Designing For The Future, Part 1 (LP&M #9)

In October, I submitted an essay to this year's Tattersfield Scholarship call for entries titled, Embracing Entropy: A Look Into A Modified Design Aesthetic. "Embracing entropy," I argue, "means doing less with more while aligning processes of nature with those of humankind. Embracing entropy ultimately means designing for change, disassembly and reuse, and with a lighter hand." While it was not selected as the winning piece this year, its core message continues to stir within me, especially within the context of this course, Landscape Planning and Management for Sustainable Landscapes.

Landscape planning and management essentially practices projection of land use and development. Sustainable landscapes, as understood throughout this course, are those where human and natural systems can exist in concert while achieving the "highest level of utility, productivity, beauty, and stability." The anticipation of this pairing to produce sustainable landscapes requires that work be performed dynamically and with understanding that ecological systems are open systems, where energies can enter into or leave the system at any given time. Currently, Earth, in both its human and natural systems–the global economy and the climate–is facing unprecedented energy flows that could produce shifts in known paradigms at any given moment.

The global economy has never been so complex and so interconnected as it is today. Complementarily, the CO2 levels in the planet's atmosphere have never been so great during the existence of humanity. Without belaboring the details of how these systems have arrived at this juncture, the consequence is that each are currently geared more for collapse than we have ever known them to be. Does, then, a status quo for ways of doing business still exist for professions embedded within each of these systems? Furthermore, if it is true that professional practice profits primarily from standardization, how might the future of the professions of planning and landscape architecture be sustained? I would argue that answers for each of these questions lie within the embracing entropy argument.

Future constraints of the planning and landscape architecture professions can be simple to envision. There will continually exist less raw resources (as populations rise and demands increase), including both the human construct of money and the physical construct of resources such as oil…and there will exist a climate with increasing unpredictability. With less to build with and more to build for, a new status quo will arise. Professional standardization, in pursuit of profit and economic sustainability, will most likely find its closest ally in nature. In place of manufactured (and resource-intensive) pastoral and modern aesthetics, such workhorse landscape typologies as reconstructed wetlands and riparian corridors could become poster children for development. They could offer a glimpse of this new aesthetic that allows natural processes take care of themselves and the landscape in our rapidly changing world.

Before the advent of reductionist thought brought on by the Age of Enlightenment, the belief that nature knew best was more prevalent throughout the collective global society. The pendulum swing may have taken a few centuries to complete, but it appears that it's headed back this way. The seemingly inevitable transition into new paradigms for climate, resources, and economy requires an embracing of this ancient ideal.