What if conservative returned to meaning“caring about the future,” and choosing and taking actions that minimized the affordance of unintended consequences?
Human-centered design always sounds a little backwards to those like me who have spent many years in the trenches and folds of environmental ethics. Eco-humanistic design perhaps, leaning toward a more bio-centric perspective; empathetic and informed bio-citizen design……. I was also wonderfully misdirected to another axe handle:
One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
Gary Snyder, "Axe Handles" from Axe Handles. Copyright © 1983 by Gary Snyder.
> On Jul 21, 2018, at 6:22 PM, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> One of my enduring concerns about contemporary design practice is how little it seems to focus on unintended consequences and what to do about them.
>
> Jerry
Jerry Diethelm
Architect Landscape Architect
Planning & Urban Design Consultant
Prof. Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
and Community Service • University of Oregon
2652 Agate St., Eugene, OR 97403
• e-mail: [log in to unmask]
• e-mail [log in to unmask]
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• 541-346-1441 UO
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