Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment

Joy A. Palmer,David E. Cooper,David Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134756247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment is a unique guide to environmental thinking through the ages. Joy A. Palmer, herself an important and prolific author on environmental matters, has assembled a team of thirty-five expert contributors to summarize and analyse the thinking of fifty diverse and stimulating figures – from all over the world and from ancient times to the present day. Among those included are:

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• Philosophers such as Rousseau, Spinoza and Heidegger

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• Activists such as Chico Mendes

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• Literary giants such as Virgil, Goethe and Wordsworth

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• Major religious and spiritual figures such as the Buddha and St Francis of Assisi.

Lucid, scholarly and informative, these fifty essays offer a fascinating overview of mankind's view and understanding of the physical world.

IAN McHARG 1920–

‘What are the natural determinants for the location and form of development?’ The answers are vital to administrators, regional and city planners, architects and landscape architects. The landscape architects, in fact, work within a profession historically concerned with the relation of man to nature and of the natural sciences to the making of the urban environment.¹

Ian McHarg is this century’s leading planner and designer of ecologically based projects. He has, through his prolific public speaking, become one of the leading critics of the world’s consumption of physical resources. He is a leading advocate for preservation and for change in planning and design and is a leading educator of professionals in the visual arts, embodying a new ecological aesthetic.

McHarg began his career as a city planner, critically observing the destruction that modern development was causing to the natural environment. He was influenced in his early education by the noted urbanist, Lewis Mumford, and his book, The Culture of Cities. McHarg found Mumford to be the only person who correctly appraised the dangers of modern architecture. ‘It has achieved its objectives, and they are hollow.’ Modern architecture was ‘deficient of technology’, yet it used technologies and their explicit materials to derive its aesthetic. McHarg furthered the Mumford criticism, stating that science, itself, was ‘resolutely excluded’ from the architectural definition of cities. ‘The wisest man I have ever known was Lewis Mumford’, he concluded.

Accepting the challenge of G. Homes Perkins, the then Dean of the College of Fine Arts, at the University of Pennsylvania, to set up a new programme in landscape architecture, McHarg reasoned that any meaningful change to this profession had to commence first with fundamental changes to the education of the professional landscape architect. He assembled a faculty comprised predominantly of natural scientists rather than other landscape architects trained under the old arcane methods. He took this bold step so that it would be possible to discover the true nature and unity among the varying and separate natural sciences. Each scientist would contribute their knowledge and discipline to the process of understanding and it would be the role of the landscape architect, as a master builder, to establish common ground, synthesis and integration of built form in the environment. McHarg attracted young, eager and talented natural scientists to teach in the new curriculum of landscape architecture and liberally supplemented permanent faculty with distinguished lecturers, and national leaders in the environment.

The University of Pennsylvania degree was proposed as a graduate degree for advanced studies of the profession by professionals who had already earned bachelors’ degrees in planning, architecture and landscape architecture. To attract only the best, McHarg placed advertisements of his new curriculum in leading international newspapers. With one of the best faculties and student bodies in place, the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania achieved international prominence.

McHarg proceeded to find common ground and solutions to American urban and suburban developmental problems. He sought to achieve built environments that were more compatible with their natural environment. He began by basing his environmental premise on Charles Darwin’s assertion: ‘The surviving organism is fit for its environment, lest it not survive’. McHarg re-stated the Darwin theory: ‘Survival is the first criterion; extinction measures failure … and … all organic life fitted within one of either of two systems: syntropic-fitness-healthy or entropic-misfit-morbidity/death’ (Ian McHarg, A Quest for Life, pp. 244–5). Receiving foundation funding, McHarg hosted a CBS television show, The House We Live In, inviting each week a major environmentalist to discuss issues and solutions. Guests included Lewis Mumford, Paul Ehrlich, Abraham Heschel, Gustave Weigel, Paul Tillich, Margaret Mead and Alan Watts. Many of these same speakers came from his roster of lecturers at the University of Pennsylvania series, Man and the Environment. It was through these lectures that McHarg developed an environmental agenda.

Using the university as a vehicle of research, McHarg founded the Center for Environmental Studies and sought both developmental problem types and regions impacted for the employment of a new planning and design methodology – one that would be ecologically based. Then, using the traditional landscape architectural design studio as a process-based laboratory, McHarg was able to bring student research power to the Center’s agenda. The Center’s studies included the New Jersey Shore; the Route Selection Study I-95 for the Delaware–Raritan Citizens Committee, New Jersey; the Potomac River Basin study; and the Metropolitan Philadelphia Open Space study for the Urban Renewal Agency for the States of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

With proven results from these studies, McHarg formed a partnership with David Wallace, a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Urban Design, to provide professional services utilizing the newly developed environmental planning and design process. Many of the same types of studies as those undertaken at the university, were now the new firm’s professional studies for governmental agencies. They advanced the thinking and development of an ecological planning methodology by providing realistic regulation and planning criterion, inter-agency review and evaluation, and most importantly, methods of implementation via the conclusions as policy of the new ecological planning process. The studies of Wallace, McHarg and Associates (WMA)² included the famous Baltimore Inner Harbor master plan, the Richmond Parkway study, the plan for Green Springs and Worthington Valleys, Baltimore, Maryland, and the plan for Staten Island, New York.

With more than twenty studies of various problem types completed and a fairly firm notion of process, Ian McHarg set out to formalize both philosophy and methodology, and in 1967 wrote the book Design With Nature; Lewis Mumford wrote the book’s Introduction. The book discussed the concepts of a limited planet and, therefore, limited natural resources. It discussed natural processes that were beyond the control of man and concluded therefore man’s folly to build and settle in these regions. It showed environments where man and nature could co-habit together, if wise planning and design were undertaken, and demonstrated how new highways, suburbs and metropolitan areas could be restructured and soundly designed for future growth. Design With Nature was the first book of its kind to define the problems of modern development and present a methodology or process prescribing compatible solutions. It contained powerful prose that delineated the ecological imperative. It also contained an abundance of maps, charts and graphics that illustrated a step-by-step analysis, synthesis and conclusionary methodology.

If nature is viewed from the vantage of the man who would intervene with intelligence and even aspire to art, then we can see that nature is process; it has values and opportunities for human use, but it also reveals constraints and even prohibitions. Furthermore, process can be measured in terms of creation and destruction … We can employ this concept for both diagnosis and prescription, in both planning and design. The application of ecology to human affairs is so recent, however, that there is not yet a formal method. I offer my own rudimentary conception of the ingredients of an ecological method.³

McHarg’s method was not rudimentary, as he so stated, but quite sophisticated and well reasoned. The initial methodology was subjected to testing, criticism and re-evaluation. It remained constant in principle and only differed throughout the years in specifics related to project type and/or environmental type. His methodology, as expressed in Design With Nature, was never so succinct as that delineated in an article for a University of Pennsylvania’s scholarly journal, VIA 1, Ecology and Design. McHarg’s method was a ten-step ‘diagnostic and prescription’.⁴

1	Ecologi...