The world is in motion. Twice a year, on the West Coast of North America, millions of salmon fight their way upriver, returning to the shady bend in a

Landscape Migration: Environmental design in the Anthropocene

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2021-08-28 14:00:08

The world is in motion. Twice a year, on the West Coast of North America, millions of salmon fight their way upriver, returning to the shady bend in a small stream where they were born — or the spot below the fish hatchery where they were dumped into the river. Millions of humans make the opposite journey, leaving home in search of economic or environmental security. Biomes grow and shrink. The ocean expands. The Pacific Plate grinds and slips against the North American Plate, traveling northwest a few inches every year.

Environmental change is constant, although it is not always perceptible or predictable. Landscape designers grapple daily with this problem, and many now focus their practice on designing for adaptation to change. In Projective Ecologies, Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister trace the ecological turn in the biological and earth sciences as it reverberates across the humanities and design fields. Landscape architects and planners have followed ecologists “toward a more organic model of open-endedness, flexibility, resilience and adaptation, and away from a mechanistic model of stability and control.” 1

And yet, most of us — designers included — imagine migration as the movement of isolated things (fish, birds, people) against a fixed background (the Klamath River, Pacific Flyway, U.S.-Mexico border). We know that environmental conditions are always changing, but we allow ourselves the fiction of background stability. When we limit our thinking in this way, our political and design responses are circumscribed. (Allot water rights. Designate a wildlife refuge. Build a wall.) Not surprisingly, they often fail.

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