From the Archive: Earth Day at 50
To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we’ve assembled a selection of fifty articles from our archive that respond, in different ways, to the call first made on April 22, 1970, to pay attention to the environment, and take action to protect it. At the time, millions of people across the United States took part in marches, demonstrations, teach-ins, and clean-ups, fostering a collective sense of environmental responsibility that provoked political action in the form of new legislation for clean air and water, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since then, gains have continued to be made, but losses have continued, too — and the actions of the current U.S. Administration have shown all too clearly that these gains must themselves be protected. At the same time, the urgency that sparked the activism of the first Earth Day has only intensified.
In the articles included in this reading list, writers, artists, and designers offer ways of seeing, experiencing, and understanding environments. They are concerned with landscapes in transition, from places marked by the practices of extractive industries to regions shaped by war and disaster. They examine the emergent (and disappearing) spaces of the Anthropocene and consider the possibilities of adapting to the challenges of climate change. Some look to everyday places, finding inspiration in the cracks in the pavement or the backyard. Others explore the massive infrastructural interventions that have transformed landscapes around the world, from New Deal-era dams to the taming of the L.A. River and the effects of urbanization on the Yangtze River and Monterrey. Several articles reflect on the narratives that shape how we perceive certain landscapes, from colonialism to landscape aesthetics to Romantic poetry, and consider the effects of the methods and measures by which we make sense of the material world.
Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies
Places Journal
The word “ecology” has been co-opted so widely that it has lost real meaning, yet it remains a powerful lens for designers working with complex adaptive systems.
Landscape with Beavers
Places Journal
Beavers have gained a reputation as environmental engineers who can restore water systems — and challenge their human neighbors to think differently about land use.
The Flora of the Future
Places Journal
Celebrating the botanical diversity of cities. A photo survey of urban wild plants.
The Dilbit Hits the Fan: Alberta Oil
Places Journal
If the Keystone XL pipeline is dead, what is the future of the Alberta tar sands? A veteran environmental journalist looks at Canadian energy infrastructure.
Confluences
Places Journal
Photographs of a landscape of incredible contradictions in the Inland Pacific Northwest.
The Land Where Birds Are Grown
Places Journal
A visit to the engineered wetlands of California’s intensively cultivated Central Valley.
The Things They Piled
Places Journal
Mountains of petcoke in Southeast Chicago finally came down this month. Terry Evans photographs an industrial landscape in transition.
The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments
Places Journal
Inside the material archives of climate science, which get wilder and dirtier the deeper you go.
Emergent Shorelands of the Great Lakes
Places Journal
Dramatic fluctuations at the water’s edge create zones of opportunity for landscape designers and planners.
Our Invisible Presence
Places Journal
Our most important interactions with landscape leave traces that cannot be contained within the photographic frame.
The Lay of the Land
Places Journal
Place and land and nature: how we tie these things together is critical to our sense of self-purpose and our fit in the world.
Bird on Fire: The World’s Least Sustainable City
Places Journal
A sociologist-critic analyzes the strange mix of freewheeling libertarianism and federal largesse that shaped modern Phoenix.
Walking the Darkness Home
Places Journal
A journey to the bottom of the Grand Canyon defies the expectations (and clichés) of the famous landscape.
The Last Days of Kaixian
Places Journal
Photographs of the last town on the Yangtze River to be submerged by the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam.
Watermark: Along the California Aqueduct
Places Journal
The extraordinary achievement of modern California — the transformation of a semi-arid region into an abundant and prosperous place — has produced a wicked tangle of problems.
Metaphor Remediation
Places Journal
As cities become the new frontiers of green living, let’s revise the old metaphors. Will the high-rise replace Half Dome as the new emblem of environmentalism?
Design and the Green New Deal
Places Journal
If landscape architects want to remake the world, we can start by remaking our discipline.
Black Fen
Places Journal
Photographs of the fenlands of eastern England and a vanishing way of life.
Notes Toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism
Places Journal
Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Andrea Branzi anticipated today’s interest in urban farming.
Soundscapes: Burning Man
Places Journal
A selection of soundscapes — ranging from dust storms to diesel generators — recorded by an architect at the Burning Man festival.
Mitigations
Places Journal
In the coal country of Southeast Ohio, the past is a renewable resource, growing larger every year.
Dams Across America
Places Journal
Images of major U.S. hydroelectric dams built during the New Deal. Something to contemplate as the Obama administration tries to stimulate the economy and smarten the energy grid.
Urban Crude
Places Journal
An exhibition documenting the metropolitan petroscape of Los Angeles reminds viewers that some 5,000 wells remain active in the second most populous city in the U.S.
The Hills Are Alive
Places Journal
How do you solve a problem like Maria? An environmental writer reflects on how stylized, color-corrected representations of nature shape our landscape aesthetics.
Your Sea Wall Won’t Save You
Places Journal
Negotiating rhetorics and imaginaries of climate resilience in Jakarta, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Bangkok.
Willful Waters
Places Journal
Los Angeles and its river have long been enmeshed in an epic struggle for control.
Cloud and Field
Places Journal
On the resurgence of “field guides” in a networked age. We’ve moved from birding to dronewatching, from natural history to dark ecology. But are we still looking through colonialist binoculars?
Control Earth
Places Journal
What is Earth’s baseline temperature? Good question. The climate scenario ‘historicalNat’ simulates a world without human intervention.
Through Mountains to the Sea
Places Journal
A journey on the A66 road in North West England, from the Lake District made famous by Romantic poets to the iron mines of the Cumbrian coast.
Dixon Marsh
Places Journal
What happens when a field biologist journeys into the mountains on the Nevada-California border, with her dog and her semi-automatic pistol?
The Island Seen and Felt
Places Journal
Australia is a place with more land than people, more geography than architecture. But it is not and never has been empty. Few landscapes have been so deeply known.
Delta Urbanism and New Orleans: Before
Places Journal
The first installment in a two-part essay on post-Katrina New Orleans offers a precise narrative of the environmental engineering that made catastrophe inevitable.
Delta Urbanism and New Orleans: After
Places Journal
The second installment in a two-part series examines the passionate debate about how to rebuild New Orleans and prevent future disaster.
Visualizing the Ends of Oil
Places Journal
Photographers Edward Burtynsky and Chris Jordan have struggled in different ways to visualize and critique the effects of our dependence on oil.
Backwater: Landscapes of the Mississippi Delta
Places Journal
Resuscitating the Mississippi Delta with river diversions and sediment siphons would be the world’s largest coastal restoration project. But it could happen.
The Scale of Nature: Modeling the Mississippi River
Places Journal
The ruins of an abandoned 200-acre hydraulic model of the Mississippi River Basin testify to the decades-long battle to control the great river.
Champion Trees and Urban Forests
Places Journal
Can urban forests save the planet? A review of The Man Who Planted Trees.
The Middle of Everywhere
Places Journal
In the Flint Hills of Kansas there are cattle ranches and art galleries, old barns and new architecture, ghost towns and growing cities. And there is the last stand of tallgrass prairie in America.
An Appalachian Trail
Places Journal
In its original concept, the Appalachian Trail was more than a hiking path. It was a wildly ambitious plan to reorganize the economic geography of the eastern United States.
Landscape Migration
Places Journal
We are now well into a geologic era — the Anthropocene — characterized by the acceleration of environmental change. This is the landscape medium in which we design.
Niagara: It Has It All
Places Journal
Honeymoon spot, casino resort, Superfund site. Niagara has always been a place of extreme contrasts, where the sublime and magnificent cozies up to the tawdry and brutal.
Urbanizing the Mojave
Places Journal
America’s greatest boomtown went bust. An examination of the troubled history of mining, militarization, tourism, and water politics in Las Vegas.
Lost Rivers
Places Journal
The ecological effects of rapid urbanization on rivers in the Monterrey region.
Levees That Might Have Been
Places Journal
A history of forgotten inventions that would have produced a very different landscape along American rivers.
The Mustard Gas in Sherwood Forest
Places Journal
The idea that violence leaves an invisible trace on the land has captivated artists and writers for centuries.
Dreams, Dust and Birds: The Trashing of Owens Lake
Places Journal
Owens Lake was drained dry by the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Today the lakebed is a howling wasteland of toxic dust. Can the city fix the problem it made?
Colstrip, Montana
Places Journal
A photo essay on the massive coal mine and power plant at Colstrip, and the complicated politics of energy and land in the American West.
Shaking Hands with a Sloth
Places Journal
The case for studying biomimicry in design education. The very act of looking to nature inspires creativity.
Everyday Spaces, Natural Places
Places Journal
Baroque still-lifes in the weeds and trash of New York City. Majesty in the ordinariness of urban life at a pedestrian scale.
After the Storm: Climate Change and Public Works
Places Journal
The accelerating crisis of climate change suggests a newly intensified political agenda for design activism.