Reformulating a historic agenda after half a century.
FROM THE MAY 2016 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
At Independence Hall in Philadelphia in June of 1966, Ian McHarg, Grady Clay, Campbell Miller, Charles R. Hammond, George E. Patton, and John O. Simonds presented “A Declaration of Concern” on behalf of landscape architecture, reproduced below. It was a statement on the growing crisis in the natural environment and the claim of landscape architects in averting the environment’s total destruction. To the degree the declaration was dramatic and self-regarding, it was also true. It preceded much of the formal regulatory protection—preventive, punitive, and remedial—of resources that we know now. The declaration’s alarm over pollution and ecological ruin speaks for itself, but it managed to be both critical and optimistic. Its hope lay in the ability of landscape architects to figure out across disciplines how to make nature and society work as a whole, healthy system.
In 2016, the Landscape Architecture Foundation marked the half century of “A Declaration of Concern” with “The New Landscape Declaration,” a gathering of landscape architects, scholars, and advocates at the University of Pennsylvania in June of that year. The foundation, which was also turning 50, asked a number of participants to write declarations of their own for the occasion as latter-day responses to the original. Five are linked to below. Landscape architects have by no means retired the threats of 50 years ago, and other threats have proliferated around them, but the moral vision of the profession conceived at the midcentury has enlarged accordingly.
“A Declaration of Concern—June 1966”
We urge a new, collaborative effort to improve the American environment and to train a new generation of Americans equipped by education, inspiring example, and improved organizations to help create that environment.
A sense of crisis has brought us together. What is merely offensive or disturbing today threatens life itself tomorrow. We are concerned over misuse of the environment and development which has lost all contact with the basic processes of nature. Lake Erie is becoming septic, New York City is short of water, the Delaware River is infused with salt, the Potomac River with sewage and silt. Air is polluted in major cities and their citizens breathe and see with difficulty. Most urban Americans are being separated from visual and physical contact with nature in any form. All too soon life in such polluted environments will be the national human experience.
There is no “single solution” but groups of solutions carefully related one to another. There is no one-shot cure, nor single-purpose panacea, but the need for collaborative solutions. A key to solving the environmental crisis comes from the field of landscape architecture, a profession dealing with the interdependence of environmental processes.
Man is not free of nature’s demands, but becomes more dependent upon nature. Natural resources are where they are—not where we wish them to be. Those who plan for the future must understand natural resources and processes. These are the basis of life and the prerequisite for planning the good life. They must know geology, physiography, climatology, ecology to know why the world’s physical features are where they are; and why plants, animals, and man flourish in some places and not in others. Once they understand landscape capabilities—the “where” and “why” of environment, the determinants of change—they can then interpret the landscape correctly. Only then are they qualified to plan and design the environment.
Like the architect, the landscape architect practices an historic art. However, the landscape architect is uniquely rooted in the natural sciences. He is essential in maintaining the vital connection between man and nature.
The demand for better resource planning and design is expanding…. Today’s demands require far more landscape architects than are available. Schools are expanding, as are the ranks of practitioners, but they are stretched thin. The gap between demand and supply widens. The environment is being built hastily and too often without such professional advice or help. In the process, far too much is damaged beyond recall.
The solution of the environmental crisis demands the skills of many professions. So that the landscape architects may make their vital contribution, we propose a four-point program to bridge the gap between knowledge and practice: (1) recruitment, (2) education, (3) research, and (4) a nationwide system for communicating the results of research, example, and good practice. Its purpose is to multiply the effectiveness of the limited number of landscape architects, while producing more trained people to cope with the future environment.
We pledge our services. We seek help from those who share our concern.
Campbell Miller
Grady Clay
Ian L. McHarg
Charles R. Hammond
George E. Patton
John O. Simonds
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sustainable Happiness: Actions for Interdependence
By Randolph T. Hester Jr., FASLA
Into an Era of Landscape Humanism
By Gina Ford, FASLA
The Landscape Architect as Urbanist of Our Age
By Charles Waldheim, Honorary ASLA
Developing Landscapes of Resource Management
By Alpa Nawre, ASLA
Fifty Years of the Declaration: Evolution and Prospects
By Mario Schjetnan, FASLA
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