ABSTRACT
Grown-up hippies We hear so much about ecological issues and environmental crises today, both within professional circles and in the wider media, that it is easy to forget that these are relatively recent concerns. Within landscape architecture, as we saw in the previous chapter, ecological values have risen to take their place alongside longer-standing concerns about aesthetics, amenity and utility. Mid-career landscape architects can look back upon a time when the profession’s environmental concerns were embryonic. When deliberating about his choice of career John Hopkins had some premonition of the importance they would one day assume:
I started to do some research into architecture and town planning, went to visit town planning offices in the local authority and also Mary Mitchell, a landscape architect, and got much more interested in landscape architecture. It seemed much more akin to what I wanted to do. This was in 1969-70, so it was really before the oil crisis of 1973, and before ecology and the issues of conservation and pollution had really come to the fore but were there but not publicly acknowledged and certainly not politically or economically acknowledged, but I could see, or just intuitively felt, this was an area that I wanted to work in.
