BY BRADFORD McKEE

Courtesy Peretz Partensky [CC BY-SA 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons.
From the upcoming December 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
There can scarcely be any overstating the threat the Trump presidency poses to the interests of the landscape architecture community, which center ardently on the welfare of human society and ecology and the planet. If design is the sum of all constraints, as Charles and Ray Eames said, this presidency will be the greatest constraint many of us will work under in our lifetimes, on the order of anathema to everything landscape architecture has ever stood for. We have to get right to work and be very canny about it, or the Trump administration, along with a Congress controlled by some of the most venal people ever to lodge themselves into American politics, will be a disaster well beyond the many ways we can name even now. During the campaign, Trump?s positions on public policy, such as they were?and fairly obscured by endless evidence of his career as a liar, a swindler, a bully, a bigot, and a sexual predator?did not, to me, warrant detailed study. They weren?t policies in any developed sense. (OK, there was the child-care one, but what was that") They consisted largely of frequent impulsive eruptions calculated only to produce outrage among his disaffected rabble and people of greater composure, though different strains of outrage, for sure. However masterful he is at plucking a populace, in terms of governanc...