The Circle and the Sphere

A future for the design practices that works within the living and intelligent design of Earth.

On a spring afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, standing against the concrete and glass backdrop of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Gund Hall, Karenna Gore addressed a graduating class of future architects, landscape architects, design engineers, and urban planners and designers. Gore, a professor of earth ethics whose work hovers around the intersection of values, faith, and ecology, could seem an unexpected fit as the messenger of parting wisdom to a group of designers. But she begins her speech by foregrounding the shared task of facing a climate crisis that continues to threaten life and systems on Earth in new and increasingly erratic ways, and encourages a future for design that lies in learning from the natural world. Calling on figures as varied as theologian Thomas Berry to landscape architect Kate Orff, Gore suggests this multidisciplinary Earth-centered approach could not only be benefical to design thinking but integral to it. “It is not Earth that needs fixing,” she said. “It is us.”

Copublished by Harvard Design PressKarenna Gore is the founder and executive director of the Center for Earth Ethics and visiting professor of practice of earth ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Karenna formed CEE in 2015 to address the moral and spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis. Working at the intersection of faith, ethics, and ecology, she guides the Center’s public programs, educational initiatives, and movement-building. She also is an ex officio faculty member of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Gore is the author of Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America (2006), and has written for numerous publications, including Slate, El País (Spain), and the New York Times.