Theme 4’s reading from the book Ecological Design by Sim Van Der Ryn and Stuart Cowan

This week a big mistake I made was that I read the wrong pages of the book and thus got totally out of my mind.

Yet we were still able to agree through discussion on the point that ecologically design is the weave that links nature and culture, that “minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes.”

We also said it is crucial to realize that different places have different cultures and economical background, so it is not correct to take one regulation and apply it to all countries. Rather, we think designing ecologically is to think from the various calture of specific places and what kind of action might fit it better to be sustainable.

We also thought about the huge companies that are profit-driven, and talked about whether they are 100% reliable to believe when they do stuff like greenwashing. What I think is that we, as customers and normal citizens, have very little we could do. Choosing what we consume is one way we could slowly affect the market, but what do we do when the companies are just greenwashing and not actually being environmentally friendly? However, it is useful to bear this contradiction in mind and try our best to see through the fact behind the scenes.