Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
We are living in a pessimistic period but
the knowledge that change is necessary is
perhaps grounds for optimism: maybe we do,
at last, have the chance to make a better world.
At the current moment then lots of normative
shifts are underway as we know that we
need radical change. We are thus living in
momentous extraordinary times: times where
we have remarkably little knowledge about
the future; times when change is accelerating,
and when the horror of what could happen if
we do nothing and the brilliance of what we
could achieve if we act can both, at times,
be overwhelming. The current uncertainty,
however, is also part of the challenge that
makes the built environment professions
such fascinating and absorbing professions.
The work of designers and built environment
professionals I would argue is thus entering a
critical and most important phase.
The human-nature split, or
nature-culture divide – ecological
unintelligence
Bill Mc Kibben (2008, 19) argues that “partly
we have failed to act because we have
become pretty denatured.” “The economy
seems more real to us than the ecosphere”
(McKibben 2008, 20). Embedded within the
mantra of sustainable development is a largely
unquestioned embrace of the economic
growth principles. There is a disconnection
in Western thinking between the well-being
of two intertwined life-systems – that of
humans and the planet (Thompson 2008, 94).
‘Development’ has become such a part of
economic discourse that other renditions of its
meaning we might bring to the table, renditions
that would challenge and conflict with the
prevailing discourse – for instance cultural
development, personal development, spiritual
development – are all too easily drowned or,
at best marginalised. We have also failed to
act as the problems are so big. In our modern
western world we have learnt to break issues
down into ever-smaller pieces and have
separated nature and culture. Grappling with
fundamental threats to creation, however,
requires moving in the opposite direction.
There is a lacking of a sense of the wholeness
and interrelatedness of things. “Organicity
must be reintroduced with a postmodern
system where living systems are not reducible
to components and where nature is considered
to be alive” (O’Sullivan 2008, 140). “The awe
and reverence toward nature, so prevalent in
pre-modern worldviews, is totally absent in the
modern world” (O’Sullivan 2008, 138).
An either or thinking has historically governed
our approaches, i.e. culture versus nature,
civilisation versus wilderness, and city versus
country. These oppositions are fierce and
counterproductive and deserve much of the
blame for the current bankruptcy of our current
approach to the environment (Capra 1996;
Orr 2004). According to Gregory Bateson,
whom Fritjof Capra regards as one of the
most influential thinkers of our time – our
worldview is founded on an ‘epistemological
error’, a perception or belief in separateness
that makes it so. We need to attempt to move
beyond this nature-culture impasse and merge
development and conservation. One could
argue that we have lost our sense of place in
the world. In Ian McCallum’s (2005) words we
have to stop speaking about the earth being in
need of healing. The earth doesn’t need
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