Symbiotic Relationship
What has landscape architecture and industrialized society to learn from indigenous cultures and their symbiotic relationships with nature?
“‘Despite nature’s many earlier warnings, the pollution and destruction of the natural environment has gone on, intensively and extensively, without awakening a sufficient reaction; it is only during the last century that any systematic effort has been made to determine what constitutes a balanced and self-renewing environment, containing all the ingredient’s necessary for man’s biological prosperity, social cooperation and spiritual stimulation.’ (Ian McHarg, Design With Nature)
At the dawn of the twenty-first century it becomes clearer and clearer daily to scientists, environmentalists, and landscape architects alike, what massive climatic and ecological devastation has been caused by one-hundred-and-fifty years of human industrial activity. Mankind can no longer avert its eyes from environmental catastrophe by pretending that the science behind such doom-full asseverations is unsound, that the results are ambiguous, that the evidence is dubious. As these delusions are blown away by ever more certain evidence, there appear in their place the horrific spectre of rivers and oceans sated with pollution and filth, rainforests ravaged by deforestation, deserts extending at unnatural speeds, and the atmosphere a toxic and noxious fog filled by the vast emissions of our industrial societies. In less than two centuries, man’s industrial and technological acceleration has brought him to the brink of environmental collapse. It is now evident to all but the most blinkered or obstinate governments that comprehensive action is needed urgently to prevent our follies from going past the environmental ‘tipping-point’ that we have neared and whereafter we risk permanent and irreparable devastation. There have been myriad suggestions from environmentalists as to which solutions must be implemented to reverse this damage of the past two
“‘Despite nature’s many earlier warnings, the pollution and destruction of the natural environment has gone on, intensively and extensively, without awakening a sufficient reaction; it is only during the last century that any systematic effort has been made to determine what constitutes a balanced and self-renewing environment, containing all the ingredient’s necessary for man’s biological prosperity, social cooperation and spiritual stimulation.’ (Ian McHarg, Design With Nature)
At the dawn of the twenty-first century it becomes clearer and clearer daily to scientists, environmentalists, and landscape architects alike, what massive climatic and ecological devastation has been caused by one-hundred-and-fifty years of human industrial activity. Mankind can no longer avert its eyes from environmental catastrophe by pretending that the science behind such doom-full asseverations is unsound, that the results are ambiguous, that the evidence is dubious. As these delusions are blown away by ever more certain evidence, there appear in their place the horrific spectre of rivers and oceans sated with pollution and filth, rainforests ravaged by deforestation, deserts extending at unnatural speeds, and the atmosphere a toxic and noxious fog filled by the vast emissions of our industrial societies. In less than two centuries, man’s industrial and technological acceleration has brought him to the brink of environmental collapse. It is now evident to all but the most blinkered or obstinate governments that comprehensive action is needed urgently to prevent our follies from going past the environmental ‘tipping-point’ that we have neared and whereafter we risk permanent and irreparable devastation. There have been myriad suggestions from environmentalists as to which solutions must be implemented to reverse this damage of the past two