BY ZACH MORTICE
The world?s protected areas. Currently around 15 percent of the earth?s terrestrial surface is protected. The United Nations target is to reach 17 percent by 2020. © 2017 Richard J. Weller, Claire Hoch, and Chieh Huang, Atlas for the End of the World.
Within the hundreds of maps Richard Weller, ASLA, assembled for his Atlas for the End of the World, there?s an implicit argument for something like a new mandate for landscape architecture: Instead of mostly planning the development of public outdoor spaces in developed and affluent cities, it?s time for landscape designers to mediate the battles between rapidly expanding developing-world cities and the irreplaceable biodiversity they?re consuming. It?s a task that increases landscape architects? zones of influence from the scale of city blocks to hundreds of square miles.  The online atlas, which launched on Earth Day 2017 and just passed its 50,000th click, has a bracingly apocalyptic name. But within the discipline of landscape architecture, it points to a new beginning.
?There?s a whole question for us about how we approach urban design and planning so that cities and landscapes are interwoven and treated as one and the same ecological, cultural dynamic,? says Weller, who is the chair of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, ?both at the very edge of cities, where they?re expanding, but also understanding cities as stewards (negatively or positively) of their broader regional landscap...