Copyright Notice

Individual articles on this website are copyrighted. Articles may be downloaded for personal use; users are forbidden to reproduce, republish, redistribute, or resell any materials from this website in either machine-readable form or any other form without permission of the author and NHLA or payment of the appropriate royalty for reuse. For permissions and other copyright-related questions, please email your question to: editor [at] nhlaonline.org.

Dr. Dirt

October 2009

Collapse: What's a Landscaper to Do?

- "not my problem" doesn't cut it anymore

After reading the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Jared Diamond, 2005), I felt compelled to share some of the author's ideas (August and September of this Newsletter). The skeleton of the book consists of case studies of past and present societies, and how they drove themselves to extinction or flourished, based largely on their relationship with their landscape. The flesh of the book is an examination of why they failed or succeeded.

So what role or roles might a landscape practitioner play in all this drama? - Or any of us, for that matter, as engaged human beings living in the landscape and living courtesy of our landscape. How can we help our ecosystem survive and thrive, thereby helping humans too? The primary directive might be taken from Hippocrates' admonition to physicians: "First, do no harm." Those four words cover a lot of territory, and can be applied directly to our approach to our environment and to each other. It might be re-phrased as, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," where "others" includes all living organisms and their support systems, as well as other humans. Most religions share this basic directive, not that many of us necessarily follow it very well -which is a lot of the problem. As the human population has soared, and as our technology and culture have radically expanded the environmental effects of each individual human, our impact on global systems has become severe.

Hippocrates' concept of preventing damage was adapted to global ecology twenty years ago in a framework called the "Natural Step." Karl-Henrik Robert, a Swedish scientist, saw declining ecosystem health across the planet and asked, "What are the inescapable and inarguable truths about the degradation of the environment?" Or put another way, "How can we do no harm? What are the basic rules and guidelines?" He polled scientists and others around the world, got a list, re-polled, reduced the list, repeatedly, and -on the twenty-second revision -boiled it all down into four simple rules, the "system conditions for a sustainable Earth." To quote from their website (www.naturalstep.org):
"In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:

1. concentrations of substances extracted from the earth's crust (for example, heavy metals and fossil fuels);
2. concentrations of substances produced by society (for example, dioxins, PCBs, and DDT);
3. degradation by physical means (for example, over-harvesting forests and paving over critical wildlife habitat);
4. and in that society, people are not subject to conditions that systemically undermine their capacity to meet their needs (for example, unsafe working conditions and not enough pay to live on)."

These four system conditions for a sustainable human presence on the planet are not really debatable. Most of the world population, however, is having a lot of trouble abiding by any of these "natural rules."

The landscape professions are not exempt from the system conditions of the Natural Step. All of our work is in the environment, and I like to say that all landscapers are environmentalists. We can do a better job of adhering to and educating clients about Best Management Practices (practices with the least harmful and most beneficial environmental effects, and with positive economic and social effects). This article isn't the forum for an exhaustive list of BMP's - and John Batson has written some good articles here about the need for this in the industry - but examples of landscape BMP's abound: reduce fossil fuel use by using more fuel-efficient machines and more efficient equipment management; reduce and eliminate use of fertilizer, pesticide, irrigation by good site preparation and using site-appropriate species; any chemicals, if used, should be target-specific, otherwise non-toxic, and break down readily; leave grass clippings to decompose on site, mow and chop fall foliage as it accumulates, and leave pruned woodies on site to the extent possible; conserve site soil and the soil ecosystem by reducing erosion and compaction, using cover crops and groundcovers, following established guidelines on slopes and drainage; increase plant diversity, thereby increasing habitat, animal diversity, system resilience, human interest and aesthetics; design to retain all precipitation on site; design out and eliminate unnecessary energy loads such as pumps and extraneous lighting; and so on. People involved in landscape design, construction and maintenance need to appreciate the role they play daily in manipulating the health of the systems they manage - soil, air, water, plants, animals, microorganisms, humans. We need to educate ourselves, then educate our clients and the towns we live in.

Ultimately, it's all about our values: what's right and what's wrong. To return again to Aldo Leopold, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (A Sand County Almanac, 1949). 'Nuff said.

Dr. Dirt, near collapse, seeks systemic help from John Hart, Professor of Horticultural Technology, Thompson School of Applied Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham.