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发布时间：2021-01-19 热度：

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What has landscape architecture and industrialized society to learn from indigenous cultures and their symbiotic relationships with nature?
‘Despite nature’s many earlier warnings, the pollution and destruction of the natural environment has gone on, intensively and extensively, without awakening a sufficient reaction; it is only during the last century that any systematic effort has been made to determine what constitutes a balanced and self-renewing environment, containing all the ingredient’s necessary for man’s biological prosperity, social cooperation and spiritual stimulation.’ (Ian McHarg, Design With Nature)

At the dawn of the twenty-first century it becomes clearer and clearer daily to scientists, environmentalists, and landscape architects alike, what massive climatic and ecological devastation has been caused by one-hundred-and-fifty years of human industrial activity. Mankind can no longer avert its eyes from environmental catastrophe by pretending that the science behind such doom-full asseverations is unsound, that the results are ambiguous, that the evidence is dubious. As these delusions are blown away by ever more certain evidence, there appear in their place the horrific spectre of rivers and oceans sated with pollution and filth, rainforests ravaged by deforestation, deserts extending at unnatural speeds, and  the atmosphere a toxic and noxious fog filled by the vast emissions of our industrial societies. In less than two centuries, man’s industrial and technological acceleration has brought him to the brink of environmental collapse. It is now evident to all but the most blinkered or obstinate governments that comprehensive action is needed urgently to prevent our follies from going past the environmental ‘tipping-point’ that we have neared and whereafter we risk permanent and irreparable devastation. There have been  myriad suggestions from environmentalists as to which solutions must be implemented to reverse this damage of the past two centuries; there have likewise been many summits, conferences and treaties convened to discuss these issues – the most recent major one being the Kyoto Agreement ratified by all countries except the United States. This essay however examines what landscape architects and conservationists may learn from the relationship with nature and the environment known by indigenous peoples for tens of thousands of years.

It looks, in particular, at what may be understood from the ‘ways of life’ of the Bushmen of the Kalahari in Botswana and Namibia in particular, and also the aborigine peoples of Australia, the indigenous Indians of the Brazilian rainforest and the nomads of the Mongolian steppes. These peoples have lived in many instances, in a near perfectly harmonious and undisturbed relationship with nature for thousands of years -- in the case of the Kalahari Bushmen for over ten thousand years! The philosophies and mythologies of these peoples reveal how they understand and rejoice in the benevolence and fecundity of nature and the profound generosity of the gifts that she has continually bestowed upon them. Universally amongst these peoples there is an intense respect and gratefulness for nature and for what, in McHarg’s phrase, is the ‘glorious bounty’ that she provides. It seems almost too simple and too obvious to say that modern man, who has wreaked enormous damage in fifteen decades, might have a great deal to learn from peoples who lived without any such damage for more than one thousand decades!

In this essay’s analysis the term ‘symbiotic’ will be a key criteria of investigation; the notion of two organisms (man and nature) feeding from each other and using each other for mutual benefit. After a section of historical reflection where it glances at the seminal and pioneering ideas of Ian McHarg and J.B. Jackson, this essay goes on to explore how the knowledge of indigenous cultures about the environment might be fused with modern technology to create an ideal, sustainable and environmentally-friendly form of landscape design and city-planning. Moreover, the essay studies the notion of ‘collective consciousness’ amongst society as to the planet we inhabit and our collective responsibilities towards it. Throughout these last sections references are made to modern examples of the themes under discussion, as well as contemporary designers such as James Corner, Mark Treib and Sebastian Marot.          

It is vital for students of landscape architecture to know something of the genesis of the theory and practice of landscape architecture; this historical orientation informs the student as to how landscape architecture can be a medium through which the understanding of nature by indigenous peoples may be fused with the technological advances of our own societies to form and develop environmentally friendly and sustainable sites for the future. Within this history, perhaps no one’s ideas are more seminal than those of the father of the discipline: Ian McHarg.  

Before the 1970’s mankind did not possess a comprehensive or total understanding of his relationship with nature and his environment; his knowledge was splinted and fragmented and so unification of environmental theories and ideas was a very rare event. Moreover, no detailed and systematic philosophy of environmental design had yet been conceived. The creation of this philosophy fell, above all, to Ian McHarg. Lewis Mumford’s eloquently tells us of the significance of McHarg’s, the ‘inspired ecologist’, for environmental studies and landscape architecture. Mumford says:  ‘. . . his is a mind that not only looks at all nature and human activity from the external vantage point of ecology, but likewise sees the world from within, and a participant and as an actor, bringing to the cold dry colourless world of science the special contribution that differentiates the higher mammals, above all human beings, from all other animate things: vivid colour and passion, insatiable curiosity, and a genius for creativity’. McHarg’s work was vital because he showed that man must conceive of his environment as a totality and respond to that totality with a dedication and awakened consciousness yet unparalleled in human history. McHarg opened man’s eyes to the destructive capabilities and tendencies of man with respect to his environment; he showed ‘. . . the way in which modern technology, through its hasty and unthinking application of scientific knowledge or technical facility, has been defacing the environment and lowering its habitability.’ McHarg nurtured a nascent consciousness amongst environmentalists and academics as to the threat of pesticides, herbicides, green-house gases etc; and his epoch-making book Design With Nature established the fundamental principles of a philosophy of landscape architecture and city-design that is harmonious with nature and seeks to benefit from nature’s generous fruits without consuming them exhaustively. McHarg’s philosophy had and has a practical aspect and a tremendous efficacy upon environmental renewal if people are willing to implement its advice. This knowledge must ‘. . . be applied to actual environments, to caring for natural areas, like swamps, lakes and rivers, to choosing sites for further urban settlements, to re-establishing human norms and life-furthering in metropolitan conurbations’. McHarg imbued landscape design and city-planning with a distinctive and previously all-together lacking moral and ethical dimension, and swung round the aesthetic sensibilities of these disciplines to exalt and revere the principle of harmonious inter-action and inter-dependence with the environment. In Mumford’s words, again: ‘McHarg’s emphasis is not on either design or nature herself, but upon the prepositionwith, which implies human cooperation and biological partnership’. By this philosophy a design is not imposed upon nature and does not therefore run the risk of being unsuccessful due to its incompatibility with the environment; but instead a design emerges out of the natural features of the landscape. By this approach, the meeting of design upon environment will be a natural and harmonious fit. To use a medical metaphor: the landscape will not reject the organ that is transplanted within it: the two are intimately joined. Perhaps, at bottom, there emerges out of the work and philosophy of McHarg, Jackson, Rachel Carson and all who have come after them, the conviction, that if done in the correct way and with the correct attitude, man can even ‘improve or ‘perfect’ nature by adding the element of himself to it.