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 Special Supplement to the October 2001 issue: A report on the proceedings of the Metropolis West Conference, February 7+8, 2001, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, "Finding the Thread of Sustainability." October 2001
Tim Duane: My son Cody is five years old, and he recently got into a bit of trouble. His kindergarten teacher was having a kid wash his mouth out, in the metaphorical sense, for using "bathroom words," so she told the offending child to go and flush the toilet. Cody got upset because there was nothing in the toilet, and he started asking questions like, "What about the salmon?" Apparently he remembered the time when I took him down to the creek near our house in Marin County, where he saw that the water used for the toilet was not going to be available for the salmon that were migrating up the creek. He made a tangible connection between an act in one area of his life with the landscape that he had come to know. This little story is meant to illustrate two points: Every act counts (whether you're flushing a toilet or building a nuclear power plant); and the ability to make that connection is not an abstraction. It was about walking out to the creek and seeing those Coho salmon go up the creek. I have to say that our educational system, including ours at Berkeley, didn't make that connection enough.
Harrison Fraker: The Boyer Mitgang Report ("Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice," Princeton, New Jersey., the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching, 1996) is one of the most important studies on architecture and design education. It proposes that architects and architectural educators assume a leadership role in preserving the environment and the planet's resources. It is this priority that could have the most far-reaching implications about the way schools and the profession itself conduct themselves in the next century. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The wisdom of the Almighty appears in our daily mention of nature and the wilderness. The Garden of Eden is a mandate for stewardship. Noah's Ark is a mandate for biodiversity. Christ was born in a manger surrounded by animals. And Christ's parables are taken from nature. Christ called himself a shepherd, a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper-because that's how he stayed in touch with people. Harrison Fraker: Is sustainable design still marginalized in the schools of architecture and design, in professional practices, and in the American material culture? I would argue that the climate in schools today has changed. We are now at a stage where we can really talk about the integration (of sustainability) into the core of the discipline. In places like Berkeley it is taught as fundamental to understanding how buildings work. Some of the best form-making students are automatically integrating it into their designs in the studios. And young teachers work in studios on these projects. Some are students of Sim's [Van der Ryn]. Mary Jane McQuillen: We sponsored a think tank in Washington, D.C., along with the World Resources Institute, to help faculty and graduate students in business schools incorporate environmental and social considerations into the curriculum. Our thinking was that many of these students will be the future leaders. Randy Hayes: The Hopi have been living in the Southwest for about 10,000 years. There's been a lot said about their prophecies. But in the ten years I lived among them, I began to understand that prophecy was a misnomer-that their stories were more about predictability. Knowing what they know about human nature and about the cycles of nature, they make predictions. William McDonough: At the Hanford Nuclear Plant at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Washington State, they had a symposium of scientists to discuss the semiology of extreme danger. They were trying to figure out how to design a ground marker to put where plutonium was being stored so that even an extraterrestrial would not dare dig there. What's funny is that the native people, the Yakima, were in another meeting in the same building and they bumped into the scientists during the breaks. When they found out what the scientists were doing, the Yakima started laughing. They said, "You know, you really don't have to worry about this, we'll tell them where it is." They weren't leaving-for them there's tomorrow. |
