If environmental transformation is this century’s greatest concern and central narrative, ecology is perhaps our most important epistemological and ontic framework for understanding and projecting possible futures? The term “ecology” simultaneously refers to a general epistemological and ontological framework as well as scientific study of interaction between systems and their assemblages into (temporal) coherences. In recent design, ecology has served as a poetic metaphor, techno-scientific imperative, and aesthetic justification. It has been employed to argue for a return to traditional architecture and used for the most rococo parametricism; ecological awareness has become an accreditation requirement and a marketing tool. Thus, even as ecology increasingly serves as a general paradigm and central organizing narrative for our culture and the contemporary imagination, as the term proliferates, it is in danger of becoming a shibboleth applied to everything yet meaning almost nothing. Once transposed from science and nature, it can all too easily be reduced to quotidian truisms that everything is interlinked and interacting in complex ways. Greater specify is therefore required, along with a theoretical problematization of the transposition of ecological concepts into the design fields.
Modern narratives of rupture, progress, and utopia are being rewritten as eschatologies of environmental calamity-both ongoing disruptions (droughts, hurricanes, etc.) and novel threats (massive coastal Hooding of newly constructed megacities due to sea-level rise, superbugs resistant to antibiotics and spread via global transport, and so on).
Christopher Hight, Designing Ecologies (2014)
landscape theory 