What is "Sustainability"? (No.1)

2007 What has tipped the social/ political/ economic environment in the USA so that things “green” and “sustainable” have come to the top of the public agenda, raising genuine issues along with corresponding bandwagon effects?

A little recent history:

1972 Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows et al. modeled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, commissioned by the Club of Rome.

1972 A Blueprint for Survival by Edward Goldsmith et al. published as The Ecologist Vol. 2 No.1, in advance of the UN Conference on the Human Environment

1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm.

1979 Gaia by James Lovelock: understanding planetary ecological systems as a single resilient, adaptive system.

1980 World Conservation Strategy published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.  Coined the term "sustainable development" recognizing the link between environment and development.

1987 Our Common Future, the report of the Brundtland Commission, formally the World Commission on Environment and Development, convened by the United Nations in 1983.  Provided a definition of “Sustainable development”:

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), better known as the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro: at which various approaches to implementing the Brundtland Commission’s report were presented.

Also published in 1992 was the City of Ottawa’s (the Canadian Capital city) Official Plan – whose Mission Statement and Environmental Management Strategy I wrote, based on the above.  See draft pages here.

Large Parks

Large Parks is the title of a new book edited by Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves.  Large Parks examines what the back cover of the book claims to be “an increasingly hard-to-define landscape type: the urban park.”  And urban parks may be hard to define these days because of a disjunct between what we might think of when we think of urban parks versus areas we might not be sure what to call that seem to occur in urban and suburban areas, which are green with remnant natural areas and planted areas, and that may be used more or less actively by surrounding populations.

My idea of an urban park is Van Horne Park in Montreal, named after the entrepreneur who made the transcontinental railway a reality in Canada in the late 1800s.  Van Horne Park is a block away from the flat where I spent most of my childhood and across the street from the primary school I attended (which accounts for the rest of my childhood).  It is about 2 hectares (5 acres) and consists, or did then, of a baseball diamond, a public open air pool, a large flat turf multipurpose playfield used for football in summer and hockey in winter, a couple of concrete chessboard tables-with-chairs, and enough pedestrian paths paved with asphalt, ornamental borders, and benches to afford a pleasant walk.  This was the park in which at the age of six I learned to ride a bicycle.  “Hang on!” I yelled to my Dad who gripped the seat as we experimented with my first ride without training wheels. “Hang on!” I yelled as I increased my speed, forcing Dad to run beside.  “Hang on!” I yelled as I glanced back at him – only to discover to my amazement, terror, and exultation that he was a small figure in the background and that I was moving fast entirely under my own pedal power and direction…

What is “large”?  By a sort of consensus among the essays, the book considers large to be 500 acres (200 hectares) or greater.  An accompanying figure compares to scale diagrams of some of the world’s large parks from Sausset (Paris) at 446 acres to Casa de Campo (Madrid) at 7000 acres. “Yet size is not the only question” writes Czerniak in the Introduction “for as important as size is shape with implications for perimeter and interiority.”  And in fact how do you compare parks when for example Golden Gate Park (San Francisco) is an elongated rectangle, Stanley Park (Vancouver) is a reasonably rounded shape, and the Emerald Necklace (Boston) is a developed riparian corridor?

What is a “park”, Czerniak then considers in the Introduction.  She provides a brief history but leaves the question open.  But concluding the brief discussion she writes “Beyond size, the criterion for selection (for discussion in the book) is relevance to urban life”. 

This may be a much more profound criterion than might seem at first – for the simple reason that most people on earth now dwell in cities.  In addition rampant urbanization has swallowed and transformed agricultural and wildland areas surrounding new and old cities, so that in North America at least cities no longer have definable boundaries, but peter out far beyond the center of the city in some sluggish urban tracts, all the while incorporating remnant natural areas too difficult to develop for one reason or another (e.g., ravines), or preserved by ownership (e.g., a large estate or a never-built railway right-of-way). 

So what the book is really addressing is the interdigitated interface between urbanized areas and areas dominated by ecological processes that nevertheless have strong demands for recreational and other human use programming.  And by extension, the book is really addressing the larger human – nature interface, because this urban edge is where all the action takes place.

Landscape and Inscape

The landscape out there of the “real” world of dirt and stones and roads and trees etc is a manifestation of the landscape in here of the shared collective idea of how the world we move and operate in is structured, organized, and changes.

JB Jackson: “…a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the lands, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community – for the collective character of the landscape is one things that all generations and all points of view have agreed upon…” (“The Word Itself” in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape 1984)

John Stilgoe: Landscape “…means shaped land…” (Common Landscape of America 1982) 

Pierre Dansereau was a professor of ecology at the Universite de Quebec a Montreal.  He gave the CBC Massey lectures broadcast in the fall of 1972.  When the text of the lectures was published a year later by the CBC the book was entitled Inscape and Landscape.  Most of the lectures examine ecological systems as if humans are an integral part of ecosystems, which is an idea somewhat revolutionary for that time.  He also grappled with understanding how to describe the spatial dimension of ecological systems – well before the invention of the discipline known today as “Landscape Ecology”.  He wrote in his introduction to the publication:

“My concern, therefore, is as much with the inscape as it is with the landscape, as much with the human perception of environment as with man’s impact on nature.  Indeed I view the inscape / landscape process as a cycle.  Man, from Magdalenian to modern times, has had a selective perception of the world about him and in turn a highly discriminating way of modeling the landscape to match his inner vision.

“Inscape” may be an unfamiliar word in this context.  It was coined by a poet, not an ecologist or a geographer.  Gerard Manley Hopkins recorded his contemplations of nature in diaries, letters, poems, drawings, and even in music.  This filtering inward from nature to man, upward from the subconscious to the conscious, and from perception to design and implementation, is indeed what happens to the agriculturalist, the forester, the engineer, the town planner.  The pathway of sensorial impression to material interference is strewn with an imagery that makes the inscape a template for the reshaping of the landscape.”

Unfortunately Dansereau does not go much further with this discussion in the text of his lectures, but uses this as a basic starting premise for the entire later discussion.

What's a "native plant"?
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