Material Recycling and Landscape


 Good use of materials such as water, forests, and soils requires
consideration of their embodied energy, since these values can help with
determining environmental priorities.

 Fitting of humanity and nature requires compatible interface ecosystems
for material reprocessing, which provides guidelines for organizing water
courses and humanity in redevelopment and landscape renewal. The principles
of waste water use in swamps tested for sewage need to be considered as a
general principle by study of other interfaces.

 As non-renewable resources become of lower quality and deeper, more and
more mining and land disturbance will be required. For reclamation, we need
principles of landscape design that meet the requirements of hierarchical
arrangement, water and material recycle, and maximum energetic and economic
vitality.



 Appropriate Environmental Technology


 The program of the National Science Foundation that was called Appropriate
Technology set up this workshop to develop suggestions on the state of knowledge
and research needs on Environmental Technology. Appropriate Technology of
Environment may be another phraseology for the patterns of humanity and nature,
which are workable because they maximize good energy and material use, are
stable in the sense of successfully continuing, and vital in organizing spatial
and temporal patterns for economic vitality. Economic vitality has different
requirements in growth than in periods without growth and these need to be
understood.



 The Patterns of Regression


 Because growth of patterns of humanity has occurred for centuries, we are
unaccustomed to considering reversal of growth and trends towards a lower energy
realm, even though thoughtful scientists have anticipated and predicted these
changes for many decades. We don't even have a good word for a period of
decreased energy flow and structure. Perhaps "regression" could be used. There
are many models for regression in smaller ecological systems and other natural
phenomena, but the nature of regressing systems at the level of the human
environmental system is little studied. A major research need is to study
the way decreasing reserves of fuels and material resources causes changes in
the networks, the technology, the energy priorities, spatial patterns, etc.

 For example, the ratio of land uses shifts from that of a cash economy
with a few types to a diversified one with more local use than long range
transport with increasing energy cost. Organization is less built around
transportation but vice versa; that is, transportation is fitted to utilize
environmental values better. In a basic science, the ways energy generates