastures are managed to benefit only a few select domesticated grazing animals. Their grazing mutually reinforces dramatically reduced diversity, favoring a few select plant species across the vast majority of our remaining agricultural lands. The planet’s diversity of life is purposely designed out of these agricultural systems, which comprise more than 50% of the land area of the US. The abundance and diversity of our living world is increasingly being converted to scarcity and monocultures that minimize and concentrate the flow of resources into a stream of money.
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The opposite of nature is impossible. Buckminster Fuller
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Relative to agriculture and rangelands, the land area we use for human habitation is small but extremely impactful. About 3% of our land area is urbanized, a three-fold increase over the past 70 years. Urban land is home to 75% of the human US population, located mostly in areas that once held the greatest concentration of life’s diversity. This land will not easily revert to any sort of “natural” functioning, and it seems virtually devoid of life (beyond humans) when compared to healthy natural areas. Some states in the northeast are 40% urbanized. Another 3% (73 million acres) is composed of rural or suburban residential development, 40 million acres of which are planted in turf grass, or lawns. These lawns, often irrigated and sprayed for weeds and bugs, severely limit habitat, virtually eliminate biodiversity, encourage water runoff that carries herbicides and pesticides into our waterways, and require large amounts of fossil fuels to maintain. Most remaining landscapes consist of non-native species that have not co-evolved with local insects, flora, fauna, microclimate, etc. and do not support species diversity. In other words, we create landscapes as virtual dead zones that in turn spread compromise, instability, and dis-ease to surrounding areas, carried by the waters, winds, insects, birds, and animals (including humans). All told, about 60% or more of the land in the US is purposely designed to significantly reduce and often eliminate life. We seem to be engaged in a collective consciousness steered by a death drive. According to Freud, life
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is a tension between the drive toward death (Thanatos) and the drive toward life (Eros). These forces collide every day in our psyche, which then manifest in our physical world – but instead of reconciling these forces, our collective will seems more channeled toward death and destruction than toward Eros, or life-enhancing creativity. The interaction between these two drives appears to be devolving into compromise rather than evolving into reconciliation. Death is dominating, and our apparent desire for continuity of the familiar builds inertia in this direction. Nobody really knows how much diversity is needed to sustain our fellow beings and ourselves. Only 23% of the planet’s landmass is currently “wilderness,” primarily consisting of areas that are too cold or too dry to support agriculture and larger-scale human development. As the planet warms, some of these areas will become inhabitable, and the cascade of destruction appears likely to continue. In his latest book, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, E.O. Wilson advocates preserving 50% of the planet as wilderness. The operative assumption here is that we need to exclude humans from these areas, because according to this way of thinking, we are inherently destructive to biodiversity. He may very well be right about us. Given the current paradigm and associated inertia, it seems that such preservation efforts may be impossible to achieve. So are we just destructive creatures with a murderous tendency ultimately bent on slow and painful species suicide? Perhaps.
Let us consider a different path . . . We frequently ask our fellow humans whether we as a species possess the capability to reverse the destruction we are causing. Almost universally, they answer “yes,” agreeing that we do indeed have the capacity and capability to do so. So why don’t we do it? Simply put, our cultural norms, mores, and customs – even the myelinated neural pathways in our brains – have been structured and conditioned to encourage more of the same. It is those underlying values that inform our worldviews and reinforce this current paradigm. Ultimately, this paradigm is what needs to shift if we want to effectively address the imbalances we are creating in the living system we inhabit.
We believe that humans do possess the capacity to change the current paradigm, to be
nurturing, constructive and creative, reconciling the tension between Thanatos and Eros. There is considerable reconciling energy already emerging. Many are seeking to “do less bad” at the very least, and in many cases, actually do good. One hundred percent less bad might allow us to sustain our way of living a bit longer, but even this is not sufficient for Life to continue
evolving, and frankly, it is uninspiring. Our predominant Western worldview needs to transcend the current paradigm so that we can align our thinking and activities with the way Life works. We need to regenerate our cultural worldviews and ourselves in service to augmenting and enhancing Life.
Regenerate means to “bring forth again,” to reconstitute, to make over in a better way. Regenerative practice reconciles the learnings of the past with the potential of the future. It implies recognizing, relearning, and re-membering our participatory role as a species in the larger living world. Building regenerative capacity begins with working on ourselves as unique individuals. It requires working on our own personal development. It calls upon each of us to observe carefully, think ecologically, design systemically, engage gratefully, and act humbly. To do so, we need to evolve our own capacity, and the capacity of our communities, to serve the larger whole systems within which we are nested, concentrating nodal efforts where they will have the greatest systemic impact for the least effort. Less may indeed be more.
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. Gregory Bateson 33
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Regeneration is not a list of ingredients or prescriptive practices. We can’t recreate some idealized time frame or restore some condition from the past and go back. Too much has changed; further, life is constantly evolving. Regeneration begins in the now and imagines the future to understand the cyclical rhythms of Nature. It focuses on the potential of all those who benefit through reciprocal relationships and the processes of nutrient exchange upon which life depends. It helps evolve the capacity of all affected parties to augment both the quantity and quality of these processes. Regeneration relies on a set of living system principles. These principles are embedded in the way life on this living planet works. They align with a worldview based on ancient wisdom passed through the ages by many indigenous cultures. Guidance by these principles helps us shift beyond our predominant Western worldview, beyond what seems as given, as if no other worldviews of any value exist. Pointedly, living indigenous cultures have a very different way of seeing and inhabiting the world. Traditional ecological knowledge grew out of long-term observations of how whole living systems work. Such understanding emerged from direct experience, over time out of mind, of how the interrelationships between entities composing a particular ecosystem have been evolving and cooperating. Strict objectivity is impossible, since the observer is always immersed in, and a part of, what is being observed. Gaining ancient insight is qualitative rather than quantitative. Everything is viewed as connected and interrelated in reciprocal kinship, each being or entity playing a valuable (and valued) role in serving the whole. Relationships are the thread that binds all beings together in the world to which we all belong.
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LIVING SYSTEM PRINCIPLES • Working with Wholes • Focusing on Potential • Systemic Reciprocity • Manifesting Quiddity • Nested Roles • Nodal Discernment • Developmental Processes
Understanding how any particular place or ecosystem (from local to planetary scale) works (when it’s working well) arises from sensing the unique patterns of relationships between that system’s beings/entities and how they affect (and are affected by) that whole. Such a worldview sees
all beings in Earth as alive and sentient, communicating and possessing a form of intelligence. Human beings are seen as capable of being in deep communication with these entities. Humans are understood as vital members of this larger ecosystem, alongside all other members. This worldview understands that human vitality depends on interrelating with other members of the larger whole. Earth is understood as our Mother, not as a collection of resources or “things” placed here for our appropriation and exploitation. From this perspective, all beings are sacred gifts, and the only proper responses to such gifts are expressions of respect and gratitude.
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The very dominance of our current Western worldview often prohibits understanding – or even acknowledging – the values in such other worldviews. Those who hold an indigenous worldview tend to understand the constructs and effects of our Western worldview; the opposite is generally not the case. The issue here, though, is not about determining which worldview is correct or morally superior; such attitudes typify Western binary mindsets tending to focus on things more than processes. The point to consider is: to what extent is our thinking bound and limited by the dominant culture we inhabit? Without question, the Western worldview has produced amazing advances throughout the arts and sciences. We are not advocating discarding it (even if that were possible); rather, we are advocating a regenerative approach to shift our worldview, an approach rooted in understanding living system processes, which by their very nature constantly evolve. Our Western worldview often blinds us from seeing these processes; it clashes against its own limitations fostered by its underlying assumptions. It sees humans and nature as separate entities, sees each being as separate from every other being, each acting in their own self-interest. We believe that we are currently being called to shift the dominant worldview and harmonize it with an indigenous worldview based on a reverence for all living beings. What is needed is a reconciliation of worldviews – a harmonizing shift that brings the abstractions of the Western worldview into direct contact with palpable experience of how nature works, a melding that helps us create and regenerate a new paradigm for humans’ role on this planet, a paradigm grounded in humility and guided by a set of principles aligning with ecological integrity. In certain respects, some of the
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differences between these worldviews are dissolving already, as advances in Western science find increasing commonalities with – and greater levels of understanding from – ancient wisdom traditions… after all, our technological advances would be impossible without a bit of topsoil and a little rain. A Regenerative approach is guided by a set of organizing principles that builds our capacity to shift the current paradigm into a new one, grounded in ecological systems thinking. It is based on a perspicacious worldview that understands how humans can play an essential role in enhancing the capacity of life to evolve in a way that benefits all beings in Earth. Hence, we can use our development for healing the wounds we have caused. To paraphrase Donella Meadows (Leverage Points in a System), the most effective way to intervene in a system is to shift the paradigm, and to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, the best way to transcend the current paradigm is to create a new one. Regenerative practice is always in service to transforming or actualizing a larger whole. It calls upon each of us to work on building our own capacity, to see with a different mind, to think systemically, to view ourselves as members of an evolving whole, to recognize the broader patterns embedded in ourselves and the ecosystems in which we are nested. Since change is constant, a regenerative mindset constantly regenerates itself. This requires regular practice. Most of us have not been educated or trained in how to think and act this way. Since this is not our “normal” mode of being, work is required – work on ourselves, work on building our capacity to express our unique perspective, and work on building our will to contribute through manifesting that uniqueness.
Regenerative Development builds the capacity of living systems to regenerate themselves. Joel Glanzberg
Regenerative practice, when working on projects, is always aimed at transforming or actualizing a particular larger whole. Such projects seek to have developmental impacts on the larger systems they serve. The vitality of these systems calls upon all stakeholders associated with and affected by the project to play a role. Such projects seek to build the capacity of these stakeholders to do so, to deepen their reciprocal interrelationships. As such, regenerative project work is distinct from employing any certain construction practice, or adding solar panels, or using a specific technology, or restoring a specific ecology, or implementing any specific design strategies (although these may be important and necessary elements); rather, regenerative design seeks to serve the people and ecosystems it affects. Any given project then, is simply an instrument for helping all members of that living system build their capacity to evolve the vitality and viability of life in the place they inhabit. The RE Farm Cafe is a wonderful example of a project seeking such holistic systemic impacts through regenerative design practices. The name RE is based on the prefix and implies “again and again.” The project seeks to transform the entire “fooding system” in Central Pennsylvania’s Nittany Valley through the construction of a
seasonal farm-to-fork cafe on a very active Windswept Farm. The building project is pursuing the Living Building Challenge as a means to also influence design and construction practices. Windswept Farm will produce a wide variety of food products following an agro-ecosystem approach that incorporates a diversity of fooding practices. The farm and the building project are envisioned as a central gathering place for the community to facilitate exploring systemic change in how food is produced, transported, and consumed locally. RE will source from itself and from the larger farm community in the region with food offerings driven by what is available locally. RE and Windswept will serve as an enlivening source that fosters community and place-sourced learning for all ages, focusing on regenerating a healthy, sustainable and local food system, manifested in unique and delicious fooding experiences. These efforts are aimed at creating a “world class” small farm approach for engaging the dynamics of larger social-economicecological systems. As such, the RE Farm Café project serves as an instrument for deepening understanding of the living systems in this unique place and strengthening reciprocal connections through action that intentionally serves its community of stakeholders.
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During the earliest stages of the RE project, the project team developed a regenerative design process through a series of co-learning workshops. These workshops engaged a larger set of key stakeholders in developing and aligning around the project’s purpose and its targeted effects in the community. The owners (Duke and Monica Gastiger) became so fully immersed in this integrative/regenerative process of learning experientially that they took a leap and facilitated a Community Alignment Workshop themselves… they developed such deep caring that they made a “promise beyond ableness,” which resulted in generating deep caring, co-learning, and participation by several entities and organizations in the community. The Gastigers continue to use this process to develop their own capacities, as well as those of the project team and community volunteers. As a result, the set of participating stakeholders has continually grown dramatically, with dozens of entities currently working together to manifest their vision of transforming the fooding system in the Nittany Valley and beyond… and by the way, they happen to be building a café. Regenerative projects are both purposeful and developmental. RE Farm Cafe embodies both. Its purpose embodies the systemic affects the project aspires to achieve in building shelter and producing and consuming food in the region it serves. The stories, learnings, and processes discovered along the way will be documented (including a video documentary being produced by 7group) and used to continually regenerate the health of the land, flora, fauna, people, farms, earth systems, community, and economy in this particular place. In short, the project
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serves as an instrument for building the capacity of all inhabitants to regenerate the vitality and viability of the lifeshed in which they live indefinitely. In conclusion, this article introduces an eight part series aimed at exploring how regenerative practices can be used to build such capacities. In particular, we’ll examine how built environment projects can serve as powerful and effective instruments for doing so. These practices are grounded in the Seven First Principles of Regeneration. These principles emerged through the work of Carol Sanford, a wise and insightful elder, and through our work with Carol, Bill Reed, Joel Glanzberg, and others over the past decade. Inspired by this continuing work, we will unpack these seven principles through the context of our experiences co-creating habitation. Find more at sevengroup.com.
MARCUS SHEFFER promotes the application of a living systems, regenerative approach to building projects. He is a partner in 7group, a multi-disciplinary team of professionals developing the capacity of your project and organization to affect how humans regenerate life through building.
JOHN BOECKER serves as a founding partner in 7group, an internationally recognized multi-disciplinary consulting firm focused on integrative process and regenerative development. As an architect, his practice has focused exclusively on green buildings and businesses since 1996.
EMULATE
From Grizzly Bears to Orca Whales, at least 137 different species depend on wild salmon. – Wild Salmon Center
Salmon are anadromous – they hatch in fresh water, migrate to the ocean, then return to fresh water to spawn and die
ANADROMOUS
Salmon provide as much as 25% of the nitrogen in riparian woodlands which in some cases results in trees growth rates up to 3x
ECOSYSTEM ENGINEERS
Habitat loss and over fishing are biggest threats to salmon (and also Orca). The warming waters are also a problem
Dependent on a number of ecosystems including: • fast moving freshwater streams • estuaries with brackish water • open ocean Special relationship with grizzlies, who carry and dispose of, salmon carcusses into the forests
A salish sea chinook salmon census from 2010 found a 60% reducation in numbers from 1984 records
Male chinook salmon have a distinctive hooked nose
Chinook are food of choice for Orcas
Adults reach maturity at 3-7 years. Return to natal streams pair up to spawn, fertilize, protect the redd, and die before eggs hatch. Female will lay 3,000-14,000 eggs.
Perhaps the most celebrated, iconic and quintessentially Northwest native is the Chinook salmon. As a keystone species, healthy populations of Chinook support healthy forest ecosystems, healthy seas, and healthy intertidal areas. The lessons of salmon are many and diverse: they are highly adaptable, spending distinct phases of their lives in entirely different aquatic ecosystems; they are highly resilient, adapting their physiologies to each of these ecosystems and then ending their lives swimming up swift moving streams and rivers,
sometimes as far as 1,000 miles, to spawn; they are nourishing, the dietary staple for Salish Sea Orca, and an important source of food for other marine mammals, grizzly bear, bald eagle, and human populations. And they provide all these services in exchange for healthy environments in which they can complete their life cycles. Declines in Chinook runs are directly correlated to habitat loss and portend decreasing health in each ecosystem in which Chinook spend some portion of their life cycle.
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EDIFY
Carbon Positive Laurentian Architecture Summit Lecture Series PNW Climate Strikes
Deep Roots KC’s Plan It Native Landscapes Conference + I2SL//International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories’ Heart of America Chapter 2019
WHERE IN THE
What: Deep Roots KC’s Plan It Native Landscapes Conference Who: MD’s Phaedra Svec Where: Kansas City, MO When: September 18 – 20 This inaugural conference brought together tools, tips, and experience from leading national and regional professionals to create a learning and networking environment aimed at helping attendees advance their landscape practices.
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Robben Island Tour
Green Building Council South Africa’s Green Building Convention
From climate strikes to native landscapes conferences to the Living Future Symposium, McLennan Designers are engaging with others around the world, envisioning and working together toward a living future.
What: I2SL//International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories’ Heart of America Chapter 2019 Education Day Who: MD’s Phaedra Svec Where: University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS When: September 26 McLennan Design’s Director of Regenerative Design, Phaedra Svec, participated as a panelist on the subject of “New Pathways to Zero: Tools and Tactics to Zero Energy, Water, and Waste in Laboratory Design.”
We have to sit with both the truth and pain of where we are… We need to do everything we can to transform our communities and if we succeed we will have become ‘homo-regenesis,’ the guardians of life on this planet. Jason F. McLennan
Living Future Symposium
What: Green Building Council South Africa’s Green Building Convention Who: Jason F. McLennan Where: Cape Town, South Africa When: October 2 – 4 Photo/Joe Jack What: Climate Strike Who: McLennan Designers in Victoria and Bainbridge/Seattle
With the targets that we put in place at this conference, the entire design and construction industry now has a common goal to work towards. It’s time to act. Brad Benke
The GBSCA, which strives to inspire a built environment in which people and planet thrive, hosted its 12th annual convention on the theme “Beyond.”
Where: Global!
What: A continuation of the learning journey around the subject of reconciliation
When: September 20
Who: Jason F. McLennan
The September 20th Global Climate Strike inspired some of McLennan Design’s team members to take to the streets!
Where: Robben Island, South Africa When: October While in South Africa for October’s Green Building Convention, Jason F. McLennan continued his personal learning journey on the subject of reconciliation by visiting Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela served 18 years for his antiapartheid leadership.
Photo/Tori Soper What: Carbon Positive ’19 Summit Who: MD’s Brad Benke Where: Chicago, IL When: September 26 – 27 The Summit convened to establish a plan of action for dramatically reducing embodied carbon in the built environment. McLennan Design’s Brad Benke participated as a panelist speaker in a session focused on the embodied carbon impacts of building skins and envelopes.
Photo/Krunal Padhiar What: Living Future Symposium Who: Jason F. McLennan Where: Sydney, Australia When: October 10 – 11 Jason F. McLennan was the keynote speaker for the symposium.
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EDIFY
FALL 2019
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Excerpt from “The Honorable Harvest” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. On a day like this, when the fiddleheads are unfurling and the air is petal soft, I am awash in longing. I know that “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s chloroplasts” is good advice and yet I must confess to full-blown chlorophyll envy. Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun. The shadowy hemlocks and the waving grasses are spinning out sugar molecules and passing them on to hungry mouths and mandibles all the while listening to the warblers and watching the light dance on the water.
It would be so satisfying to provide for the well-being of others—like being a mother again, like being needed. Shade, medicine, berries, roots; there would be no end to it. As a plant I could make the campfire, hold the nest, heal the wound, fill the brimming pot. But this generosity is beyond my realm, as I am a mere heterotroph, a feeder on the carbon transmuted by others. In order to live, I must consume. That’s the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world.
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So instead I live vicariously through the photosynthesis of others. I am not the vibrant leaves on the forest floor—I am the woman with the basket, and how I fill it is a question that matters. If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own. Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take? In our oldest stories we are reminded that this was a question of profound concern for our ancestors. When we rely deeply on other lives, there is urgency to protect them. Our ancestors, who had so few material possessions, devoted a great deal of attention to this question, while we who are drowning in possessions scarcely give it a thought. The cultural landscape may have changed, but the conundrum has not—the need to resolve the inescapable tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human. The traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous harvesters is rich in prescriptions for sustainability. They are found in Native science and philosophy, in lifeways and practices, but most of all in stories, the ones that are told to help restore balance, to locate ourselves once again in the circle.
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Collectively, the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest. They are rules of sorts that govern our taking, shape our relationships with the natural world, and rein in our tendency to consume—that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own. The details are highly specific to different cultures and ecosystems, but the fundamental principles are nearly universal among peoples who live close to the land. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to 44
watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am. What I share here, in the same way they were shared with me, are seeds gleaned from the fields of their collective wisdom, the barest surface, the moss on the mountain of their knowledge. I feel grateful for their teachings and responsible for passing them on as best I can.
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The guidelines for the Honorable Harvest are not written down, or even consistently spoken of as a whole—they are reinforced in small acts of daily life. But if you were to list them, they might look something like this:
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever. (pg 183)
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Imagination is one of our most powerful tools. What we imagine, we can become. I like to imagine what it would be like if the Honorable Harvest were the law of the land today, as it was in our past. Imagine if a developer, eying open land for a shopping mall, had to ask the goldenrod, the meadowlarks, and the monarch butterflies for permission to take their homeland. What if he had to abide by the answer? Why not? The Honorable Harvest does not ask us to photosynthesize. It does not say don’t take, but offers inspiration and a model for what we should take. It’s not ... so much a list of “do nots” as a list of “dos.” Do eat food that is honorably harvested, and celebrate every mouthful. Do use technologies that minimize harm; do take what is given. This philosophy guides not only our taking of food, but also any taking of the gifts of Mother Earth—air, water, and the literal body of the earth: the rocks and soil and fossil fuels. Taking coal buried deep in the earth, for which we must inflict irreparable damage, violates every precept of the code. By no stretch of the imagination is coal “given” to us. We have to wound the land and water to gouge it from Mother Earth. What if a coal company planning mountaintop removal in the ancient folds of the Appalachians were compelled by law to take only that which is given? Don’t you long to hand them the laminated card and announce that the rules have changed? It doesn’t mean that we can’t consume the energy we need, but it does mean that we honorably take only what is given. The wind blows every day, every day the sun shines, every day the waves roll against the shore, and the earth is warm below us. We can understand these renewable sources of energy as given to us, since they are the sources that have powered life on the planet for as long as there has been a planet. We need not destroy the earth to make use of them. Solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy—the so-called “clean energy” harvests—when they are wisely used seem to me to be consistent with the ancient rules of the Honorable Harvest.
And the code might ask of any harvest, including energy, that our purpose be worthy of the harvest… what will we use our energy for? These may seem like charming anachronisms, rules for hunting and gathering whose relevance vanished along with the buffalo. But remember that the buffalo are not extinct and in fact are making a resurgence under the care of those who remember. The canon of the Honorable Harvest is poised to make its comeback, too, as people remember what’s good for the land is ... also good for the people. We need acts of restoration, not only for our polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world, we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth’s beings.
ROBIN WALL KIMMERER is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her first book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. Her writings have appeared in Orion, O Magazine, and numerous scientific journals. She lives in Fabius, New York, where she is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Robin Wall Kimmerer, excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass. Copyright © 2013 by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Reprinted with the permission of Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org.
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“Rebuilding Biodiversity” was contributed by our friends at +Impact, a publication of the Green Building Council of South Africa. It was originally published here.
Rebuilding Biodiversity Considering the catastrophic decline of biodiversity in urban landscapes world-wide, it’s essential that custodians of the built environment take stock and begin to rethink what we can do to support and nurture the natural world so that it can continue to support us. WORDS Mary Anne Constable
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Since 1970, the world has lost 60% of wildlife due to habitat and ecosystem destruction. Over and above biodiversity loss due to a shrinking natural world, poor land-usage practices in the anthropogenic world, caused primarily by agriculture and to a growing extent urban sprawl, continues to exert pressure on remnant pockets of natural spaces and wildlife. In Europe, bird life has declined by 30% over the last 25 years in the anthropogenic landscapes. Simply put, we are in the throes of the Sixth Extinction - that includes us if we don’t act now. John Masson An overarching pattern in our post-industrial, post-modern world is a fundamental disconnect between human beings and nature. As mankind’s ability to harvest the land and extract resources from it has grown over the centuries, the natural world simply hasn’t been able to keep pace to a point at which, if we don’t find a new way of doing business-as-usual, it may eventually disappear, and then what? This is a frightening prospect and perhaps one of which the consequences are not quite fully understood. John Masson, founder and CEO of the Local Biodiversity Council, a non-profit environmental organisation which focuses on global biodiversity standards, explains: “Our disconnect with the natural world is the underlying cause driving climate change. We
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live in an anthropogenic world that provides for our day-to-day consumptive and lifestyle needs by transforming natural resources in such a manner that it obscures the source to irrelevance. Unfortunately, we have been conditioned by living in an artificial world, with a mentality that is unaware of our consumptive demands having an impact on biodiversity. There is a primary lack of understanding of our blue green planet and its network of interconnected biomes that makes life on earth possible”. We need to foster a sustainable environmental awareness related to our dependency on and our need to be connected to the natural world, as well as treating nature as having equal rights to human beings. Sustainability architect, Marc Sherratt concurs: “To talk about nature as being separate to hu-
man beings is a very western attitude. I find the African approach more accurate. We are part of nature in every aspect, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. We have been designed by the same architect as it were. It is only in very recent times that we have separated ourselves severely from nature in the urban realm.” The solution of course is finding a way to bring back and nurture a positive relationship between mankind and nature. And in doing so, there is hope for regeneration of damaged landscapes. “Nature has a great ability to heal itself but people have a significant role to play in this healing. The perfect world is not the removal of human beings from nature but the integration of human beings into it in a sustainable manner. The biggest mistake we can make is to remove ourselves from the process of this healing,”
Photo/Recycled Island Foundation
The Recycled Park in Rotterdam, Netherlands, is constructed from floating islands moulded from plastic litter retrieved from the New Meuse River. The islands are filled with soil and plants, thus attracting local biodiversity, and creating a shelter for fish at their bases.
“Buildings hold huge ecological potential if designed as fully integrated biodiversity systems functioning as selfsustainable ecological entities delivering ecosystem services.” JOHN MASSON
Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) by Stefano Boeri Architetti in Milan, Italy, is a pair of residential towers that incorporate actual trees and shrubs in the architectural design–attracting local urban biodiversity.
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A 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup legacy project, the City of Cape Town instituted the Green Point Urban Park and Biodiversity Showcase Garden over a portion of the existing Green Point Common which was previously derelict and run down with no public access.
Photo/Mary Anne Constable
Biodiversity and Cities – the tragedy of the commons An overarching pattern in our post-industrial, post-modern world is a fundamental disconnect between human beings and nature. As mankind’s ability to harvest the land and extract resources from it has grown over the centuries, the natural world simply hasn’t been able to keep pace to a point at which, if we don’t find a new way of doing business-as-usual, it may eventually disappear, and then what? This is a frightening prospect and perhaps one of which the consequences are not quite fully understood. In cities, natural spaces are usually found as parks or open spaces that are shared publicly and by default collectively-owned. These are often fated to the “tragedy of the commons” says landscape architect from Urban Choreography, Donovan Gillman, referring to the tendency for individuals to value their own property over that which is shared, and also to exploit - usually for personal gain - what is not necessarily “owned” by one single entity. An example of this would be people dumping waste on common property. Because these landscapes are not intrinsically valued as being essential to the functioning of the urban environment, they become “somebody else’s problem” to look after, very often falling into
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disrepair and degeneration. “Biodiversity is the backbone to sustainability – without it we have a crisis,” says Masson. Therefore biodiversity has to be the foundation upon which we develop our cities. Human beings have the ability to adapt relatively quickly to almost any environment on the planet but other species have a hard time relocating to new suitable habitats. “They are unable to migrate ahead of current rapid ecological changes, or are hampered by artificial barriers such as roadways, cityscapes, and suburban sprawl, which increase discontinuity between viable habitats throughout the world,” Gillman notes. And as a result biodiversity is being sacrificed for
other forms of land use or simply being exposed to destructive impacts within our urban edges leading to what Masson calls a “bleaching out effect”. “This is despite our dependence on ecosystem services, with benefits to every single form of land-use and resource supply, be it sustenance, water, energy, communication and transportation, clothing and shelter, commerce and industry, defence and security, medical, recreation and vacation, or culture – in essence it is what enables the establishment of our global civilisations,” Masson adds. We need to have an understanding of biodiversity’s significance from a macro level right down to where we live, if we are to survive as a species.
Biodiversity and the built environment Biodiversity in cities has suffered greatly under destructive (and usually unregulated) land-use practices which conventionally consider human development to be superior to nature, as opposed to an integral part of it. Sherratt says that in post-industrial Africa the built environment has been driven by “top down” modernist city planning which “sees nature as some kind of tameable garden” and secondly (an agenda which is often viewed in opposition to this), the human need for shelter which has seen the “bottom up” growth of informal settlement. “Unfortunately both are based on an anthropogenic, consumerist approach to nature as a resource for human pleasure.” Professionals within the built environment still work largely in isolation within their specific portfolios, often considering sustainability to be an (optional) add-on, but Gillman calls on the building industry to practise “systemic design” which is interdisciplinary and holistic, integrating the environment from the very start of a project. “Instead of building, designing or thinking in terms of objects we should instead think in terms of flows,” he explains. These flows are guided by what is already existing on site, such as natural water systems, natural habitats (flora and fauna), and the micro climate (sun, wind, rain). He suggests an ecological planning approach called “urban harvest”, which assesses the potential of a site to generate and harvest its own resources in terms of energy and water; the creation of a sustainable “urban metabolism” that reuses and recycles waste produced – essentially a circular versus a linear set of processes. The conventional approach to landscape planning is to first decide what you want and then modify the conditions of the
landscape to suit the design, but the premise with systemic design is that landscape comes first and its existing set of constraints determines the flows. It is only after this process has taken place that one decides where to build. Humans’ tendency to try to mechanise the natural flows also usually results in (negative) disruption, and further contributes to degeneration of landscapes. Instead, flexibility and an experimental approach is required – one that mimics the tendency of nature to be fairly unpredictable. “Systemic design requires choreography of all the flows,” Gillman says. “The process is not one of grand design. It’s one of tinkering, small trials, disruptive technologies, and accepting things that already work.” Sherratt’s architecture reflects the symbiotic relationship between landscape and building. “Buildings are landscape. What do you think a speckled pigeon thinks when it sees a high-rise building? I will tell you, it sees a cliff face. The starting point [when building on both greenfield and brownfield sites] is to understand what life exists or did exist in these places and how, like a tree, a building can support and benefit from the indigenous ecological system. Future architecture will include buildings as alive as we are, buildings that move, communicate, excrete, breathe, heal and reproduce,” he says. Sherratt’s sensitively- designed Vleihuis residential development in Linden, Johannesburg, received three GBCSA Net Zero pilot certifications for carbon, water and ecology, and was runner-up Net Zero Innovative Project at the 2018 GBCSA awards. The project involved a lengthy and rigorous research process to understand the indigenous natural environment on the brownfield site.
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The existing site was a well-maintained residential property with “manicured exotic gardens” - a man-made landscape which required lots of water and maintenance. It was decided to create a “natural” wetland on the site that mimicked the natural flows of the landscape in the area. The buildings were then sensitively “nested” into this context. The wetland works in symbiotic relationship with the building to aid in cooling the building and purifying water on site, while providing a sanctuary for native wetland biodiversity. Masson says it helps to think of a building as “a topographical ecological structure from the perspective of enabling successful ecological habitat colonisation, in a sense much like decommissioned ships are used to function as reefs supporting marine life.” Yet it’s important to look at buildings within their context from a master plan level as topographical forms that can simulate an entire biodiversity landscape. “For example, one could design a city using the built environment to form the topographical support structures to provide for the establishment of distinct ecosystem zones fully integrated with all the typical mixed land-useneeds.”
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Photo/Marc Sherratt Sustainability Architects
The Vleihuis development in Linden, Johannesburg, by Marc Sherratt Sustainability Architects, comprises five residential units on a long 2500m² site. The buildings are nested into a restored indigenous wetland landscape. Besides using renewable energy and storing and purifying water on site, the timber screens are made from a natural African reed which could be grown on site. BOTTOM: Elephant Highway is an elephant migration route connecting Madikwe Game Reserve in the north west to Kruger National Park through the city of Johannesburg. This was presented by Marc Sherratt Sustainability Architects to the City of Johannesburg in 2018.
A resilient future It’s clear that re-framing our understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature, and buildings and the landscape, is an essential starting point for regeneration and restoration of the natural world and local biodiversity in cities. It’s essential to our survival as a species, and to the creation of a resilient sustainable future. From this starting point we can
begin to approach design of buildings in a more systemic and integral way that puts the landscape first. The beauty of it all is That when nature’s innate tendency to want to restore and regenerate is harnessed and incorporated into a design, the resulting flows often seem to simply “just work”. “I honestly believe that some of the greatest environmental achievements are some of the
simplest. Imagine hearing larks singing in our city centres, or mongooses foraging for grubs amongst a bed of autumn leaves in a city centre woodland coppice. The presence of such species serves as a bio-indicator of an environmentally healthy city, because if the air is healthy enough for butterflies, then it’s healthy enough for our children,” ends Masson.
SETTING SUSTAINABILITY STANDARDS The GBCSA plays an essntial role in providing objective assessments for sustainable buildings in the built environment, but there is not yet a specific standard for Southern African sustainable land-use practices. International precedents can, however, act as a guide for local developers. Sheratt emphasises that it’s important to have objective certification systems because “without this, sustainability is left as a subjective set of ethical values which cannot be measured.” Ratings encourage developers to implement change but Masson suggests that biodiversity needs to become an integral part of the GBCSA’s philosophy. The Local Biodiversity Council developed the Biodiversity Area Standard Certification in collaboration with EcoCert, in 2016. The global standard provides objective measures for determining a site’s ecological biodiversity status and enables assessment of biodiversity from the macro down to the micro level on a site. “The standard has been applied to industrial sites, residential estates, commercial multi-storey facilities, large-scale restoration projects for urban riverine systems, and reverting of highly-impacted transformed landscapes to local biodiversity,” explains Masson. The American Society of Landscape Architects’ Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) is another framework for the rating of sustainable ecological process that is used widely internationally. To read the standard: localbiodiversity.org
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Photo/Zane Masson
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Photo/John Masson
Photo/John Masson
After
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One of John Masson’s projects, the Royal Canin Eco-Industrial Park in Kya Sands, Johannesburg, is an internationally-acclaimed sustainable ecological icon completed in 2003. It served as the blue print for sustainable environmental development by establishing standards for biodiversity integration with primary landuse and self-sustainable ecological ecosystems with zero natural resource inputs including water, chemical-free, and fully restored 100% local biodiversity with close to 200 hundred birds.
The Vodafone Site Solutions Innovation Centre achieved a Net Positive Ecology pilot certification in 2018, for its brownfield transformation of a vacant parking lot into a lush indigenous garden surrounding the building.
Photo/GLH Architects
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HYBRID LANDSCAPES & ADAPTIVE REUSE Gillman highlights the fact that “net zero” with regards to waste is in many senses an anomaly, as even the natural cycle of life produces a certain amount of waste; for example, compost from decaying organic matter. This waste is cycled back into the system thus stimulating regeneration of life. While it’s clear that human beings need to drastically reduce their waste outputs, an appropriate amont of (the right kind of) waste can be used for fuel or some other kind of useful function, while also providing economic value. In this sense it’s useful to think about “adaptive reuse” of degenerated landscapes in urban spaces. Professor of urban design at MIT, Alan Berger, coined the term drosscapes - urban landscapes which are seen as a waste product of redundant economic and industrial processes. These spaces can be regenerated and transformed into useful spaces which enhance the urban environment. These might also be considered “hybrid” landscapes because they support human use but are not necessarily indigenous or “natural.” The New York City High Line is an example of one such hybrid landscape–a 2.3km elevated linear public park created on top of an old industrial railway line.
Other examples of adaptive reuse of wastelands include the US Environmental Protection Agency Superfund programme, which funds the restoration and regeneration of previously contaminated waste sites from manufacturing, landfills and mining. Sites are cleaned up and returned to productive use for communities. Many other programmes exist world-wide.
MARY ANNE CONSTABLE is a qualified architect and awardwinning specialist architectural journalist, passionate about the role that the built environment can play in moving towards a more sustainable world. She is currently Editor for +Impact (Positive Impact) Magazine - the official publication of the Green Building Council South Africa - which was awarded the prestigious 2019 SAPOA (South African Property Owners Association) Property Publication of the Year, under her editorship. She writes freelance as The Paper Architect while still being actively engaged in the architectural world. She also dabbles in architectural photography.
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ABOUT MCLENNAN DESIGN McLennan Design, one of the world’s leading multi-disciplinary regenerative design practices, focuses on deep green outcomes in the fields of architecture, planning, consulting, and product design. The firm uses an ecological perspective to drive design creativity and innovation, reimagining and redesigning for positive environmental and social impact. Founded in 2013 by global sustainability leader and green design pioneer Jason F. McLennan and joined by partner Dale Duncan, the firm dedicates its practice to the creation of living buildings, netzero, and regenerative projects all over the world. As the founder and creator of many of the building industry’s leading programs including the Living Building Challenge and its related programs, McLennan and his design team bring substantial knowledge and unmatched expertise to the A/E industry. The firm’s diverse and interdisciplinary set of services makes for a culture of holistic solutions and big picture thinking.
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ABOUT JASON F. MCLENNAN Considered one of the world’s most influential individuals in the field of architecture and green building movement today, Jason is a highly sought out designer, consultant and thought leader. The recipient of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize, the planet’s top prize for socially responsible design, he has been called the Steve Jobs of the green building industry, and a World Changer by GreenBiz magazine. In 2016, Jason was selected as the Award of Excellence winner for Engineering News Recordone of the only individuals in the architecture profession to have won the award in its 52-year history. McLennan is the creator of the Living Building Challenge – the most stringent and progressive green building program in existence, as well as a primary author of the WELL Building Standard. He is the author of six books on Sustainability and Design used by thousands of practitioners each year, including The Philosophy of Sustainable Design. McLennan is both an Ashoka Fellow and Senior Fellow of the Design Future’s Council. He has been selected by Yes! Magazine as one of 15 People Shaping the World and works closely with world leaders, Fortune 500 companies, leading NGOs, major universities, celebrities and development companies –all in the pursuit of a world that is socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative. He serves as the Chairman of the International Living Future Institute and is the CEO of McLennan Design – his architectural and planning practice designing some of the world’s most advanced green buildings. McLennan’s work has been published in dozens of journals, magazines and newspapers around the world.
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