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Goal is not to the mastery, but the reasons for the harmony, no blemishes, or human ecology, and in other places, or at a later time. It is not only a matter for decision-making, but of the existence of people in the world lives in an honor and protect human dignity.           Ecological Enlightenment     In the past two centuries the human footprint on earth has multiplied many times over. Our science and technology are powerful beyond anything imagined by the confident founders of the modern world. But our sense of proportion and depth of purpose have not kept pace with our merely technical abilities. Our institutions and organizations still reflect their origins in another time and in very different conditions. Incoherence, disorder, and violence are the hallmarks of the modern world. If we are to build a better world—one that can be sustained ecologically and one that sustains us spiritually—we must transcend the disorder and fragmentation of the industrial age. We need a perspective that joins the hard-won victories of civilization, such as human rights and democracy, with a larger view of our place in the cosmos—what [theologian Thomas] Berry calls "the universe story.” By whatever name, that philosophy must connect us to life, to each other, and to generations to come. It must help us to rise above sectarianism of all kinds and the puffery that puts human interests at a particular time at the center of all value and meaning. When we get it right, that larger, ecologically informed enlightenment will upset comfortable philosophies that underlie the modern world in the same way that the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century upset medieval hierarchies of church and monarchy.   The foundation for ecological enlightenment is the 3.8 billion years of evolution. The story of evolution is a record of design strategies as life in all of its variety evolved in a vast efflorescence of biological creativity. The great conceit of the industrial world is the belief that we are exempt from the laws that govern the rest of the creation. Nature in that view is something to be overcome and subordinated. Designing with nature, on the other hand, disciplines human intentions with the growing knowledge of how the world works as a physical system. The goal is not total mastery but harmony that causes no ugliness, human or ecological, somewhere else or at some later time. And it is not just about making things, but rather remaking the human presence in the world in a way that honors life and protects human dignity.       — David W. Orr, The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention             Indexes/07