The Minneapolis bridge collapse: A symbol for our times? (Flickr photo by Mordac.org)

Thomas Fisher, the dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, whose work appears in The Chronicle now and then, has a special appeal to journalists who cover architecture, because he is a former journalist. And as such, he can write, which is an uncommon talent among the designer set.

Architectural Design and Ethics: Tools for Survival, his latest book, is an unusual offering from an architecture press — a reflective examination, peppered with personal anecdotes, of where we stand in our environment and the challenges we face with sustainability, climate change, rampant consumption, and design. Design, in fact, may be the key to fixing all the rest.

“Once we understand ourselves as nature, we can begin to think properly about our planetary design problem,” he writes. “It is a design problem because much of the toxic waste and environmental damage we have wrought at a global scale over the last century has arisen from a lot of very bad design objects, structures, and systems that did not take into account the energy they needed, the waste they generated, or the durability they needed to have. If we, as a species, are to succeed as planetary designers, we need to approach the problem as designers would, breaking its scale down in order to grasp what might otherwise be an overwhelming task.”

The book urges designers, and those who hire them, to consider various kinds of places and principles, and offers along the way thoughts on “drafting a new social contract,” “why having less is more,” and “how nature suffers in the naturalistic fantasy.” Mr. Fisher draws from eminences like Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas More, and Plato. The book is illustrated mainly with aerial shots of landscapes, which I as a Minnesotan recognize as places around the Twin Cities area. (“One of the best vantage points to understand the predicament we have created for ourselves is from the air,” Mr. Fisher writes at one point in the book.) The bird’s-eye shot on the back cover is of the doomed highway bridge in Minneapolis, pre-collapse. In his introduction, Mr. Fisher says that the bridge symbolizes the mess we may be facing in a global social, economic, and environmental collapse — there you are, humming along in your gas-guzzler, when some key supports weaken and break, and … boom.

In the last chapter, “The Consequences of Ignoring Consequences,” Mr. Fisher examines a common criticism of architects: that they do not visit the buildings they design to find out how they have worked. Design is a relationship with a client, he says, grounded in pragmatism. He has seen talented designers sit in their studios, surrounded by fetching drawings, waiting for someone to buy them. What a waste, he says. “This partly arises from attitudes instilled in college, in which the client and the public seem to be seen by some as an obstacle to creativity,” he writes. “I once heard a student exclaim: ‘If only there could be design without clients!’ — as silly as wishing for medicine without patients or law without the courts.” Designers, working with the people who use their creations, to make things people healthier and happier — “then it has passed the pragmatic test.” —Scott Carlson