ABSTRACT
In Design with Nature, Ian McHarg told architects and landscape architects that they should emulate the economical way in which nature resolves conflicting forces and incorporate nature itself in their design. The natural environment is like a design, in that it represents the resolution of conflicting forces. Once the landscape is destabilized by development, it can take a long time for natural systems to reach a new equilibrium, and this new environment is likely to be far less desirable for people than it was before. Regional development should be looked at as a design problem. In the late 1960s, when McHarg was writing Design with Nature, the climate of the entire planet, which had been relatively stable for some 11,000 years, was beginning to change because of carbon and other chemicals issuing from factory smokestacks and from vehicle exhaust pipes. These pollutants trap the sun's energy and produce "the greenhouse effect"—a rise in temperature in the earth's atmosphere.
