A final principle of the environmental ethic concerns limits on the boundaries of influence that a design is obligated to consider. Here too there are shades of green determined by the extent of scale. The spectrum crosses between what Norwegian ecophilosopher Arne Naess terms “shallow ecology” and “deep ecology,” designating respective degrees of local versus global concern. Local – scale thinking deals with efficiency, economy, and direct benefit to the building user over a finite project life span. Global-scale “deep ecology,” on the other hand, frames the question in terms of ecological “footprint” and accounts for environmental origins of construction, embodied energy content of materials, resources used in the occupied life span of buildings, and the eventual reuse or reabsorption of a building into natural processes as it decays. Deep ecology means that a building is providing for everywhere and for all time.
Scale of impact is also a question of social equity. The 10 percent of the world’s population that uses 80 percent of its resources and produces 90 percent of its pollution is in an advantaged position to afford the broader longterm ecological view. Propagating the shorter perspective of shallow ecology ensures the prosperity of the affluent few at the expense of the world’s many peoples today and of future generations tomorrow. In the deepest shades of green, design is not the activity of satisfying wants and needs — it seeks instead to configure places where humanity and nature can co-prosper in sustainable harmony.
Science fiction author Larry Niven once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Green architecture captures Niven’s sense of alchemy and mystical fascination in its romance with nature.
With that transcendence as a departure point, the sciences of ecology have attained an avid following of technodesign subscribers. They find architectural meaning in the expression of these scientific methods, just as structural expressionism involved the technics of construction method. The new element in green architecture is the embodiment of process, or more exactly, of flow. Flow is precisely what ecological design is about: flows of energy, flows of air, flows of light, flows of water, nutrients, wastes, materials — and of course, of people.
Science and its close cousin, technology, are important dividing points between the ambitions of High Tech Style and those of green architecture. These distinctions are instructive. The similarities are evident in their use of minimalist resources and ethic of efficiency. The departures, however, are more defining. First, there is a difference in what each would treat as optimal levels of technology. For High Tech the goal is unfettered expres – sion—design may be visually minimalist but it is sometimes exaggerated by exuberance. Green buildings, on the other hand, use restrained technologies that satisfy function and work within a regulated cycle of flows while producing the lowest ecological impact. The green goal is one of fit: appropriate technology. The two approaches are not incompatible, but neither are they synonymous.
Second, and perhaps more fundamental, High Tech is based on an ideal of universal flexibility: the kit of precision parts from an anonymous factory that can be configured to suit and reconfigured later almost anywhere. Green-Tech is just the opposite, embracing local materials, site-specific conditions, and complex interactions between occupant, architecture, site, and climate. If High Tech is the universal industrial shed, then Green-Tech is the vernacular hut.