A very long time ago indeed, our most distant forefather was charged with a task. Banished from his natural biotope, he was told ‘to till the ground from whence he was taken’.1 He had already been informed that he was to have dominion ‘over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’2 He understood well enough what this was all about and why he had to pack his bags. The garden in which he had lived up until then was a fully conditioned environment. Everything there had been made at the discretion of a certain creative genius. And now it was time for our man to stand on his own two feet and follow this example. In short, he was not to rest satisfied with the desolate and empty land he had found after quitting his garden. He had to bend all things to his will.

It was an arduous task, one which required careful planning and a great deal of energy. Together with his female travelling companion, he hit upon the idea that many hands make light work. And so it was that on the first day they began to multiply. That went well enough so they decided to keep on at it. On the second day they set about clearing the forests, and followed this by impoverishing and acidifying the soil. Now they could start with a clean sheet. The third day brought with it the emission of greenhouse gases plus a few holes punched in the ozone layer. The fourth day’s project, the nuclear winter, failed miserably, but was compensated for on the fifth day with a whole host of smaller projects: smog, aids and ebola viruses, swine fever, mad cow disease and a few other ventures with code names like Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez and El Niño. On the sixth day they put one last big effort into the multiplication programme and laid on some well-stuffed metropolises to accommodate everyone. And so it was that on the seventh day they were able to take a breather. Everything was going according to plan: the land where they had been sent to held no more surprises; the proliferation of flora and fauna had been reduced to manageable proportions and the climate was now under control instead of being left to the whims of natural forces. The many descendants of the original pair believed that their historical mission had been accomplished and whiled away their time with carefree travelling and leisure pursuits. The seventh day could last forever. Some even spoke of ‘the end of history’.
And yet not everyone was satisfied. A small group did not believe in the historical task assigned to man, or felt that a mistake had been made in interpretating it. They called themselves ecologists, and felt that this saga of human creation was in fact one long string of disasters.

Life force

Ecologists don’t believe in God, nor do they believe that mankind was put on this earth for some higher purpose. Ecologists do believe in objective truth. Their argument is that mankind is dstroying the earth and feel that there is scientific evidence for this, incontrovertible evidence that points to the absolute necessity of a change of course. Paul Ehrlich, for example, wrote in 1968 in The Population Bomb that if the world’s population growth was not stopped it was certain that ‘in the 1970’s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs’.3 In 1971, Barry Commoner argued in The Closing Circle that by the end of the century mineral and fossil resources would be depleted.4
The historian Arthur Herman locates the first real signs of ecological awareness in the early nineteenth century when nature in the Romantic way of thinking registered as an irrational, wilful force.5 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, can be read as a protest against burgeoning technology which, over all else, brought danger in its train, but the book also shows that newly created life is not to be controlled. Life force is a thing that cannot be contained. A later example is Jules Verne whose Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, written in 1868, features the embittered scientist Nemo. Nemo believes that man has no respect for the mighty oceans, and turns his back on human ‘civilization’, even, in a later sequel, waging war against that so-called civilization.
The emergence of biology as a science was a subsequent development of significance. In On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin set down his theory of evolution in which he undermined the Biblical account of creation and showed that man was no more than an accidental species of animal. Ernst Haeckel, a follower of Darwin and the spiritual father of the concept of ‘ecology’, wrote best sellers such as The Riddle of the Universe of 1900 (more than 400,000 copies sold worldwide) which rejected the distinction between nature and culture. Studies by Konrad Lorenz and others into the behaviour of animals in their natural habitat showed that there was no clear-cut dividing line between them and humans. This laid the foundations for an anti-anthropocentrism: man did not hold a unique position vis-à-vis the rest of the world, but was merely part of it. Accordingly, humans should show more respect for the living world around them.
Developments in the natural sciences were a major contributing factor to the increase in ecological awareness. With the discovery of the second main law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, there was a growing realization that finite, non-renewable resources might become depleted. ‘The universe was now seen as a closed system: nothing came in, nothing came out. Therefore, the energy that was dissipated, changing its form from usable to unusable energy, could never be replaced.’6

Ecological utopias

New insights such as these, which developed gradually, had an impact on thinking about how society was to be organized and about man’s relationship with nature. Noteworthy in this respect was that some wished to return mankind to nature, while others wanted to reshape the urban environment, to bring nature back into the city, so to speak. Henry David Thoreau is an early example of the first camp. In Walden, or a Life in the Woods, published in 1854, he describes how he retreated to nature, to the forests of Massachusetts, for two years; how he built a hut there with his own hands and enjoyed freedom and independence. ‘Most of Walden consists of detailed and often lyrical descriptions of the hills, woods, meadows, ponds, animals, trees and plants. Thoreau recounts how he used to sit for hours on end watching hawks circling high in the sky, the field mice and squirrels that scampered around his hut, the ripples on Walden lake caused by a sudden breeze, the ribbons and wisps of mist that passed before his eyes.’7 His possessions consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a small mirror, a pair of tongs and fire irons for his fireplace, a kettle, a saucepan, a cooking pot, a serving spoon, a wash basin, two knives and two forks, three plates, a beaker, a dessert spoon, an oil jug, a syrup can and a lamp.8 Thoreau claims that a few dozen square metres of land (planted with beans, potatoes, grain, maize, peas and turnips) was sufficient to support himself. He seems to have believed that the world could only be saved if people followed his example en masse.
William Morris was one who took another approach. In News from Nowhere, or an Epoch of Rest, published in 1891, Morris sketches a picture of how the polluted and inhuman city can be transformed into an ecologically sound society. Morris concerned himself ‘with ‘modern’ problems such as environmental pollution, the squandering of natural resources, the inferior quality of goods, the process of urbanization, and the violation of valuable landscapes.=9 News from Nowhere is a vision of London in the twenty-first century, following a revolution which had taken place around 1954. ‘The inhabitants are friendly, quiet and contented people who find satisfaction in craft work and lead a peaceful, healthy, idyllic life in a largely agricultural society based on social equality, harmony with nature and suitably adapted technology. In this society there is an enduring equilibrium, with no economic growth or progress to speak of.’10
Both attitudes, the ideal of the return to nature, and the endeavour to remodel the city, have found support. What the two have in common is that both have failed. The back-to-nature idea is still propagated today and put into practice by a great many green communes. Research into such communes in the United States indicates, however, that these are for the most part anything but self-supporting. Most depend on donations from parents of the commune members and state benefits.11 One might also wonder just how realistic this ideal of small communities in (unspoilt) nature is, at a time when ninety per cent of the world’s population lives in metropolitan areas.
The utopian urban schemes fare no better. In visions such as that of Morris – but the same is true of the planning ideals of, say, Ebenezer Howard (To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform of 1898, reissued as Garden Cities of To-morrow), or those of Patrick Geddes (described in the articles ‘The Village World. Actual and Possible’ of 1927, and ‘Rural and Urban Thought. A Contribution to the Theory of Progress and Decay’ of 1929). Time and again they point to ultimate goals that could never be achieved with the usual mechanisms of urbanism. What, according to these planners, is good for mankind could at most be imposed from above. So the ideal green urban societies pushed our way often have everything of green dictatorships. For example, the inhabitants are regularly obliged to carry out work in the collective interest (work is, after all, the simplest renewable and gratuitous form of energy). In these utopias no realistic assessment is ever made of ‘human nature’. Morris, for one, believed that crime could be solved by doing away with private possessions. Further, he believed that in the new society inhabitants would spontaneously and altruistically take the products they had made to markets, where everyone could then select what they needed.12 Noteworthy too, is how it is always assumed that ‘enjoying nature’ is life’s greatest pleasure and is therefore acceptable as life’s ultimate aim.

The Black Forest

The ecological movement suffered a major setback through its association with national socialism, which served to undermine awareness of the tradition from which it had sprung. In her book Ecology in the 20th century, Anna Bramwell devotes considerable attention to this tie-up. She shows that under national socialism ecological ideas were supported and propagated at both ministerial and administrative levels. Under the leadership of Rudolf Hess, Walther Darré, Fritz Todt and Heinrich Himmler, among others, such ventures were launched as the setting up of thousands of biodynamic farms and the organic embedding of motorways in the landscape. Ecology played a role in foreign policy too. Bramwell: ‘Tension between Germany and Italy intensified when Mussolini persisted in cutting down trees in South Tyrol. German spies in Poland in 1937 saw an outbreak of pine bud mite, which destroyed vast tracts of forest along the German-Polish border, as tantamount to an act of war – the Poles had not only taken their trees, they had neglected and destroyed them.’13 Bramwell also recalls that when the Greens became a political party in Germany in 1979, they proved to hold considerable attraction for the far right. The idea that there should be some sort of holistic union between man and the ground on which he lives is close to the image of the farmer as model citizen of the Third Reich.
Mention Germany, national socialism and ecology and there comes to mind the philosopher from the Black Forest, Martin Heidegger. As is well known, his ideas have had enormous influence on architecture via the writings of the likes of Christian Norberg-Schulz and Kenneth Frampton, who claim that architecture could possess a certain ‘identity’ if it were to relate to the characteristics of the landscape in which it stands. And yet Heidegger, as well as being a propagandist of a species of ‘genius loci’, is also a philosopher of opposition to modern technology. According to Heidegger, the advent of technology loosed man’s ties with the earth, with its origins, with the things themselves. He denounced the aggressive, ‘objectifying’ attitude, as a result of which ‘things’ became ‘objects’ subordinated to human will. Heidegger thus laid the foundations of a school of thought which has kept throngs of philosophers off the street, and which accuses Western civilization of generating alienation. This aversion to capitalism, and most of all to the consumer society and mass production, is difficult to imagine today. Most of us (with the exception perhaps of museum attendants) would be hard put to point to five objects in their daily environment that were not mass-produced.
For all that, this criticism of the consumer society is part of a tradition that preaches sobriety. The belief that the so-called ‘development’ of the Western world was a threat to the entire globe found ever greater support. The price for profit here was paid for elsewhere. Today’s concern for the environment is becoming more and more sharply focused on the issue of the legitimacy of economic growth and the collective lifestyle that comes with it.

Scepticism

The latest warnings by ecologists may be less apocalyptic in tone than those of the sixties and seventies, but they can still be characterized as scenarios of doom. Evidence seems to suggest, though, that things are not that bad after all. In a review of six studies by ‘environmental sceptics’, Wybren Verstegen, lecturer in ecological and economic history at the Free University in Amsterdam, lists a number of developments: air and water pollution have been reduced, the speed at which vertebrates are disappearing is slowing down, nuclear power stations are safer, reserves of raw materials are increasing, the world food supply is improving, there are more trees in the northern hemisphere, and so on. And the greenhouse effect, the environmental problem which topped the agenda at the last environmental summit in Buenos Aires, ‘is based on provisional computer models which are still light years away from a scientific analysis of the climate.’14
Neither Verstegen nor his informants are out to play down the problems. And yet, if in a hundred years’ time global warming is not eight degrees Celsius, as was first predicted, but only one and a half; if the warning that 100,000 animal species are becoming extinct every year proves to be unfounded; and if it transpires that, contrary to claims, there is no large-scale destruction of forests in the United States, then this has consequences for the ecological movement: ‘doom-mongering … as a strategy … has proved an extremely shortsighted policy. In the short term, it has brought mass publicity, research and measures, in the long term it leads to indifference and a wane in political interest.’15
This scepticism comes at a time when the construction industry in the Netherlands has fallen under the spell of the phenomenon of ‘sustainability’. In 1989, the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment (VROM) published the Nationaal Milieubeleid (national policy on the environment, or NMB). The NMB centred on three policy areas: integral chain management (reducing the use of raw materials), energy efficiency (limitating energy consumption) and quality enhancement (limitating health risks). Considerable emphasis was placed on the importance of laying out an ‘ecological main structure’ and on the need to transform agricultural areas into rural areas. A year later came the NMB Plus, which included a report on ‘sustainable building’. Sustainable building was defined as ‘building and using buildings and their surroundings in such a way as to keep to a minimum damage to the environment in all phases, from design to demolition.’ 1995 saw publication of the first Plan van Aanpak Duurzaam Bouwen (strategy plan for sustainable building), which was to serve as a guideline for prescribing measures. In 1996, a provisional incentives scheme for sustainable building (for existing housing) was introduced.
Sustainable building has become a buzz word. There is not a municipality in the Netherlands which does not have a sustainable-building spearhead project. It is no longer left to designers to take the initiative in devising and propagating utopias. The panic at the height of the doom-mongering about ten years ago has now crystallized as national recommendations and regulations for the construction industry. The fact that the building industry features prominently in environmental measures is not that surprising. The exploitation of natural resources, the manufacture of building materials, transport in the construction phase, energy and water consumption in buildings, and demolition waste: all have a detrimental effect on the environment. Half the raw materials consumed (for some raw materials this percentage is much higher) and about forty per cent of total energy consumption can be laid at the construction industry’s door.
But the various government memoranda on sustainable building amounted to no more than challenges, suggestions, advice worth taking. It was up to individual clients, developers and municipalities, spurred by a sense of responsibility, to put sustainable building into practice. Research has shown that the extra cost involved in erecting a sustainable home averages 13,000 guilders (as opposed to the 3000 the government considered sufficient). Initiatives aimed at encouraging clients to make this kind of investment abound. In Rotterdam, for example, there is a points system for commercial and industrial buildings with which a project’s ‘sustainable building score’ can be calculated. Because the results are ‘given widespread coverage in the media’, a company can raise its profile and thereby enhance its market position – at least, that is what the council’s brochure Duurzaam bouwen scoort (sustainable building pays) is claiming.
In November 1997, VROM published the second >strategy plan for sustainable building= (for housing  – a package of measures for ‘sustainable commercial and industrial buildings’ was published in November 1998). The aim was to integrate the wide variety of sustainable building requirements obtaining in the Netherlands. Moreover, in the Bouwbesluit (building decree) of January 1998, certain of these were tightened up and became enforceable. Standards governing energy consumption in buildings are now much more stringent, and to prevent the immediate replacement (and the attendant demolition waste) of kitchen sink units and sanitary fittings – something which used to be common practice in Dutch housing – only the connecting points for facilities in kitchens, bathrooms and toilets are now required, and not the facilities themselves. And yet it is good intentions, rather than specific measures, that remain uppermost. By way of example, the second strategy plan states that by the year 2000, eighty per cent of new homes in the Netherlands should be built using sustainable methods, but it is far from clear just how this is to be achieved.

Building practice

The sustainable building schemes which have now been, or are about to be, realized take account of a whole host of aspects, including the recycling of materials, water and energy, and comply with the ‘green-label list’ of building materials. On the face of it, these results signify a demonstrable step forwards on the way to a more sustainable society. However, the question forces itself upon us as to whether the country’s regulations and recommendations aren’t overshooting the mark somewhat in their translation of environmental concerns into manageable and measurable quantities. It is, for example, amusing to see how the building materials industry has reacted to the green-label list. Those who came off badly in the tests swiftly responded with glossy full-colour brochures in which the facts were put straight. Take the brochure ‘Kiezen voor duurzaam bouwmateriaal’ (choose sustainable building materials), issued in July 1998 by the Stichting Duurzaam Bouwmetaal (foundation for sustainable building metal) accompanied by a letter containing the following: ‘Many of you will know zinc, copper and lead to be highly sustainable metals with a wide range of applications in the construction industry. Several of these metals have unjustly been given a negative press recently. Practice has shown that these building materials are eminently applicable to a sustainable building concept.’ You can just imagine the brochures issued by the association of concrete manufacturers, the league of sand-lime brickmakers or the timber pile foundation.
The problem is, of course, that the concept of ‘sustainability’ is so multifaceted and complex that just about everything is sustainable, depending on the line of approach you take. This gives problems when applying the so-called life cycle analysis, the analysis underlying the green-label list of materials. The Leuven-based researchers Hens and Verdonck have shown that the life cycle analysis in architecture, whether of building materials, building components, or complete buildings, can never result in hard and fast pronouncements. They argue that energy consumption ‘depends not only on choices of construction, but also on the external climate, dwelling patterns, the financial situation of residents, and so on.’16 Some aspects, such as heat insulation, can be optimized. But, they warn: ‘a great many uncertainties play a part in these optimizations. This necessitates a stochastic response, as a result of which only pronouncements in the sense of ‘the chance that this or that solution is optimal is so many per cent’, are possible.’17

Lifestyle

The ultimate question which still needs answering is how far will we get with all our good intentions. Supposing the objectives of sustainable building are attained, how much influence will that have? Aren=t there infinitely more important issues at higher scales waiting to be dealt with? Is there any point in, say, getting someone to live in a sustainable house if nothing is done to reduce their car use? And what will our efforts for a better environment count for if next century China starts drawing on its coal reserves?
Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia, published in 1975, and Ecotopia Emerging, 1981, believes that ‘a profound, large-scale and costly alteration of the social infrastructure is inevitable’.18 The size of the population must decrease, as must the level of production and consumption. Cars and lorries must be done away with, and so on. The well-known ecological activist Murray Bookchin asserts in Remaking Society. Pathways to a Green Future, published in 1989, that not only must there be a change of lifestyle, but that this must be accompanied by a sharp political about-face that could cause institutions to function differently.19 The Dutch government as yet does not think in anything like these terms. It still believes in the possibility of a ‘win-win situation’, in which the economy grows and the environment is spared. In the long term, the government is hoping for a technological change of trend that would bridge the gap between economy and environment. That would shut us up, wouldn’t it, if in the future we were all able to produce our own little nuclear fusions at home. But whether we should anticipate this development is another matter.
The experts are not in agreement on this issue. Will current measures be effective enough to maintain raw material reserves, limit climate changes, safeguard human health? We shall have to wait and see. What is certain is that if the water does rise to shoulder height, it will not only be lifestyles that will prove able to change rapidly, but political systems too. Because then our life force will come into play, the only force on earth able to resist entropy.