landscape architecture as time magic

The great irony of the discipline is that although our practice is preoccupied with space, our product is pure time. Even the sportswriter-philosopher Graham Harman manged to observe that “a landscape is like a wormhole linking different times. . . . The fossils are themselves the landscape.” When we plant trees, pour concrete, embed stones, and erect mounds, we are burying the fossils that Anthropocene society will use to order its universe. Why, then, do we waste this transcendent power on gazebos and putting greens that will all be underwater before we’re even dead? If we love fishes so much that we’re designing dog parks and jogging trails for them, why do we kill three trillion every year?

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