The Animated Environment

I’ve just seen WALL-E.  Despite my doubts about liking such a mainstream movie, its one of the most beautiful movies to be widely distributed in a while.  Most fascinating to me is the theme of environmental degradation leading to the utter collapse of civic life, causing the evacuation of all human life (and the death of everything else).  One can’t help but form an emotional attachment to this character that has been left on Earth to clean up humanity’s mess for hundreds of years–alone–while finding an enormous range of curiosity for all the trash left behind (i.e. junk collecting). The Simpsons Movie had a similar theme last year, with the pollution of the town’s water leading to dire environmental crisis.  This is a huge symbol that popular culture has an acute awareness of the human potential for destroying land, water, and communities and the absurdity of contemporary federal government involvement in those problems. Hayao Miyazaki was even exploring environmental degradation in animation back in the 90’s, epitomized by Princess Mononoke in which the process of industrialization is shown to be in direct opposition to anything wild, green, and vibrant.  Human prosperity is shown to only exist on barren soil, where human leaders actively seek to destroy every last tree and non-human animal. My grim concern is over the ways in which these movies portray a contemporary industrial mindset of human opposition to either wilderness or the rest of the biosphere.  WALL-E and Princess Mononoke both offer a harmonious resolution, but really as an idealized afterthought.  I want narratives all about the solutions, not the problems!  Contemporary landscape architects, I believe, are charged with reconnecting human habitation with local biota in order prevent the premonitory environmental catastrophes project in contemporary media.  Toolbox: edible landscapes, urban agroforestry, guerilla gardening, green roofs, revitalized public parks, civic funded homes and jobs for the homesless and poor, a strong agricultural cooperative extention that educates the pulic on horticulture and landcare, a polity interested in land policy and food production, vibrant public markets that support local farmers, and ethical, innovative design.

Oil slick (car-bashing continued)

I’m all-a-rumble from this video posted at Carfree USA’s Blog, showing economic analysts predicting the changes in American cars consumptions/ridership with the continued increase in oil prices:

This coincides with a particularly insightful dialogue on the poison cars bring to cities over at the Ecotecture Journal:

Cars, Mobility, and Holistic Systems

The problem though is that we act like cars are the only thing into which oil is pumped—I’m screaming (shrieking, really) over this:

“Petroleum Education”

Is there anything in my life from which oil can stay distant?  Ideas, anyone?

Automaniacs

I am constantly reminded, living as a pedestrian and cyclist, that cars are destroying people, communities, and the planet.  The post-war suburban mindset still rages strong, where few walk or bike to live, work, and play, despite formal attempts to redirect ourselves.  The space between buildings becomes the imminent domain of combustion vehicles, with a tuft of grass or a shrub thrown in for good measure.  We loose community networks as bikers and pedestrians cling to narrow paths.  Markets are shoved onto parking lots from their historical central pedestrian plazas.  I won’t even get into obese car drivers and global warming (sitting ducks).

BUT pedestrian promenades are popping up:

Ithaca, NY: Ithaca Commons

Boulder, CO: Pearl Street

Denver, CO: 16th St. Mall (with transit access)

On and on and on…

Bikers take back streets, critical mass events:

Designers have weighed in on what the city without cars should look like.  The question of cars in cities represents a coalition building point, where urban resdients, designers, environmentalists, and public health advocates can unite for positive change–i.e. walk/bike and keep yourself, your community, and your planet healthy.  I’m lucky now to be living in Berkeley, a relatively walkable, bikeable city, but if one more car revvs its engine at the stop sign while I am crossing the street, I am not responsible for my actions.

squatter cities

First, an image cascade:

Coptic Quarter, Cairo

Dharavi, Mumbai

Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro

The challenge of creating an economically, ecologically, and culturally vibrant arrangement of a squatter city falls to contemporary landscape architects, who must be greatly interested both intellectually in the modes of improvisational vernacular design and ethically in the livelihoods of some of the poorest on the planet.  A Harvard MLA recipient just went out on a limb to develop water solutions in Mumbai.  What I know is that every latrine and trash heap has the potential for compost and fruit trees and every marginal space can be redesigned to embrace the community (with a garden, of course).

Molly O’Meara discusses livelihood and (the escape from) urban planning in squatter cities in Where the Sidewalk Ends, in Worldwatch Magazine.  Excerpt:

Slums are often located on a city’s least-desirable locations—situated on steep hillsides, in floodplasins, or downstream from industrial polluters–leaving residents vulnerable to disease and natural disasters.

Robert Neuwirth examines squatter cities as hubs of creativity and new political battlegrounds.  He gave a TED talk and writes a blog, both worth looking at.

Stewart Brand also gave a brief TED talk on the influx of people into squatter cities currently underway.

Michael Pollan describes Cartesian POV on man/nature [clipping]

Comments:

Pollan eloquently describes the difference between a pseudo-logical based approach to defining human or “culture” from “nature” through the inspriations gained from working directly in a garden as a beneficial ecological being (just like we talk about pollination or dispersal being beneficial insects functions).  What seems particularly interesting to me as a movement artist/dancer is the way in which this physical form of involvement in one’s environment/ecological community (gardening) rearranges ideas about the dualism of “man vs. nature” to a manageable scale.  Environmentalists cannot rely on using Cartesian dualisms to explain or examine environmental problems, because they omit us from a sense of belonging–we are at best stewrds of a fragile system.  Instead Pollan posits a regenerative form of land management (a rotational permaculture system) as the progressive example of placing humans back into a beneficial ecological role.

I will vegetate your roof

The American Society of Landscape Architects has launched a new Green Roof Education Site that maintains a delightful amount of accessible and technical information on green roofs. They include an inspiring tour of the ASLA building’s green roof.

Green roofs have caught on more in Europe (Germany especially with 14% of new flat roofs vegetated) than here in the US, but with so many new projects going after green roofs, we can feel optimistic about our national meter of design. The ASLA leading benefit of green roofs, “saving the environment,” is actually all about saving ourselves. Each of the benefits of green roofs represents how inextricably connected we are to our environmental conditions. The site reviews the keys to green roofs as:

• contribution to heating/cooling buildings (reducing operating costs)
• stormwater management (maintaining our drinking supply), the urban heat island effect (keeping us healthy)
• urban wildlife habitat (keeping ecosystems functioning)
• aesthetic resources (give us a sigh of relief)

With so much energy being expended into heating and cooling buildings and destitute watersheds from stormwater flash floods, somehow green roofs seem an absolutely necessary penitent action. A Bioscience study shows that green roofs can even contribute to bird and invertebrate habitat in urban settings.

A classist said what?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/dining/02cheap.html?pagewanted=all

The current system, they argue, is almost completely reliant on petroleum for fertilizers and global transportation. It has led to consolidations of farms, environmentally unsound monoculture and, at the end of the line, a surplus of inexpensive food with questionable nutritional value. Organic products are not subsidized, which is one reason those products are more expensive.

How on EARTH can Pollan and Waters celebrate higher food prices?!

They suggest higher food prices come primarily from increasing fuel costs for trans- and intercontinental transportation of food. I do not see the logic of how higher food prices encourage people to buy more sustainable food. Most of the poor people they hope to stop buying cola are geographically excluded from any markets where these wealthy whites are buying their hip local food.

They should be FREAKING OUT that this country has maintained no respect for small, local farmers, and entirely degraded any transportation and social-networking system that provide for local food markets in lower-income districts. Alice Waters needs to get off her sustainability-priced-above-$50 wagon, and get back into the dirt to grow food for hungry people.

Good food, like good gardens, are not only meant for white upper-middle class Californians.

The ends of the Earth

A new installation has come up in Antarctica: Stellar Axis created by Lita Albuquerque explores space-greater-than-Earth by propelling us beyond what we think to be the ends of the Earth.

This work engages a rich history of land art, coming from Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. These large installations can be as accessible as central park or distanct as the antarctic, but often are heavily documented in photographs and video to maintain an immenent form of physical resonsoance.

I’m particularly interested in the physical installation of this work, that so many people gave their time to go freeze in abstract art in Antarctica. Albuquerque says something particularly telling about this in one of her videos:

What I’m interested in is not so much art as object but an art that is in relationship to the world and that shows you your own relationship to the world and to your life.

This is the precise legacy I’m hoping to embrace with landscape architecture, since gardens, parks, waterfronts, and atria are the places where so much of our relationship to the world is expressed and explored.

TREAT the Land

The Great Barrier Reef is in serious trouble.  So much of northeastern Australia’s once lush and expansive rainforests have been over-logged, removed, and replaced with cattle.  This has induced a great deal of soil erosion, clogging streams and water ways leading to the Reef–not to mention all the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides further causing algal blooms out at sea.

This has led to several community groups dedicated to reforesting the land, providing habitat for wildlife, and stopping effluents from damaging the Reef.  One such group is TREAT: Trees for the Evelyn and Atherton Tablelands.  While in Oz, I got the chance to work with them on tree plantings and planning future decades of forest restoration projects.

TREAT works systematically to reconnect existing, degraded fragments of rainforest through corridors of replanted trees, often along creeks and streams.  Restoring this riparian (aquatic-bordering) vegetation is key to protect these water resources for reducing sediment and nutrient loads.  Community groups have been identified by extensive scholarship as some of the most effective groups at restoring environmentally degraded land.  This is just one potent example of the good work that will propel this planet to harmony with the human species.

Invading Ashley

The last few decades of ecological investigations have produced a budding discipline of study on invasive biota. These organisms are identified normally as exotic to areas in which they invade, suppressing or out-competing native biota. These organisms’ spread and potency are normally linked to human activity, e.g. species being captured in cargo ship ballast water and subsequently spread to other regions of the world when the ship discharges ballast water.

The shores of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in northeastern Utah, bordering Ashley National Forest, is blanketed with invasive plants, from the sudden fall of the lake level due to dry seasons and use for irrigation.  These invasives are the most prolific colonizers, outracing native species that are further limited by the overstocking of cattle.  These cattle are placed onto public land leased to private ranchers to obtain a yield from the land.  The U.S. Forest Service sprays fields of identified invasive plants with toxic herbicide mainly to increase or improve grazing area for cattle, not preserve some historical environmental quality.  The invasive plants in Ashely National Forest are particularly located around drained areas from the flaming gorge reservoir decrease, disturbance from cattle, logging activities, and cleared land for campgrounds/paths.  Each of these activities is plainly linked to a direct human activity.  When I scaled a mountain peak in the Uintah Wilderness I saw invasive thistles littering the trail up the ridge, and had to question how successful any attempt to remove these plants could even be feasible.

After a summer of tracking down, mapping, and digging up invasive species in Ashley National Forest, I feel convinced that we need strongly to reconsider our ideas about what these plants are doing and how they come to be.  Invasive plants do indeed have an established scientific history of environmental detriment, but somehow we imagine that these organisms in-and-of themselves are malevolent forces trying to dominate ecological communities and ruin what we see as the better, more natural state of the landscape, that is untouched, unaffected, and unchanging.

The rhetoric taken by scientists and federal land managers portrays invasive plants as exotic outsider which is perpetually defiling a “native” landscape with which we are charged in protecting.  The obvious irony is that the exotic groups causing the most disturbance are the environmental management organization (Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Bureau for Land Management, etc.) in the post-colonial state.  To only use the language “native” and “exotic” seems to make a mockery of the long and bloody North American history of exotic humans pushing out/oppressing the indigenous communities, as though white scientists have some right now to decide what is native to this land based on only a few decades of ecological information. In Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience, David Theodoropoulos describes this history of conflating xenophobic tendencies with environmental management to produce oppostional attitudes to invasive plants as intities that must be erradicated, rather than indicators of deep ecological problems for which human communities are the culprit.  He also shows through rigorous scientific review that the field of invasion biology is in fact not in concensus on the nafarious effects of exotic species, and that the kind of spread we see in invasive species is documented in many plant species as common through history.

A Permaculture lecture by Geoff Lawton I attended in Portland in July 2007 finally elucidated and articulated a different point of view on invasive species that, oddly enough, seems more objective and relavent that the majority of what is considered serious, rigorous ecological science publications.  He proposed viewing invasive plants as a response to especially disturbed conditions in which primary pioneer species, i.e. those species first to colonize an area, take root in spaces early in the successional chain.  He pointed out that invasive plant roots are typically excellent at breaking soil compaction, responding to harsh conditions, and slowly improving conditions for other late successional plants, e.g. shrubs, trees).  This perspecitive is dangerous in one respect since it may suggest that we should have a hands off approach a let things run their course, possibly to a dangerous end–what if the successional chain becomes stuck in cyclic invasive annuals?  But this perspective also allows for the tangible two fold consideration that 1) the problem is the orginal distubance itself and that 2) the lack viable native flora would require postive ecological efforts by human communities in cultivating and planting native plants that are suppressed not by invasives, but by our activities.

The federal government is pouring a great deal of money into the eradication of invasive species under the guise of native species protection.  I would hope that we can stop the demonization of these species identified as exotic or invasive and focus on reducing our destructive activies on land (e.g. releasing rivers by removing dams and decreasing cattle stocks on federal land) and focusing on the kind of native plant stimulation and cultivation proposed by restoration ecologists.