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Ecology and Design
Frameworks for Learning
By Bart R. Johnson, Kristina Hill ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Island Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-865-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Toward Landscape Realism
Bart R. Johnson and Kristina Hill
Ecology, the study of interactions between organisms and their environments, has long been a compelling theme for faculty, practitioners, and students of landscape design and planning. Frederick Law Olmsted's visionary public designs, Jens Jensen's native plantings, May Watt's observations of vernacular landscapes, and Ian McHarg's book, Design with Nature, are all milestones of ecological thinking in landscape design and planning. Many contemporary designers and planners identify an understanding of ecology as crucial to their work (Spirn 1984; Lyle 1985; Hough 1995; Thompson and Steiner 1997; Nassauer 1997). Yet ecology is a rapidly evolving field that has undergone major paradigm shifts in the past two decades. It no longer presupposes a "balance of nature," but instead describes the natural world in terms of flux and change. Moreover, new fields of applied ecology such as conservation biology and restoration ecology have emerged in response to the global biodiversity crisis, a crisis inherently linked to the need to provide burgeoning human populations a reasonable quality of life. How can designers and planners respond to these increasingly global challenges, which require an integrated understanding of human societies and ecosystems? How will new theories of nature affect the theory and practice of landscape design and the collaborations that take place between scientists and designers?
Designers and planners are not alone in grappling with the interdependence of humans and natural systems. Many ecologists have come to recognize humans as keystone species in most, if not all, ecosystems. In a key development, some are beginning to emphasize urban ecosystems as critical landscape features (Pickett et al. 1997; Parlange 1998; Collins et al. 2000). Other ecologists have identified training in human dimensions of landscape change as an emerging need in conservation science education (e.g., Jacobson and McDuff 1998). Scientific practitioners are looking for new ways to collaborate as well.
Landscape designers, planners, and applied ecologists belong to a diverse group of disciplines that face common needs to integrate cultural and ecological understanding toward prescriptions for land protection and change. The extent to which they succeed in this endeavor depends not only on how scholars and professionals rethink their research and practice, but also on the priorities they establish for the next generation of scholars and practitioners through education.
That education, particularly its foundations and methods, is the subject of this book. We intend to stimulate faculty to think broadly and creatively about how they incorporate ecological knowledge in design and physical planning curricula, and to offer specific approaches to teaching. We ask what conceptual foundation and practical skills are needed for practitioners to develop ecologically responsible practices, and how they can adapt to a regulatory environment that is increasingly shaped by technical debates about environmental trends and impacts. How can we initiate collaborations with colleagues from the natural sciences to stimulate mutual learning and improved design and planning? How can we bring ecological accountability to design education while supporting our traditions of innovation and inspiration through art?
Common Ground for Dialogue
Within the last two decades, new ecological subdisciplines that seek to use ecological science as a foundation for solving environmental problems have gained prominence. Each has its own focus and approaches, and each is rapidly evolving (Boxes 1-1 to 1-4). New ideas for design subdisciplines have also emerged, including ecological engineering and ecorevelatory design. Meanwhile the established design professions have increasingly recognized the need for ecological awareness and responsibility, and have begun to adopt ecological guidelines for professional practice (Boxes 1-5 to 1-8). Whether these fields choose to learn from one another at this critical time, and whether they build collaborative approaches to land development and conservation, could have impacts that resonate throughout this century. One thing is abundantly clear—no single discipline possesses sufficient knowledge or skills to address the combined complexities of cultural and ecological issues across the diverse set of contexts and scales in which they occur.
This book project began with the idea that educational restructuring can be a means to plant the seeds of future professional and research collaborations among many fields, including landscape architecture, urban design, planning, architecture, civil and environmental engineering, landscape ecology, conservation biology, and restoration ecology. There are significant opportunities for these fields to learn from each other and, in so doing, to increase their relevance to contemporary issues. We feel that the core of such collaborations is twofold: first, to develop deep and meaningful understandings of places, including how each place is imbued with interdependent cultural and ecological attributes; and second, to assist individuals, organizations, communities, and regions to envision new courses of action and select from among alternatives. The essays contained in this book focus on identifying practical strategies for teaching these concepts and skills.
In addition to a desire to encourage collaboration, our motivation for this book was to explore and debate the idea that all designs should be held accountable for their ecological impacts. We wanted to address the philosophical divide between designers who want to inspire through art and designers who want to sustain natural processes by asking both groups to pursue a higher standard. That standard would call for designs that are aesthetically challenging, in the best sense of fine art, and ecologically sustainable, enabling humans to coexist with the other species that have evolved on this planet.
Defining the "goodness" of design is clearly an ethical and philosophical question, and we wish our position as editors to be explicit. We do not believe there is an inherent trade-off between beauty and ecological integrity in landscapes that are built or managed by humans. We believe that design excellence must be judged by both aesthetic and ecological criteria. Indeed, we find it ethically unacceptable for our students and for practitioners in the design fields to decide to concern themselves with art but not ecology. The decision to pursue ecological sustainability without art also is flawed, because art—whether fine or folk—may be the key to touching human hearts and minds in new ways. Artful design can be a means to affirm that being human is a profoundly beautiful expression of nature, an expression of the fundamental bonds that we share with all other forms of life. Our art can offer inspiration and hope in the face of negative environmental trends that are linked to human behavior. Joining art with a scientific basis for design can be a profound means to anchor and firm our art in the realities of these same relationships. As designers we are interested in new visions for the future, not the paralysis that results from recrimination and blame. This book is about taking practical steps to achieve a future in which artists and scientists collaborate and understand each other.
Frameworks for Learning and Collaboration
Human cultures and ecosystems exist in a reciprocal relationship. In essence, all landscape design is ecological, whether by intent or default, because every landscape place, no matter how large or small, includes multiple species and biophysical processes that will be affected by human actions. In similar fashion, every ecological conservation or restoration plan is cultural, involving and affecting people. In particular, such plans are likely to distribute costs and benefits differentially among people with different socioeconomic and cultural status. Moreover, a plan's success ultimately depends on satisfying human needs and values. To ignore this reciprocal relationship of human culture and ecosystems is to turn away from a fundamental reality of the landscapes we share with other people and other species. As a basic principle for collaboration among the design disciplines and the new fields of applied ecology, we propose that all landscape design, planning, and management should be evaluated through a thorough accounting of its consequences for ecological health, biotic integrity, and cultural well-being (human, social, and economic).
One important arena for building common ground in design and ecology, for example, would be developing an understanding of health that integrates ecological health and human health. In ecology, health has most often been thought of from the standpoint of biodiversity and sustainability (Chapter 13), whereas landscape design in its early formulations included human health as one of its core concerns through civic design. A more unified concept of health than either discipline has embraced to date might conceive of human health in ecological terms, and in ways that dispel the illusion that we and our bodies are somehow separate from ecological realities. To this end, Steingraber and Hill (Chapter 8) propose that health encompasses (1) relationships among living bodies, (2) relationships among processes and organisms within living bodies, and (3) relationships between living bodies and the physical earth.
We realize that many designers and planners want to believe that their work already has positive affects on both cultural well-being and ecological health. But are we doing enough? The authors we worked with in this book generally shared the belief that the design professions, and their educational programs, are not sufficiently committed to understanding and sustaining ecological health. To "get real," design and planning education must embrace ecological knowledge as deeply as it does cultural knowledge. This is not to imply that designers must become ecologists or vice versa. Rather, the education of each must be grounded in a framework that unifies ecological and cultural ways of knowing. As Joan Nassauer (Chapter 9) points out, design is cultural action that structures ecosystems. We believe that design and planning education must be steeped in knowledge of how humans, as biological, social, and spiritual beings, inhabit a world filled with myriad other species, a world that is maintained and changing through crucial biophysical processes often invisible to the immediate senses.
In David Orr's (2001) words, "ecological designers should aim to cause no ugliness, human or ecological, somewhere else or at some later time." As every designer knows, what is "ugly" is a matter of opinion. But we know Orr's work well enough to believe he did not mean it in a superficial or arbitrary manner but rather with deep respect for the beauty of life. He calls for responsible design in space and time, and in human and nonhuman terms that have deep implications for how we act as members of what Aldo Leopold named the "land community." We argue that to meet this charge we must move beyond separate visions for humans and nature, guided by the recognition that humans are a key species in contemporary earth ecosystems and the premise that cultural well-being and ecological integrity are intimately linked. Further, we advocate a vision of community that is founded in diversity and that explicitly includes consideration for the intrinsic values of all species and for cultural, social, racial, gender, and intergenerational equity. Social and human justice should not be divorced from biological justice.
To reach these higher standards for design, new approaches are needed in both education and practice. We must collaborate more deeply with applied ecologists. We must find ways to interpret and apply new understandings from ecological science in physical planning and landscape design. We must understand the implications of our work for both social equity and ecological sustainability. And we must heal the historical schisms that have developed between practitioners who base their design work on artistic principles and those who look for a basis in scientific principles.
A working knowledge of design and planning processes is also essential to the emerging fields of applied ecology, if they are to translate the essentially descriptive and predictive knowledge of science into normative prescriptions for land conservation and development. Collaboration is also essential to their success. We should work together to build shared knowledge among people who are learning to restore ecological systems, people who are trained in the rigorous rules of testing and evidence that have shaped science, and people skilled in articulating and responding to human needs and aspirations.
Designers, however, have a longer record of considering the relevance of ecology to their work than ecologists have for considering the relevance of human cultural action to theirs. It is only recently that the practice of prescribing spatially explicit landscape futures has assumed a prominent role in ecology. While the fields of restoration ecology and landscape ecology have been jointly developed by designers, planners, and ecologists, among others, this collaborative relationship has not been prominent in other applied ecologies. Notably, those writing about partnerships needed for conservation biology and ecosystem management rarely mention a role for designers and physical planners, even when they offer wide-ranging lists of needed disciplines (e.g., Grumbine 1994; Meffe and Carroll 1997; Jacobson and McDuff 1998; Kohm et al. 2000). In part, this omission may be due to what Howett (1998) characterizes as the difference between the mission of landscape design and the manner in which it is carried out in everyday practice, where it is heavily influenced by a market-based economy and the politics of multiple uses on public lands. This frequent omission of the design fields from ecologists' lists of necessary collaborators raises important questions that the design professions must face for their future in public practice (Chapter 5).
Teaching collaborative skills is as necessary as teaching new knowledge in designers' and ecologists' efforts to integrate fragmented understanding of how landscapes function as both ecological and cultural places. To create a living bridge between design and ecology requires more than tweaking the margins of their respective educational curricula. It requires a deep reconceptualization of how designers, planners, and ecologists conceive of humans as members of Earth ecosystems. If we don't get real by tracking the ways in which humans affect those ecosystems, using consistent monitoring of built designs to detect failures and retrofitting them to improve their performance, we are teaching no more than good intentions. And good intentions alone will not address the problems we have created.
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Excerpted from Ecology and Design by Bart R. Johnson, Kristina Hill. Copyright © 2002 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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