Abstract
Concerted efforts to balance human use with ecological concerns sustainably in the twenty-first century continue to be necessary. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, visionary giants like George Catlin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Perkins Marsh, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Ebenezer Howard alerted us to the negative impacts of human actions on the landscape. Today, almost two hundred years later, human impacts are greater and more complex, making solutions increasingly difficult to achieve. Landscapes serve as life support systems for people and other organisms but continue to gradually degrade, even as promising solutions are offered. An urgent need, thus, exists to continue to search for ways to effectively balance human use with ecological concerns.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949); Forster Ndubisi, Ecological Planning: A Historical and Comparative Synthesis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4.
- 2.
Frederick Steiner, “Landscape,” in Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 77.
- 3.
Ibid., 86.
- 4.
Frederick Steiner, Design for A Vulnerable Planet (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2011): Landscape Architecture Foundation [LAF], 2000.
- 5.
Mariana Alberti, “The Effects of Urban Patterns on Ecosystem Function,” International Regional Science Review 28, no. 2 (2005): 168.
- 6.
The United Nations, accessed September 10, 2013, and January 25, 2014. http://www.un.org. Demographic change and dynamics in the United States follows a similar trend. Between 1960 and 2010, the population of the United States grew from 179.3 million to 308.7 million, representing a 72.2 percent increase. It is estimated that by the year 2050, the population of the United States will be approximately 410 million, and 86 percent of this growth will be located in metropolitan areas.
- 7.
Neil Everton, “The Fragile Division,” in The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 93. Two distinct viewpoints about people’s relations to nature emerged that are still evident today. The first is that nature has an order, a pattern that humans have to understand, conserve, and manage with wisdom. The other is that nature is a resource to be used by people for their exclusive use (Worster 1979). Different people, in different ways, and for different reasons have aligned themselves on either side of the duality. Those who subscribe to the first viewpoint believe that nature has an order that has an intrinsic value, that is, a value that exists independent of humans, that needs to be nurtured and preserved. On the contrary, adherents of the second viewpoint look to nature as a storehouse of resources to be organized and used by people. The scientific historian Donald Worster commented on the ramifications of this duality for understanding the history of ecology. “In any case, one might cast the history of ecology as a struggle between rival views of the relationship between humans and nature: one view devoted to the discovery of intrinsic value and its preservation, the other to the creation of an instrumentalized world and it exploration.” In David Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1979), xi.
- 8.
Everton, “The Fragile Division,” 93.
- 9.
Anne W. Spirn, “The Authority of Nature: Conflict, Confusion, and Renewal in Design, Planning, and Ecology,” in Ecology and Design: A Framework for Learning, Kristina Hill and Bart Johnson (eds.), (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001), 32. Landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn’s views on this topic are equally instructive. She pointed out that “Nature is mirror of and for culture. Ideas about nature reveal as much or more about human society as they do about non-human processes and features.” Yet, people’s interactions with the environment may be harmonious or destructive.
- 10.
Forster Ndubisi, “Sustainable Regionalism Evolutionary Framework and Prospects for Managing Metropolitan Landscapes,” Landscape Journal 27, no. 1 (2008): 51–68.
- 11.
American Farmland Trust, accessed February 16, 2011. http://www.farmland.org/resources; Steiner, Design for A Vulnerable Planet.
- 12.
Alberti, “The Effects of Urban Patterns on Ecosystem Function.”
- 13.
Ndubisi, “Sustainable Regionalism Evolutionary Framework and Prospects”; Alberti, “The Effects of Urban Patterns on Ecosystem Function”; Mark McDonnell et al., “Ecosystem Processes Along an Urban-to-Rural Gradient,” Urban Ecosystems 1, no. 1 (1997): 21–36.
- 14.
Bruce Wilcox and Dennis D. Murphy, “Conservation Strategy: The Effects of Fragmentation on Extinction,” The American Naturalist 125, no. 6 (1985): 879.
- 15.
Ndubisi, “Sustainable Regionalism Evolutionary Framework and Prospects,” 51.
- 16.
John M. Levy, Contemporary Urban Planning (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988).
- 17.
U.S Bureau of the Census, 2010.
- 18.
The resurgence of population into the inner city has some costs. For instance, it is creating inequality in urban areas. Those who have more access to resources and power benefit substantially from inner-city investments, while the underprivileged and economically challenged miss out on the emerging opportunities; for instance, see http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2014/02/why-income-inquality-so-much-worse-atlanta-omaha/8451/.
- 19.
Levy, Contemporary Urban Planning.
- 20.
Ndubisi, Ecological Planning: A Historical and Comparative Synthesis.
- 21.
Frederick Steiner. The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008), 4.
- 22.
Frederick Steiner, Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead; Ndubisi, Ecological Planning: A Historical and Comparative Synthesis.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Forster O. Ndubisi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ndubisi, F.O. (2014). Introduction. In: Ndubisi, F.O. (eds) The Ecological Design and Planning Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-491-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-491-8_1
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-59726-646-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-491-8
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)