In the era of climate change, your landscape says a lot about your values
by Thomas Paine ASLA
Not so long ago, when building owners and developers talked about their landscape, they meant their competitive landscape, the economic landscape, even the distinctly unvegetated digital landscape. They rotated in “environment” to give “landscape” time on the bench. But for sure they were clueless about the landscape landscape. Yes, landscape landscape. Landscaping they totally got, but landscape? And how theirs stacked up against the competition was hardly a matter of earth-shattering concern. They were missing the forest through the trees. The question that owners and developers have to ask now is whether that real-world outdoor landscape experience thing is winning new friends, being a good neighbor, keeping customers, adding to worker productivity, sending the right message about their attitude toward sustainability, and ready for climate change disruption.
Except for a few holdouts, sustainability is in; indeed, the term seems to include just about everything nowadays—environmental, social, and, my word yes, economic sustainability. For market leaders, sustainable design, construction and property management have become the new baseline, to be embedded in all decision making, and this is most welcome. After recent disruptive events like Hurricane Sandy, climate change disruption is at last a “hot” issue. Exactly what, we may well ask, will the combination of sea level rise and increasingly disruptive storm events mean for our basements, our building lobbies, our infrastructure, our public open space, our streets, our Harbor, and those of every other flat coastal area on this planet? Though not as early as the Netherlands and not suggesting we build dikes, Mayor Menino to his great credit has been an early adapter, even a pioneer, in harnessing our abundant intellectual energy to focus our resilient city on specific responses to the impact of climate change.
For now, although the jury is still out on those specific responses, owners and developers are not off the hook. Your irrigation system may be a resource hog, your lighting may be an energy sink, your use of non-organic pesticides may come with hidden environmental costs, your plants may be invasive species, your paving may be heating up the microclimate, your fancy site materials may have been shipped at vast consumption of non renewable fuels from halfway across the globe. You may not have installed a green roof, let alone a green wall. Your world of choices past is suddenly being tagged as a laundry list of tomorrow’s environmental no-nos. Market leaders who have done their homework realize that going green is not only doing the right thing, it can save money over the life of the project. Energy and resource efficient operations can more than offset the modest construction cost premium in a matter of years. As energy prices soar, so much faster the payback.
We at AGER take climate change very seriously, since we are living in not only the flat world of the East Coast, but also the “flat world” described in Tom Friedman’s best seller, in which he was thinking more about a level playing field that extended globally, practicing and producing across cultures and time zones with our colleagues in our Shanghai, Beijing and Manila offices. Here at AGER, fusion design means melding sustainable best practices and design creativity. Responding to climate change can be a beautiful thing.
Thomas Paine ASLA founded the Boston office of AGER Group Landscape Architects and Land Planners, www.agergroup.com
