The following is an excerpt from a longer essay in Design with Nature Now. Its title refers to the opening line of Ian McHarg’s speech at the first Earth Day in 1970.

As a native of Clydebank, Scotland, Ian McHarg (1920–2001) grew up on the shadowy fringes of the Industrial Revolution. His father, John Lennox McHarg, started his professional and married life with the promise of upward mobility as a manager in a manufacturing firm. Both of his grandfathers were carters who labored transporting whiskey kegs and soft goods behind teams of Clydesdale horses. The economic depression of the 1930s took its toll on family and city alike. The time McHarg spent alongside his mother, Harriet Bain, tending the family garden—their hands working the soil together—must have awakened his curiosity about nature and the larger landscape. Young Ian’s hikes from the urban grit of Glasgow to the idyllic countryside of the Kilpatrick Hills formed enduring counterpoints in his adolescent development.¹

At the age of sixteen, McHarg resolved to be a landscape architect and dropped out of high school to formally apprentice with Donald Wintersgill, head of design and construction operations for Austin and McAlsan, Ltd., the leading nursery and seed merchants in Scotland. Service in the British Army during World War II (1938–1946), including bloody fighting during the invasion of Italy, delayed the completion of his training. However, it was in these years that a parochial, “gangling . . . hobbledehoy” developed a strong sense of self-confidence and courage.² He had also marched through the Roman ruins in Carthage, Paestum, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Rome, and Athens, as well as the length of Greece, and returned to Scotland a worldly man.

After the war, McHarg resumed his training at Harvard University, completing a bachelor’s degree before receiving master’s degrees in landscape architecture and city planning. He supplemented his required courses with classes in government and economics, which had a lasting impact on his thinking. At Harvard, McHarg recalled, modern architecture was “a crusade . . . a religion. We were saved; therefore, we must save the world.”³ He had returned to Scotland in the summer of 1950 with the conviction of a reformer, but a life-threatening bout with tuberculosis diminished his professional prospects. Following four years in the Scottish Civil Service engaged in planning postwar housing and towns, McHarg packed up and sailed for America.

The Philadelphia in which McHarg arrived in early September 1954 was thinking big about the future. Postwar reformers had mounted the Better Philadelphia Exhibition in the fall of 1947 to introduce the virtues of urban and regional planning through a series of dazzling and engaging displays installed on two floors of the city’s Gimbels department store. New ideas for revitalizing the city took a more sensitive approach to urban renewal, incorporating historic fabric and human scale. Architectural Forum called this approach “the Philadelphia cure,” a version of clearing slums with “penicillin, not surgery” that featured works by architect Louis Kahn to illustrate recent developments.⁴ Three hundred thousand citizens visited the exhibition, and the organizers’ efforts came to fruition in the reform administrations of Mayors Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth. Both politicians supported Edmund Bacon, who served as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC) from 1949 to 1970. Under his leadership, Philadelphia was highly regarded for its imaginative city planning, and Bacon’s close ties to architects suggested that the field would have an important role to play in the city’s future. G. Holmes Perkins, who was chair of the PCPC and dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Arts, helped to establish this atmosphere of accomplishment.⁵

Meanwhile at Penn, Perkins was working to shed the vestiges of Beaux Arts formality, but not all of its concern for the City Beautiful. The school was an energetic environment, committed to the city, with a dynamic faculty in architecture and city planning. Broadly understood, the faculty coalesced around the notion that a building, in its design, should be understood as an element integral to a larger context and that the role of the designer was, in part, to interpret how a building should relate to and grow the “patterns” around it. . . . 

As concern over cities shaped funding priorities in the 1950s, alarm over environmental degradation—signaled by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring—sharpened priorities in the mid-1960s. President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s call for “a new conservation” catalyzed efforts at the national level. . . . Ecology became McHarg’s central focus, a lens through which a comprehensive assessment and evaluation of the environment became possible. Studio problems, as well as his professional commissions, were the primary vehicles for testing ideas and for developing the method and techniques needed to advance the ecological approach to landscape architecture. The great river basins of the Potomac and the Delaware became ideal regions for study; their boundaries were shaped by ecological forces rather than political divisions. By 1966, McHarg had successfully assembled a team of ecologists, scientists, environmental lawyers, and designers . . . and was actively shaping an expansive agenda.⁶

William Whitaker is curator of the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is coauthor (with George Marcus) of The Houses of Louis I. Kahn and recipient of the 2014 Literary Award of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

Photograph: Ian McHarg in Portugal, July 1967. Credit: Pauline McHarg, Ian and Carol McHarg Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Notes

¹ For McHarg’s account of his youth and education, see Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Natural History Press, 1969); and Ian L. McHarg, A Quest for Life (New York: John Wiley, 1996). The official birth registration for McHarg lists his given names as “John Lennox,” after his father. His family must have begun using the Gaelic variation “Ian” early on. Extract of an entry from the Register of Births in Scotland, obtained by author from the General Register Office of Scotland, August 2018.

² McHarg, Quest for Life, 63–64.

³ Ibid., 77.

⁴ “The Philadelphia Cure: Clearing Slums with Penicillin, not Surgery,” Architectural Forum 96, no. 4 (April 1952): 112–119.

⁵ Thomas Hine, “[Philadelphia] Influence in Architecture on the Decline,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 7, 1980, M1–2.

⁶ Ian L. McHarg, “An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Architecture 57, no. 2 (January 1967): 105–107.

In 1969, Ian L. McHarg, professor of planning and landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, published a manifesto titled Design with Nature. Translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, and still in print to this day, it is arguably the most important book to come out of the design professions in the 20th century. Design with Nature not only captured the zeitgeist of the late 1960s by decrying modern civilization’s—or at least North America’s—sprawling urbanism and environmental degradation; it went further than most by proposing a practical method for doing something about it.

Using rudimentary digital tools and painstaking analog drawings, with his students and colleagues at Penn, McHarg developed a method of overlaying maps of the biophysical characteristics of a given place to make decisions about future land use. Part science and part common sense, the method provided an empirical, rational, and ostensibly objective basis for deciding which land was most suitable for which purpose—for example, farms on the good soil here, forest upland from water supply there, and of course, housing outside of flood zones and behind coastal dunes.

Throughout history, cultures have either withered or flourished as a result of how they live with land and water, or per McHarg, how they designed with nature. For cultures attuned through experience to the specific conditions of their landscapes, designing with nature becomes a form of lore. In this sense McHarg’s design philosophy is nothing new. But his advocacy of ecology as the basis for design and its application to the modern city was. McHarg’s great achievement, then, was to create a simple, universal method for assessing and then incorporating environmental science into the decision making processes of modern development. When applied well, his method offered a way to both guide and substantiate design decisions, especially those that limited the scope and scale of otherwise sprawling development.

However, Design with Nature is more than a land use manual. It soars from geology to cosmology, it cuts from Christianity to Buddhism, and it interleafs speculations on entropy and evolution to arrive at a unifying theory of design. For McHarg, to design with nature meant for humanity to intentionally and benignly fit itself to the environment. Drawing on the most advanced ecological science of his time, this idea of fitness flowed from a belief that cultural and natural systems could coexist harmoniously, in balance, if each part were in its proper place. For him, this was not just biological determinism at work; it was the highest of arts.

McHarg’s vision, like that of his mentor the great polymath Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes before him, was that by living with rather than against the more powerful forces and flows of the natural world, humanity would gain a biocentric sense of place; and this, in the deepest sense, would replace the Abrahamic theologies and capitalist culture of consumption he held responsible for the environmental crises of the 1960s.

For McHarg, Western culture’s greatest promise was a synthesis of the sciences and the arts that had yet to be applied to how we dwell on the land, and it was the profession of landscape architecture that could steward society through this evolutionary process. To this day, at least in theory if not in practice, this remains the field’s primary raison d’être.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Design with Nature, with this new book and its associated exhibitions and conference, we ask what might be meant by design(ing) with nature now? As faculty at the school to which McHarg devoted his life, we feel a particular responsibility to explore these questions at this time and from this place. While McHarg’s prescience warrants celebration, our intention in marking the 50th anniversary of his magnum opus is not hagiographic. Rather, we view our responsibility, and the purpose of this volume, as one of constructive and critical discourse—to ask how the ethos of designing with nature has evolved over the past half-century, and to speculate on its prospects over the next fifty years.

By making recourse to Nature as a higher authority on the one hand and reducing it to interpretation through data-driven positivism on the other, McHarg was always going to get into philosophical trouble and attract criticism. Indeed, much of what has happened in landscape architecture over the past fifty years can be read as either an endorsement or a critique of his philosophy and method. Had McHarg titled his book Design with Landscape instead of Design with Nature, and had he offered caveats about the limits of his method to inform human creativity and ingenuity, then accusations of hubris and artlessness that were periodically leveled at him could have been largely avoided. But in his rush to change the field—and indeed to change the world—McHarg overlooked some of those critical details.

That McHarg inspired debate is, however, no small part of his enduring significance. Whereas these debates once may have threatened to split the profession between “the designers” and “the planners,” we can now see a profession that has intellectually matured around these tensions. We see a profession that is diversified in its practices but united in its sense of ecological and artistic purpose. We see a profession equipped with a range of design techniques that build on, rather than obviate, their foundation in the McHargian method of landscape suitability analysis described earlier. And yes, we also still see the rift between McHarg’s grandiloquence and daily practice—a rift that to some extent must always exist between the ideal and the real. Without gaps between the theory and practice of designing with nature, there would be nowhere for landscape architecture to grow or evolve. . . .

As anyone who knew him or even attended just one of his lectures will attest, McHarg was an unforgettable character, a man of passion and erudition in equal measure. Ian McHarg died in 2001, his life’s work completed well before the expressions “climate change” and “the Anthropocene” became central societal concerns. The environmental reality these terms now signify, the debates and anxieties they engender, and the increasing calls for climate action make McHarg’s prophetic injunction to design with nature more pertinent than ever. Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric scientist usually credited with first declaring this to be the epoch of the Anthropocene, has described its advent as beginning with the Industrial Revolution and then radically accelerating after 1945. In 2011, along with his colleagues Will Steffen and John McNeill, Crutzen argued that we should begin moving into a new period in which we “steward the earth.”¹ This of course was the essential message of Design with Nature some fifty years earlier, and in this regard the profession of landscape architecture has been at the vanguard of a broader cultural revolution that now comes into its own in the context of the Anthropocene. This is not to say, however, that the profession has fulfilled its McHargian mandate of leading global environmental stewardship. Such a claim would be absurd. More to the point, it could hardly be argued that the world is environmentally better off now than it was when Design with Nature was first published. On the contrary, the dawn of the Anthropocene signals the opposite. We are plunging, headlong, into an epoch of global environmental change at an unprecedented scale and pace. How we learn to live with that change is the central challenge for the next half-century of design. In the work we have collected here there are real clues as to how, through design, we can better tune our cities and their infrastructure to the forces and flows of the Earth system. The fact that such projects are the exception and not the rule only underscores their importance as landmarks of a more widespread historical change yet to come.

The 21st century is marked by the fact that humanity has directly or indirectly modified every habitat on the planet, and much of it deleteriously so. With the unintended consequences of global warming, species extinction, and resource depletion, it is now possible that our extraordinary success as a species could also become our demise. Our recognition of this “tragedy of the commons” is what distinguishes us from other species that have also flourished in the course of evolutionary history. To not only know this, but to act on that knowledge in a precautionary way, is to intentionally design environments so that they are more life-giving and more life-sustaining, for all forms of life. This is not a punitive or messianic project; it is a political and above all a creative project, one that transcends geographies, economies, and the forces of globalization that have overwhelmed and divided the planet—between developed and developing, rich and poor. That is the enduring and inspiring meaning of Design with Nature, and it is to that end that this new book is dedicated.

Richard Weller and Karen M’Closkey are professors of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Frederick Steiner is dean and Paley professor at the school; Steiner and Weller are also co-executive directors of the school’s Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, where Billy Fleming serves as the Wilks Family Director.

Image: Cover of Design with Nature, 1969. Credit: Doubleday/Natural History Press, American Museum of Natural History.

Notes

¹ Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 38, no. 8 (2011): 614–621.

“Man is an epidemic, destroying the environment upon which [he] depends and threatening his own extinction.”

Addressing a throng of 30,000 people in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park at the first Earth Day demonstration in 1970, landscape architect and author Ian McHarg minced no words. His was not a feel-good speech; in addition to the sobering assessment above, he also informed the crowd, “You’ve got no future.”

Those words, though dark, were intended to help his listeners see the light. McHarg believed humanity was mired in a plight of our own creation, but not an intractable one—and he had solutions to offer. Exactly one year earlier, he had held in his hands the first bound copy of his book Design with Nature, a nearly 200-page treatise in which he called for a new way of thinking about the relationship between people, the built environment, and the land we occupy. The book’s first print run sold out. So would a second. It was evident by the time he delivered that Earth Day speech that a hunger existed for the ideas he was putting forth. In fact, his philosophy would ultimately change the way an entire generation of planners, architects, and designers thought about the relationship between people and place. His book, along with the work of other leading thinkers like Jane Jacobs, helped change the way many of our cities look and function, especially in the United States. It still tops lists of influential design and planning publications.

Fifty years ago, Design with Nature helped launch the field of ecological planning—and helped us pivot from a late 20th-century society that viewed cities as a necessary evil to one that increasingly sees them as attractive, liveable places that just might hold the key to our salvation as a species. Today, the Lincoln Institute is delighted to partner with McHarg’s successors at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania on the follow-up volume excerpted in this issue, Design with Nature Now. Edited by Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, Billy Fleming, and Frederick Steiner, the new book offers an unprecedented collection of thoughtful tributes to McHarg, exemplary projects that reflect his tenets, and forthright assessments of how far we’ve come—and how far we’ve yet to travel.

Taken together, the book (forthcoming in October) and an eponymous international exhibition and conference, both hosted at Penn in 2019, remind us of the urgency that led McHarg to write his seminal work—and the unavoidable fact that, in many ways, that urgency has only increased. With urbanization occurring rapidly—some two billion more people are expected to live in the world’s cities by 2050—and climate change demanding that we rethink nearly everything about where and how we live, McHarg’s ideas are more apt than ever.

For the Lincoln Institute, introducing a new generation to his work is part of a broader effort to elevate the critical role of land as a solution to our most pressing economic, social, and environmental challenges. We do this through publications like this book, and through our work on the ground in places like the U.S. Rust Belt, where we bring together small legacy cities to think about innovative revitalization strategies; in China, where we support a government-led effort to implement stormwater-absorbing sponge cities; and in Latin America, where we promote new teaching tools to engage planners in the work of improving urban conditions.

This kind of work is important everywhere, but especially in the developing world, where urban growth is accelerating and weakly governed. A shift toward quality growth is beginning to happen; we can support that shift by embracing and spreading McHarg’s principles. To contradict his warning that society has no future, we must continue the work of getting urbanization right. That means ensuring safe neighborhoods and strong economies, yes, but it also means replacing impervious pavement with bioswales and redesigning streetscapes at the human scale; implementing green and blue infrastructure where gray infrastructure once reigned; and converting energy-intensive buildings into sustainable structures that are healthier places to live and work. These are not glamorous projects, but neither are they extraneous; they are fundamental to our ability to redesign and rebuild a functioning society for ourselves that does not, in the words of McHarg, “threaten our own extinction.”

Is humanity indeed an epidemic bent on destroying our environment and ultimately ourselves, or can we find and apply a cure? At the Lincoln Institute, the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and other organizations dedicated to studying the connections between people and place, we know that tools ranging from thoughtful land use policy to innovative design can contribute to a positive prognosis. But the time for action is now. We can’t change the past, but we can embrace the vision of McHarg and his many successors in the field of landscape ecology and broaden the implementation of ideas that elevated practice in the fields of architecture, urban planning, stormwater management, and many others. We must build upon McHarg’s legacy and Design with Nature Now—before it truly is too late.

Hace cuatro años, me hallé en un avión sobre el delta del Colorado con Katie Lincoln, la presidenta de nuestra junta. Desde nuestro punto panorámico, veíamos kilómetros y kilómetros de sedimento fluvial seco y polvoriento, y poca vegetación. Era un paisaje impactante, vasto, como de otro planeta, pintado con mil matices de beige.

Una vez que pisamos tierra, el panorama era diferente. Once meses antes, los Estados Unidos y México habían lanzado un “flujo por pulso” desde las represas del río Colorado para imitar las históricas inundaciones primaverales que ocurrieron durante milenios antes de que los humanos empezaran a administrar el agua del río. Hacia el sur fluyeron más de 0,1 kilómetros cúbicos de agua (cantidad suficiente para suplir las necesidades anuales de más de 200.000 viviendas), con el objeto de satisfacer las estipulaciones y las promesas hechas años antes entre ambos países. Por primera vez en dos décadas, el río llegó al Golfo de California.

Con esta meta en mente, los actores públicos y cívicos de ambos países prepararon un experimento para observar si el hábitat natural del delta se podría restaurar con una mejora en el caudal de agua. Retiraron la vegetación no nativa en unas 130 hectáreas del territorio aledaño a la Laguna Grande, sembraron plantas nativas en parte del terreno y árboles nativos en otros sectores. Para cuando Katie y yo visitamos el sitio, era evidente que el experimento había tenido éxito. La flora nativa prosperaba y atraía a la fauna nativa, que regresaba al lugar. Aves migratorias y no migratorias ostentaban su presencia con una cacofonía de llamadas y respuestas. Por fortuna, dos castores se habían establecido cerca del sitio restaurado. Su represa capturaba la corriente invertida del agua subterránea y la irrigación agrícola, a fin de garantizar el suministro de agua. 

Este experimento sobre uso del suelo, que había sido invisible desde el aire, demostró con claridad que el hábitat nativo del delta se podía restaurar. También fue evidente que era necesario hacer mucho más. 

En el pasado, el delta representaba el humedal más grande de América del Norte: cubría unos 70 millones de hectáreas. El flujo por pulso de 2014 llegó a las noticias; en realidad, fue una devolución de agua que se debía a México y se había almacenado en el lago Mead, tras un terremoto de 2010 que había dañado los canales de irrigación al sur de Mexicali. Después del evento, los Estados Unidos y México negociaron la liberación de flujos de forma más regular y gradual. En septiembre de 2017, acordaron entregar 0,25 kilómetros cúbicos de agua al delta durante una década. A principios de este año, el Consejo para la Defensa de Recursos Naturales informó que el sitio original restaurado en Laguna Grande había crecido a más de 485 hectáreas.

En muchos sentidos, el éxito de esa pequeña porción de suelo es la historia de toda la cuenca del río Colorado. Cuando se mira el panorama completo, cuando se observa desde una perspectiva real o figurada, a un kilómetro y medio de altura, se puede ver un sistema complejo, una maraña de geografía, historia y cultura, un recurso limitado y casi agotado del cual dependieron, y el cual compartieron y se disputaron varios estados, tribus y países durante el último siglo. Pero, si aterrizamos y husmeamos un poco, veremos algo más: pequeñas porciones donde prosperan la innovación y la colaboración. Asociaciones de restauración y compromisos renovados para afrontar problemas que parecen inextricables. Mejor comprensión de la importancia de reconocer las intersecciones entre agua, suelo y personas.

Luego del recorrido, en el momento del informe, les pregunté a nuestros anfitriones sobre la etapa final para el delta: ¿qué se necesitaría para restaurar todo el lugar? El flujo por pulso fue un momento único, ocasionado por una constelación de eventos y respaldado por la intervención diplomática. Para generar una solución permanente, se necesitaría una alineación distinta de actores. Pero ¿qué actores? ¿Sería posible promover el diálogo civil entre los interesados en el río para concebir una solución colectiva y poder administrar este recurso valioso? ¿Quién los convocaría?

Esta es una cuenca muy disputada. El río ofrece agua potable a más de 40 millones de personas; más de la mitad viven fuera de la cuenca. También irriga más de 2 millones de hectáreas de cultivo y produce más de 4 gigavatios de energía eléctrica. El río está distribuido (mejor dicho, sobredistribuido) en una intrincada red de derechos de aguas, acuerdos interestatales y un tratado internacional. Por lo tanto, forjar nuevos acuerdos y prácticas entre estos interesados podría resultar una tarea insuperable.

Que algo sea difícil no quiere decir que no valga la pena. Hemos decidido descubrir si el Instituto Lincoln puede ayudar a administrar mejor el río, y cómo hacerlo.

Nos embarcamos en una investigación de campo para averiguar quiénes vienen trabajando en los problemas del agua de la cuenca y evaluamos nuestras propias competencias de base. Queríamos saber si había una demanda para nuestros aportes potenciales. ¿Podríamos aprovechar nuestro conocimiento y experiencia en las áreas de políticas de suelo y compromiso de interesados? ¿Deberíamos ampliar nuestra labor para recopilar, mejorar y mapear nuevos conjuntos de datos? ¿Deberíamos adaptar y potenciar el uso de nuestras herramientas de planificación de situaciones para promover la toma de decisiones informadas y alcanzar un mayor compromiso cívico?

Nos encontramos con un campo atestado de investigadores, defensores, técnicos y funcionarios públicos dedicados. Las universidades y los organismos gubernamentales estudian constantemente la ciencia del río. Los gestores de políticas y analistas cubren los amplios contornos de las políticas en toda la cuenca. Varios expertos producen y perfeccionan proyecciones técnicas de situaciones demográficas, de sequías y de desarrollo. Sin embargo, notamos que el nexo entre políticas de agua y suelo era un nicho desatendido, pero esencial, en el campo. Al tomar las decisiones sobre el uso del suelo, no se suele considerar el impacto en el agua; así, se pone en riesgo la sustentabilidad de nuestras comunidades y del río. Fundamos el Centro Babbitt para Políticas de Suelo y Agua, con el objetivo de explorar y alimentar las conexiones económicas y medioambientales fundamentales entre el suelo y el agua.

Dedicamos el centro a Bruce Babbitt, ex Secretario del Interior de EE.UU., gobernador de Arizona y miembro de la junta directiva del Instituto Lincoln. Babbitt fue el primero en codificar la conexión entre la planificación del uso del suelo y la administración del agua en una ley estatal, al firmar la Ley de Aguas Subterráneas de Arizona, en 1980 (no se pierda nuestra entrevista con él, en la página 10).

El mayor enfoque del Centro Babbitt es el río Colorado y quienes dependen de él, pero no trabajamos solos. Sabemos que la administración efectiva y a largo plazo de este recurso inmenso, pero frágil, implica un gran emprendimiento que requiere amplias colaboraciones. Con el apoyo intelectual y económico del Instituto Lincoln, el centro está aprovechando los recursos de otros mediante asociaciones con universidades, ONG e inversores (ver página 6).

La sede del Centro Babbitt en Phoenix tiene la suerte de contar con personal con un nivel de conocimiento y compromiso elevadísimo; muchos de ellos trabajaron para esta edición de Land Lines. Jim Holway, el director, conoce las negociaciones occidentales sobre políticas de agua, ya que fue vicedirector del Departamento de Recursos Hídricos de Arizona y ahora es vicepresidente de la junta directiva del Distrito de Conservación de Agua de Centro Arizona. Hace poco, hizo un viaje de canotaje por el Gran Cañón. Luego de su viaje, le pedí que reflexionara sobre qué estaba en juego en la cuenca. Esto es lo que respondió:

En el futuro, los administradores del río Colorado se enfrentarán a numerosos rápidos políticos y una importante incertidumbre sobre las condiciones futuras, tanto climáticas, como de aprovisionamiento y demanda de agua. Sin embargo, no estamos ni cerca de los peligros y las adversidades que enfrentaron los primeros exploradores del Colorado. Existen soluciones para nuestros desafíos, y podemos construir sobre el legado de John Wesley Powell, quien exploró la cuenca del Colorado, comprendió cómo administrar de forma sostenible los suelos y los recursos hídricos limitados en esta región árida, y desafió el razonamiento convencional.

Desafiar el razonamiento convencional. Si bien lanzamos nuestro trabajo en la cuenca del río Colorado, sabemos que será relevante a nivel global. Mediante el alcance más amplio del Instituto Lincoln, ya iniciamos relaciones con socios globales, como la OCDE y la ONU. Según la ONU, más de 1.700 millones de personas de todo el mundo viven en cuencas de ríos, donde el uso del agua supera la realimentación.

Este número especial de Land Lines, el primero que celebra los 30 años de la publicación, refleja nuestros primeros esfuerzos para generar una gran cantidad de conocimientos que articulen la importante relación entre el suelo y el agua. En estas páginas, identificamos los desafíos de la cuenca del Colorado, recorremos brevemente su historia y hablamos con algunas de las personas más sabias que conocemos para enterarnos de qué nos depara el futuro. Además, observamos algunas labores innovadoras que se están llevando a cabo para integrar mejor las políticas de suelo y agua en las comunidades pioneras. Al compartir estos conocimientos con otras comunidades de regiones áridas y semiáridas de todo el mundo, haremos nuestro pequeño aporte para satisfacer la fascinación humana primitiva con los lugares donde el agua y el suelo se encuentran.

Four years ago, I found myself in an airplane above the Colorado Delta with Katie Lincoln, our board chair. From our shared vantage point, we could see miles and miles of dry and dusty river sediment and scarce vegetation. It was a stunning, vast, otherworldly landscape, painted with a thousand shades of beige.

On the ground, we saw a different story. Eleven months earlier, the United States and Mexico had released a “pulse flow” from dams on the Colorado River to mimic the historic spring floods that occurred for millennia before humans began managing the river’s waters. More than 100,000 acre-feet of water—enough to meet the annual needs of more than 200,000 households—flowed south to satisfy provisions and promises that had been made between the two countries years before; for the first time in two decades, the river reached the Gulf of California.

Leading up to that event, public and civic actors from the two countries prepared an experiment to see whether the natural habitat of the delta could be restored with improved water flow. They cleared about 320 acres of land near Laguna Grande of non-native vegetation, seeded some of the land with native plants, and planted native trees in other sections. By the time Katie and I visited the site, the success of the experiment was obvious. Native flora was thriving, and it was attracting native fauna back to the site. Both migratory and non-migratory birds made their presence known with a cacophony of calls and responses. As luck would have it, two beavers had taken up residence next to the restoration site. Their dam captured return flow from groundwater and agricultural irrigation to provide a more reliable water supply.

This land use experiment, which had been invisible from the air, demonstrated clearly that native habitat could be restored in the delta. It also was clear that much more needed to be done.

At one time, the delta was the largest wetland in North America, covering some 173 million acres. After the headline-making pulse flow in 2014—which was actually a return of water due to Mexico that had been stored in Lake Mead, following a 2010 earthquake that damaged irrigation canals south of Mexicali—the United States and Mexico negotiated the release of more regular, more gradual base flows. In September 2017, they agreed on the delivery of 210,000 acre-feet of water to the delta over the next decade. Earlier this year, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported that the original restoration site at Laguna Grande had grown to more than 1,200 acres.

In many ways, the success of that little patch of land is the story of the entire Colorado River Basin. When you look at the big picture—when you peer down from an actual or figurative mile-high perspective—you see a complex system, a tangle of geography and history and culture, a limited, nearly tapped out resource that multiple states, tribes, and countries have relied on, shared, and fought over for the last century. But get down to the ground and poke around a little, and you see something else: Little patches where innovation and collaboration are blooming. Restorative partnerships and renewed commitments to confronting seemingly intractable issues. A growing understanding of the importance of recognizing the intersections of water, land, and people.

During our debrief following the tour, I asked our hosts about the end game for the delta—what would it take to restore the entire place? The pulse flow was a singular moment, produced by a constellation of events and aided by diplomatic intervention. It would take a different alignment of actors to generate a permanent solution. But which actors? Would it be possible to promote civil discourse among the river’s stakeholders to conceive a collective solution to manage this precious resource? Who would convene them?

This is a hotly contested watershed. The river supplies drinking water to more than 40 million people, more than half of whom live outside the basin; irrigates more than 5.5 million acres of farmland; and produces more than 4 gigawatts of electrical power. Because the river is allocated—actually, overallocated—through a byzantine web of water rights, interstate agreements, and an international treaty, forging new agreements and practices among these stakeholders might seem to be an insurmountable task.

Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. We decided to find out whether and how the Lincoln Institute could contribute to better stewardship of the river.

We embarked on field research to find out who was already working on water issues in the basin and assessed our own core competencies. We wanted to see whether there was demand for our potential contributions. Could we leverage our knowledge and experience in the areas of land policy and stakeholder engagement? Should we extend our efforts at collecting, curating, and mapping new data sets? Should we adapt and advance the use of our scenario-planning tools to promote informed decision making and better civic engagement?

We encountered a crowded field of researchers, advocates, technicians, and dedicated public servants. Universities and government agencies continuously study the science of the river. Policy makers and analysts cover the broad contours of basinwide policy. Various experts are producing and perfecting technical projections of demographic, drought, and development scenarios. We noted, however, that the nexus of land and water policy was a neglected but critical niche in the field. Land use decisions are often made without consideration of their impacts on water, putting the sustainability of our communities and the river at risk. We founded the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy to explore and nurture the critical economic and environmental connections between land and water.

We dedicated the center to Bruce Babbitt, former U.S. Secretary of Interior, governor of Arizona, and member of the Lincoln Institute’s board of directors. Babbitt first first codified the connection between land use planning and water management in state law when he signed the Arizona Groundwater Act of 1980.

The Babbitt Center primarily focuses on the Colorado River and those who depend on it, but we don’t work alone. We know that effective long-term stewardship of this immense but fragile resource is a huge endeavor requiring broad collaboration. With intellectual and financial support from the Lincoln Institute, the center is leveraging the resources of others, establishing partnerships with universities, NGOs, and funders.

We are lucky to have an incredibly knowledgeable and committed staff at the Babbitt Center headquarters in Phoenix, many of whom worked on this issue of Land Lines. Director Jim Holway is no stranger to western water policy negotiations, as the former assistant director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and current vice president of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District board of directors. He had this to say when I asked him, after he took a recent Grand Canyon rafting trip, to reflect on what’s at stake in the basin:

Looking forward, Colorado River managers will face numerous political rapids and significant uncertainty about future climate, water supply, and water demand conditions. However, we face nothing like the dangers and hardships faced by the early explorers of the Colorado. Solutions to our challenges do exist, and we can build on John Wesley Powell’s legacy of exploring the Colorado Basin, of understanding how to sustainably manage the lands and limited water resources of this arid region, and of challenging conventional thinking.

Challenging conventional thinking. Although we launched our work in the Colorado River Basin, we know that it will have global relevance. Through the broader reach of the Lincoln Institute, we are already initiating partnerships with global partners like the OECD and the UN. According to the UN, more than 1.7 billion people around the world live in river basins where water use exceeds recharge.

This special issue of Land Lines—the first issue of the publication’s 30th year—captures our early efforts to build a body of knowledge that articulates the important relationship between land and water. In these pages, we identify the challenges in the Colorado Basin, take a brief tour through its history, and talk with some of the smartest people we know to find out what the future holds. We also look at some innovative efforts being undertaken to better integrate land and water policies in pioneering communities. As we share this knowledge with other communities in arid and semi-arid regions throughout the world, we will do our small part to satisfy the primordial human fascination with places where land and water meet.

Adriana Soto, the former Vice Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia, has joined the board of the Lincoln Institute.

Soto has more than 20 years of experience as an environmental economist and consultant, and has worked on environmental policy in Colombia and internationally. In her tenure as vice minister, from 2011 to 2013, she oversaw the 1.5 million hectare expansion of Chiribiquete National Park in the Amazon and implemented tax incentives encouraging electrical vehicle use. She also acted as a member of the board of directors of the Green Climate Fund of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where she led the financial structuring of the fund. More recently, Soto served as Regional Director for Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru for the Nature Conservancy with a focus on the strategic management of the region’s water resources.

“We welcome Adriana Soto, whose careerlong dedication to natural resource conservation and resilience will be an inestimable resource to the Lincoln Institute as we work to address climate change and other pressing challenges through better land policy,” said Kathryn J. Lincoln, chair and chief investment officer for the Lincoln Institute.

Prior to her service with the Colombian government and the Nature Conservancy, Soto was a consultant for the World Bank, researching mechanisms to reduce the environmental impact of largescale livestock farming and providing expert consultation during the establishment of Colombia’s National Protected Areas Conservation Trust Fund. She was a senior policy advisor for the Wildlife Conservation Society and worked for Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology, and Environmental Studies (IDEAM). In 2011, Soto was awarded the Baron Alexander von Humboldt Grand Order of Environmental Merit, in recognition of her contributions to Colombia’s environment, institutions and society.

The other members of the Lincoln Institute board include Carolina Barco, former ambassador of Colombia to the United States; Thomas M. Becker, retired president of the Chautauqua Institution; Raphael Bostic, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta; Mimi Brown, former commissioner of Rating and Valuation for the Government of Hong Kong; Jane Campbell, director of the Washington office for the National Development Council; Anthony Coyne, president of Mansour, Gavin, LPA in Cleveland; Bruce Lincoln, president of Innervizion Surf Company in Chandler, Arizona; John G. Lincoln III, former senior engineer at CH2M-Hill in Boise, Idaho; Johannes F. Linn, a resident senior scholar at the Emerging Markets Forum in Washington, DC; George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Constance Mitchell Ford, visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland; Michael Nutter, former mayor of Philadelphia and the David N. Dinkins Professor of Professional Practice in Urban and Public Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs; Kevyn Orr, former Detroit Emergency Manager; Timothy Renjilian, senior managing director for FTI Consulting Inc.; Jill Schurtz, executive director, St. Paul Teachers’ Retirement Fund Association, in St. Paul, Minnesota; and Scott Smith, former mayor of Mesa, Arizona, and CEO of Valley Metro.