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143 CHAPTER 11 Our Lake, Our Responsibility Ecologically, every place is unique, and human history and culture add layers to that uniqueness. Water is vital ecologically and culturally. Today, ecosystems and ecological values are under increasing threat, and human nature is such that new threats continue to emerge. Living close to the water’s edge disturbs one of the ecosystem’s most vulnerable spots, but it is also central to our self-understanding. Reinventing our lakeshore living requires rethinking place identity and shifting cultural identity in the areas we inhabit. Leopold, Olson, and Whyte were keenly aware of this, and their writings, each in a different way, shed light on the complexity of such endeavor, on the complexity of the relations between individual, community, and place. They suggested, sometimes plainly, sometimes subtly, how we might resolve the issues we’ve created, issues that strongly affect the lakes we love. Leopold was primarily involved in management of areas with a history of tragic desecration and abuse, with a variety of stakeholders pushing in different directions. He advanced a land ethic in the hope that he would see immediate improvement in our treatment of nature. Olson referred often to “wilderness” and was active in its protection. He was very inclusive in his interpretation of wilderness, believing that a wilderness experience can take place in the backyard or in a city park. Whyte personally experienced the legacy of suburbanization and its implications for nature. He promoted cluster developments and conservation easements, and he used science to improve city public spaces. Their combined experience makes it unequivocally clear that change is possible, that shards of nature and wildness can have great value, and that careful management can promote ecosystem diversity and resilience. Devising community design strategies that support the insights of our writers requires a cautious approach to the landscape; much of their writing is an argument for context-sensitive design, for carefully embedded interventions. It is also an argument for uniqueness. Understanding the unique character of a place can lead the way to a design that might actually mean something for the people living there, inspiring them to protect the quality of space, life, and ecology. Continuing our current habits of parceling up the lakeshore, of creating individual enclaves on the water, will not work. Building on actual natural and cultural assets is crucial in the creation of place identity. Maintaining place identity can only occur in a community, so the design must envision and encourage community. Leopold, Olson, and Whyte wrote often of combining uses in appropriate settings and separating uses in others. The same applies to the coexistence and separation of humans and the rest of nature; a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the local landscape can help to devise strategies to preserve wildness here, restore it there, or in some places aim for a more cultural landscape and plan. Landscapes help form places. Their writings also argue for a 144| Making Good Things Happen comprehensive approach: working toward place identity on the smallest scale can only work if there is a concerted effort to design at larger scales. There must be not only a design for the home, but a vision for the whole lake, the city, the region. Our writers also confront us with the uneasy fact that things become more appreciated when they are rare. The environmental movement gained momentum when much was lost. But people also get attached to what they appreciate and understand. Giving people the opportunity to know a place better, to experience a place in a different way, to enrich that experience and multiply the perspectives on a place, not only creates place identity but can also deepen the attachment to that place. Olson explained in Open Horizons, “only if there is understanding can there be reverence, and only when there is deep emotional feeling is anyone willing to battle.” Showing people some of the characteristics that make a place unique, like its vulnerable wetlands or rare wetland birds, can help foster their appreciation, attachment, and stewardship to that place. Bringing people too close endangers the qualities observed. Careful designs can add greatly to the precision of separation and combination; precise framing of approach and perspective and creative and precise routing can enable experience and attachment while preserving the most vulnerable ecologies. In addition, we could be more careful in our disturbance of complicated and intricate systems that have been around for a very long time. We pollute our lands and, given time lags...

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