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Gustave Flaubert: On ne choisit pas son sujet. Voilà ce que le public et les critiques ne comprennent pas. Le secret des chefs-d'oeuvre est là, dans la concordance du sujet et du tempérament de l'auteur.
One does not choose one’s subject matter; one submits to it.
(extrait de la Correspondance)
While biodiversity may be the basis of resilience, it is not the only foundation for resilience. Ecosystems depend also on physical, structural characteristics to keep from being overwhelmed. Some examples:
· In the aftermath of the tsunami hitting the coast of Indonesia in December 2004 aerial photography revealed that some parts of the coast were hit harder than others. Research subsequently demonstrated that the coast suffered less damage where the offshore reef was intact. Apparently, many reefs areas around the Indian Ocean have been exploded with dynamite because they are considered impediments to shipping, an important part of the South Asian economy. Similarly, the removal of coastal mangrove trees (for residential development) is believed to have intensified the effect of the tsunami in some locations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
Damage from the tsunami was reduced by the presence of an extensive, intact mangrove fringe. 2005, Danielson et al. Science 310:643 “The Asian Tsunami: a protective role for coastal vegetation”
· In the aftermath of Katrina, the hurricane that made landfall August 29 2005 in southeast Louisiana, USA, it was shown that where the offshore mudflats were more intact, the impact of the storm was reduced. “Barrier islands, shoals, marshes, forested wetlands, and other features of the coastal landscape can provide a significant and potentially sustainable buffer from wind wave action and storm surge generated by tropical storms and hurricanes. Anecdotal data accumulated after Hurricane Andrew suggest that a storm surge reduction along the central Louisiana coast of about three inches per mile of marsh… Emergent canopies such as provided by forested wetlands can greatly diminish wind penetration, thereby reducing the wind stress available to generate surface waves and storm surge. Shallow water depths attenuate waves via bottom friction and breaking…” pp3,15 2006-Jan-26, Working Group for Post-Hurricane Planning for the Louisiana Coast, A New Framework for Planning the Future of Coastal Louisiana after the Hurricanes of 2005.
· In the coastal forest extending from the Canadian west coast into the American pacific northwest the bark near the forest floor of Redcedars, Douglas-firs, Redwoods, and other large trees is thick enough to be able to withstand small fires, such as would occur naturally by lightning and that would consume the local underbrush. Where a fire suppression policy is in place, underbrush builds up – providing fuel for a potentially large and hot fire – which might be hot enough to destroy the large trees. The Oakland Hills fire of 1991 was at least in part a result of this condition: “At the fires peak it would destroy 1 home every 11 seconds. In addition to the winds and the heat, an important factor in the rapid spread of the fire was that it started in an area that was at an interface between developed and undeveloped land. Many of the first dwellings to burn were surrounded by thick, dry vegetation. In addition, the nearby undeveloped land had even more dry brush along with several groves of non-native volatile eucalyptus trees. The same conditions contributed to ..the Berkeley 1923 fire.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Hills_firestorm A major fire near Limantour Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore in October 1995 consumed 48 homes and scorched 12,000 acres (1/7th of the park.) Some say that Marin County, California (where I live) is a forest fire disaster waiting to happen…
Any habitat goes through cyclical perturbations like storms, flooding, fire, in addition to regular occurrences like seasons. Habitat succession may follow a course of slow change but also diverge suddenly and reach a completely new state.
The ability of ecosystems to recover, reorganize, and adapt is commonly known as “resilience”. The basis of resilience is biodiversity. The more biodiversity, the more library information the habitat has to keep from being overwhelmed and from being changed to potentially less desirable new states.
What are some of the appearances or symptoms of those “less desirable states”?
· High Floods
· Desertification, loss of topsoil, and duststorms
· Erosion and siltation of streams and rivers
· Subsidence
· Very hot and fast-spreading wildfires
· Appearance of pest animals like rats.
As urban environments invade and displace rural and wild environments natural areas in cities connected to sub and exurban natural areas become the location in which natural systems may find their balance. Natural areas in cities typically include parks or greenways, ravines and streams, abandoned and regenerating industrial or transportation lands: both large and small.
In addition where natural systems are allowed for, people generally use the natural areas, engaging with natural areas for recreation, or to find meaning and inspiration. Property values may also be higher in proximity to natural areas. Flourishing natural habitats may also support native plants and wildlife – and the rats and pigeons might not be able to compete with them. Events which might otherwise be “natural disasters” may become limited in impact and property damage and human loss.
In a development project, the professional team may map habitat types within and adjacent the master plan area, matrix-patch-corridor and landscape flows, and – since the progression of the natural areas is open-ended – identify alternative/possible scenarios for the natural development of the habitats. This information contributes to the base data used for community planning and urban and landscape design. For example, the information may be used to identify areas that have great value for natural processes; the information may also be used to identify preservation measures (i.e., legal protection) and conservation measures (i.e., management activities) for those areas.
Even while natural processes carry on eternally, “nature” is also a socially-constructed landscape value. So a development plan could program a range of activities and services for the natural areas for its future residents and people who might visit from outside the region. These activities and services could include trail hikes, a nature interpretation center, sustainable gardening center, etc.
Urban open space for natural process and recreation is a “land use” in a development plan.
Our separation as humans from the natural world / natural processes is an illusion. We humans are an integral part of the natural world and the processes which animate it, or to put that another way, from natural processes and their appearance as a steady state called the natural world. I have read I can’t remember who said it that in a way humans are the way that nature knows about itself, the way nature has self-awareness.
The wild-eyed pigeon, the gull, and the brown pelican that you encounter at the Marina breakwater in San Francisco are not primitive creatures, they are your contemporaries and our lives (their lives and our human lives) are bound up together. Their lives may be short but so is a human life, relatively speaking.
In constructing or renovating landscapes all sorts of measures for sustainability, like using native plant species or conserving irrigation water, are good but not because ecological systems provide ecosystem services to us humans, such as providing shade or purifying water, but because they extend our connection to the natural world, enable us to live more fully integrated. “Resourcism”, the identification of the natural world/natural processes only as an assembly of useful resources, of materials and operations, for human benefit is what got us into trouble in the first place – a utilitarian approach to the world. Resourcism is an “I-It” relationship rather than and “I-You” relationship, in the words of philosopher MartinBuber.
Our human connection with the world is spiritual. If our relationship to the world is “I-It” then not all the food, sex, money, hybrid Camelias, or recycled water irrigation systems in the world will fulfill us, there would always be more that is needed. But rather by a relationship of “I-You” where we let go of attachment to these things, letting the inconsistencies of life have their moment, yet participating and seeing the perfection which includes the imperfection may give us the opportunity to connect and heal, heal our bodies, heal our minds and spirit, and bring healing to others, human and non human who can only communicate with us when we set ourselves to listen.
“Sustainability” is not for the future. Yes we want the next generation those who are now children to have all the benefits and a good life as we do and we can be conscious to not use up everything so that they have nothing. But really sustainability is always about now, about being present, present in the world, present in our lives, present with a reality that has transformed the image of “America the beautiful” to an America that includes large urban parks built on old landfills like Fresh Kills on Staten Island, New York – a constant presence of what we may have thought we were “throwing out” – out of sight out of mind – but in the end thrown only as far as the other side of the river.
In creating landscapes practical measures are necessary because we do not live only as spiritual beings. In creating landscapes sometimes we turn surface run off into storm sewers and sometimes we use bioswales to recharge groundwater systems; it is important to know when each of these is the really sustainable measure. There are different levels to our existence: we still have to eat and put out the garbage. It is how we do it, how we eat and put out the garbage, that counts; it is the intention with which we do things.
(Thanks to Zoketsu Norman Fischer and to Gloria Justen for helping to crystallize some of these thoughts.)
It is almost impossible to imagine any great landscape architectural design in isolation from a broader social context and in particular from an urban condition. The great gardens that exist today and that have been preserved over in some cases centuries embody a public discourse or social relationships. Large parks like New York’s Central Park were imagined in the context of the urban condition that it would ameliorate.
Referring to 19th century park designs Beth Meyer writes:
“These park designers and their clients believed that spatial practices such as promenading, riding, and boating in the company of others engendered what Olmsted referred to as a sense of “communicativeness” or “commonplace civilization”. A democratic community emerged through the enactment of everyday recreational spatial practices in constructed rural scenery”.
These days, in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, most people ride bicycles, not trotting horses. We’re there for a run, hanging out with friends, or Lindy-in-the-park, not promenading. And, in addition to the official uses, Golden Gate Park has a host of unofficial uses – commercial sex, other kinds of deals. As John Beardsley writes:
“...parks are among the few places where people are most free to pursue the ordinary and (my italics) extraordinary expressions of daily life. . . We need to reclaim parks as part of our essential urban infrastructure, as key features in functioning urban social systems, …maximize their potential as ecological systems, … and promote them as the vital laboratories of democracy”.
Though the specifics have changed, the effects still seem to be true.
It is easy enough to think about urban parks, even though urban parks may not be the same things today as they were in Olmsted’s time, because “urban park” provides a handle to grasp contemporary urban landscape. But contemporary cities are urban megalopolises, not the large 19th century cities, and we’re really talking about a network-patchwork of fragmented (socially, programmatically, ecologically) landscape of which large parks are (just) large patches. Even the large well-known park projects in the news these days – Fresh Kills in NYC, Downsview in Toronto, Great Park in Orange County (Los Angeles) – are connected to and have relation with adjacent or nearby landscape features. It’s just that in some cities we see the large patches of landscape and in other cities the network-patchwork of landscape is more intact, that’s all.
It is not just the big urban parks that deserve our attention as designers these days but it is the network of urban landscape open space. As a whole the network-patchwork can address a host of urban "problems": creates connections at nested scales (from local site to region), provides for flows of people, water, wildlife, and plants, provides recreational and educational opportunities, meets various municipal regulatory codes, reveals its intrinsic character. The network of landscape areas, large and small, public and private is the contemporary Central Park.
“Sustainability for what?”
“Well, for landscape areas.”
“Landscape areas – you mean the paved walkways, planting beds, seating spots, and so on around public buildings?”
“Yes.”
“For those landscaped areas a worthwhile approach is sometimes called “designer ecology”. That’s an aesthetic, educational, and inspirational design with straightforward user programming that recalls the native habitat type of the place. People love it, even though it often requires intensive gardening maintenance.”
“OK but what about for larger areas?”
“You mean like 50 or 100 or even 500 acres?”
“Sure.”
“The larger the area the more chance that it will have capacity for ecological resilience. Resilience – that’s the ability to recover from disturbance, accommodate change, and basically continue to function in a healthy way.”
“Can you design resilience?”
“One approach is to establish hearth areas with native plants: you might establish a wetland area, a sunny oak grove, a cool pine stand, and an open field. Then let nature take its course. We can’t really predict how that landscape will develop but creating habitat diversity and allowing nature to build up biodiversity we are creating the beginnings of a sustainable landscape."
“Beginnings… so there’s more to it?"
“Yup: even the designer ecology pocket park is much more sustainable if it is connected to other natural areas. You know native birds will inhabit any area with the native trees that they like, but only if they can see them and get to them. So the downtown designer parks connected by a greenway bicycle path connected to larger parks in the suburbs which are in turn connected by greenways and stream corridors to big old remnant forests and fields outside the city has a lot more resilience."
“Aren’t we forgetting something?"
“Like what?"
“People! All that ecology stuff sounds lovely but landscaping is for people, isn’t it? You want to go for a walk or a run, have lunch with your co-workers outside, picnic with your kids, have coffee with your boyfriend, or play a pick-up game of football with your buddies. Like that old winery they are going to turn into a park. . . and besides, who is going to pay for all that ecology – so if they do turn that winery into a park it will have to be revenue-generating.”
“You’re right. Any large landscape area, whether it is a corporate campus or a public park, is probably going to have both ecological and programmatic complexity. So you build the wetland, and it also works for stormwater management. You establish a forest grove, and it also works for shade. When they do that winery they should remember to include hiking trails, interpretation, and they can turn the courtyard into a multi-use plaza with a coffee place for informal hanging out and programmed events like outdoor theatre. They could even reestablish a small winery operation, sell memberships, and members would produce a vintage every year with the old label...
Keeping the old winery buildings with their outdoor courtyards and updating their use is another part of landscape sustainability – it is called maintaining the cultural landscape, and people really love to poke around, explore it. It connects them to the lives of their Moms and Dads who worked in the winery, and lets their kids get to know what it was like.
Any landscape, big or small, could be successful and maybe live on long past its builders time if it is ecologically resilient and if it has a constituency of people who love it and use it and for whom it carries meaning.”
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 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.
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.
