Dossier of Details
EcoTech III’s final assignment tasked students to craft a “dossier of details”1 encompassing the course’s three modules and write an approximately 400 word summation reflecting on regenerative practices in design with specific attention paid to the selected content of their dossier.
The dossier were composed of three construction details, measured drawings, or rigorous diagrams (i.e. a line drawing) illustrating regenerative tools, techniques, tactics, strategies, or technologies. The first two required students to revisit their work in the Urban and Rural Lands modules, extracting, revising, and/or interpreting previous drawings from their stormwater exercise, case study, or regenerative agriculture project.
The third and final drawing was newly drafted in visualization of indigenous knowledge systems2 in conversation with the Colonial Lands module. This was not instructed as an extractive practice but rather an exercise in engaging with healthy and restorative frameworks in which humans and more-than-human species and systems have evolved to need and thrived within. Humans have been in better or worse relation with their environments at various points in time. It’s important to learn from those instances of mutually beneficial relations. Many of the actions taken in restoration ecology can be characterized as anti-colonial, but are also a full acknowledgment of the needs of natural3 systems and the organisms they support now and into the future. Illustrating specific restorative behaviors and disturbance regimes not only needs to happen, but it needs to be explored in tremendous detail, debated, and done so within the context of existing natural system feedback. Precise illustration thus allows greater communication and coordination of such practices. These drawings seek to document regenerative frameworks such as prescribed fire, seed-saving, and even something as abstract as land relations.
All drawings can be seen below, presented as an ecology of relationships.
Please use the different categories to filter related details and draw out new synergies, tensions, or discourses.
1 Dossier: a collection or file of documents on the same subject, especially a complete file containing detailed information about a person or topic.
2 Indigenous Knowledge Systems: The evolving knowledge frameworks acquired by indigenous and local peoples over time through direct engagement with a local environment. These systems include humans as part of nature, engaging with it directly in responsible and regenerative ways. Also included in these systems are indigenous systems, non-human species, indigenous materials (sediments, rocks, water, for example), and natural disturbance regimes that are an integral part of an environment. Indigenous knowledge systems rely upon a deep, nuanced, and extremely detailed understanding of local environments, the knowledge of which is gained through an interactive and responsive feedback loop tied to day-to-day living as part of a regenerative system.
3 Natural (as applied in restoration ecology): An adjective describing species, objects, systems, and phenomena that are normal for a specific place on the land, and reflect a deep connection to the other aspects of that place. These “natural” things have emerged through a deep-time honing of systems, regulated by specific physiographic and climatic patterns of pressure. They reflect the ecological fate that has been rendered by these complex place-based phenomena over time. They are born of the place itself. Human beings are part of natural systems and phenomena (even though our behaviors don’t always support other parts of nature).
Ecology of Organization
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