To Heal the Earth

"To Heal the Earth": Selected Writings of Ian L. McHarg
Edited by Ian L. McHarg and Frederick R. Steiner
Island Press. 380 pp. $32.00

Reviewed by J. Glenn Eugster

"To Heal the Earth" feels much like a ramble along a familiar path seeing things again, with a new clarity. Ian McHarg's papers, and Frederick Steiner's analysis, provide illuminating guidance for how communities and land use practitioners intertwine natural systems and the built environment to achieve healthy and healthful environments.

Professor McHarg's "Design With Nature" principles, first published in his 1969 globally renown book, appear throughout these selected writings somehow seeming again, new and timely for a Nation, and a world still struggling to be able to prosper with and protect the environment. McHarg's words still ring true when he says, "We must do more than sustain the planet, we must design and regenerate communities and landscapes"......”There is a desperate need for a concept of a "healthy" and "healthful" environment”....”The role of man is to understand nature, which is also to say man, and to intervene to enhance its creative processes...”Written on the place and upon its inhabitants lies mute all physical, biological and cultural history awaiting to be understood by those who can read it". Although his words span a period of fifty years they connect with some of the most pressing and important land, growth and stewardship opportunities we face locally and globally.

Reading "To Heal the Earth" is virtually a visit to Professor McHarg's office at the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. The book feels as if you have dropped in to see Ian and listen to he and Frederick "Fritz" Steiner discuss Ian's writings between the 1950s and 1990s within the historical context of ecological planning and design work. As you move through the chapters its easy to imagine sitting across an obviously busy desk from McHarg and Steiner, with a backdrop of bookcases filled with the classic texts and reports which influenced or were shaped by the man who changed the face of landscape architecture and planning. Only a visit from Lenore Sagan, a longtime colleague and confidant of McHarg, would make this visit and to McHarg's office and what he has shared more authentic.

Professor McHarg's writings, taken from his most noteworthy presentations and projects, are chronologically ordered and analyzed by Fritz Steiner to combine the clarity vision with substantive detail. Steiner, a former student of McHarg's and the founding director of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University, helped Ian publish "A Quest for Life: An Autobiography of Ian L. McHarg". Professor Steiner's contribution to this book, as well as McHarg's autobiography, draws unique perspectives into the depth and breadth of Ian's work and offers a context useful to the past present and future.

The latest collaboration between Professors McHarg and Steiner's is most timely. It celebrates the past work of McHarg a "living legend" who continues to practice and advance the profession of landscape architecture and ecological planning. It also offers public and private leaders new insights about planning, land use and the relationship between people and their environment which are grounded in a half-century of experience. These historical and contemporary insights come at a time when the planning and design professions are struggling to redefine themselves. "To Heal the Earth" appears at a time when leaders at all levels of the government and the private sector are knee-deep in data, boutique federal government programs, snappy double-speak slogans about growth and a tyranny of small solutions about healthy and healthful communities.

McHarg's evolving message over the last fifty years is based on a holistic land use planning and design model of how living organisms interact with their environment. His premise is that, "The place is because. It is and is in the process of becoming. This we must be able to read, and ecology provides the language". McHarg's principles advocate an understanding of places, people and the work performed by both in order to ascertain human and ecological values, constraints and opportunities. Once labeled a "radical view of planning" and now embraced globally as "sustainable development", this message and its practical application describes a way for communities, states and nations to manage complex interrelated systems to simultaneously achieve environmental social and economic objectives.

Professor McHarg's papers articulate his view that science and applied ecology can help decision-makers understand the consequences of different actions. Professor McHarg's belief is that in order to understand a region, watershed or site, one must understand the place, its inhabitants and all of the areas physical, biological and cultural history. "Planning is a means to address social issues and a device to confront the future. Such confrontation requires that human values be explicit and when these values are clarified and linked to the environment, they have considerably more influence on planning than any amount of data.

McHarg's writings, and Steiner's analysis including a wealth of footnotes, makes this book both an inspirational read as well as a practical reference. Of particular value to the practitioner, as well as enjoyment to the historian, is the chapter "Methods and Techniques for Ecological Planning". Here McHarg and Steiner combine to reveal what Alexander Pope refereed to as "the genius of place".

Key to McHarg's method is the use of the "Layer-Cake" model for understanding a place (i.e. begin with the physical evolution of the place, continue with its bio-physical evolution and conclude with the addition of cultural history); uniting all of the discrete perceptions of divided science into a description of a single interacting system; and making sure that humans are adequately represented in ecological planning (i.e. human ecology). In a way McHarg's method challenges leaders to use information scientific data and community visioning to answer the following questions for a place (i.e. basin, physiographic region, site, etc.): What are the environments? How did they come to be? What physical, biological and social processes characterize them? What tendencies do they exhibit? What has been the effect of human use? What is their current status? What should we do?

The case studies selected, which include plans done for highways, water quality improvement, growth management and housing developments read like the benchmarks documents in McHarg's bookcase. Examples such as "The Plan for the Valleys" outside of Baltimore, MD.; "Biological Alternatives to Water Pollution"; and "Ecological Plumbing for the Texas Coastal Plain" continue to be models of innovation for smart growth, watershed protection and restoration and green infrastructure efforts today.

Never to be without vision McHarg's book also includes a proposal which he and several colleagues made to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a "National Ecological Inventory" for transforming environmental research and education into place-based environmental monitoring and action.

A trip to Professor McHarg's office, like "To Heal the Earth" can be a rather heady experience. Whether Mr. McHarg is discussing his new book on children's poetry or a land use plan he is helping to prepare for Taiwan, he challenges readers--and former students, to expand their thinking to the next larger context. By embracing ecology, at a local, global and biosphere level, he urges us to view the world as complex and diverse. McHarg says that "By seeking the simple important aspects are omitted or ignored. Complex and diverse designs have a greater chance of being sustainable". Such advise will serve us well as we look at ways to help Potomac communities protect and prosper.

Professors McHarg and Steiner have provided all of us with unique and personalized ideology and ideas which we can use to better understand the places we live or work in. More importantly they reaffirm that our role and relationship with nature is essential as we design and regenerate our communities.


J. Glenn Eugster is the River Navigator for the Potomac American Heritage River. He works for EPA and is on detail to the National Park Service. He studied landscape architecture and ecological planning at the University of Pennsylvania with Professor McHarg from 1974-76. He still enjoys visits to Mr. McHarg's office.