A Rally for Impermanence

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“How can the discipline of landscape architecture address and respond to the dual challenges of our global energy decent and our need for perpetual economic growth at different nested scales?”

The project is framed by the dual predicaments of carbon descent and the global requirement for unlimited, enduring economic growth. The amount of accessible fossil fuels is in decline and it is unlikely that we will ever have access to such a cheap, abundant and dense energy source.

This is intrinsically linked to global economic growth which is built around the use of energy, mainly in the form of fossil fuels, to turn raw materials, many of them nonrenewable, into useful goods and services.

The perpetual use of fossil fuels and unlimited economic growth has negative impacts on the environment and the ecology for ourselves and future generations, however there is no linear path forward to solving this predicament, economies are complex and varied and a transition away from fossil fuels would require long term strategies that are adaptive and responsive to emerging realities as opposed to a drop-in substitute.

The size of our economy has a direct correlation with the amount of energy we use on non-renewable resources, they walk hand in hand and in order to respond to an energy descent, it is vital that we transition away from an economy that requires ongoing growth to continue functioning, toward an economy that responds to the material limits of the ecologies that support it.

Being a landscape architect is no guarantee of being an environmentalist. The landscape architecture profession is by in large a ‘business as usual’ profession, underpinned by the same drivers of economic growth as most other professions, and embroiled in the same economy that perpetuates the continued use of non-renewable natural resources in the face of a global decline in primary energy. The reality is that many projects and by-products of landscape architecture are not sustainable by any definition. However there is some hope.

A fundamental strength of landscape architects is that they can suffuse their principles, values and ethics through a fluid, unpredictable design process, creating a physical relationship between personal identity, landscape and people, this is critical as landscape architects engage directly with dynamic regenerative ecologies. They foster explicit connections between communities, individuals and nature. This ability to inform landscape is reflective as the landscape should also inform and reflect in individual personal values.

The development of personal fundamental principles, values and concepts becomes a critical lens for which landscape architects can develop and reflect on variable emergent outcomes (practical and theoretical) in a manner responsive to site and context.

This project utilises such a lens to understand how Marsden point oil refinery, Northland, New Zealand and the surrounding ecologies and communities can begin to transition into an energy descent future. One thing that we can guarantee is uncertainty, this project is a rally for uncertainty and impermanence, to begin to progress responses based on a variable and complex understanding of all the relevant threads.