15. Re-Weaving Landscapes: Wildlife Crossings & Designing for Nature as the Client

Written By alexa firmenich

“By thinking about the movement of everything from the side blotched lizard and the monarch butterfly to the California condor or red-tailed hawk, students are able to experience not only a different functional way of movement, but a different way of being in relationship to the land and to urbanization.”

- Nina-Marie Lister

 

SYNOPSIS:

The roads on which we drive are unlikely to strike us as an exciting source of design innovation or interspecies dialogue. And yet, some of the most fascinating experiments and living laboratories are taking place around the world in how humans can build structures of hope and creativity for other species to flourish, despite having their habitats sliced in half by concrete veins. 

Earth is a fluid organism and needs connected landscapes like a canvas upon which to paint its life. Roads, on the other hand, are the single most destructive element in the process of habitat fragmentation (not to mention the millions of deaths due to collisions and the massive economic cost of these accidents). Over the coming 30 years, an additional 25 million km of roads will be built across the planet’s surface. So today in the show, we speak to pioneers in the world of wildlife crossings and design competition leaders who have spurred the process of globally rethinking and redesigning human structures to grapple with the concept of “wilderness” and the radical interconnectedness of nature and culture.

Jeremy Guth is a trustee of the Woodcock Foundation, and an ARC founding sponsor. Nina-Marie is the Graduate Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University where she leads the Ecological Design Lab, and has created a series of courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design called Wild Ways.

 

GUEST BIO:

Nina-Marie Lister is Professor in the School of Urban & Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University and Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where she leads a series of courses and seminars entitled Wild Ways: Thinking, Relating and Being with/in Wilderness, Wildness and Nature in the Anthropocene.

Lister holds the Margolese National Design for Living Prize and is Senior Fellow at Massey College in Toronto. She is a Registered Professional Planner (MCIP, RPP) trained in systems ecology, environmental science and landscape planning, and her research, teaching and practice centre on the relationship between landscape infrastructure, biodiversity and ecological processes—specifically in the context of ecological design for resilience, health and well-being.

At TMU, Lister founded and directs the Ecological Design Lab, a collaborative incubator for ecological design research and practice. She is co-editor of Projective Ecologies (with Chris Reed, published by Harvard University and ACTAR Press, 2014, 2020) and The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability, and author of more than 100 scholarly research & professional practice publications.

These include notable contributions to Design With Nature Now (Lincoln Land Institute 2019), Nature & Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Planning & Design (Lincoln 2016), Is Landscape…Essays on the Identity of Landscape (Routledge 2016), Ecological Urbanism (Harvard University with Lars Müller Publishers 2010), and Large Parks (Princeton Architectural Press 2008, winner of the J.B. Jackson Book Prize).

Jeremy Guth is a trustee of the Woodcock Foundation and director of the foundation’s large landscape conservation program. The program has been focused on the protection of core and corridor areas within the Yellowstone to Yukon region, which offers one of the world’s best opportunities to conserve a landscape of a sufficient scale for the full range of ecological processes such as migration and adaptation to climate change.

Jeremy is the co-founder of the ARC International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Design Competition (completed: January, 2011) and founding director of the ARC Solutions Partnership. Rural life is not foreign to Jeremy. As a child, he grew up on a farm, and this experience left an undeniable imprint that is the basis of his interest in conservation and the environment.

QUOTES:

  • Nina-Marie: Wildlife crossing structures capture the public imagination. They're very much structures of hope. They show in very visible, tangible ways how wildlife move. They share the stories of movement over, under and around us, sometimes by creatures that are hidden in plain sight.

  • Nina-Marie: We have socially and culturally made acceptable that roadkill is a part of everyday movement, when in fact if you step back from it, does not have to be that way at all. There's a kind of stunning acceptance of death on the road as being the cost of modern society's movement.

  • Jeremy: What ARC adds to that is a much more dynamic approach to how you can actually respond to the needs of the client, which is wildlife.

  • Nina-Marie: If we simply view wildlife as an obstacle to traffic, that's in the domain of one particular agency, potentially highway engineers. If on the other hand, we think about wildlife as beings whose habitats have been severed, disconnected, restricted, then we engage a very diverse group of professionals beyond the the traffic engineer. Thinking about these structures as architectural, ecological living structures worthy of investment, and the creatures themselves not only as individuals but as communities and populations.

  • Jeremy: The requirement to design and to build infrastructure, and the requirement to build responsibly to the needs of the (wildlife) client have really changed our relationship to nature.

  • Nina-Marie: By thinking about the movement of everything from the side blotched lizard, and the monarch butterfly to the California condor or red-tailed hawk, students are able to experience not only a different functional way of movement, but a different way of being in relationship to the land and to urbanization. And it offers them an ability to understand multiple types of knowledge to solve a problem, and an open-heartedness, compassion and sense of humility… Rather than architects who typically are trained to see the landscape as white space into which they place buildings.

  • Nina-Marie: The best place for an intervention is often to begin by listening and looking and being able to sense movement in different ways, particularly when they're asked to understand how species not just barely survive, but can have a flourishing life.

  • Alexa: I think there's something so respectful and healing about looking at what was here before. As you said, no landscape was ever a white place without humans or other species. So what was here before? Can we have profound reverence for it? And then begin to embody that perspective in order to ourselves become richer through the experience of expanding our sense of self and our sense of seeing.

  • Jeremy: Parks and protected areas are ultimately not going to be the full solution. We will need them, but we will also need to change our relationship to the rest of the landscape for meaningful forms of nature to persist into the future.

  • Jeremy: I'm really thrilled to think that there's a decade of design professionals out there going through schools like Harvard, that are now aware and really committed to designing for nature.

  • Nina-Marie: So whether we're talking about green roofs, living walls, bioswales, green streets, or bird safe glass, there are thousands of interventions that rely on design solutions and strategies for flourishing for other species.

  • Nina-Marie: What we offer is a working set of methods that have been tested through a decade of research in how to bring multiple stakeholders together and in particular, working methods that involve soft system sciences and complex systems thinking about the relationship between people, roads, wildlife, agriculture, and movement.

SHOW LINKS

CREDITS

  • Cover Photo: Lucilleb, Banff Wildlife Overpass

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