ABSTRACT
The Pattern Language articulates in a systematic way a network of relationships that breathes life into design for people and nature. There is a lot of congruity between Chris's approach and my own ecological perspective. One of my mentors, who is both a very fine naturalist and a Jungian psychiatrist, looks at what we’re doing in our modern world and chuckles, “It's like burning up the house of life in order to toast marshmallows.” My passion is about the House of Life and how it relates to the marshmallow. There's a great congruence between the picture Chris paints on how we should design the man-made environment and how the natural world works because both work around his concept of Centers of Life. In our evolution as humans, we instinctively always moved to nature's center of life—where two systems meet, such as grassland and forest, the places of greatest diversity and productivity which ecology calls “Ecotones.” Our human origin in Africa where savannah met forest was no accident.
