Fertilizer Consultant and Regenerative Systems Designer
(40 years experience)
Return on Ecology’s work is experiential, relational and rooted in desire, as in Matisse’s embrace above.
We are exploring how to root science in the art of managing a piece of land. The simplicity of this work — at it’s most mature — should be entirely lost in the expression of the work. This is so eloquently described in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars (1939):
“No doubt our house will gradually become more human. The more perfect machines become, the more they are invisible behind their function. It seems that all man’s industrial effort, all his calculations and his nights spent poring over drawings, all these visible signs have as their sole end the achievement of simplicity.
It is as if only the experimentation of several generations can define the curve of a column or a ship’s hull or an aeroplane fuselage, and give it the ultimate, elementary purity of the curve of a breast or a shoulder. On the surface it seems that the work of engineers, designers and research mathematicians consists only in polishing and refining, easing this joint and balancing that wing until there is no longer a wing joined visibly to a fuselage, but a perfectly developed form freed at last from its matrix, a spontaneous and mysterious whole with the unified quality of a poem. It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. At the climax of its evolution, the machine conceals itself entirely.
Thus the perfection of invention amounts to an absence of invention.”
Bennie reflects, “I have been grappling with a quote that describes our work in developmental ecology: ‘Our environment is an extension of our immune system‘. I am struck by the word, ‘our’. And also struck that we do not notice the workings of our immunity until it collapses. The worlds within worlds that make up our ecosystem — our immunity — are biological, physical, and psychological. These are the worlds we tend to, in Return on Ecology.”
Pair this with the 1993 album by the Irish band, Hothouse Flowers: Songs from the Rain.
