“There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?” -Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Ecological history underscores our terrestrial issues. How much and how fast has the climate changed? How far are such changes man-induced? Is nature in balance? Are humans helpless to stem — or bound to alter — natural processes? Has humanity on the whole improved or spoiled the Earth? In what sense do environmental misuse and reform matter? Today’s ecological concerns trigger these essentially historical questions. Save for the subject of oppressed minorities, no aspect of history is currently so resurgent as that of the environment. Past historians habitually disjoined nature from history. As recently as 1984, Donald Worster found “little history in the study of nature, and little nature in the study of history”. history –the annals of civilization — is derived from recollections and written records. By contrast, erudition of nature — Earth and Cosmos — emerged from material residues, theoretical logic, and verifying research. history was a humanistic enterprise, ecology a scientific one. Analogies abounded, “the book of nature” was a common cliche, and historical “science” was recurrently trendy. But most scholars stressed the disparate temporal horizons, subject matter, and sources of the two realms and slighted their parallels. Nature was mundane and mindless, history the sublime drama of human will. To be sure, historians never forgot that men and women required terrestrial abodes for food and shelter, even for sanctuary and faith. And the reciprocal influences of locale and life perennially intrigue chroniclers. At least since Herodotus, historians have invoked landscape and terrain, climate and soils to explain why peoples and nations differ. In the Western world, human dominion over nature was decreed by the deity and lent added impetus by Enlightenment science. While ecologists doggedly termed nature mankind’s master, devotees of advancement saw nature as mankind’s servant. Thus design should fit within nature not enslave it. Design, like the Thoreaus’ bird nest, is in tune with the narrative of place. design cannot be seperate from its history. BUT much of design history does not consider nature directly. What next???
