The Land: How to Design with Nature

Ian L. McHarg is a 48-year-old landscape architect who delights conservationists with eloquent speeches that blast man the polluter as “a blind, witless, lowbrow, anthropocentric clod.” With his Scottish burr, fierce beard and piercing eyes, McHarg is a cross between Jeremiah and a kind of male Rachel Carson. He is not only a symbol of rising anger at environmental abuses, but a successful practitioner of the hard art of stopping those abuses. In his new book, Design with Nature, which Lewis Mumford calls “a vision of organic exuberance and human delight,” McHarg clearly shows that the main obstacle to saving the U.S. landscape is ignorance.

McHarg grew up near Glasgow, hating the hideous city while exploring the handsome countryside around it. At 16, he decided to spend “a life giving to others the benison which nature gave to me.” His model was Lancelot (“Capability”) Brown, the 18th century landscape architect who transformed much of England into a showpiece of natural beauty before the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution. As McHarg fondly recalls, Brown was an ecological Faust. Once, on being asked to save Ireland, he grandly replied: “I have not yet finished England.”

McHarg’s dreams were interrupted by World War II and his seven years’ service as a British paratroop officer. Later, at Harvard, he earned three degrees in three years and picked up a case of tuberculosis. As a noted Scottish city planner, he was invited in 1954 by the University of Pennsylvania to found the first American department of landscape architecture and regional planning. He now teaches at Penn, is a partner in a planning firm and preaches what he practices all over the U.S.

McHarg’s new book is partly a burst of rage at the lavalike flow of U.S. cities into the countryside, where city dwellers yearning for nature destroy it in the process. McHarg blames the lack of planning on the arrogance of both capitalism and Christianity, cries that man is poisoning the very biosphere that sustains him and calls for a new ecological religion based on living in harmony with nature rather than on conquering it.

Beyond all that, McHarg astutely analyzes such disasters as the overdevelopment of the New Jersey seashore, where builders put up hundreds of vacation cottages in total ignorance of nature, sapping vital ground water and thus killing the delicate dune grass that anchors beaches. As a result, when a 1962 hurricane lashed the coast, 10,700 homes were damaged or destroyed. The emphatic lesson: design with nature.

Matching Capability. Though McHarg is only one of several such pioneers, he is now the nation’s most visible apostle of using ecology for planning—and turning a profit in the broadest sense. As an example, his book describes how his firm planned a scenic highway on New York City’s increasingly squandered Staten Island. To find the best route, he mapped every physical and social feature in the area, in-eluding slopes, soil foundations, forests, scenic and residential values.

Each feature was charted in color on a separate transparent map. When McHarg superimposed all the maps atop each other, he saw, shining through the colors, a thin line of white that marked the highway’s optimum route. Later he used the same method to pinpoint exactly where different land uses should occur with “the least costs and greatest savings and benefits on all of Staten Island.”

McHarg’s plan for the unspoiled area just northwest of Baltimore was even more impressive. With 44,500 acres of farms and country estates, the area was a natural target for tract developers and subdividers. Even so, McHarg turned “progress” from sprawl to beauty: his plan concentrated all developments on hills and plateaus, leaving the valleys open forever. Endorsed by landowners and the city, the scheme opens the area to 83,000 new residents by 1990 —without helter-skelter destruction of the rolling countryside. Going on from there, McHarg’s firm recently completed another enlightened development plan for the seven counties around the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Despite his acid criticism, McHarg is convinced that the U.S. can replan its cities, curb pollution and halt suburban chaos. As he notes, “America is land rich —90% of the people live on 2% of the land. The answer to our environmental problems is diffusion. The 100 million more people we expect in the next few decades could be settled in 100 new cities. We have everything we need: the land, brains, wealth, technology. We only need the desire—and leadership.” Eventually, by helping to provide that leadership, McHarg may match the work of his hero, Capability Brown.