Landscape Architecture Magazine

SARA JENSEN CARR, ASLA, (“Climate Crises Pedagogies,” page 100) is an assistant professor at Northeastern University whose research, writing, and teaching examine the intersection of landscape, human health, and climate resilience. You can follow her on Twitter @sarajcarr. “The days of pandemic teaching revealed so much about the strengths and weaknesses of studio culture. How we take those lessons while still training students to meet the expanding challenges of the profession will hopefully reshape education in the coming years.” TANEASHA WHITE-GIBSON (“On Their Own Terms,” page 22) is a Black, queer lover of words and community. Through storytelling, she pushes for continued action and conversation around the vitality of social equity. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @oheytaneasha_. “Not only is the work of the Godley sisters ongoing, but the impact…

I was delighted to see the article about the Silver Bow Creek restoration project in Butte, Montana, in the April issue of LAM. Great job! As a Montana native, landscape architect, and historian, I know quite a bit about Butte’s contentious history. I think Sarah Shaw caught that essence pretty well by highlighting how the Butte residents eventually embraced Stacey Robinson’s work. I am a bit puzzled, however, by the article’s title—“The Heart of the Hill”—which, I assume, is a vague reference to Butte’s title as the “Richest Hill on Earth.” Granted, the mining of that hill spawned the massive pollution that turned the entire Silver Bow Creek/Clark Fork River watershed into the largest Superfund site in the country, which, in turn, necessitated the hiring of Land Design, Inc. and the…

Climate crises burnout is a real thing. In April, I attended the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Boise, Idaho, and among the questions raised at a plenary was how journalists could continue to bring urgency to the successive cycles of climate coverage. In the unending news loop of escalating harm, how do we keep readers engaged when we report on the next Atlantic hurricane season (which begins June 1), and the next, and the next? While there may be only so many ways to report the dismal data and science, there are unlimited facets of human experience to bring into the story and ways to refract what we are learning—a particularly salient angle when we begin to unpack the deleterious cultural frameworks that brought us to this moment in human…

At the Catawba Trail Farm, founded by sisters Delphine Godley Sellars and Lucille Godley Patterson, land once occupied by the 30,000-acre Snow Hill Plantation outside Durham, North Carolina, is being reclaimed as a community garden. For $100 per year, residents can rent one of the 40-plus garden beds, learn to grow their own produce, and take it back home to feed their families. The sisters hold classes and share skills on canning and growing, host gleaning events, and collaborate with partners to give fresh produce and recipes away, with more activities to come. The Godley sisters’ organization, Urban Community AgriNomics (UCAN), was founded in 2016 with the connected missions of reducing food insecurity, preventing and reversing health issues, improving the academic success of community children, and empowering healthy families. UCAN helps…

The unprecedented scale of wildfire in the American West has produced a corresponding crisis for agencies charged with restoring postfire landscapes: a shortage of native seed. According to the January 2023 Assessment of Native Seed Needs and the Capacity for Their Supply report, conducted by a committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the nation’s supply of native plant seed is “severely insufficient.” Susan P. Harrison, a professor of environmental policy at the University of California, Davis, and one of the report’s lead authors, says the scale of the problem is nearly impossible to quantify, but it is “very, very, very big.” Large-scale ecosystem restoration requires an enormous amount of native plant material. That material typically comes in the form of seed, which is often procured from private…

In 1980, prospective landscape architecture students had eight accredited graduate landscape architecture programs to choose from in the United States. Forty years later, that number has swelled to 53. In the past five years, five schools—Kent State University, University of Delaware, North Dakota State University, South Dakota State University, and Universidad Ana G. Méndez in Puerto Rico—all added undergraduate or graduate degree programs in landscape architecture. The profession’s training grounds are expanding. The latest school to join these ranks is the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) at Maānoa, whose MLA program received accreditation from the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board (LAAB) earlier this year. “Up until 2018, Hawaiʻi was one of a handful of states that didn’t have formalized landscape architecture education,” says the program director and professor of landscape architecture Judith Stilgenbauer,…