Designing as if the Earth Really Mattered
Carol Franklin, FASLA examines sustainable and regenerative
issues, such as strategies for the profession to strengthen and expand its
environmental stewardship, building on its historic land ethic.
"Today almost every site on which we, as landscape
architects, will work, has been abused. We need a broader and more pro-active
definition of sustainable design and this is why it may be preferable to call
the new paradigm "ecological design." This is a design approach that should go
beyond the modest goal of minimizing site destruction to facilitating community
recovery by reestablishing the processes necessary to sustain natural, social
and cultural systems.
As landscape architects, we need to be comfortable promoting
the value of the land to human health; we also need to take public stands on the
importance of land stewardship in promoting public safety and well-being. Reconnecting
urban America to the natural processes that mark rural landscapes is one of the
activities that landscape architects are well-suited to do."
Ecological design in its largest and best sense is the only
philosophic approach encompassing enough to energize the profession and give it
relevance.
Landscape architects should be better informed in the
study of the world and how it works. This study should include a wide knowledge
of structures and materials, a knowledge of history, art history, poetry,
anthropology, natural science, especially ecology, and many other disciplines.
Ecological design is a process of raising consciousness,
and changing basic attitudes. These changes require that we actually see the
present deterioration of the landscape, that we recognize the impacts of our
interventions and that we understand each site and each piece of a site as parts
of a larger system."
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