Cultural Commentary

If we're going to address the climate crisis, along with the myriad of other challenges society faces, we'll have to blur the lines between ourselves & "the other." Not just in our places of government, but also in our master planning efforts, design charrettes, and construction progress meetings.

No more meaningless debates. It’s time for us to get collectively serious. The clock’s ticking.

When discussing the design of schools for safety/security and their need for adequate mental health/wellness support, it's important that we don't forget the larger societal role of gun control legislation.

The 2018 Cultural Evolutionary Society Conference, OPR research, and the society’s new Sustainable Working Group

The rebranding of the high performance building consulting firm previously known as M.E. GROUP

Sandy Hook Elementary School redesign, Newtown, CT

Our built environments represent a major human phenotypic adaptation, part of our collective cultural toolkit for adapting to the world around us. But because they form a major part of the environmental contexts we live, play and work within, and because their construction and operations have such a global impact, they also shape humanity’s ongoing evolution as well as that of other species on the planet. The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has the ability to mindfully orchestrate the direction our built environments push us in with regards to climate change,occupant wellbeing and the evolution of life on this planet. But it requires we construct our “niches” in a manner that consistently provides environments aligned with our individual and group level needs, including long term needs associated with social stability and environmental sustainability. Doing so requires an understanding of how our evolutionary past has shaped our physiological, psychological, and social/cultural needs with respect to the built environment. It also requires an understanding of how we can guide the decision-making process during design and construction to avoid the domination of short term, annual drivers like the profit margins of a smaller group of people. This “Constructing Our Niches” publication outlines how deliberately operating within an evolutionary theoretical framework would better position the industry to make all of this happen.

Applying evolutionary theory within the building/construction industry.

Part 3 of this series looking at how evolutionary theory can be applied to the building/construction industry in order to design, build and operate more sustainable, healthy and successful built environments.

"This means that human behaviors, the physical objects we create and use (such as the built environment), and their associated intellectual traditions (including those of the design/construction industry), are part of our collective toolkit for adapting to the larger social/cultural and physical environments we live within, individually and as members of nested groups of ever-increasing size. Given this, we can use Darwinian evolutionary theory to not only understand human biological change, but also human cultural change and transmission. To illustrate this, let’s examine the use of forced air as the dominant modern method in the U.S. to heat and cool buildings. In such systems..."

Avoiding the most devastating impacts of climate change will require better alignment of our self-interests, needs and goals from the local to global levels. And evolutionary theory offers a framework for doing this.

The first in an anticipated seven part series of articles focusing on this topic.

“Policy, whether a small business’s new employee on-boarding policy or a nation’s economic policy, based on ideology at the expense of evidence is simply folly. At best it’s a short term success by accident. At worst it can lead to an organization’s downfall. Policy makers have a duty to make decisions based on the best evidence available to them...”

"And as we’re still subject to the forces of evolution, these adaptations don’t always prove beneficial, depending on the time frame or scale of interactions in question. Our ability to successfully cooperate in the extraction of natural resources, aided by the cultural reservoir of knowledge relevant for a given time and place, can lead to unsustainable outcomes for those outside of the group in question, or for the group itself after a period of time. Over the course of human history this has resulted in negative environmental impacts and the depletion of local resources, contributing to the disbanding of communities or weakening of civilizations. Individuals may have benefited in the short term, but the long term viability of the larger group (and/or outsiders) was negatively impacted."