The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture and design. In science, the field of ecology has moved away from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty and order, in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience and flexibility. Increasingly these concepts are seen as useful heuristics for decision-making in many fields, and as models or metaphors for cultural production, particularly in the design arts. This places landscape architecture in a unique disciplinary and practical space — informed by ecological knowledge as an applied science, as a construct for managing change, and as a model of cultural production or design.

Ecology is, by definition, a transdisciplinary science focused on the relationship between living organisms and their environments. A relatively new science, its modern roots emerged in the early 20th century with the work of Frederic Clements and Henry Gleason, American botanists who studied the interactions between plant communities, and Sir Arthur Tansley, a British botanist and zoologist whose research on the interactions between plant and animal communities and the environment led him to coin the term “ecosystem” in 1935. ¹ The interdisciplinary work of these pioneers prompted the development of models of ecological succession that dominated plant biology during the early 20th century and became the basis for the new integrated science of plants, animals and the environment eventually known as ecosystem ecology.

The implications of this developing work were not limited to the natural sciences; in fact, popularization of these emerging world views was manifest in more widely read writings in the humanities and reverberated in other fields as well, including large-scale project management, governance and planning. Complex adaptive systems thinking made its way into the design arts as landscape was being rediscovered as both model and medium for design, and the environmental movement was becoming mainstream.

Today “ecology” has been co-opted to refer to almost any set of generalized ideas about environment or process, rendering the term essentially meaningless. To recover a critical sense of ecology as a specific set of ideas that can continue to inform design thinking and practice, we start by identifying three important and parallel genealogies of ecology: in the natural sciences, the humanities and design

Throughout most of the 20th century, high-school biology courses were taught to the early models of (linear) ecological succession: that ecosystems gradually and steadily succeed into stable climax states from which they don’t routinely move unless disturbed by a force external to that system. An old-growth forest is one of the classic examples usually given, in which the forest matures and then remains in that state permanently, such that any disturbance is considered an aberration. Yet large-scale longitudinal research in ecosystem ecology has clearly shown that change is not only built into these systems but in some cases ecosystems are dependent on change for growth and renewal. ³ For example, fire-dependent forests contain tree species that require the extreme heat of fire to release and disperse seeds and facilitate forest renewal — and sometimes, a shift in the complement of species. All ecosystems are constantly evolving, often in ways that are discontinuous and uneven. While some ecosystem states are perceived by us to be stable, this is not strict stability in a mathematical sense; this is simply our human, time-limited perception of stasis. The work of Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling pioneered this concept in terms of resource management. He referred to ecosystems as “shifting steady-state mosaics,” implying that stability is patchy and scale-dependent, and is neither a constant nor a phenomenon that defines a whole system at any one point in time or space. ⁴

Much recent work in applied ecology has been about trying to understand those ecosystem states that we perceive as stable, and thereby useful to us, such that we want to encourage apparent stability. This perspective has profound implications, from the humanities to management applications to design, as it rests on the recognition that humans are not outsiders to the ecosystem — rather, we are participants in its unfolding. This perspective also fundamentally challenges the Western Judeo-Christian ideology that humans are the dominant species and therefore have a responsibility (even a moral obligation) to manage or control other species and resources.

There is a pressing need for a more sophisticated understanding of the state(s) in which ecosystems appear stable.

Of course humans are designers as well. We shape the ecosystems in which we live, sometimes profoundly and irrevocably. This reality means that there is a pressing need for a more sophisticated understanding, derived through empirical research, of the current state(s) in which an ecosystem appears to be stable. This knowledge is critical to our ability to manage resources sustainably, which means having sufficient knowledge about a given ecosystem so that it can be guided (using specific design or management interventions) back to some recognizable, desirable, resilient state after a sudden or surprising change. Much of the applied ecological research into dynamic ecosystems has been focused on wilderness ecosystems and large natural landscapes being managed for resource extraction, such as boreal and temperate forest ecosystems, the tundra and tropical rainforest ecosystems. The collapse of the Canadian cod fishery in the 1990s has also been studied in this context