A New Philosophy of Landscaping

Beautification of parks and roadsides is something heritage planners have to consider, but the actual decisions tend to get handed to a landscape architect. We were involved a few years ago in an urban park revitalization project with one of the most celebrated landscape architects in America. He proposed to make the park a kind of botanical history museum containing specimens of tree species that had been brought to the city from overseas over a period of three centuries. At the time, everyone agreed : What a wonderful idea – connecting horticulture with history!

If anybody on the planning team had read Douglas W. Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants there’d have been a howl of protest. Tallamy cites several hair-raising examples of widespread environmental destruction wrought by alien organisms and invasive plants that were brought from overseas to beautify America. Two of the best known are the chestnut blight, called the single worst environmental disaster in North American history, and the wooly adelgid, an alien insect that’s at this very moment busily wiping out old-growth stands of hemlock forest. Tallamy’s central point is that we owe it to the environment to plant only native species, which provide food for our increasingly beleagered wildlife and avoid apocalyptic risks to the ecosystem.

And just what is a “native species” anyway? Apparently there are lots of exotics that, after living on this continent for a few hundred years, are generally considered “naturalized.” Not so, says Tallamy. He defines native as having the ability to support a large number of insect and animal species. Non-native extends even to other parts of the continent: a Douglas fir from the Pacific Northwest is worthless to species living in the eastern states.

A fascinating point Tallamy makes is that most plants have developed chemical defenses to make their leaves unpalatable to most insects, but each species of caterpillar has evolved specialized abilities get past certain kinds of defenses and feed on leaves that are inedible to others. Our North American caterpillars have not developed the ability to eat leaves of most alien plants. But why all the fuss about caterpillars? We’ve all been raised believing a caterpillar in the garden is a pest. Nurseries have, in fact, convinced people to buy exotic plants because they’re immune to the depredations of caterpillars and other insects. In fact, the caterpillar is a most generous beast. It provides food for most birds, especially during critical nesting periods, and forms the base of a food pyramid that’s critical to the whole ecosystem. A yard full of foreign nursery stock may look green and natural, but it might as well be paved with asphalt if you’re a caterpillar, or an animal that’s looking to feed on one

The real point of this book is that landscaping badly needs to be rethought. We need to realize that what we’ve thought of as simply nice patches of green lawn and pretty flowers are actually deadly in terms of the effect on biodiversity. As Tallamy puts it, landscaping should be about our taking steps to slow the rate of extinction. Planners are in a great position to carry this message forward and set good examples. As we develop byway beautification plans or park management plans or anything that involves plantings in a developed area, we have a responsibility to urge that non-native species be eliminated and replaced with true native species.

Another Fun New Toy

Sunday’s New York Times has a piece on a digital field guide for identifying tree species. You snap a picture of a leaf with your iPhone, then the software compares the image with shapes in a database, and voila! you get the name of the tree. What’s not to like about that?

Note that the leaves shown in the photo are all oaks, some of the easiest leaves to identify. Now let’s see what this kleine wunder can do with these species (being smarter than a computer is a growing recreation activity):

It’s long been typical that the heaviest things in this hiker’s pack were the field guides: one for birds, another for wildflowers, another for amphibians, and another for mushrooms. You haven’t lived till you’ve discovered a Velvety Black Earth Tongue!

What a fine thing it will be someday to have all of those books in one lightweight digital package.

But let’s not stop there. The field guide is just a small subspecies of interpretation, defined by pros in that specialty as “A mission-based communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and meanings inherent in the resource.” (National Association for Interpretation) One is tempted to snicker at the dry academic tone at first, but it’s really quite a serviceable definition. A good interpreter gets you fired up about something and wanting to know a lot more about it. Relevant story: On a motorcycle trip around France, found myself passing by Chartres and, not deeply interested but refusing just to blow off one of the greatest of the medieval cathedrals, I popped in for a sample. I casually sidled up to a group listening to a donnish gent lecturing about one of the windows. Long story short: two days later I was still there listening to him. He knew how to turn the stone carvings and windows into an illustrated encyclopedia of the bizarre and wonderful culture of the Middle Ages. That’s interpretation!

We can all look forward to the day when we’ can carry that kind of talent around in our pockets, embedded in a little device, pulling us deeper and deeper into the things we encounter. Robert Oppenheimer said (paraphrase of how it goes): “Everything is interesting if you just look close enough.” Little interpretive devices will help us get there.

On “Messing About”

Sometimes words can just make you crazy. The Inuit have a few dozen of words for “ice” (not hundreds for snow, as the cliche runs), but we haven’t come up with a single good word for “stuff we do when we want to get out of the house and have fun.” All the official terms have serious flaws. “Tourism” makes you think of disoriented people wandering around in a daze, and crafty folks plotting to relieve them of a few dollars. “Leisure” smacks of old timers in polyester garments. And worse, it makes no distinction between a mind-numbing, zombie-like state of consciousness like staring at a screen while reclining and its polar opposite. “Recreation”, the least problematic of the three, has a persistent odor of cod liver oil. It says, “You just need to hold your nose and take this medicine because it’s good for you.”

Last week Rick Potts, head of the rivers and trails programs at the National Park Service, gave a presentation at the National Association of Recreation Resource Planners conference and showed that you can talk about the same concepts without using any of those three words. Coining a sticky new term that could grow legs, he called for a generation of “Free Range Kids,” recalling an earlier time when moms routinely said, “Go on outside and play and don’t come back till dark.” He reminded a room full of recreation planners that “fun” is what their profession is all about, and more opportunities to have “fun” is what people want from them. Imagine the opposite of this: a conference of stand-up comedians talking about “stimulating the laugh response.”

Which brings us, believe it or not, to things that float. There’s a famous line in The Wind and the Willows when the Water Rat, who lives in a den on the riverbank and rows a sweet little skiff, remarks, “There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Try Googling that phrase “messing about.” You’ll find a much-loved periodical called “Messing About in Boats, ” a blog called “Messing About in Sailboats,” another called “Messing About in Ships.” Here in Charleston we organize rallies of small boats at an island in the harbor that we call “a mess-about.”

It’s actually pretty amusing (though not enough to trigger the “laugh response”) that the boat people would have grabbed onto a phrase that stresses aimlessness and off-handedness. Of all the various species of “recreationists,” they have some of the most chrystallized traditions of discipline, skills gained by long experience, high self-reliance, and constant watchfulness toward changing conditions. Alpine mountaineers have those qualities, too, but no other “leisure market segment” has anything half so romantic as the ancient, time-honored traditions of “men who go down to the sea in boats” (cue up “Victory at Sea” track.) It would be easy to get all pretentious about that kind of stuff, but “simply messing about” is how they choose to describe themselves instead.

Messing about (in the woods, the creek, the tree house, the ball field, or wherever) is what Free-Range Kids do. It’s also, really, what virtually everybody does when they’re out of the house looking for fun, regardless of whether they’re on vacation (technically being “tourists”) or making the most of a Saturday (“technically doing recreation” or “pursuing leisure activities.”) And that phrase gives us a far more essential description of this planning field: we make it easier for people to mess about.

Broadband and Rural Economic Development

The Stimulus Package spending on broadband internet access can mean real gains for rural providers of recreation and heritage-based, sustainable tourism opportunities. The internet is by far the most cost-effective way to reach the traveling public, and it allows a location’s message to reach a target audience far more effectively than the traditional shotgun approach of printed brochures, tourism guides, and other print media.

The installed base of broadband is definitely going to grow under the Stimulus, and one of the priorities is expansion into rural areas. The real question is: will more and more households be willing to pay for it, especially in an economic downturn? Is it safer to depend on tried-and-true print-media delivery methods?

A survey out recently from the Pew Research Center suggests that broadband is now regarded as a necessity, not a luxury, by 31% of the adult population. More telling, broadband has moved two points deeper into necessity territory in the past three years, while most household appliances have been downgraded by the majority of people from necessity to luxury. (Here’s the full report from Pew.)

This makes sense, really, if you consider that the internet is an excellent way to save money, find job opportunities, sell unwanted items, and find the sense of safety in numbers.

Bottom line: it’s a safe bet that more and more people will making trip planning decisions online, and that applies to weekend outings as well as vacations. Many rural regions have significant natural, historic, or cultural assets, but the public is often not aware of these. Once these regions figure out how to use the internet effectively, they will be found by a growing visitor market. If a desire to stay closer to home and save gas returns as a prime motivator, scenic rural counties within two hours of a big city will be more and more in demand.

The trick, as ever, is for decision-makers in rural areas to learn the principles and practices of sustainable tourism and quality growth planning BEFORE they get flooded with visitors. Otherwise, as in so many other “discovered” areas, they end up killing the goose.

State Recreation Plans – Great New Survey Option

Survey Monkey, a great new toy for planners. If public input is needed for a statewide plan, public meetings in a finite set of locations can hardly be said to cover the whole map. An online survey can reach far more respondents in many more locations. Impossible or prohibitively expensive a few years ago, now free and easy as pie. Example: this Tenn Recreation Plan public input survey was produced in a couple of hours by first-time builder.

Yes, an online survey does tend to exclude demographic groups that lack computer access. But, as with Rural Electrification in the 1930s, broadband is steadily creeping into more and more homes. It’s beginning to displace cable TV, on the road to becoming a new household necessity. The Stimulus Package’s $7.2 for broadband installation has been characterized as a digital version of the construction of the Interstate Highway System. So it’s just a matter of time before online surveys can reach directly into the homes of most US families.

Having access to frequent, massive amounts of public feedback will revolutionize the planning profession. Like X-ray and CT-scan technology, online surveying will allow us direct observation and measurement of variables where before we had only extrapolation and inference.

The Universe of Recreation Stakeholders

When doing recreation planning, it’s always easiest to harvest most of our input from those well-known realms of resource providers and advocacy organizations. Of course we must consult the public as best we can, generally through surveys and public meetings. Unfortunately, The Public is huge, diverse, and widely spread out. It’s tempting to limit ourselves to taking snapshots here and there and extrapolating like crazy (often described as something like “robust efforts to provide for public participation.”) But really get the grassroots engaged in the process, and you can produce a quantum leap in the accuracy and political clout of the final product.

Recently a group of state recreation planners wanted to do just that. They challenged me to produce a comprehensive picture of the whole universe of stakeholders for recreation issues and interests of all kinds. I decided it would help to show fundamental relationships among the various types, as in a taxonomy. Asking myself “what would Tufte do?” (see Edward Tufte on this site’s Expert Resources page) I managed to cook up the following (click the image for a larger version):

If you’d like to use this, you’re welcome to download a PDF here:

Recreation Users Taxonomy

Comments and suggestions would be most welcome.

The Secret Back Door to NEPA, part 1

Does the National Environmental Policy Act have a secret back door? That’s a question that could have important consequences. Few have explored this secret door, and no court has tested it yet. But there it is, hidden in plain sight, waiting for enterprising heritage planners to find and use it.

When Congress passed NEPA in 1969, they seem to have been thinking mostly about protecting the natural environment. Of course – there it is in the title. But the language in the act extends it far beyond natural resources. Here is the key paragraph:

“In order to carry out the policy set forth in this Act, it is the continuing responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable means, consistent with other essential considerations of national policy, to improve and coordinate Federal plans, functions, programs, and resources to the end that the Nation may…preserve important historic, cultural, and natural aspects of our national heritage, and maintain, wherever possible, an environment which supports diversity, and variety of individual choice.” (Sec. 101 [42 USC § 4331])

The Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Statements that this law requires for most federally funded projects get close scrutiny from all kinds of folks – especially agencies that manage natural resources, conservation and environmental organizations, State Historic Preservation Officers, and historic preservation organizations. Those people are good at looking out for natural and historic resources. Very few reviewers are interested or trained in assessing impacts on “cultural aspects of our national heritage.” And there’s the secret door, right under our noses!

I’ll have more on how this door might be used and what it could mean for heritage planners in the next installment.

Farmland Losses

On this map (from the recently released USDA 2007 Farm Census) clusters of red dots highlight the places where deep cultural traditions of connectedness to the land may be most threatened.

These places are also losing wildlife habitat, scenic rural landscapes, and potential recreation lands. This tells you at a glance why I do so much heritage planning work in Tennessee.

Some states have “Century Farms” programs to identify farms that have been worked by the same family for 100 years or more.  Always a good idea to include those farms in your resource inventory.  Team up with the local farm bureau, and look creatively for ways to keep your small family farms economically viable.

Mapping the Territory

Begin every project with a good map…

The territory of “heritage planning” includes three provinces:

An era of increased specialization has made it harder for professionals to function as generalists. One planner is completely at home with trees, rivers, parklands and habitat; another is a real crackerjack when it comes to preserving old buildings; and a third, the rarest by far, understands how to use principles of cultural anthropology to understand local folkways and traditions.

Planners, prudent souls who are naturally drawn to the safety their known valleys, eventually must strike out and cross mental divides into unfamiliar terrain. The trick, of course, is to become an expert navigator in all three of those provinces. Only then can we begin to grasp the authentic identity of a place, what the scenic byway community calls its “Intrinsic Value.”

Definition, v.1

Looking for a good place to find a working definition of “heritage”, I find the folks over at Heritage.org (The Heritage Foundation) busily defending a heritage of “principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” Actually not a bad start, after you unpack it in terms of what heritage planners do.

Free enterprise: A heritage planner’s central mission is to enable local businesses to prosper. A strong entrepreneurial focus yields the best justifications for conservation and preservation of a place’s natural, historical, and cultural heritage.

Limited government: Projects of local or regional scope seldom succeed through government efforts alone. A heritage planner studies ways to energize local stakeholders, because the real energy and power at this level comes from the grassroots.

Individual freedom: People tend to be bonded to and fiercely proud of the place they call “home.” They also tend to identify the homeplace’s natural, historical, and cultural heritage as part of their rightful heritage. A good heritage planner never gets between a people and their heritage.

Traditional American values: This is a nation that has evolved from a frontier ethic of survival at all costs to a conservation ethic that places great value on preserving treasures that we want to pass on to our grandchildren. We invented the concept of the national park and first adopted principles of sustainable forestry. We’ve embraced history and local culture as something else we want to pass along. A good heritage planner knows how to build on these values.

A strong national defense: Recreational pursuits are particular forms of cultural heritage that contribute directly to national defense by promoting health and fitness among young people, teaching teamwork and perseverance, and building self-confidence. A nation of couch potatoes is ill-prepared to defend itself.