I decided to pursue landscape architecture because I wasn’t sure which held more sway in my mind; the arts or the sciences. After 6 years of practice in a field that aspires to pair the two daily I don’t feel any closer to knowing, but I have realized that indecision isn’t a barrier preventing me from going further into the world, it’s a doorway inviting me. Lessons learned in one sphere are easily translated to inform the other and the most important insights often prove to be universal. It’s been essential for me to remember my core beliefs and ques- tions, using those to feel confident challenging the established community when the status quo no longer feels valid.
PHOTOS: Michael Yun and Patrick Gookin
Valuing Nature in Design
by Michael Yun
Our current cultural paradigm tends to value ecology based on its ability to provide something measurable for us. ‘Ecosystem services’, defined as the collective ways that ecosystems benefit humankind, is the term used most often to represent nature when it appears in the decision making process for planning and development. These services are quantified as measurable ecological benefits which are then translated into basic economic units. This allows designers and decision makers to directly compare the costs and benefits of multiple complex design and planning scenarios.
The problem is that this approach falls short of describing the real value of nature outside of its relationship to our economic intentions. It therefore becomes inadequate as a framework if real sustainable, progressive design is the goal. Is there a better way for us to consider ecological value within the context of contemporary design and planning?
I think that in order for us to reach the next threshold of sustainability we must understand that there is an inherent value in nature that goes beyond us and an opportunity in any context, at any scale, to cultivate this value.
Life exists tenuously. E.O Wilson writes in The Diversity of Life, “The biosphere, all organisms combined, makes up only about one part in ten billion of the earth’s mass.. If the world were the size of an ordinary desktop globe and its surface were viewed edgewise an arm’s length away, no trace of the biosphere could be seen with the naked eye.”
Imagine that in relationship to our solar system, the Milky Way and the rest of the cosmos. The complexity and fragility of life on earth is so extreme it’s almost paradoxical. How can so much diversity and wonder exist in such challenging and limited physical constraints?
Change is constant. Nature has no goal, no apex, it is iterative and open-end- ed. Ecologies are susceptible to flows and are integrated into nature’s processes. There is constant disturbance which precludes arrival to or exis- tence in an optimal state; a state that would be impossible to define anyway. There is a constant progression and regression that leads to dynamism and resilience. Adaptation and flux become a platform for evolution by natural selection. Designing for change is necessary.
Nature has fractal qualities. Fractals have two basic characteristics: 1) variations at one scale can be found at another (self-similarity) and 2) their dimension is not an integer but a fraction (fractional dimension). If you mea- sure a coastline on a map its length increases logarithmically with the scale of map. As you zoom in you continue to find more nuance that was previously unresolvable. Ecology functions in the same way. The scales are gradients, self-similar, unbound by limits and they interrelate from top to bottom. These fractal qualities of nature imply that at every scale there are potential oppor- tunities to effectuate a positive change that will add value to the world as a whole.
Michael Yun is a landscape ecological designer who has worked at many scales locally, across the US, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He is interested in landscape ecological theory and often applies this thinking to projects that wouldn’t traditionally consider this ap- proach. He plays in the band WL.