Constructed Ecologies

Critical Reflections on Ecology with Design

Margaret Grose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317495253
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Today, designers are shifting the practice of landscape architecture towards the need for a more complex understanding of ecological science. Constructed Ecologies presents ecology as critical theory for design, and provides major ideas for design that are supported with solid and imaginative science.

In the questioning narrative of Constructed Ecologies, the author discards many old and tired theories in landscape architecture. With detailed documentation, she casts off the savannah theory, critiques the search for universals, reveals the needed role of designers in large-scale agriculture, abandons the overlay technique of McHarg, and introduces the ecological and urban health urgency of public night lighting.

Margaret Grose presents wide-ranging new approaches and shows the importance of learning from science for design, of going beyond assumptions, of working in multiple rather than single issues, of disrupting linear design thinking, and of dealing with data. This book is written with a clear voice by an ecologist and landscape architect who has led design students into loving ecological science for the support it gives design.

Part I
A Background to Design

1
The Environment is not a Human Construct

There is sometimes an instant of delirium when a sensitive clavichord imagines that it is the only clavichord that exists and that it alone produces all the harmonies of the universe.

Diderot¹

The environment is not a human construct. At first glance, this statement might appear a contradiction to my entire theme of constructed ecologies, but I will explain my contention. There is a pressing need to distinguish fact from cultural opinions about the nature of Nature. This distinction is needed more clearly than ever because many design professionals reject science at the very time when the door is open for designers to join forces more strongly with engineering, ecological science, hydrology, physics, and mathematics. Yet landscape architecture is grappling with how to work with scientific knowledge and methods.

When I first came to landscape architecture from working in plant eco-physiology and mathematical ecology, I was presented with the alleged importance of pink bagels on a small lawn,² and to curious debates about whether nature was real. It seemed that only moments before my favourite book had been Martin Zimmermann’s beautiful Xylem Structure and the Ascent of Sap³ that describes the three-dimensional hydraulic architecture of woody plants. With this in mind, I also encountered a nagging problem in landscape architecture that arises from time to time. When I was a student, the landscape historian had set a small and delightful assignment of writing a 2,000-word play in which seven famous landscape architects were to discuss their design ideas over a meal. Nearly everyone in the class included André Le Nôtre, the great landscape architect of the French Baroque who had designed the garden of Versailles, dining at table. However, everyone else in the class portrayed Le Nôtre as vain, conceited, rude to those below him in status, and fawning to King Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’. I protested. No one had done the research to establish how Le Nôtre’s contemporaries had described him – as humble, kind, who treated the boy who worked in the pot shed with the same courtesy as he did the king, a loving husband, a wise mentor, and the only person to address the king as Louis to his face.⁴ Truth was a very different thing than supposed by many, but Truth did not appear to have concerned my fellow students; an arrogant Le Nôtre was apparently much more fun. And yet in design, we cannot ignore the truth of ecological processes and behaviours if we are to work in the world. To do so would be at our peril.

The environment does not respond to points of debate or preference. In the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, temples in Japan that long ago had wisely been placed above known tsunami ranges survived, but that knowledge had seemingly been forgotten by modern planners. The tsunami’s range was not a point of debate between us and natural processes; towns built below that line were swept aside in moments. Natural processes do not discuss; the environment is not a human construct. While our policies, laws, and legislations change with our understanding of ourselves, nature’s ‘laws’ do not change. For example, we can change policies, but we cannot ask plants to convert more sugars or produce more oxygen tomorrow, or ask a tropical plant to live in the Sahara. Nature is not a human construct dependent on our own limitless imagination, but is one of physical limits and finite riches.

It is important that design works with a recognition of the distinction whether we are dealing with knowledge with a cultural overlay, endlessly referred to as a cultural construct, or with real and specific information that is not flexible to mere opinion. While the latter is part of our culture because it is part of science, it is not as mutable as opinion and preference. I believe that a failure to recognise this distinction is a central impasse in design. This failure is holding up landscape architecture from moving out of its current limitations to engage more specifically and creatively with major environmental issues. Almost twenty years ago, James Corner wrote that the ‘active life processes of which ecology speaks – are rarely paralleled in the modern landscape architect’s limited capacity to transfigure and transmute’.⁵ At the heart of Corner’s assertion is the failure to distinguish between culturally loaded ecological information with ideas that are fluid and debatable, and information that is not culturally loaded and obeys physical, chemical, and biological laws and processes⁶ that reveal to us information needed for wise design. It seems that this last ecology, or definite data, was forgotten in the last few decades amid an insistence that the world is a human construct.

As the great landscape historian Oliver Rackham noted, ‘There is nowadays a tendency to regard the landscape as a mere artefact, the product of human endeavour, and to forget about Nature as the player on the other side of the board’.⁷ We need to engage with this player by having stronger fundamental knowledge of the active life processes of which ecology speaks, for in doing so we can be transfiguring and transmuting with the player on the other side of the board.

Expressions addressing the sensitive clavichord’s harmonies

There are a number of expressions that I have not used at all, or not much, because they are close to Diderot’s sensitive clavichord in their anthropocentrism. These are ‘ecosystem services’, the ‘Anthropocene’, and ‘climate change’. Designers (and ecologists) often cite ecosystem services largely unaware of the debates and concerns about this term in ecology, as in many concepts. My caution about ecosystem services lies in its general failure to deliver good science. In a paper entitled ‘Have ecosystem services been oversold?’⁸ Jonathan Silvertown neatly caught these concerns, including ethical issues about judging species. Who judges us? The commodification and then monetisation of ecosystem services have constrained thinking on our relationships with nature and are ultimately deeply anthropocentric. Fundamentally, nature is not an actor in the human construct of the money market based on commodities and cannot be accommodated in those markets as a member of the human team. Nature cannot bargain; while environmental scientists might bargain on behalf of nature, natural processes and systems cannot take part. The idea that nature has an intrinsic value independent of human use cannot sit within any concept of nature as a ‘service’ to us. The concept of ecosystem services has been used to connect with policy-makers, but it must be used with intellectual caution due to the parallel decline in discussing biodiversity and nature conservation with policy-makers, as the vague expression ‘natural capital’ has replaced these two terms. We must always remember that the only natural capital equivalent to a New Guinea rainforest is a New Guinea rainforest.

I have not used the term Anthropocene here because of the issues I will raise when discussing the savannah theory in Chapter 3. I defer using a term without going deeply into its meaning and complexity, and into the discipline in which the real decisions of that intellectual territory are made. In 2000, the Nobel atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen suggested the ‘Anthropocene Age’ when casually talking to the press. Designers, everywhere, have taken it up, without pause. However, geologists – those who determine the ages of earth – are still discussing the term and have yet to pronounce upon it because they already have a term for the human era – the Holocene.⁹ Many geologists feel that the data are insufficiently distinct and consistent (or dateable) to substantiate a Holocene/Anthropocene boundary (a ‘global event horizon’);¹⁰ in short, the term might be used informally (with a little ‘a’) but not formally,¹¹ as the ‘Age of’, much like the ‘Age of Steam’.

Eric Wolff, Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change and Earth-Ocean-Atmosphere Systems, points out that the evidence is still coming in and it is best to let future generations decide on any potential naming of any Holocene boundary.¹² In particular, as is clear from what I have written, and from the references I cite, humans have been creating major disturbance on the world for 10,000 years. While more of the same is not a boundary, we might be witnessing an ethical and spiritual boundary, a boundary of ‘giving up’ – as many conservationists are profoundly concerned about – of any feeling of the Earth as our mother, as Lucretius so eloquently observed long ago. This is a dangerous ‘theology’ because although we alter, add to, and distort, we do not create the fundamental physical, chemical, and biological processes of the planet. Wisdom, including that sustained in indigenous societies, should remind us of this fact.

Nor have I explicitly focused on climate change in the modern era. Climate change has become the overriding narrative of the times, and that is dangerous. First, it blinds us to other important issues that impact ecology, human imagination, and knowledge, and second it is a non-discrete problem, has no elegant simple solution, and cannot be ‘solved’. Population increase, poverty, global political tensions, global jihad (whose members care not for climate change, scientific inquiry, or humanist ideas), and pandemics rank as equally likely to unbalance human existence as a species. One failure of the politics and language of climate change has been a failure to see change as the normal condition of earth, or to discuss uncertainty.¹³ Landscape designers need to manage change and flux in order to liberate our design ideas. Climate change is a constant companion, but I take the view of climate scientist Mike Hulme – in his superb Why We Disagree about Climate Change – that climate change is an opportunity for self-correction and rethinking, not the overwhelming disaster of the future. We need to unlock the uncertain future. We will make mistakes, but we always have self-corrected, and we will self-correct, as we are now doing in many fields. This attitude gives us all a far more positive future towards which we can work.

Problems of how we use ecology in design

Design has for too long taken two opposing views on how to consider ecology, views seemingly polarised between rigid empiricism and a loose choice, where one opinion is equal to any other opinion, whether informed or not. This problem has not done the design professions much good, leaving them locked in chatting, and not understanding phenomena or processes. The contrast between these two positions in the discipline of landscape architecture has been a microcosm of C.P. Snow’s original 1949 long essay on the tyrannies of the two cultures – the arts and the sciences;¹⁴ it has tended to place everything in apposition, rather than as a discipline employing the best available knowledge.

I have reflected upon ideas in this book that are either core to current design discussions, or missing from them. My approach focuses on knowledge gained from science that designers can use. The strength of this approach is that scientific knowledge is continually fluxing and growing, as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I A background to design
• PART II Thinking about design
• Concluding comments
• Index