Editor’s Letter

Career transitions can bring both rapid and gradual changes. A year ago, for example, I taught my final design studio at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After 35 gratifying years of teaching, research, and service—with a few inspiring sabbaticals along the way—I began a new life chapter. Now in semi‐retirement, I reflect on past experiences, tackle new personal and professional goals, and reconnect with old friends.

While travel and community engagement are part of this new chapter, I am eager to continue serving CELA as Landscape Journal’s editor‐in‐chief. Writing has long been a passion of mine. And I take great satisfaction in helping authors bring their scholarship to publication. I also am working on a scholarly book, and I hope to write another after that. As Ernest Hemingway observed years ago:

Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge, and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.

This career transition included a move to a more rural region rich in lakes, forests, and wetlands but under pressure from development. Engaging with my new community was always my intention, but little did I know I would soon be involved in a local land use dispute. In small towns across America, governance capacity is often limited. While most of our town’s leaders are well intentioned, they often make important development decisions without the involvement of landscape architects, allowing civil engineers to play outsized roles in local land planning, design, and management.

In my new community, a nearby landowner proposed, without a trace of irony, to build a “conservation” subdivision on 44 acres (17.8 hectares) of forested hillside. The land is within a few hundred yards of a pristine lake that is a prominent recreational destination and the sole water source for community residents. The native forest is habitat for diverse flora and fauna, including several species of native frogs that are dependent on forest vernal pools for breeding and raising offspring. In other words, this “conservation” subdivision would destroy half the site’s forest and leave the remaining half badly fragmented.

The local development review process includes public hearings. Yet, to my chagrin, the town’s staff and planning board include neither landscape architects nor urban and regional planners. The same can be said of the project’s designers who produced a cookie‐cutter subdivision layout that ignores the site’s character and natural resources. The proposed development conforms to the worst stereotypes of brute force engineering, callously destroying significant natural areas without regard for the ecological consequences.

Adapting development plans to the site’s biophysical and cultural context (both on‐ and off‐site) is the way most (if not all) landscape architects would approach a design challenge like this. Our profession can be proud of the site analysis and site planning skills that we provide to the real estate development industry.

Acting ethically and with integrity—even if it means walking away from a project—is vital for landscape architects and other design professionals working in the land planning arena. As Ed Stone Jr. (founder of the firm EDSA) remarked many years ago in connection with an in‐house design review for a large project on Florida’s southwest coast, sometimes design professionals need to “fire the client.”