Ecological Design for Environmental Problem Solving

A s human populations increase demands on the land, ensuring that the environment has the ability to support and maintain an integrated, adaptive community of species and possesses important functions of natural ecosystems becomes increasingly challenging. Currently, how to incorporate ecological design into strategies for maintaining or improving environmental quality is unclear or poorly understood. The unrealized potential of ecological design could stem from its stark differences with other kinds of environmental solutions or from a lack of confidence that built projects actually improve the environment. The exhibit Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed/Nature Revealed affords an occasion to consider how ecological design complements other strategies and the likelihood that designs yield effective environmental problem solving. Solving most environmental problems, such as biodiversity losses from habitat fragmentation and pollution of air, water, and soil, often requires societal attention at broad scales. Catalysts for such collective societal action toward the environment take two forms: regulations or incentives. Although these catalysts are opposites, they both require science-based information and human emotion to succeed. In the United States, regulations have long been relied upon as efficient ways to translate what we know to be wrong with the environment into widespread change. These regulations, usually triggered by fear of catastrophe, proved successful in many ways, but not in others. For example, air pollution in some major urban areas has improved somewhat because of restrictions on automobile emissions, although concentrations of long-lived greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) are increasing globally because of fossil fuel combustion and forest land conversion (e.g., Risser 1999). Point sources of water pollution have been managed through discharge permits, but nonpoint sources such as sediment and nutrient losses have not. Scientists, planners, and designers have questioned the effectiveness of environmental regulation (e.g., van der Valk 1989; Olin 1997) and have suggested incentives as alternatives. Direct financial incentives to farmers, for example, created opportunities to restore more than 90,000 acres of drained wetlands in the United States between 1987 and 1990 (Dahl and Johnson 1991). If the rewards are solely monetary, however, the interest and commitment to these environmental restorations are sure to be fleeting. Incentives likely to be more durable are those that increase appreciation for environmental quality, either directly through experiences or indirectly through education (Schroeder 1996, in part). This mode relies on people experiencing places, understanding their relevance, and wanting to have more places like them. Ecological design is, in large part, about creating the places to think about, appreciate, and advance environmental quality. The exhibit Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed/Nature Revealed provides an opportunity to compare the motivations, approaches, and potential outcomes of ecological designs from many contexts. The designed landscapes are geographically diverse, including those from temperate to arid lands, mountains to wetlands and rivers. They attempt to demonstrate effective solutions for dealing with environmental diletnmas of urban stormwater, ecosystem restoration, industrial contaminants, and sustainable land use. In spite of the diversity of these landscapes, each designer undoubtedly grappled with challenges common to ecological design: the perceived dichotomy of art and science; the role of site design in addressing broadscale environmental problems; the desire to make landscapes for people while remediating environmental damage. My analysis of this exhibit’s work focused on the ecological premises used in the designs. While popular notions of ecology are sometimes broadened to include ethics and politics related to land use ("Soil That New York Rejected and Recollects" and "Windows of Opportunity" in this exhibit), the scientific definition of ecology is operative here; that is, the study of plants and animals, their interactions, and their relationship to the environment. Teasing out the scientific underpinnings allows the risks of biophysical failure to be assessed. Minimizing these risks in ecological designs often may not be limited by the technical competence of designers but by the scientific information available. The preponderance of data collected by ecologists in North America comes from natural landscapes, not cultural ones (that is, urban, industrial, agricultural). Consequently, ecological principles relevant to designed landscapes are potentially lacking. I considered how the landscapes included in this exhibition could be used to generate the science needed to refine ecological design. Generally, ecological designers focus on one to a few ecological phenomena at a particular site to ensure that the meanings and qualities of the places created can be clearly understood. Thus I also evaluated the appropriateness of the chosen ecological phenomena to the site on the basis of three criteria. First, the ecological phenomena chosen should be relevant to both the site and its surrounding region so that there is sotne way to link what is learned at a site to larger landscape issues. Second, ecological phenomena should be revealed honestly at the scale of the