“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
-E. O. Wilson
This fabulous quote is from a larger 2009 story in Harvard Magazine about the tensions and reconcilliation between Wilson and the recently deceased James Watson. (h/t Kottke)
After reading about Jean Muenchrath's hike on Mount Whitney, you might feel ready for a hike: “Well, yeah, and I’m carrying 15kg [her backpack] on my broken spine and pelvis, and I’ve got gangrene now in my butt because of the injury.”
As we are reminded of the 2005 damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, I encourage readers to reflect on stories beyond those from New Orleans. It was a huge storm with a wider path than many remember. Mississppi lost more than 200 lives when a storm saurge, possible as high as 30', washed across the coastal communities of Biloxi, Waveland, Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis. Houses built on 10' or 15' stilts were washed away. The Bay St Louis bridge, US 90, was collapsed.
How much wind, solar, gas, or nuclear energy does your visit to this website require? Click and see.
The Danube is benefiting from a clean-up culture that has people competitively collecting plastic on the river in homemade boats. The ability to create a positive culture that helps the environment is a remarkable thing.
As I race to finish some of my summer reading, I found Austin Kleon's description of the centrifugal force of books to be quite intriguing.
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF BOTANY AT RUTGERS
24 October 2025
We are delighted to invite you to our special jubilee symposium to celebrate botany at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
The symposium will be held on Friday, October 24th and will include presentations by invited researchers, a poster session, an open house at Chrysler Herbarium, and a field trip on Saturday, October 25th.
Please sign up for the Chrysler Herbarium’s mailing list to stay up to date with information about this event and other herbarium news at this link: https://tinyurl.com/CHRBlist.
Registration information will be sent to recipients of the mailing list in September.
“These individuals have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.” — Seneca
NYC's Urban Textscape mapped out all of the visible words in StreetView. "The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city's source code"
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake
A nice article is out about the Princeton Hydro floating islands on Woodcliff Lake. These are intended to be a living tool fighting algae in the reservoir water.
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”
― Hermann Hesse, Wandering
The Subway is Not Scary is an essay from Hamilton Nolan. If you are one of those people who avoids the subway in NYC, give him a hance to convince you that you should ride it more. I find it to be a pretty amazing system and, as he suggests, don't understand why some work so hard to avoid it.
In a recent post, The Hydraulic Mission Impossible!, Nik Kowsar looks at the damming of Western US rivers, with highly visible impacts, as a hint about what is happening below the surface. But, as he explains, the groundwater is where the biggest crisis lies hidden.
"New research using NASA’s GRACE satellites reveals the Colorado River Basin has lost 28 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003—twice the volume lost from Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined."
The Washington Post takes a closer look at the rates of subsidence and reasons that our major cities are sinking.
Thinking about the future? A new survey claims that 13% of lawn owners have robot lawn mowers. Warning: Lots of infographic and very little about methodology.
Frequent question: I have some extra time this summer/semester/winter and would like to read an extra book or two. Can you suggest anything good?
It depends on your interest.
A) For trying to get a sense for Landscape Architecture as a profession:
An interesting book to read and explore is John O. Simmonds' Landscape Architecture. While quite dated, it is fairly easy to read, can often be acquired as a used book (especially online) and is interesting for folks in and out of the profession.
Another avenue to consider would be to get some recent issues of Landscape Architecture Magazine which is published by the American Society of Landscape Architecture and is meant as their semi-official portrayal of the state of the profession.
B) For environmental planning students I frequently recommend the following (although some are recommended as examples of trends that I may or may not fully endorse):
Ian McHarg's Design With Nature and A Quest for Life.
Anything written by Wendell Berry. My favorite was Home Economics, but he has lots to choose from.
Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck's Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.
James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape.
Oh, what the heck. Maybe you should just pick from Planetizen's Top 20 Planning Books list for this stuff.
C) For those who are trying to move up from entry level students to serious students of landscape architecture, Dr. Allan Shearer has prepared this for his design students:
A few people have asked me for a list of books that might be of use to a landscape architecture education. Below is a starter-list which, I think, should offer something to everyone. I have not looked which of these are on the shelf of RU libraries, but all could be borrowed by way of interlibrary loan services. Similarly, I am not sure how many of these will be for sale at Borders or Barnes and Noble's, but everything should be available through Amazon or Alibris (a great site for used books).
There are several books by John R. Stilgoe that are well worth reading. He is an historian, not a designer, and holds a joint appointment between the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Visual & Environmental Studies Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Before mentioning the books, I should give a couple disclaimers: First, he will be speaking here next spring, so you might want to take the opportunity to get a sense of who he is, what interests him, etc. The topic has not been set, but he might very well ask you if you see the arrow in the FedEx sign. Second, JRS was my dissertation advisor (and J.B. Jackson, author of The Necessity for Ruins, was his). And no, I am not required to be a shill for his books. Also worth mentioning, he writes a bi-monthly column in the Sunday Boston Globe--South Shore Edition. You can find these by searching his name on Google News.
John Stilgoe, Common Landscapes of North America. His first major work, this book examines how North America has been intentionally shaped from the colonial era through the early nineteenth century by non-designers. Topics include measures taken by government--such as the Ordering of Towns which was penned before the Puritans stepped off the Arabella, the Spanish Law of the Indies, and the Jefferson-era Northwest Ordinance; by farmers--how northerners made fences to keep things in vs. how southerners made fences to keep things out and why barns are red; and by what might be considered visionary industrialists--such as the people who funded the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Erie Canal. As one might expect, this book is chock full of historical facts, but its real strength is that demonstrates how "traditional" practices for shaping the landscape are not conventions to be followed uncritically. Instead, they are based on a complex combination of ideals and practicalities. At a minimum, this book would complement your landscape history class in that it describes the "non-art" shaping of the environment. But separate from that potential, I think this book would be of interest to everyone, regardless of whether you are in the landscape architecture, landscape industry, or environmental planning & management programs.
John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic. Relatively short and very approachable, this book was written for a broad audience and intended to get everyone to go outside, look around, and think about the implications of what they see. For example, how does the US Post Office organize space and how, in turn, do we--in part--live by that organization?
John Stilgoe, Landscape and Images. This book is a compilation of some of JRS' articles and essays. Topics include the role of photography in shaping our understanding of the landscape (for better and worse), the specter of hobgoblins in suburbia, and bikinis. This book came out last year through the University of Virginia Press and I do not know if it is available as a paperback yet.
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory. Schama is another historian, but unlike Stilgoe does not focus on the environment. (For example, a previous book was on Dutch painting and he has recently been compiling a multivolume history of the Britain.) As a result of his range, he is not as insightful on particular points about landscape change, but his breadth makes connections that a more specialized mind might miss. Some of the places described in Landscape and Memory will be familiar to you from your landscape history class; others--like Mount Rushmore--you will know from elsewhere. What I think is useful about this book is its organization: Rather than go through a discussion of these sites by time or by location, it is arranged in three parts by material: wood, water, and rock. This perspective can help you re-think not only what you learned in your history class, but how you might apply design themes based on materials in studio.
William Cronan, Natures Metropolis. If you are looking for patterns in this list, Cronan is also an historian. If he has a fault, it would be that he occasionally sentimentalizes some activities associated with shaping the environment. That particular problem is not so evident in this history of Chicago in which he describes how the idea (the promise?) of "progress," natural resources, and technology combined to create a new kind of urban condition. I recommend this book not because I think everyone should know about America's second city, but because it lays out, in clear language, how possibilities can be combined to create something bigger than most people can imagine. Whether or not such things should be built is another question, but it is happening at a rapid clip in China as you read. Admittedly, this book will be of more obvious interest to those in the environmental planning & management program, but it could help everyone think about the built environment.
J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. This book is not an easy read: most graduate students need to keep a very good dictionary at hand, and you will want to (or need to) pause and think about what is expressed after each and every page. In essence, Entrikin tries to synthesize two opposing ways we understand the creation of regions. On the one side, there is the German "science of space" view which holds that law-like forces of change operate universally over time. On the other side is the French, "description of place" view which holds that regions emerge from entirely idiosyncratic opportunities and decisions. If you can get through it, it will help you to understand arguments of geographic limitation-determinism.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. If you pick up Kevin Lynch and Gary Hack's Site Planning, you will be able to start applying what you read very quickly; It's just that kind of book. The Poetics of Space is the opposite in term of easy application, but it is arguably as important. You do not "use" this book. Instead, you live with it, and as you do it infuses your own ideas and makes them richer. Most of the points are made in terms of architecture—and indeed, this book is read by just about every architect at some point in his or her education—but do not let that get in the way of you reading it. (Stilgoe thought it important enough that he wrote an introduction to one of the more recent editions.)
Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension. Hall is an anthropologist who writes on a variety of issues that frequently go unnoticed in daily life because they are so ingrained in a culture. In this book he examines what might be considered the dynamics of personal space and indirectly, what designers might do to influence how social places are designed.
Niall Kirkwood, The Art of Landscape Detail and Weathering and Durability in Landscape Architecture. Kirkwood now deals with bioremediation and other technologies for brown field sites, but his first book and follow-up were careful studies of construction details. On the surface, they are about what combinations of material and forms work, what do not work, and why. However, their underlying premise is that for site scale design to be successful, the ideas of the larger scheme should be expressed in the thoughtful execution of the smallest elements. Admittedly, most books on building details are hopelessly dull and this text might suffer a certain lack of glamour. But if you want to further explore how a curb or a flight of steps might matter and, moreover, how thinking about these things might contribute to a richer design process, then these books are worth a look. Also of note, when I last looked, they were quite expensive.
James Corner [Editor], Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. Corner is the Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of the essays in this collection are difficult to read, but if you are interested in wrestling with big ideas, it is a good place to start.
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. Another disclaimer: I was GB's teaching fellow for several years. There is "smart," there is "really smart," and there is "scary smart"—so smart that you are glad the person uses their mind for good and not to rule the planet for their own enrichment. Giuliana Bruno is scary smart. This book is about the relationship between seeing and traveling, about the "motion" in emotion. That topic alone makes it engaging, but what I think is even more important about this book is the way it brings together different arts.
Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand. During pin-ups and reviews we have talked about how the making of drawings and models is a matter of craft—of knowing about the qualities of materials and how they can be shaped for a certain effect. Very soon you will be making representations with a computer in addition to with a lead holder and chipboard and you might be wondering, is there such a thing as "digital craft"? After all, most AutoCad plots look as if they could have been made by anyone any time. McCullough, who was trained as an architect and urban planner, thinks that digital craft does exist, even if the ideas of craft are not discussed or taught in a computer lab. This book places digital media within a larger context of visual arts. It will not teach you how to make the most of the Photoshop magic wand tool, but it will introduce you to a way of thinking about your efforts with keyboard and mouse that will lead to better works.
Douglas Cooper, Drawings and Perceiving: Life Drawings for Students of Architecture and Design. Cooper teaches at Carnegie Mellon and this book might be considered a translation or adaptation of the well known The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicholaides for designers. The instructions and exercises are quite good.
Robert W. Gill, Basic Rendering. This book is all about black and white rendering. Its strength is its discussion of how light behaves on the objects around us. It will help you to become a master of stippling.
The Library of Congress online includes the 41,000 photographs in the Harris & Ewing Collection, all searchable.
If you use trails in New Jersey, here is a survey from the NJ DEP about trails and trail use.
Is this our best response to increased flooding in a changing climate? New gates to close the roads?
You don't need to travel to Europe or South America to visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There are multiple sites within an easy drive of Rutgers. And there are even more all throughout the US (28, to be precise), with the National Park Service and the Department of Interior maintaining a list of future candidate sites to list. Here is a list/map of the US sites.
What should be added? What is a site that is significant to the entire world's population?
In the GISciences, people often cite Mark Monmonier's How to Lie with Maps. It is a very accessible guide to the ways that maps can trick us and how cartographers, even well meaning ones, can create maps that mislead.
So I am quite taking with the chart equivalent. FlowingData has posted an accessible explanation about Dishonest Charts that can help us both as the creators of charts but also as critical readers of data that need to be wary of what at first seems obvious.
Drought-challenged areas can get serious about the water supply. Consider this story from Texas where the community acquired land that was the aquifer recharge zone as a way of protecting their water supply.
In New Jersey, Home Rule gives the municipality substantial autonomy over its own planning and zoning decisions. As such, even a development on a shared border with a neighboring town is left largely to the one community. Hence, Edison just approved a new warehouse on its border with Metuchen despite objections from "Metuchen's land use attorney and planner."
Southern New Jersey has an unique landscape called the Pinelands. The UN-recognized landscape benefits from a variety of strategies and protections including the New Jersey Pinelands Commission's Comprehensive Management Plan (CMP). First adopted in 1980, the plan is an important tool for guiding growth while protecting these unique resources, including the very large Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer. If the CMP is too much for you, this StoryMap offers an easy point of entry.
Planning and designing for people is tricky because community perception doesn't always match reality. A striking example of this is the Mean World Syndrome in which people express grave concerns over crime and public safety at times during which these concerns are not well founded. What else might a community perception that can sometimes be shown to be misaligned with the facts?
Interstate 80 is closed again because of a sinkhole. Why does this keep happening? Mine shafts.
Matthews Nielsen Landscape Architects (MNLA) has released a design proposal for Hudson Square. The design includes interactive seating and a cool and shady area they list as a tree and umbrella bosque. If you ever visit the Film Forum, this is just a couple blocks over. See a movie, chill out in the park.
Are we designing or planning communities to support the trendy activities? There is an increased interest in biking to school in groups, called bike buses. It help young students develop physically while building relationships and gaining some personal autonomy - all good things. But what are we doing to make our communities fit this trend? Are we creating safer routes? Are we making connections that reward the young cyclists? Does the route make them feel like they are welcome and encouraged to travel this way?
Today's Wall Street Journal reports that climate change is going to hammer home values and dramatically increase the cost of home insurance. Explaining the data from a report by First Street, the WSJ explains that we should anticipate a $1.75 trillion reduction in value by 2055. And they even tell us where to watch:
First Street projects the hardest-hit places will have rising home-insurance costs and population declines. The counties with the biggest projected population loss over the next 30 years are Fresno County, Calif.; Ocean County, N.J.; and Monmouth County, N.J.Sould you trust their data? The article mentions that First Street is providing climate change data to Zillow which accompanies each house on the website. Here is a house that is 10/10 high risk in three categories.
The movie Groundhog Day includes the very end of Phil Connors reading the Kilmer poem Trees:
Trees
By Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Happy Groundhog Day!
Before you plan a summer vacation in one of our National Parks, you might want to be sure that they will be staffed up. Among the flurry of Federal news there is a temporary pause in hiring of seasonal staff in the parks. Maybe it will be resolved quickly, or maybe it will be a lingering issue. Seems like something worth watching while making summer plans.
Every place is a little different. Finding and celebrating those differences is such a treat. For that reason, Scouting NY was one of my favorite resources when it was active. I still love to check it before taking a group out in the City.
The newest entry that field is Howard Veregin's Oddsconsin, which is a blog about the interesting spots across the landscapes of Wisconsin. It will be exciting to see what they have in store.
The North American landscapes may have a richer cultural heritage than many think. The Smithsonian magazine has a feature on the water-logged archaeologists that are finding ancient canoes. These are older than many might expect: "Once in a while, though, they’ll find a specimen that shares a timeline with Beowulf, the Phoenician alphabet or even early math."
The next meeting of the City of New Brunswick Planning Board will be February 10, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. in Council Chambers, New Brunswick City Hall, 78 Bayard Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
