ABSTRACT
As humans are biological entities, it should not be surprising that many human activities, such as building construction, can be understood through analogy to happenings in biological systems. The analogies from emergence of biological organization to human building construction are many and rich, and likely to be helpful at this time. Over recent decades a body of theory has developed in ecology that applies energetics to emergence of organization in ecological systems (Odum 1983; Wicken 1987; Schneider and Kay 1994). This chapter uses recent advances in ecological energetics to inform building design, construction, and use.
