Nature to be commanded: Earth science maps applied to land and water management.
The issues of representation and interpretation are central to the everyday work of planners and designers. Maps and plans are the way we present our work, and they are usually based on/constructed from data obtained from other maps and plans. Misreading or even neglecting those sources -consciously or unconsciously- is one of the most common activities we perform in a everyday basis.
Nature to be commanded aims to spread the knowledge about the earth-science among decision makers, planners and designers -‘Earth science within reach’ we could title. The authors’ main concern is to make easily readable the maps containing series of data that could inform the making of urban settings. The style is direct and simple, and every detail is well illustrated. The complexity of the maps increases progressively, from the topographic maps to the geologic ones displayed later in the paper.
The authors introduce a series of maps –topography, land use, geology, hydrology-, and discuss the basic features contained on them. Then, they create a cartography specially crafted for each site, a new set of maps combining the information contained in the original ones. To illustrate the procedure they chose several sites where they highlight the natural conditions of the site and its suitability for being developed, conserved or protected.
In my opinion, the report owes some credit to the work of Ian McHarg in Design with Nature. This book, published in 1969, claims the need to read the natural conditions of each site, designing with nature and not against. The book richly illustrates the proposed methodology following a series of cases study. For example, the research on Staten Island aims to identify a suitable area for all the prospective land uses, and we can read there: ‘Nature is process and value, existing both opportunities and limitations to human use. Therefore, we must identify the major physical and biological processes that operate there now [… ] All the basic data was compiled and mapped- climate, historical, geology, physiography, hydrology, soils, plant ecology, wild life habitat and lands use… This data are of little use until they are interpreted and evaluated’.
Technology has greatly changed since both the report and the book were written, and nowadays a great amount of data of almost everywhere is easily available. However, no matter how many layers of information we do have if we are not able to properly read and interpret them.
I revisit once and again this method, mapping through the addition of layers, and I always find my own limitations when interpreting the data I get, and pushing further my analysis.
And the same with time and the challenge of depicting change with the traditional techniques of representation. How do you get a map that deals with change and not a fixed state in time? How do you map different times happening together?
Revisiting The Granite Garden we find the concern of time expressed in very different ways, one of them highlights the idea that geological time spans for generations. This is an overwhelming concept for humans who take man as the unit of measure and make an opportunistic use of nature. In this sense, the chapters devoted to Earth account for all the alterations we make to the environment and the geological hazards that shake once and again human creations, similar to the maps we see in Nature to be commanded -alteration of topography, contamination, the management of mineral resources, the waste disposal, earthquakes, floods.
‘Soil is the crust of the earth in which life is rooted- a porous medium between rock and air. It is neither entirely mineral nor entirely organic; it is composed of sand, silt, clay, air water, and the decomposed remains of plants and animals’.
‘Every city should assess the nature of the earth that lies beneath it’
Los Angeles against the mountains.
‘We should stop buildings things where they do not belong, and leave some room for nature’.
This quotation could serve as a way of conclusion to the stories presented in Los Angeles against the mountains. The author, John McPhee, portraits the endless fight to urbanize the mountains in LA region and the failure to read the natural processes that would otherwise prescribe construction.
Nature is presented as threatening, causing major destruction and human death when ignored. Written more than 30 years ago, I am curious to know how many times the stories will have been rewritten in the same sites by many other people since.
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