Design With Nature Now ed. by Fredrick Steiner, et al. (review)

DESIGN WITH NATURE NOW Fredrick Steiner, Richard Weller, Karen M'Closkey, Billy Fleming (eds.), Design with Nature Now. Lincoln Land Institute of Land Policy, 2019

As stated in the foreword by Andrew Revich, "In Design with Nature Now, an array of [Ian] McHarg's contemporaries—along with practitioners, scientists, and scholars in fields from planning to ecology to comparative literature—explain why there has never been a greater need for McHarg's way" (p. xi). I still have my first edition of Design with Nature (McHarg, 1969) that I used throughout graduate school at the University of Massachusetts while pursuing an MLA degree with an emphasis on landscape planning. I hosted Ian McHarg as one of our major speakers at Our National Landscape Conference at Lake Tahoe in 1979, where I first met him.

All the writings in this book, apart from the editors' introduction, stem from the Design with Nature Now Conference in June 2019 at the University of Pennsylvania. Except for two keynote addresses, the other speakers were asked to address McHarg's legacy through selected projects. There are a number of projects presented in chapters 10–16 that illustrate a distinctively McHarg approach to planning and design. These project chapters are grouped under human ecology and design, big wilds, rising tides, fresh waters, toxic lands, and urban futures. Chapters 17 through 26 are a series of commentaries or essays on the 25 projects presented in the middle of the book.

The opening chapter is a biographical essay by Fredrick Steiner, which is followed by short tributes from scholars and practitioners who worked closely with McHarg. Other chapters by Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, James Corner, Anuradha Mathur, Laurie Olin, Anne Sprin, Dana Olin, Brina Evans, and Laurel McSherry offer insight into how McHarg influenced them as scholars and practitioners.

Recently there has been a burst of articles commenting on McHarg's contribution to the environmental movement as well as landscape architecture and planning. Although some are critical of his contradictory theories (Herrington, 2010), others expand on the range and scope of his contribution to an ecological planning theory (Steiner & Fleming, 2019), as an application to specific projects (Wagner et al, 2016; Yong & Li, 2016), and as systems thinking for resiliency planning (Bryant & Turner, 2019). Whatever the theoretical debate, McHarg certainly had an impact on the fields of landscape architecture and environmental planning.

The short essays in chapters 1 to 9 paint a rich picture of McHarg and his contribution. Chapters 10 to 16 are richly illustrated design and planning projects reflective of the McHarg approach. Chapters 17–26 are more reflective communications on the state of ecological planning and design.

Berger and Susskind in chapter 17 highlight two mega-regional initiatives: (1) the 2050—An Energetic Odyssey in the North Sea, which includes the installation of some 25,000 wind turbines by 2050, and (2) the Great Green Wall initiative in the Sahara and Sahel regions of Africa to counter desertification. The overall chapter theme addresses the danger of oversimplification versus exploring the complexity of environmental issues.

In chapter, 18 Thomas Compton describes the history of a proposed marine park in the Gernsten Creek tidal estuary to the current estuary restoration effort using a McHarg-like ecological planning approach.

Rob Holmes, in chapter 19, stresses abandoning what he calls "landscape solutionism" and emphasizes that landscape planners should move toward using cartography generationally and become more involved with using landscape modeling to project landscape futures.

Kathleen John-Alder, in chapter 20, focuses on "the need to see the connection between things and the desire to pose generative solutions to perceived challenges the ecological axiom that … links design with nature rather than to design with nature now" (p. 271).

Nina-Marie Lister in chapter 21 describes the disconnect between landscape planning and conservation science and the need to move from conservation science to socioecological design to better address large-scale biodiversity conservation planning.

David Orr in chapter...