The environmental movement has often been accused of being overly negative-trying to stop "progress". The Nature of Design, on the other hand, is about starting things, specifically an ecological design revolution that changes how we provide food, shelter, energy, materials, livelihood, and deal with waste. Ecological design is an emerging field aiming to recalibrate what humans do in the world with how the world works as a biophysical system. Design in this sense is a large concept having to do as much with politics and ethics as with buildings and technology. This is a book that combines theory, practicality, and action.

"The creativity of thought displayed is refreshing when compared to the hundreds of texts that criticise current practice without offering substitutes. And Orr's understanding of the role pysical surroundings play in human thinking inspires a vital alternative to the technological fundamentalism

constricting so much current thought."--Ecologist

I. The Problem of Ecological Design

1. Introduction: The Design of Culture and the Culture of Design

2. Human Ecology as a Problem of Ecological Design

II. Pathologies and Barriers

3. Slow Knowledge

4. Speed

5. Verbicide

6. Technological Fundamentalism

7. Ideasclerosis

8. Ideasclerosis, Continued

III. The Politics of Design

9. None So Blind: The Problem of Ecological Denial (with David Ehrenfeld)

10. Twine in the Baler

11. Conservation and Conservatism

12. The Politics Worthy of the Name

13. The Limits of Nature and the Educational Nature of Limits

IV. Design as Pedagogy

14. Architecture and Education

15. The Architecture of Science

16. 2020: A Proposal

17. Education, Careers, and Callings

18. A Higher Order of Heroism

V. Charity, Wildness, and Children

19. The Ecology of Giving and Consuming

20. The Great Wilderness Debate, Again

21. Loving Children: The Political Economy of Design

Bibliography

Index