Dryland Tactics, by Dr. Ila Berman

What is becoming increasingly apparent, especially within the extreme environments of the American West, is that the sheer magnitude of the earth’s industrialization over the last century has caused a series of truly catastrophic, albeit unintentional, effects. Climate change, manifest through temperature increases and precipitation decreases, snowpack reduction and sea level rise, and the intensified consequences of groundwater depletion, increased salt water intrusion and environmental pollution are leading not only to water shortages and accelerated species extinction, but also to an irreversible environmental future, the larger effects of which we have only begun to anticipate. We have fundamentally changed the earth and its environment to such an extent that our climate and hydrological cycles are no longer the same, resulting in an ecological system far from equilibrium that is expected to bring with it more extreme environmental fluctuations and more intense drought. Arid landscapes will no doubt face a future of far greater aridity. We are currently facing a crisis of epic proportions unparalleled at any other moment in human history. Indeed, this crisis is both real and catastrophic, even if this simple fact is seemingly invisible to the vast majority of the US population.

In an era when our senses have become dulled by incessant overstimulation, we must therefore ask what can we do to make this crisis visible—to make it as real in the public perception as it is in the world? Will it only be through the direct unmediated confrontation with extreme drought or flooding that these issues will become visible and attitudes will change, or can we begin to initiate a broader environmental transformation through education and public policy, or regulatory incentives and disincentives coupled to provoke a more immediate response? Will only the fear of getting a $100,000 ticket for having a lawn in Los Angeles be what is necessary to incite change—that moment when we can signify within the terms of our existing value system the amplitude of the crisis we have created?

The idea that our environmental landscape is not simply a provider of ever-abundant natural resources to be instrumentalized in the service of culture, is a concept that seemingly runs counter to the modern American imagination. Since we waste what we don’t value, against the backdrop of the water crisis, it is now time to ask what is required to contribute to the value of water within our cultural imaginary? If water is what is needed to sustain life, then perhaps it is not simply a question of putting a heftier price tag on water, but rather inverting our system of values so that water, and the natural environment of which it is a part, become the primary terms and substructure upon which our future values and economies are based. Our return to the value of indigenous practices, for example, is also the return to the value system of the cultures from which these practices emerged, whereby nature, the environment, the earth, were not thought of as mere natural resources, but rather embodied deeper principle values. Certainly real environmental transformation will only be truly realizable when we reassess our values and change the representational myths upon which our current reality is built.

In addition to underscoring the extent and depth of the environmental crisis we are facing, and asking us to reassess our structure of values, the dialog at the Drylands conference promoted an attitude of cultural adaptation and resilience. It can no longer be a question of changing the environment to suit our needs, but rather, through a form of critical re-valuation, changing our habits to suit the landscape we are occupying. Cultural adaptation means learning to live within an arid landscape rather than believing that we can manipulate and transform any natural environment to fulfill our needs or desires. This requires inserting ourselves into a complex ecology that pre-exists us and understanding how we can act as responsible stewards within this system rather than wasteful manipulators of it.

Adapting to larger ecological cycles might mean: transforming our culture of excessive production and waste to a culture of conservation, recycling, and regeneration; adapting to the topography of the landscape through gravity-fed infrastructure or storing water underground and recharging aquifers rather than relying on artificial surface storage reservoir systems that lead to high evaporation and greater water waste; replacing water intensive crops with agricultural techniques and food systems suitable to arid environments; drawing upon the cultural practices of indigenous peoples whose survival was dependent on environmental adaptation in order to inform future design opportunities; adapting design to integrate a better understanding of water so that it is no longer part of an invisible infrastructure—the hidden “plumbing” of our buildings and cities—while introducing a lag or delay in the water-to-waste trajectory to promote local water capture, retention, filtration and recycling; and lastly, transforming the modes through which we represent the landscape to suit the environments we live in. Reinserting nature’s arid landscapes into the suburban terrain is a representational issue as much as it is a problem of design, education and policy. If the lawn is a cultural product representative of a specific subburban lifestyle, we might ask what it would mean to advance the desert landscape as a new cultural artifact with positive attributes to signify a future of “brown” within arid environments rather than the artificial importation of “green” or “blue.”

Mitigation strategies directed toward decreasing the consumption of energy, water and natural resources on the one hand, and reducing the production of atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions and environmental waste on the other, were also advanced as critical initiatives moving forward. Mitigation, however, needs to also be applied to the design of space, in equal measure to reductions we are making within the realms of material and energy. Bloated needs and wasted space are likely the largest contributors to urban sprawl and environmental degradation. Increasing urban densities and shrinking our environmental footprint necessitates the adaptive reuse and recycling of existing urban territories, limiting lateral city expansion while reducing the quantity of living space per capita (and the energy associated with it) that is considered to be normative within our western environment. Simply scaling back the size of our individual spatial envelopes at both the urban and architectural scales and changing the architectural standards that we are operating with can have an enormous impact on mitigating the environmental crises that we currently are facing.

Reduction is certainly difficult to imagine within a culture that is essentially built on models of amplified production and the generation of capital through the accumulation of surplus. Thus, despite the obvious fact that our current deleterious environmental impacts would be substantially reduced if we simply manufactured, built, used and disposed of less—a concept that undermines the impulse toward excessive production that drives global capitalism—the true inversion of our modern obsession with production and consumption is not only to be found in their absence (for those who yearn towards a pre-industrial future), but also in their much needed reversal, by amplifying processes and designs that contribute to cultural digestion and regeneration. We must therefore ask: how do we operate within a culture based on efficiencies, rather than excess, and modes of exchange that engage design in the “other” side of production—those cycles of digestion and regeneration, recycling of materials and assemblies that are intrinsic to the ecological cycle of own our cultural production. This is an evolutionary eco-technological model of regeneration that would require that we spend as much of our energy on the strategic recycling of matter, form, and space, as we do on the creative design of new objects.

Design must therefore begin to embrace cycles that, until recently, were seemingly outside of its purview. To design within a larger temporal framework that encompasses the transformation and recycling of our buildings and cities means, not only understanding the life cycle of the things that we produce, but designing this lifecycle of disassembly and re-use into the making of the objects themselves. We need to begin to understand principles of exchange through ecological rather than economical structures, or align the economical and ecological in such a way as to ensure that our economies of exchange support rather than exploit and destroy our environments.

Many of the conceptual responses and design strategies presented at the Drylands conference would seem to fundamentally invert the ideological models that we have inherited. The fixity and stationarity upon which our infrastructures were built are being called into question, as we look to the energetic and protean character of living systems and their capacity for exchange and transformation to become new models for architectural practice. To think in terms of the dynamism of the fluid environments we have been trying to control, contain and instrumentalize, might mean rethinking the very premises we are operating within, while recalibrating our design strategies so that they better reflect the environments that they engage.

Singular, monolithic or universal systems, for example, are being replaced with multi-scaled or intensely local, scale-specific material systems that necessarily negotiate relationships across the differently scaled territories of regions, cities, and neighborhoods. The idea that cities or even neighborhoods might be thought as mini-watersheds with architectural topographies reconceived as hydrographic units for local water capture, retention and water recycling, is a concept that models the urban on the environmental rather than its inverse.

Within this inverted structure, nature becomes the new model through which the urban is reconstructed, generating productive mixtures between natural material ecologies and defined cultural systems. How might we re-imagine the city, for example, if we understand it as an urban biosphere or urban metabolism rather than a static collection of discrete architectural objects? In a very direct way, initiatives such as the integration of urban agriculture, green roofs or tree planting strategies to produce micro urban forests——are interventions that integrate green living systems into the civic core in order to generate food locally, filter water, or mitigate carbon production—natural regenerative infrastructures that act as new lungs and kidneys for the city. These hybrid strategies resist oppositional thinking while enabling new creative models integrating cultural and natural systems.

Exchange is also a concept critical to living systems that is now being applied to the urban and architectural through the disruption of boundary conditions. The promotion of soft membranes over hard enclosures, and proliferation of permeable surfaces and responsive skin systems recognizes the need for continual environmental integration and exchange. 80% of storm water might be directed toward recharging groundwater aquifers, for example, if we were to simply make our urban surfaces more pervious to reduce storm water runoff.

Water, as a form of matter, is of course much more complex than we imagine, yet our traditional approach to its management has reduced this complexity to a singular universal idea, rather than appreciating and responding to its material gradations and diversity. Inverting past ideological models means redesigning our systems to respond to the multiple types of water, so that storm and sewage systems are dissociated and treated differently, water catchment and filtration becomes the norm rather than the exception, and grey water is productively recycled for irrigation and other uses.

The complex gradations of matter and the incredible bio-diversity that exists on this planet is a testament to the localization of natural environmental systems and their relationships to much larger networks. Plants, literally tied to the earth, could perhaps never comprehend the notion of an international style—a single approach universally applied across highly distinct environments and material territories—and yet this is the approach inherited from global industrialization. Learning from the natural systems that have adapted well to arid environments would therefore seem to be an imperative moving forward. Since the cactus might seemingly understand the concept of aridity far better than we do, perhaps it is time to let culture be informed by nature rather than ensuring its inverse.

One of the most important efforts of this conference was the promotion of cross-disciplinary collaboration between design, pedagogy, science and policy. Simultaneously a strength and weakness of the design profession is the belief that architects can, or should do all things, something long-abandoned by most other professions and disciplines that have focused historically on specialization, and now on new open exchange networks and the hybridization of knowledge. In the future cross-disciplinary collaboration will be the norm rather than the exception and will transform the ways in which we operate, allowing non-traditional crossovers between disciplines where biologists, meteorologists, material scientists and architects will meet and generate new solutions to old problems, and discover new design potentials that have yet to be discovered.

Designers of the built environment—architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners—need to not only respond to the problems presented to them, but also need to be analyzing our current environmental, architectural, and infrastructural landscape, determining cultural needs in relation to our built world and advocating—at the highest level—for resources (physical, economic, intellectual) to be directed toward these endeavors. The best of our academies and profession should be also those who are jointly generating models for solving these very real issues and for evaluating proposals for their solutions. Designers can no longer be the passive instruments through which policy is implemented, but also need to be a bridge between the domains of science and policy becoming an “active” (rather than “reactive”) body of collaboratively networked participants dedicated to the retooling of political regulatory structures.

As discussed in the conference, political retooling might include a number of objectives: the realignment of political boundaries with hydrographic systems and watershed boundaries to better link policy with environmental awareness; the reinvention of water law and development of a national water policy; the national adoption of the 2030 challenge so that carbon neutrality becomes a future policy goal; the creation of new parameters for ecological zoning that integrate water and energy management with design; the repositioning of capital and policy so that these are fundamentally rooted in environmental values; the assurance that designers become active and integral partners in the development of environmental policy; and the fundamental need for policy makers to have the requisite education to effect a changed landscape and environmental future.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must never underestimate the critical value of design. There is seemingly nothing more powerful and optimistic than the potential of design to literally remake the world and reinvest in the future of our cities and larger environment. Every single day we contribute, either positively or detrimentally, to this ongoing transformation. If we understand water to be one of the most fundamental contributors to sustaining life on this planet, perhaps it is time for us to truly redirect design initiatives so that they are in alignment with environmental values and processes. As was directly expressed within this conference, we must observe with intent, measure to educate, harvest to conserve, install to reveal, and travel to learn. Through research and mapping we must make new trails for arid lands, rendering visible that which is currently invisible (perhaps because of the immensity of its scale or the complexity of its systems) while reconceiving urban design models to be based on the dynamism of life, rather than reifying life according to the early 20th century model of environmental control and utility. It is no longer our machines that should be displacing or territorializing nature, but perhaps it is nature that should now become the new model for our cultural machines and help redirect us to rebuild and transform our cities. It is time for all of us to wake up and stop painting the lawn.