The Problem

Our world is barreling towards a future of 4 degrees C warming by the end of the century: the worst-case (and also the business-as-usual) scenario described by scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014). The impacts posed by this scenario will be “severe, widespread, and irreversible:” creating risks for the human and non humans alike: more severe and frequent heat waves, droughts, floods, ocean acidification, insect-born diseases, sea level rise, and food insecurity are a partial list (IPCC 2014).

International climate agreements and national climate policies top-down governance have fallen short, and evidence has shown that breakthroughs in technology like fourth generation nuclear power and Carbon Capture and Sequestration cannot provide a realistic and adequate intervention (Klien, 2014). Social scientists, perhaps those best-suited to understand how the complex interactions of culture, politics, and economics shape our abilities to address this problem- are driven by the crushing reality of academic survival to deliberate and theorize in echo-chambers rather than use their insights to take practical action. We continue to live the status-quo of exorbitant fossil-fuel combustion.

Where does that leave those who are called to tackle this problem? Of course, advocacy organizations of all breeds push the various actors determining our climate future on the world stage- from #NoDAPL to 350.org- and this work is important. But it still leaves the question of exactly how humanity will physically create the world we want to- that we need to- live in. In other words, perhaps our inability to act is related not only to our inability to imagine potential futures, but to actually design and enact them, here and now.

Our Project

Can we together re-imagine a future that maybe is actually even better than the present? And can we really make that a physical reality? What would it take to pursue such a path?

The Center for Ecological Design focuses on the practical: re-creating the systems we rely on for survival for sustainability, carbon-neutrality, even regenerative capacities: from shelter, to water, power and waste. The Project also prioritizes the cultural via the cultivation of wonder- “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.” The prospect of a bleak future must be confronted with awe, beauty, and delight if we are to cultivate motivation, momentum and monumental change.

The Center for Ecological Design is focused on three cross-cutting themes: Science, Solutions, and Skills. These themes carry through all of the work that we do. The Science theme is focused on climate change and interlinked issues, covering the physical climate science basis and impacts, and the social elements of adaptation and mitigation. The Solutions theme covers physical sustainability innovations (shelter, food, water, waste, and power) and social elements (communities, art). The Skills theme cultivates practical skill-building necessary to execute solutions. As a whole, these themes provide a holistic, evidence-based, and practical approach to understanding and solving one of our generation’s most wicked problems.

The Center for Ecological Design carries these three cross-cutting themes (Science, Solutions and Skills) into three core project areas: Research, Practice, and Education. Our research program gathers and assesses the best available research in our thematic areas and processes them for educational uses. The practice core concentrates on the co-creation of physical experimentations with sustainability innovations (shelter, etc.) and art. The education core provides opportunities for distance and experiential learning in the two thematic areas in addition to a focus on skills through the publication of online content, books, guides, and in-person workshops.

The impact of this project is potentially enormous, and includes both long- and short-term concrete physical achievements and the seeding of human knowledge and experience. The experiments in sustainability will manifest in actual systems that are usable and replicable to other places. The research core will produce materials that can be distributed and used across the globe. The groundedness of educational activities in experiential learning will help to cultivate lasting and profound experiences for visitors that may seeded broadly. In a long-term view, it is important to acknowledge that this project may have an important legacy in creating sustainable innovations at a time when easy access to fossil fuels and presently minimal climate impacts facilitate their creation.

In all, the Center for Ecological Design focuses on preparing for the next earth-

in the inevitable:

an earth that is facing the impacts of climate change

an earth that adapts to those impacts

and in the possible:

an earth that prioritizes the mitigation of climate change

an earth whose human and non-human residents are able to flourish