In Ecological Design, Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan envision how the living world and humanity can be reunited by making ecology the basis for design. Ecological design, the marriage of nature and technology can be applied at all levels of scale to cereate revolutionary forms of buildings, landscapes cities, and technologies. Some examples include: sewage treatment plants that use constructed marshes to purify water agricultural systems that mimic and merge with their surrounding landscapes industrial "ecosystems" in which waste from one productive process becomes fuel fo rthe next The authors present design principles that can help build a more efficient, less toxic, healthier, and more sustainable world." "Ecological Design...is not a book about things, but rather one about systems, patterns, context, integration, and ultimately about vision, which is where good design begins. To say that Ecological Design deserves a large readership in the late years of the twentieth century is abit like saying that folks on the Tiatanic needed lifeboats." - David Orr, Whole Earth Review "An elegant introduction to the field of ecological design. This ground-breaking book will change the way we think about buildings, agricutlure, industrial processes, and our management of resources and wastes." - Alex Wilson, Editor and Publisher, Environmental Building News