NATURE’S POETRY BY STEVEN APFELBAUM AND ELIZABETH ROGERS TILLER
Biographies Steven I. Apfelbaum is the founder of Applied Ecological Services, Inc., an environmental consulting and ecological restoration firm. He is co-author of the Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land series for restoration ecology. He is also the author of the award-winning book, Nature’s Second Chance, which recounts the 30-year story of how he and his family restored a dairy farm to prairie, forest, trout stream and wetlands near Juda, Wisconsin. He is a lecturer in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Elizabeth Rogers Tiller is an ecologist and ornithologist who works as a communications associate with Applied Ecological Services. Dr. Tiller has over 20 years experience working in the environmental field, including federal, private, and tribal employment. In her free time, she pursues ecological interests that include birdwatching, botanizing, mammal tracking, gardening, and just prowling around with her Springer looking for natural wonders.
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. “Marshland Elegy” by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac
We humans relate to the land on a personal level. Starting with the backyards of our childhoods, we expand outward to our neighborhoods, our towns, our counties, our states, our countries, and sometimes beyond. Asked to conjure up an image of a peaceful, lovely place, the answers would be as varied as the people asked and their life experiences. We tend to love what we know. For ecologists, that personal relationship extends to ecosystems—plants, animals, soils, bedrock, weather, seasonal changes, and more. It is a bit of a professional handicap perhaps, but a restoration ecologist really can’t look at a parcel of human-inhabited land without seeking ways to use ecological restoration principles in order to bring it to its full potential. This affinity for the land and respect for its potential comprise common ground for restoration ecologists and landscape architects. In their professions, they share the goal of creating landscapes that are aesthetically pleasing. They both know that the public’s eye falls first on appearance, each viewer synthesizing his or her own poetry of the landscape. In addition, both know that designed landscapes need to be practical—low in maintenance costs, while still providing practical functions such as stormwater management and noise abatement. Looking a little deeper, they also likely agree on the need to incorporate sustainability into their designs addressing issues such as carbon sequestration, temperature moderation, soil development, groundwater infiltration, and wildlife habitat. In many ways, these are the values Leopold spoke of in the opening quotation as “values as yet uncaptured by language.” Being pretty is not only valuable in and of itself; it is the main doorway to deeper appreciation and understanding of all the associated values. More than 40 years ago, in his book, Design With Nature, landscape architect Ian McHarg made the case that design and planning should respond to the regional environment. Others had trod that ground in their own ways before him. Some 170 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged the American artist and architect to consider “the climate, the soil, the length
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of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government” in creating their works. Frank Lloyd Wright was elegantly sparse in his words: “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” The precedent has been well set. What is left is interpretation. Nature as defined by a restoration ecologist, however, does not always form a one-to-one match with other definitions. Much landscape design, for example, has been dominated by the use of non-native plant species, employed to create an aesthetically pleasing, but more formal and controlled perception of nature. They pass the test of being “pretty,” but what about all the values “as yet uncaptured by language?” When used in landscape designs, alien plant species that evolved in another region, or even on another continent, lack the intricate, life-sustaining connections of their native ecosystems. This can include a lack of natural controls that allows their populations to expand to the detriment of native species, should they spread to unmanaged areas. In other cases, an alien species becomes overabundant simply because a human-altered landscape provides an ideal habitat. These alien invasive species (as regulatory agencies call them) can crowd out native species and exacerbate issues of ecological integrity that were only dimly recognized when McHarg penned his text. Clearly, when it comes to creating natural and sustainable landscape designs, more is needed than just a search for visual aesthetics with nature broadly defined. A thoughtful understanding of nature’s poetry, not unlike interpretation of written poetry, requires a sort of reading between the lines. This means looking at ecological functions, interactions, and services to find the deeper meanings in each design or ecosystem. Again, ecologists and landscape architects can find common ground here, expressed popularly in the landscape world with the rubric “form follows function.” To address these deeper design principles, a restoration ecologist typically starts from a foundation of ecosystem health, often described in terms of stability and resiliency. A healthy ecosystem is composed of a diversity of species performing overlapping, interrelated functions. It is harder for a perturbation (such as drought or windstorm) to upset the ecological balance of such a system. Likewise, such an ecosystem recovers from disturbances more quickly, returning to a healthy, functioning, and balanced state.