On a spring afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, standing against the concrete and glass backdrop of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Gund Hall, Karenna Gore addressed a graduating class of future architects, landscape architects, design engineers, and urban planners and designers. 

Gore, a professor of earth ethics whose work hovers around the intersection of values, faith, and ecology, could seem an unexpected fit as the messenger of parting wisdom to a group of designers. But she begins her speech by foregrounding the shared task of facing a climate crisis that continues to threaten life and systems on Earth in new and increasingly erratic ways, and encourages a future for design that lies in learning from the natural world. 

 Calling on figures as varied as theologian Thomas Berry to landscape architect Kate Orff, Gore suggests this multidisciplinary Earth-centered approach could not only be benefical to design thinking but integral to it. “It is not Earth that needs fixing,” she said. “It is us.”