Designing the Reclaimed Landscape

Alan Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135979034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The first practical yet in-depth exploration of how to reclaim the post-industrial landscape, this volume includes excellent case studies by practitioners and policy makers from around the US, giving first rate practical examples.

The book addresses new thinking about landscape, which applies new techniques to the task of transforming outdated and disused post-extraction landscapes through design. In the USA alone, there are nearly 500, 000 abandoned mines in need of reclamation and this book provides the first in-depth guidance on this real and pressing issue.

Drawing on the work of the well-known Project for Reclamation Excellence at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, this volume outlines the latest design thinking, theory and practice for landscape planners, landscape architects and designers and others interested in maximizing the future potential of reclaimed land.

Part I
Contextualizing landscape alteration through historic, systemic, and biologic perspectives

Chapter 1
Valuing alteration

Frederick Turner

An interesting point came up in a recent conversation with two students on the subject of this volume. I said that I wanted to identify what makes good reclamation. My students, who are brothers, had grown up in rural Kentucky, where strip mining had been extensive. They told me about an area near their home which had been abandoned after the stripping. This place was for them a wonderland, with little lakes and ponds that were full of fish, lots of miniature hills, and a switchbacked isthmus between two ponds that was perfect for riding bikes across. The place was full of wildlife – birds and mammals and butterflies. A whole community came there to fish and play and ride.

Then, in due course, the reclaimers came and graded it all, leaving one boring lake and reducing this magic place to a prosaic field with a dirt road leading to a farm. Something had gone amiss with the task of reclamation. How do we distinguish between good and bad reclamation?

The work of reclamation began as a practical need, a public-health necessity, a legal problem, and a technological challenge. This volume inaugurates and celebrates a second phase in the work; the point in any craft or occupation or activity at which the need arises to look at itself, to assess its performance, to refine its methods, to develop measures and techniques by which its results can be examined. The editor of this volume is making an admirable start, and it will indeed have been a success if it does no more than provide the foundations for answers to such questions as what is reclamation?, how is it done?, and what are its constraints (legal, technological, geological, biological, etc.)?

In this context, it may still be premature to embark on a more philosophical exploration of the subject. Yet sometimes it helps, when climbing a mountain, to have an aerial photo of the whole, even if that photo is obscured by cloud and distorted by perspective. Alan Berger has shown us how valuable an aerial picture can be.¹ Certainly, a good map of our subject must wait until we climbers have done a survey on the ground. If my analogy holds, however, even a poor picture of the peak – the goal – and of its approaches may be valuable; and, with regard to reclamation, that poor picture would be provided by preliminary answers to some big value questions: What should reclamation be? What is good reclamation?

In order to answer these questions, we must first answer others. “Good for what? For whom?” It seems to me that three main “stakeholders” have a claim. The first two are obvious, or so it would appear: good for human beings and good for the rest of nature. But even to put the issue in this way is already to raise problems. Are human beings part of nature or not? If not, then we must adopt some theory by which human beings were somehow injected into nature from some sphere that is outside of nature, from some unnatural sphere. The theory of evolution is one of the foundations of the biological science and technology that reclaimers must use daily, if only implicitly, in their work: in considering, for instance, geological succession, immunity to pesticides, species extinction, and competition between native and exotic species. Only if we abandon the theory of evolution – and with it the basic assumptions that make reclamation possible – can we assume a radical distinction between humans and the rest of nature. We are another animal species that evolved, say the evolutionary biologists. So we must assume that humans are part of nature. If humans are as natural as anything else, how do we examine the claims of one part of nature (humans) with respect to those of others (e.g. rare native fish or insects)? Is a forest of humans – a suburb – more or less valuable than a forest of conifers? If there are lots of suburbs but only a few of that species of conifer, does the equation change?

Even if we give a priority to the good of nature as a whole, what criteria of goodness do we use? Should we be trying to maximize the biomass of a place? Or its living biomass? Or its richness in species? Or its contribution to the world’s species richness? Or its genetic variety? Or its population of higher organisms? Or of organisms with higher nervous systems? Or the richness of the cultures, animal or human, that inhabit it? Or – to change the criteria in other ways – the self-sustainability of the place? Its inheritance of former ecological or genetic patterns? Its efficiency in using solar energy? Its independence from the resources of other parts of the planet?

Each criterion has its own justifications. Sheer biomass has the advantage of not putting us humans in the position of judging which biological material outranks which, thereby giving us the top position in a hierarchy of judgment. Living biomass avoids the definitional problems involved in the criterion of biomass: is a caddisworm’s jacket of gravel part of its body, or not? Is a termite’s nest biomass? What about dead heartwood? My artificial hip joint? The undigested material in an owl’s stomach? Richness in species is, for obvious reasons, our common ecological measure. Contribution to species richness remedies the logical incompleteness of the criterion of species richness. Genetic variety speaks more directly to the health and adaptiveness of a living biome. Higher organisms act not only as a “canary,” signaling ecological soundness lower down, but also as indexes of several other factors cited as evidence of environmental value; and this criterion avoids the problem of overvaluing, for instance, a landscape that consists only of a billion species of moss and lichen, with wildly various genetic codes. The formula “organisms with higher nervous systems” sharpens the vague term “higher organisms” and also implies a criterion of what we might call “epistemic value”: a landscape observed by sentient inhabitants may be worth more than a landscape with no observers. In the same spirit, the cultural criterion of systemic value is sharper still: social animals that can share their observations may be better observers than solitary ones.

Self-sustainability has the advantage of appealing to the sense of peace and balance that we associate with nature. The inheritance of past patterns of life has scientific value. Efficiency in converting solar energy is more easily measurable by physicists, and gets us out of the philosophic tangle already manifest in this discussion. And “independence” has a nice ring of robustness about it.

Each priority would yield different policies. The biomass of a climax forest, in which most of the carbon is sequestered in dead heartwood, might be outranked in the “living biomass” criterion by other biomes, such as a swamp or a fish farm. But should we burn down climax forests to make room for more biodiverse prairies and savannas? A botanical garden might have more species yet – and more endangered ones. A suburb might have more genetic diversity, more nervous systems, more culture. A few species with rich and complicated genomes of many strains might have more genetic variety than a large number of monoclonal species. A eutrophicated pond might use solar energy very efficiently indeed. Barren rock might be very self-sustaining. Or should we be trying to create Jurassic Parks? If we accepted all the priorities I have mentioned, how should we rank them or weight them with respect to one another? Upon what principles? Principles derive from a deep understanding of something.

The question then becomes: what views of nature and of human beings will best serve good reclamation?

There are ways of avoiding some of the knotty philosophical problems involved in this approach. One rule of thumb has been the policy that reclamation should leave a place as close as possible to how it was found. Of course, we always fall short. If this is our goal, then we will always fail. The only difference our work might make would depend on how badly we fail. On purely psychological grounds, this goal would seem to provide a poor standard for rallying enthusiastic recruits to a much-needed profession! The often-used term “remediation” implies the restoration of health to something that was sick. But if health is defined as the status quo ante, the situation that prevailed before the alteration, then the plateau of Arizona was a healthier place before the Colorado incised the Grand Canyon in it, the devastated slopes of Mount St. Helens were healthier than the forests and meadows that have since grown up there, and the frozen rock beneath the glaciers of the last Ice Age was healthier than the mixed deciduous forest of the upper Midwest. So another question, which must accompany our question about human beings and nature, is: can reclamation go beyond remediation?

The term “remediation” is a good one, though, in its sense of healing, of organic process. Broken bones can heal to become stronger than before. To embark on physical therapy in order to bring back wasted muscles – as I have had to do a few times after surgery – is to begin a process of micro-tearing the muscle fibers, forcing the body to heal the tiny lesions with sturdier patches, the cells then warned of the greater challenges they must expect. When athletes train, they do the same thing, only to an already perfectly healthy body. Can we heal our landscapes in such a way as to improve on their original states? Indeed – to continue the sickness-and-healing metaphor – do we not often find that a period of grave or even life-threatening illness and convalescence opens up to us entirely new perspectives in our lives, enables us to pass through one of the maturational metamorphoses that enliven our souls? Can alteration of a landscape have the same effect, providing the landscape with a destiny and a role that are grander than its original ones?

But is nature itself capable of such strange growth? Much of our basic thinking about reclamation – getting back something that was gone, being unsatisfied with anything but what we had before – assumes that nature (presumably untouched by humans) was perfect before, and that its cycles and harmonies are, or ought to be, eternal. It is easy enough to point out that, if this were so, nature made a big mistake in evolving human beings; and if nature can err in one place, it can err in others, and is not as perfect as we thought. We would also have to explain those episodes in the Earth’s history when perfectly natural megameteor collisions or eruptions wiped out two-thirds of the planet’s species and plate tectonics and ocean currents created a snowball planet, with glaciers down to the equator. The word “nature” itself derives from the Latin word for being born, “nascere,” “natus,” and the Greek word “physis,” which gave us “physics” and “physical,” means “growth,” or “production.” Both the Latin word and the Greek word imply a dynamical process that can create new forms and beings, a paradoxical concept of naming something that is in terms of “is”’s “isn’ting” – the process of change and ...

Table of contents

• Designing the Reclaimed Landscape
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Contextualizing landscape alteration through historic, systemic, and biologic perspectives
• Part II Interdisciplinary responses and opportunities in reclamation
• Part III Technology, representation, and information in reclamation design
• Part IV Future directions and programs in US reclamation policy and law
• Index