Nature’s Bookshelf
Design with Nature by Ian M. McHarg
Book Review by Paul Roberts
This unusual and important book on designing
with nature was commissioned in 1967 by Russell
Train, who was at that time the President of the
Conservation Foundation. It was written by an influential
environmentalist, ecologist, landscape architect and
urban planner named Ian McHarg, a partner in the design
firm Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd, a professional
landscape architecture firm. McHarg also taught
Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania
in Philadelphia. The book is unusual for a number of
reasons, not only its outsize dimensions - 11 inches by 11
inches, but also for its abundant and beautiful illustrations,
photographs and explanatory maps. The copy I read is
a library version of the 25th anniversary edition of the
original 1969 printing with an introduction written by
Lewis Mumford. The book has become a classic as a text,
influencing generations of ecologists, landscape architects
and urban and regional planners at a time when the
National Environmental Policy Act and the Environmental
Protection Agency did not yet exist, and when the
environmental movement was only beginning.
This book is doubly important for those of us who
love Kiawah because it helped inspire our most important
Island planner, Mark Permar. You only have to read the
second chapter entitled “Sea and Survival” to understand
its implications for planning here on Kiawah. It shows
how the shore topography and microenvironments are
interrelated and how man’s influence can work for good
or ill. Using diagrams and photographs of typical plants
in each zone, McHarg discusses the relationships of the
ocean, beach, primary and secondary dunes and their
inter-dune troughs. The different zones offer both tolerant
and intolerant areas for human development. Photos of
the devastation that can occur when man violates the areas
that nature has reserved for itself are presented.
McHarg grew up in Scotland in a beautiful
pastoral countryside in perfect tune with nature. Ten miles
to the east lay the city of Glasgow, which he describes as
“One of the most implacable testaments to the city of toil
in all of Christendom, a memorial to an inordinate capacity
to create ugliness, a sandstone excretion cemented with
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smoke and grime. Each night its pall on the eastern
horizon was lit by the flames of the blast furnaces. A
Turner fantasy made real.” His descriptions of life before
he became a landscape architect and city planner reveal
his ability to convey in words the tranquility and peace of
the natural world and its importance to the well being of
society. He acquired his professional training by simply
showing up at Harvard and attending classes of his choice.
He eventually emigrated to the United States permanently
and settled in Philadelphia.
The book has 17 chapters in 196 pages. Some
chapters are philosophical, some introspective, and some
are deeply incisive over a wide spectrum of subjects
ranging from geology, geomorphology, plant ecology,
meteorology, history, sociology, evolutionary biology,
chemistry and even the elements of astrophysics. His
writing is beautiful. His ability to go deeply into subjects
is impressive and the short, well-illustrated chapters make
the book a fairly quick read.
The real jewels of the book, however, are the
case studies in which he lays out his creative ecological
processes for approaching a planning project. In the
first case study he was asked to advise on which lands in
Photograph courtesy of Design with Nature, Pamela Cohen and the Kiawah Conservancy.