operation at all times in order to

operation at all times in order to have validity. A personal word to my friends is various art fields. I know how resistant artists are to the notion of systematizing processes by which art evolves. There is a feeling that to enclose gossamer is to destroy it. These RSVP cycles and the point of “scoring” are not meant to categorize or organize, but to free the creative process by making the process visible. I have found, in my own work, that my hangups come when there is some buried obstacle that I don’t understand and can t flush out. When I can “see” obstacles or get in touch with what’s blocking me, I can deal with them. I hope the RSVP cycle can do that; it already has for me and others with whom I have discussed it.
Nothing in the RSVP has attempted to define talent or ability or the final making of a decision which, of course, remains at the very core of personal creation. The magic of magic remains.
For me, professionally, the significance of the RSVP cycles lies in the fact that as an ecological designer I have always been interested in pluralism and the generative force of many contributions to solutions. I view the earth and its life processes as a model for the creative process, where not one but many forces interact with each other with results emergent—not imposed. I see the earth as a vast and intricately interrelated ecosystem. In this system all of the parts have value, and they are all moving toward balance.
The essential characteristic of community in the ecological sense is that all of the parts are functioning within their own habitat, that no one element outweighs the other, that each contributes to the whole. Thus, the total ecological community has the characteris¬tics of an organism which lives and grows and reproduces itself in an ongoing process.
Human communities, too, have many of the same characteristics, to which we have given the name “tout ensemble,” that is, the sum is itself valuable and has more qualities than simply one additive of its ingredients. Such a “tout ensemble,” recently threatened by a freeway in New Orleans, has been saved by the decision not to allow that one factor to undermine the balance of the whole community. The balance of climax communities in natural or human communities is tenuous and easily destroyed it is not static it exists as long as no one force outweighs the others. This I believe to be true of all human affairs and a model for all the life processes in which we need to integrate ourselves.
One of the gravest dangers that we experience is the danger of becoming goal-oriented. It is a tendency that crops up on every hand and in every field of endeavor. It is a trap which goes like this: things are going poorly (in the realm of politics or religion or building a city or the world community or a personal relationship or whatever). As thinking people we must try to solve this problem that faces us. Let us set ourselves a “goal” upon which we can all agree (most goals after all are quite clearly moralistically based and incontrovertibly “good ideas”). Having set ourselves this goal we can then proceed posthaste to achieve it by the most direct method possible. Everyone can put his shoulder to the wheel, and sys¬tems engineering, technology, and our leader (or whatever) will get us to the agreed goal.
It doesn’t work! The results of this oversimplified approach, now coming into general vogue, are all around us in the chaos of our cities and the confusion of our politics (or other politics fascism and communism are clear statements of this approach). It generates tension in personal relationships by burying the real problems; it avoids the central issue of education, which is why today’s young people are dropping out; it is destroying the resources and physical beauty of our planet; and it avoids the basic issue.