"Discovering" what we once already knew?

Kaleigh has mentionned the idea of the built environment itself being out of sync with nature simply in it's very existence. This is absolutely true, and I believe that it is up to us to learn how to encorporate our designs into the existing ecosystems around us, just as we make the effort to encorporate surrounding buildings into the one we may be designing. One thing that struck me recently was something I read in a fiction novel, oddly enough. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a novel set hundreds of years ago in South America. Long story short, a family rebuilds their home, and it speaks of their use of certain trees and bushes planted for insulation and protection from wind, along the most exposed side of their home. They weren't fighting nature, so much as working with it.I think that we have lost some instinctive knowledge in using what is around us to enhance our way of life. How many homes incorporate their landscape into the efficiency of their home? Provided there is some accuracy in the depiction of this family's method, I think that this way of thinking is valuable. In our cold/windy climate it is obvious that trees as windbreaks are a natural "insulator". In fact Madi and I recently commented on how the Wolseley area is warmer than other parts of the city. I truly believe it is all about the shelter from the trees. So instead of turning to new technologies, maybe we need to encorpoate what we naturally already have. Why cant we employ this "Wolseley" logic on a smaller scale (our homes!) and enhance not only our way of life, but give back to the natural environment while we're at it?