B. ECOLOGICAL DESIGN
The SDC is a Canadian non-profit dedicated to the promotion of Ecological Design, which includes Environmental (with our world), Elemental (integrating 1)Air, 2) Water, 3) Earth states of gaseous, liquid and solid matter, 4) Energy in solar, fire etc and Life both vegetable and animal, Ergonomic design with the human body, 'Economic' from the Greek = 'care and nurture of the home and family'. Our programs are designed to support each other in livelihood (food, shelter, clothing, warmth and health) during the process of making a living. Supporting people and processes are key to reaching our goals together.
Contact: Douglas Jack douglasf.jack@gmail.com
Integrated holistic Ecological Design starts with nurturing / facilitating the relationships of the people involved in any human strength-need-based life event or enterprise. We look at our needs in terms of our strengths both as individuals and as groups. When people are sovereign (contributing co-owners with progressive accounting recognition, accreditation and rights, acting on their own choice or initiative with freewill, inspiration, freely choosing collaborators, with voice and without dominance from hierarchy and with established formal feedback processes) they each speak as a voice of the earth. There are no distinctions between professionals, volunteers and clients. All are intelligent beings whose livelihood and participatory intelligence must be considered
Design continues with integration of the five elements of Sun (energy), Air (wind), Water (humidity, rain & snow), Soil (earth materials), and Life (plant and animal). Energy is first then the three basic states of matter as gas (Air), liquid (Water) and solid (Soil) with Life as the fifth element integrating all. We promote Ecological, Elemental, Ergonomic (design in harmony with the human body and community), Environmental and Economic design.
Cohousing refers to a multi-home design with individuals and families living with independent privacy but in proximity, with condominium ownership of each dwelling-unit and the ability to contribute to common area resources such as: community-kitchen, orchards-gardens, composting-humanure recycling, computer-specialist-library-information, child-handicapped-elder care-interaction, infrastructure mechanical-electrical, water-air-soil-energy, heating-cooling-repair, clothes making/repair, bicycle-repair, accounting, book-keeping, communications etc. .
Indigene Elemental Design Solar (1st graphic) looks at solar and other element interaction with a green roof filtering water for a structure, with composting, green-bio-digestion urine-fecal separating toilet kitchen-composting independently treating humanure off of the grid, providing nutrients for plants air, soil enrichment, water-purification lowering requirements from damaging city services and infrastructure.
Organising from the tree-roots is a metaphore inspired by Orchard-tree-led food production through perennials by which cells, tissues and organs unite their strengths together across critical numbers to specialise and interact with the whole organism or community penetrating deep tens of metres into earth's substrate and photosynthetically harvesting solar energy from 92 - 98% and producing 100 times that of 'agri-culture' (Latin 'ager' = 'field') in three-dimensions. In comparison 'organising from the grass-roots' doesn't have the organisation, concertation or specialisation of cell numbers, penetration (scant centimetres) or solar absorption 2 - 8% so as leaving the organism 2 dimensionally weak and greatly less productive (1%). Multi-home strategy starts with cataloguing human resources in any group and/or community. A group of apartment 21 renters are paying 210,000$ into their individual leases which can be grouped together under non-profit management and mortgage application to a bank for buying a typical 35 dwelling building. Just three families with full equities of 250,000$ per home can use these equities to apply for a mortgage on a 3,000,000$ building. Through comprehensive accounting facilitated interaction, multi-home Cohousing provides young, old, handicapped and able individuals the opportunity and proximity to 'give and receive' in complementation with each other. 900,000 people in the greater Montreal region live in apartments or townhouses presently in which they can organise their strengths to develop sustainable mutual-aid community.
Cohousing Elemental Generic Multi-Dwelling provides other views of an apartment style cohousing design. These five elemental principles can be fully incorporated into new-builds depending on the site or adjusted for renovation of existing buildings. The three buildings shown in this drawing are oriented east-west, SOLAR with porch-access corridors on the south side , green rooves absorbing solar, growing food, WATER filtering water/snow, AIR calming winds on a resident outdoor space, ENERGY insulating the roof, providing resident services to buildings and the larger community around the buildings, AIR building mounted linear helical wind turbines on roof and wall shear surfaces, SOIL providing green bio-digestion urine-fecal separating composting toilets.
HOLISTIC SCIENCEinvolves design & conception across all levels of being. The graphic at left looks at humans and sentient life (all living beings) as being an interface between an infinate range of being from macro to microcosm. We draw knowledge from both macro and micro observations & compose understanding of the fractal patterns which happen at all levels. Holistic Design plans for these patterns of interaction with the energy, physical & bio-sphere's 5 elements sun, air, water, soil & life, assuming results or consequences at all levels of macro and micro existence. Common senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, kinetic (body-movement) and the mind's integration of these are our primary tools for understanding because these senses are integrated automatically by the mind into multi-sensory holistic perception. It is through these integrated multi-sensory levels that all other levels of understanding flow.
Refer to section D. PARTICIPATORY STRUCTURE subsections 1) Both Sides Now Equal Time Recorded Dialogues 2) Satyagraha 3) Economic Memory 4) Apprenticeship Education 5) Collaborative Language respectively on the construction of three-dimensional perception from 2-D sensory neural inputs and understandings from whole body neurogy where sensory inputs from all senses have on site memory, decision-making and acting authorities. Mohandas Gandhi admonishes us to "Become the change you want to see in the world", reminding us of our whole selves as the first fractal of human existance.
Reductionist Science gets caught in an intellectual trap of prioritizing observations only in the 'macro' or 'micro'spheres with distance from our holistic nature. Reductionists consider parts at various levels of microscopy or magnification but not for the whole or relations (ecology) between parts. Analysis is valuable but as well bears responsibility for integrating synthesis. Each micro & macro observation is facilitated by machinery of some kind. Machinery distances the human in subtle ways from integrated understandings by composite human sensory inputs as well as altering perception. Often the machinery is expensive to be afforded only by exploitive hierachies corporate or government. Reductionist scientists being dependent upon institutional interactions and status get caught in the celebration or obsessive concern for expense, not understanding many pathways of collective intelligence. Often these institutionally dependent interactions are the closest unjust societies and institutional agents get to collectivity, so scientists confuse this primal urge for human unity with the scraps of institutional finance and status they receive.
This cartoon about a 'job-interview' at IKEA the furniture manufacturer, illustrates several relations between the parts & the whole. As institutional dependents, reduction scientists worship micro or macro understandings as though truth can be found only at the smallest or largest levels of microscopic / macroscopic observation or testing. We worship microscopic or macroscopic results while ignoring sensory observations all around us. Not having experienced or understood whole systems design, complementary collective interaction and abundant three-dimensional food and material ecologies, institutionalized scientists and citizens don't understand science in its holistic framework. We send expensive atmosphere destroying space probes out into outer-space with ecological footprint destroying economic expense, before we have developed a team capacity for all humans (collective intelligence) on earth. We can not rely on exploitive economies to achieve science-fiction dreams.
SPACE is all around us at all levels or micro or macro-analysis. We send expensive atmosphere destroying space probes out into outer-space with ecological footprint destroying economic expense, before we have developed a team capacity for all humans (collective intelligence) on earth. We can not rely on exploitive economies to achieve science-fiction dreams.There are understandings to be gleaned at all levels and interactions as well as from outer-space but not when humans suffer from lack of resources which could feed and empower human intelligence. Holistic scientists are obligated to Natural Science, the long human world-wide indigenous tradition and understanding the web of life's grand intelligent design and thus proceed from the heart of compassion and caring for all of humanity. Holistic scientists honour the ecological traditions, economies and biosphere into which we are born. While micro and macro understandings are necessary, they must be integrated with observations at all levels through collective economic empowerment. See Holistic Science https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/structure/6-holistic-science
Indigenous peoples around the earth upon encountering European 'scientific' expeditions have repeatedly said that mind (the act of minding or caring for) or 'intelligence' (Latin = 'inter' = 'between' + 'legere' = 'to choose') is found in a combination of the head and the heart, but not the head alone. A First Nation expression is that; "We (humans) are the voice of the earth speaking". Each human alive and other living beings carry the wisdom of parts of life, which is complementary among us all. It takes all of us and compassion between us to understand the world in which we live as well as the micro and macro-cosms. Exogenous imperial feudal colonial societies including their 'scientific' expeditions depend upon exploitation because they don't know how to live in harmony with the earth. European 'exploration' was driven by the destruction of the once rich European biosphere and ecological productivity consequential to Roman invasion. Colonial supposed 'scientists' are in fact 'gleaners' looking for resources to feed colonial scarcity from deficient human societies which have forgotten their indigenous knowledge and become hierarchies. Modern science is based in this scarcity. Indigenous peoples and the checks and balances of holistic science are based in respectful human interactions with nature's abundance.