The Circle and the Sphere: Earth Ethics as Inspiration

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 Press