SYMP 14-6
Restoration of landscape biodiversity through innovative landscape architectural design
The vernacular of the world’s traditional and indigenous peoples has historically inspired innovation in the field of architecture. However, so far there has been minimal impact to landscape architecture and urbanism. Meanwhile ecologists and conservation biologists have begun to respond to a powerful critique from anthropologists, who point out that “indigenous peoples live in most of the ecosystems that conservationists are so anxious to protect.”[i]With an estimated 20 million Conservation Refugees removed from their homelands by the policies that protect our natural habitats, the field of Conservation is being questioned.
This lecture migrates the emerging biocultural model for conservation into the purview of designers, using global case studies the undocumented ecosystem innovations of Indigenous and Traditional Peoples will be explored. The adaptations of these ‘ecosystem dwellers’, inhabiting the global shadow conservation network, will offer answers to the assist in solving the complex environmental problems plaguing the 21stcentury. In the sciences these innovations are termed Coupled Human and Nature Systems and are informed by Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). As designers forge the frontier of environmental innovation, focusing on high tech solutions to mitigate climate change, I pose three questions to counter this direction. What do Indigenous Peoples know that we once knew? Is this knowledge lost or just forgotten? How can we use this knowledge today?
Results/Conclusions
It turns out that this knowledge is neither lost, nor forgotten. It is hidden in some of the remotest places on earth. As for the vernacular, the neglected practices of indigenous peoples have the potential to cast new light upon ecological design practices that empower indigenous peoples, enhance ecosystem biodiversity and increase ecological services.
Influencing Architecture’s fascination with the non-pedigreed architecture, Bernard Rudofksy accounted that the vernacular remains unnoticed, being overshadowed by our western fixation on the higher arts, coupled by a lack of documentation of these vernacular practices.[i]By exploring the adaptations of Indigenous peoples, we afford a new direction of inquiry for the preservation of earth. These explorations reinforce the urgent need for a successful bio-cultural conservation model that ensures large-scale cultural landscapes can be assured long-term preservation. They also inspire us to investigate these indigenous innovations and in turn this allows us to revisit an engagement with the ancient, whose criticality we are only just beginning to understand.