Reformulating a historic agenda after half a century.
From the May 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
At Independence Hall in Philadelphia in June of 1966, Ian McHarg, Grady Clay, Campbell Miller, Charles R. Hammond, George E. Patton, and John O. Simonds presented ?A Declaration of Concern? on behalf of landscape architecture. It was a statement on the growing crisis in the natural environment and the claim of landscape architects in averting the environment?s total destruction. To the degree the declaration was dramatic and self-regarding, it was also true. It preceded much of the formal regulatory protection?preventive, punitive, and remedial?of resources that we know now. The declaration?s alarm over pollution and ecological ruin speaks for itself, but it managed to be both critical and optimistic. Its hope lay in the ability of landscape architects to figure out across disciplines how to make nature and society work as a whole, healthy system. The Landscape Architecture Foundation is marking the half century of ?A Declaration of Concern? with ?The New Landscape Declaration,? a gathering of landscape architects, scholars, and advocates at the University of Pennsylvania on June 10 and 11. The foundation, which is also turning 50, asked a number of participants to write declarations of their own for the occasion as latter-day responses to the original. Five are printed here. Landscape architects have by no means retired the threats of 50 years ago, and other t...