To Heal the Earth

Selected Writings of Ian L. McHarg

Ian L. McHarg, Frederick R. Steiner

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781597269223
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Ian L. McHarg's landmark book Design with Nature changed the face of landscape architecture and planning by promoting the idea that the design of human settlements should be based on ecological principles. McHarg was one of the earliest and most influential proponents of the notion that an understanding of the processes that form landscapes should underlie design decisions.

In To Heal the Earth, McHarg has joined with Frederick Steiner, a noted scholar of landscape architecture and planning, to bring forth a valuable cache of his writings produced between the 1950s and the 1990s. McHarg and Steiner have each provided original material that links the writings together, and places them within the historical context of planning design work and within the larger field of ecological planning as practiced today.

The book moves from the theoretical-beginning with the 1962 essay "Man and Environment" which sets forth the themes of religion, science, and creativity that emerge and reappear throughout McHarg's work -- to the practical, including discussions of methods and techniques for ecological planning as well as case studies. Other sections address the link between ecology and design, and the issue of ecological planning at a regional scale, covering topics such as education and training necessary to develop the field of ecological planning, how to organize and arrange biophysical information to reveal landscape patterns, the importance of incorporating social factors into ecological planning, and more.

To Heal the Earth provides a larger framework and a new perspective on McHarg's work that brings to light the growth and development of his key ideas over a forty year period. It is an important contribution to the literature, and will be essential reading for students and scholars of ecological planning, as well as for professional planners and landscape architects.

Part I

Changing the Nature of Design and Planning: Theoretical Writings

Design with nature is an elegant theory. Both simple and direct, it is as much a proposition as a principle. Design with nature is a normative theory, an ideal to be achieved. A process is suggested to reach that goal. The conception that we should design with nature is deeply rooted in the Western arts and sciences; some would argue it is a universal theme underlying all cultures. Certainly nature as represented by our material surroundings and our own human character underlies all art and science. In Western societies knowledge about our surroundings has too often been used “to multiply and to subdue” nature. A grand canyon exists between the values espoused and the reality created.

A better fit between the ideal and the actual, between our surroundings and our interventions, has long been promoted in design theory. From ancient to modern times, architects have worked to fit buildings to a given site. In the first century B.C., the Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio devoted much of his ten books on architecture to understanding sites and to the primordial elements of air, fire, earth, and water. In the planning of a city, he noted the need to “consider and observe the natures of birds, fishes, and land animals” and suggested that the designs of houses should “conform to the nature of the country and to diversities of climate.” Two thousand years later, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright advocated an “organic” approach to architecture, seeking to blur the distinction between the inside and the outside of a building. Such wisdom should be used in the planning of groups of houses that form communities as well as communities that comprise cities and their regions.

Landscape architects and planners have also promoted environmental understanding to guide their arts. Jens Jensen advocated the use of native plants in park design. Patrick Geddes promoted the idea of a regional survey of environmental factors to precede planning, a concept embraced by Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and others.

With his contribution of connecting the science of ecology to the environmental design and planning arts, McHarg is an important part of this tradition. He linked the Vitruvius–Wright–Jensen–Mumford tradition with that of Aldo Leopold, Paul Sears, and Rachel Carson.

The following five papers represent the core of McHarg’s theoretical ideas. They overlap with the topics of the subsequent sections of the book on planning and design, but focus more on the theoretical than the applied aspects (although McHarg has always jumped back and forth). The earliest essay was published in 1963 and the most recent in 1997. There is a gap between the four theoretical papers from the 1960s and the 1997 article in this section. This gap is filled with the four subsequent sections that illustrate how his theories were transformed into actions.

McHarg has identified “Man and Environment” as his first serious theoretical writing that set the stage for those that followed, including the themes of religion, science, and creativity that emerge and reappear throughout his work. What may surprise some readers and some of the critics who lump McHarg in the American antiurban tradition is the attention McHarg gives to city life and his desire to seek out an alternative urban morphology. His interest in, and knowledge of, urban history is also impressive and due in part to the mentorship of Mumford.

McHarg’s 1964 “The Place of Nature in the City of Man” explicitly addresses “the place of nature” in our urban habitat. The prose exhibits McHarg’s often sardonic humor as well as his clever way with words, for example, “that anarchy which constitutes urban growth” and “the place where man and nature are in closest harmony in the city is the cemetery.” The essay clearly defines the urban environmental agenda that still dominates planning debates: the loss of prime farmland “by the most scabrous housing,” the pollution of air and water, the paving over of precious green spaces within the city, the filling in of marshes that we now call wetlands, and the gradual uglification of everything. These processes occur worldwide from Phoenix to Madrid, from Mexico City to Seoul. McHarg lays the blame of the “urban growth anarchy” on economic determinism and he provides a theoretical antidote.

In the 1966 article, “Ecological Determinism,” McHarg proposed the use of ecology in planning and design to avert the necropolis predicted by Mumford. The Mumford influence on McHarg’s 1960s writings is evident. So too is the thinking of the great minds he invited to his The House We Live In television program and his “Man and Environment” course at Penn, especially, I think, Paul Sears, Paul Shepard, and Ruth Patrick. He also learned much from his interactions with his Penn colleagues, such as David Goddard and the wonderful Loren Eiseley, whom McHarg once described as “a large, wise, round, magnificent man.”

In “Ecological Determinism” McHarg pushes his ideas for a new urban morphology, one determined by ecology to counter the prevailing economic determinism, which McHarg masterfully critiques. Ecological determinism differs from environmental determinism as it was developed by geographers and other social scientists early in the twentieth century. These social scientists were strongly influenced by biological ideas, and briefly the prospects for a synthetic human ecology were bright. Unfortunately these ideas were appropriated by individuals seeking to advance racist notions about the influence of surroundings on human physiology. These theories were rightly debunked, but an unfortunate drifting began of the social scientists away from the natural scientists that is only recently being bridged. McHarg’s ecological determinism focuses on the importance of interactions and rather exclusively on the role of surroundings.

Another contribution of the “Ecological Determinism” paper is McHarg’s treatment of the English landscape movement. Before McHarg’s analysis, the English landscape school was viewed mainly as a period of garden history populated by funny, eccentric people doing bold things. He observed that “Nature itself produced the esthetic” of the landscapes designed by William Kent, Capability Brown, Humphry Repton, and others. McHarg recognized the complexity of their work, which contrasted the simplicity (or “simple-mindedness”) of French Renaissance garden design. Since McHarg’s 1966 observations, the English landscape school has been viewed as an applied ecology that formed the basis for creating functional landscapes with a new aesthetic.

McHarg was quite clear early on, even before the publication of Design with Nature about his quest. In the 1968 “Values, Process and Form,” he wrote: “We need a general theory which encompasses physical, biological, and cultural evolution; which contains an intrinsic value system; which includes criteria of creativity and destruction and, not least, principles by which we can measure adaptations and their form.” The theory was to be based on an understanding of ecology: “The place, the plants, the animals, and man and the orderings which they have accomplished over time, are revealed in form.” Our role, then, was to be creative agents of change, that is, “The role of man is to understand nature, which is to say man, and to intervene to enhance its creative processes.”

Creativity was one of McHarg’s central and recurring themes. His persistent optimism is impressive. McHarg became mildly disillusioned about the state of the earth without being embittered. His optimism provides a counterbalance to the pessimism, the necropolis of Mumford. “There are the challenges. What are the opportunities?” is a question posed by McHarg frequently.

The writings from the 1960s are as contemporary as if they were written today, except for his use of “man” instead of “human” or “people,” an indication of his time when “man” was used in its Greek sense to refer to humanity. They address contemporary, perhaps timeless, topics. That we should “understand nature, which is to say man” is a response to critics of environmentalists who claim ecological designers and planners ignore people. In fact, McHarg’s themes from the 1960s foreshadow Neil Evernden’s ideas in his insightful The Social Creation of Nature (1992) as well as Daniel Botkin’s in Discordant Harmonies (1990). Like Evernden, McHarg indeed recognizes that nature is a social creation. Like Botkin in his “New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century,” McHarg has long acknowledged people as part of ecology, as active agents who interact with and bring about change in their environments. Similar, too, are McHarg’s ideas to those of the Dutch geobiochemist Peter Westbroek (1991) that life, including human life, is a geological force.

He proposed the concept of the biosphere as a superorganism a decade before James Lovelock (1979) and Lynn Margulis put forth their Gaia hypothesis. Although his focus in the 1960s was more on local and regional landscapes, even then McHarg offered a global view, graphically displayed in the early use of the portrait of the Earth from space on the cover of Design with Nature. Early on, he provocatively compared people to “a global pathogen, an agent of planetary disease.” Simultaneously he recognized the potential for people to become the Earth’s physicians.

His reflective 1997 “Natural Factors in Planning” challenges the human race to transform itself from being a “global pathogen” to that of a catalyst for maintaining crucial processes. After presenting the consequences for not becoming such catalysts, McHarg summarizes the challenges to more effective ecological planning. First, there is the fragmentation of knowledge. “Integration requires bridging between separate sciences,” McHarg observes.

A second challenge is the fragmentation of government. “There are redundant and often conflicting policies, evidence of cross purposes” that handicap governmental environmental management efforts. McHarg also identifies the inadequacies of planning initiatives to respond to the environmental challenge, but, he provides hope.

McHarg observes the emergence of the environment in public policy since the 1970s. He gives several reasons for optimism, including the environmental literacy of today’s children. Scientific knowledge about the environment, although still fragmented, has grown. He urges us to “direct our energies toward synthesis.” Such synthesis of environmental knowledge is necessary “to improve the human condition.”

Design the nature of the planet: heal it, restore its health. This is our challenge, this is our opportunity. In these five chapters, McHarg provides a foundation. Ecology is the basis for that foundation—ecology, the subversive science, as Paul Sears (1964) called it. Sears speculated that if ecology was “taken seriously for the long-run welfare of mankind, [then it would] endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies, whatever their doctrinal commitments” (1964, p. 11). Ian McHarg has indeed taken ecology seriously and, in doing so, changed how we approach planning and design.

References

Botkin, Daniel. 1990. Discordant Harmonies, A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Evernden, Neil. 1992. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lovelock, J. E. 1979. Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sears, Paul. 1964. “Ecology—A Subversive Subject:” BioScience 14 (7, July):11.

Westbroek, Peter. 1991. Life as a Geological Force. New York: Norton.

1

Man and Environment (1963)

Ian McHarg considers the writing of this paper, published in The Urban Condition edited by Leonard Duhl, as “a threshold in my professional life and . . . the first summation of my perceptions and intentions.” It began when McHarg was invited by Duhl to join his Committee on Environmental Variables and Mental Health. Duhl, a medical doctor, was director of research for the National Institute of Mental Health. He selected the members of the committee, which included Herbert Gans, J. B. Jackson, and Melvin Webber.

For McHarg the paper represented a “tremendous leap in scale.” He changed his focus from small-scale urban concerns to a targer regional vision. He wrote “Man and Environment” at the time when he was organizing his The House We Live In television program for CBS. The influence of the guests from that program is evident in this paper. Not only did the scale of McHarg’s concerns change, but also the nature of his audience. Prior to 1962, his lectures outside of Penn had been limited to state associations of garden clubs, where he agreed to devote half his speech to garden design history if he could spend the other half speaking about the environment. This paper is a “coming out,” where the half garden designer is shed for the complete environmentalist. It was, according to McHarg, “my most embracing address on the subject of the environment to that point.”

The nature and scale of this enquiry can be simply introduced through an image conceived by Loren Eiseley. Man, far out in space, looks back to the distant earth, a celestial orb, blue-green oceans, green of verdant land, a celestial fruit. Examination discloses blemishes on the fruit, dispersed circles from which extend dynamic tentacles. The man concludes that these cankers are the works of man and asks, “Is man but a planetary disease?”

There are at least two conceptions within this image. Perhaps the most important is the view of a unity of life covering the earth, land and oceans, interacting as a single superorganism, the biosphere. A direct analogy can be found in man, composed of billion upon billion of cells, but all of these operating as a single organism. From this the full relevance of the second conception emerges, the possibility that man is but a dispersed disease in the world-life body.

The conception of all life interacting as a single superorganism is as novel as is the conception of man as a planetary disease. The suggestion of man the destroyer, or rather brain the destroyer, is salutary to society which has traditionally abstracted brain from body, man from nature, and vaunted the rational process. This, too, is a recent view. Yet the problems are only of yesterday. Pre-atomic man was an inconsequential geological, biological, and ecological force; his major power was the threat of power. Now, in an instant, post-atomic man is the agent of evolutionary regression, a species now empowered to destroy all life.

In the history of human development, man has long been puny in the face of overwhelmingly powerful nature. His religions, philosophies, ethics, and acts have tended to reflect a slave mentality, alternately submissive or arrogant toward nature. Judaism, Christianity, Humanism tend to assert outrageously the separateness and dominance of man over nature, while animism and nature worship tend to assert total submission to an arbitrary nature. These attitudes are not urgent when human societies lack the power to make any serious impact on environment. These same attitudes become of first importance when man holds the power to cause evolutionary regressions of unimaginable effect or even to destroy all life.

Modern man is confronted with the awful problem of comprehending the role of man in nature. He must immediately find a modus vivendi, he must seek beyond for his role in nature, a role of unlimited potential yet governed by laws which he shares with all physical and organic systems. The primacy of man today is based more upon his power to destroy than to create. He is like an aboriginal, confronted with the necessity of operating a vast and complex machine, whose only tool is a hammer. Can modern man aspire to the role of agent in creation, creative participant in a total, unitary, evolving environment? If the pre-atomic past is dominated by the refinement of concern for man’s acts towards man, the inauguration of the atomic age increases the dimension of this ancient concern and now adds the new and urgent necessity of understanding and resolving the interdependence of man and nature.

While the atomic threat overwhelms all other considerations, this is by no means the only specter. The population implosion may well be as cataclysmic as the nuclear explosion. Should both of these threats be averted there remain the lesser processes of destruction which have gathered momentum since the nineteenth century. In this period we have seen the despoliation of continental resources accumulated over aeons of geological time, primeval forests destroyed, ancient resources of soil mined and sped to the sea, marching deserts, great deposits of fossil fuel dissipated into the atmosphere. In the country, man has ravaged nature; in the city, nature has been erased and man assaults man with insalubrity, ugliness, and disorder. In short, man has evolved and proliferated by exploiting historic accumulations of inert and organic resources, historic climaxes of plants and animals. His products are reserved for himself, his mark on the environment is most often despoliation and wreckage.

The Duality of Man and Nature

Conceptions of man and nature range between two wide extremes. The first, central to the Western tradition, is man-oriented. The cosmos is but a pyramid erected to support man on its pinnacle, reality exists only because man can observe it, indeed God is made in the image of man. The opposing view, identified with the Orient, postulates a unitary and all-encompassing nature within which man exists, man in nature.

These opposing views are the central duality, man and nature, West and East, white and black, brains and testicles, Classicism and Romanticism, orthodoxy and transnaturalism in Judaism, St. Thomas and St. Francis, Calvin and Luther, anthropomorphism and naturalism. The Western tradition vaunts the individual and the man-brain, and denigrates nature, animal, non-brain. In the Orient nature is omnipotent, revered, and man is but an aspect of nature. It would be as unwise to deny the affirmative aspects of either view as to diminish their negative effects. Yet today this duality demands urgent attention. The adequacy of the Western view of man and nature deserves to be questioned. Further, one must ask if these two views are mutually exclusive.

The opposition of these attitudes is itself testimony to an underlying unity, the unity of opposites. Do our defining skin and nerve ends divide us from environment or unite us to it? Is the perfectibility of man self-realizable? Is the earth a storeroom awaiting plunder? Is the cosmos a pyramid erected to support man?

The inheritors of the Judaic-Christian-H umanist tradition have received their injunction from Genesis, a man-oriented universe, man exclusively made in the image of God, given dominion over all life and non-life, enjoined to subdue the earth. The naturalist tradition in the West has no comparable identifiable text. It may be described as holding that the cosmos is unitary, that all systems are subject to common physical laws yet having unlimited potential; that in this world man is simply an inhabitant, free to develop his own potential. This view questions anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism; it does not diminish either man’s uniqueness or his potential, only his claims to primacy and exclusive divinity. This view assumes that the precu...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I - Changing the Nature of Design and Planning: Theoretical Writings
• Part II - Planning the Ecological Region
• Part III - Form and Function Are Indivisible
• Part IV - Revealing the Genius of the Place: Methods and Techniques for Ecological Planning
• Part V - Linking Knowledge to Action
• Prospectus (1998)
• Acknowledgment of Sources
• Index
• Island Press Board of Directors