Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

36 Designing ecological Habitats
Declan’s atrium.
The solar gain
facilitates comfortable
conversation.
is tailored to the combined needs of all those involved; it takes
time to make this shared vision a reality, but the shared vision
forms the basis of the settlement’s spiritual, intellectual and
material character. Many of the ideas expressed here can be
found in the concept of ‘Transition Towns’, as formulated by
permaculture designer Rob Hopkins. 5
In its book, The First Global Revolution, the Club of Rome
made an appeal to humanity by stating: “We need a vision”,
because, they argued, “global problems cannot be solved by
market mechanisms alone”. The vision sees the way ahead
as the thousands of small ‘smart’ decisions that reflect a new
awareness, shared by millions of people, which will help ensure
the survival of society as a whole. The strategy of ecological
design has the advantage of not only being feasible, but also of
corresponding to the vision many people share of a world in
which they would like to live. Making the vision a reality only
requires the will to take calculated risks and shed old prejudices
and patterns of behavior. In view of the problems bombarding
us from all sides, this can only be seen as a hopeful perspective.
Renewal instead of New Construction
The biggest challenge for everyone involved in building all over the
world is the ecological renewal of existing buildings, villages and towns.
Renewing ecologically means converting and renovating buildings with a
view to sustainable use of resources. This involves, for instance, saving nonrenewable
materials such as copper, aluminum and iron from dismantling
operations in cities and reusing them efficiently, rather than mining them
anew from the Earth. It also means allowing waste water to flow back into
the ground water, or into rivers and lakes, in a state that is just as clean,
or cleaner, than it was when we extracted it as drinking-water; keeping the
air clean, so that we can once again smell the scent of plants; planning
quietness and reducing noise; and providing a diversity of uses in a small
area, so that living, working and leisure can be combined to reduce transport
distances and improve the quality of life for all. In almost all our cities,
but also in many of our ecovillages, we are still very far away from the full
implementation of this vision. However, some of the new urban ecovillages
indicate that there are ways and means of getting closer to these goals. What
we need now are examples of ways of attaining these goals.
Naturally, renewing older urban areas ecologically requires greater
sensitivity, patience and openness to teamwork than developing new urban
or green pasture ecovillages. One of the differences compared with new
building projects is that it is considerably more difficult to find groundbreaking
models and documentation of such projects, probably because
urban ecovillages are less spectacular. At first glance, they generally appear
to differ very little from completely ‘normal’ projects, and, with the exception