Ecological design and planning.

This is the book-of-the-symposium from an event in Tempe, Arizona that provided a retrospect and prospect for landscape design. A series of key figures from the past recur in these pages: Frederick Law Olmsted, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and the group associated with the Regional Planning Association of America. That tradition was crystallised in 1969 by Ian McHarg in his important book Design with Nature, and the editors of the present volume note the emergence of a backlash 'still ongoing in some professional circles', despite the fact that we are all now advocating sustainability, and stressing the essential links between architecture, forestry, geography, planning and soil science in the professional world of landscape management.

McHarg himself is the last of the dozen symposium speakers collected in this book, arguing that 'Degradation has reached such proportions that I now conclude that non-ecological design and planning is likely to be trivial and irrelevant ...' Other contributors reinforce this imperative, stressing for example the role of geography in education to implant an understanding of the interconnectedness of the humanly constructed and the natural worlds.