Restoring the Balance: A Pattern Language for Future Ecologies

n the 1970s, a group of architects published a remarkable book called A Pattern Language, in which they crafted a set of principles to govern the design of human infrastructure from the scale of doorknobs up to metropolitan regions, drawing on careful study of patterns in successful human design throughout history. In the 1980s, permaculture emerged as an attempt to articulate a similar set of principles for agriculture and the design of human-centered ecologies.

This raises the question: what would it look like to articulate a “pattern language” for the design of natural systems themselves—a set of principles and practices for ecological restoration based on observation of natural patterns? And what would it look like to apply those patterns to the landscape around us, degraded as they have been by over a century of extractive colonial mismanagement? In this talk, we open up the restoration practitioner’s toolbox and apply it at a landscape scale to see what patterns might emerge.