The excerpt below comes from the final chapter of our book, The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building: Redefining the Practice of Sustainability. This chapter foreshadows where we were headed then and speaks to what it is we are really working on now.

SHIFTING THE PARADIGM

Pioneering environmental scientist and systems analyst Donella Meadows explains in her article “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,”* that the fastest way to change a system (e.g., a person, a profession, a society, an ecosystem) occurs by changing your mental model—shifting the paradigm. She proposes twelve leverage points for intervening in a system and ranks changing “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises” second only to “the power to transcend paradigms” as the most effective. She writes: “You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow about paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter. They resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.”

Over time, as we have watched people progress through different levels of capability with respect to this way of working and looking for leverage points, we have realized that there is a difference between wanting something good to happen and having the capability to make that good thing come into being. It is not enough to simply believe that we should save the planet—we also must commit to understanding what that means in each particular place, with each particular project. The nature of this process, therefore, is inherently developmental. As we iterate between creating goals for integration and developing the type of thinking required to achieve that integration, our paradigm begins to shift.

Mark Biedron of the Willow School describes a moment at the conception of that project where his paradigm shifted. When he and his wife, Gretchen, started the school, paramount among their founding concepts was the idea of Core Virtues. The program’s goal was to develop ethical relationships between humans through a values-based curriculum that focused on the virtues of responsibility, honesty, respect, and compassion. Also important to its founders was that the school be environmentally sustainable.

It was not long after we began working with the Willow School that the idea of humans being a part of nature clicked into place with Mark and Gretchen. As
Mark describes it, he realized that if we are in fact a part of nature, how can we mentor an ethical relationship between individual humans without also mentoring an ethical relationship between humans and nature? Not fully understanding what this meant but knowing with certainty that it was important, Mark set about the process of discovering what doing that might look like. Pursuing the goal of environmental sustainability triggered a paradigm shift that ultimately led to a higher order understanding of what it meant to be successful at achieving the project’s goals for education.

When all was said and done, the Willow School ended up with not only a highly sustainable solution to the design of the campus and its buildings but also an integrated curriculum that engages students in developing an understanding of how the school itself works with nature. The school’s integrated design becomes the subject matter for student exercises in various subjects. Students draw pictures of the component of the school’s water-cycling system—from toilets to rooftop harvesting to wetlands—in art class. They write descriptions of these same systems in language arts class, calculate water savings in math class, study the working of the campus wetlands system for science class, and overall engage in activities aimed at establishing greater and more healthy diversity in the forest. This achievement was the direct product of Mark’s and others’ efforts to expand the philosophical framework, or paradigm, of what constitutes Core Virtues to include not only human relationships but also the larger systemic interrelationships between humans and nature.

We are only beginning to explore the potential for transformation. As we shift our mental model from stopping the damage to one where humans are an integral part of nature, we also shift our consciousness. As we begin to participate with nature, we discover that humans working with healing nature will ultimately heal and grow themselves as well. This transformation does not happen overnight, but it is rather a continuous process of healing or making whole*—wholing.

When we work to stop the damage, we must make a constant investment of energy to just break even like paddling water out of a rowboat with a hole in the bottom. Partnering with nature, conversely, is hugely inspiring and actually creates energy, because we are investing our effort into a living system that is capable of its own growth and evolution. Imagine those cities and municipalities that are trying to stop damage by organizing cleanup efforts to clear litter and debris from barren roadsides and medians. Now imagine investing that effort into replanting guilds of native trees and shrubs that had once grown there. When the growth begins to take hold and the flourishing ecosystem begins to attract species of native fauna, then entirely new plants grow in its understory that were seeded by the droppings of the returning bird and animal populations, do you think that passersby will be more or less inclined to toss their garbage onto the ground in these places?

Imagine that you own a piece of forested land. Imagine that you begin to devote meaningful time to understanding how this forest works, seeking to form a deeper relationship with the land. You may do some research to learn which plants in the forest tend to cluster together and how nutrients are exchanged throughout the biotic community. Maybe one day you will stumble across a portion of the forest that has been lightly grazed by fi re, and maybe the following spring you will notice the riot of growth that sprouts on the charcoal fertilized ground. Maybe you will begin to understand, as many indigenous cultures have, that there are ways that you can assist the forest in its own evolution and health. You may begin to thin invasive species of plants or to practice annual controlled burns to remove crowded understory elements while simultaneously improving the quality of the soil, helping new seedlings to flourish on the forest floor. You understand how to do this not because you have mastered or conquered nature, but because you are nature—your mind and muscle were shaped by the same metaprocesses that created our planet and its many forests, its deserts, its mountains and oceans and rivers. Your understanding of the forest stems from your relationship with it and evolves as the relationship grows.

It is this relationship that feeds and nourishes us, if only we work to reform it. It does not matter if you live in a rural area or an urban center, if you are looking at an already-healthy piece of land or one that has been assaulted and degraded over time, if you are working on the design of a single building or urban planning for an entire new or existing city. We are in relationship with nature.

*Donella H. Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” ©1999 by the Sustainability Institute and available on the web at http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf (accessed December 2008).

*The etymology of “heal” traces its roots to the Proto-Germanic khailaz, meaning “to make whole,” which is the source of the Old English haelan, meaning “make whole, sound, and well.” (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary at www.etymonline.com; accessed December 2008.)

The image at the top of the page is a framework called the Four Paradigms which is the work of Carol Sanford.

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