The Native Landscape Reader

Series Editor’s Preface

ix series Editor’s Preface The Native Landscape Reader edited by Robert Grese is the inaugural volume in the series Critical Perspectives in the History of Environmental Design published by the Library of American Landscape History and the University of Massachusetts Press. The aim of the series is to offer incisive commentary on issues concerning environmental design at this moment of unprecedented change. Global warming, a burgeoning aging population, peak oil, international economic tumult, technological advancements, and other factors ensure that the world our grandchildren will inhabit as adults will differ significantly from ours today. A probing retrospective of environmental design practices can provide the important insights of history, showing us approaches that are timelessly effective which can enrich our present and future innovative environmental strategies. In his 2010 book The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, the urban planning theorist Richard Florida delineates three major eras of economic crisis in the United States during the past 150 years—the Panic of 1873, the Great Depression, and the current recession. In the years after the first two crises, he notes, Americans systematically transformed the national landscape through several interventions. Following the crash of the 1870s, large industrial cities were built, and by 1920 the United States had become an urban rather than agricultural nation for the first time. Entrepreneurs (or robber barons ) supported by government incentives connected these burgeoning cities to the resource-rich hinterlands by an extensive network of rails, hastening extraction at an unprecedented scale. After the Great Depression, Americans again substantially altered the national landscape. The post–World War II era witnessed massive highway construction and the explosive growth of residential suburbs, enabling greater freedom of movement and making the American dream of home ownership available to millions. But the decentralized pattern of landscape change has also caused harm to the environment, and it is x sERiEs EditoR’s PREfaCE increasingly difficult to sustain. The seeds of our current economic downturn, Florida demonstrates, were sown during these past decades of suburban and exurban development. Florida predicts that the current severe recession will lead to an era of revolutionary changes which will create a more environmentally sound and socially equitable landscape. But his prediction does not take into account that it will be up to generations of Americans increasingly disconnected from physical place to make these critically necessary changes. Grese astutely describes this broken connection in his epilogue. Other writers including Bill McKibben in The Age of Missing Information, Maggie Jackson in Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, and Richard Louv in his awardwinning Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder have elucidated the grave consequences of a distracted and environmentally detached populace. In this moment of urgent need for reconnection and innovation, we hope that Critical Perspectives in the History of Environmental Design will foster a crossdisciplinary dialogue on timeless lessons to be relearned about the human/nature relationship , which will inform the decisions we make and the places we design today and in the future. A consideration of the words in the series title (critical / perspectives / history / environmental / design) illuminates how forthcoming volumes will help readers to better understand their place in natural and built landscapes. Critical can mean either a negative appraisal or clear and discerning judgment. Series authors will not only bring clear and discerning judgment to bear on a wide variety of topics in the history of environmental design, but they will also offer commentary on negative critiques which will reveal the sources of different perspectives. Just as the composition of a perspective drawing can vary greatly depending on the location of the station point and number and location of vanishing points, so too here analyses of various perspectives will uncover the station points, or beliefs, from which critiques are leveled. Kate Soper, in addressing the question asked in her book What Is Nature?, explicates three different perspectives on nature: the lay, the metaphysical, and the realist. The lay perspective, shared by many average citizens, holds that those things which appear different from human artifice (plants, for example) are the most natural (or, put more simply, green is natural and gray is unnatural). This seems a particularly unreflective point of view, but it is nevertheless widely shared. The lay perspective, which so completely disconnects nature from people, also leads readily to the commodification of nature. The metaphysical perspective suggests that nature is a human construct and, as...