Environmentalists’ rural ideal of nature hindered building an urban land-use vision

Evidence

The task of envisioning good land use was made more difficult by the long-standing environmentalist habit of setting nature apart from the city. When environmentalists described landscapes where people lived in harmony with the nonhuman world, the scenes were almost always rural: The English countryside, the hillside villages of the Mediterranean, the Pennsylvania Dutch country. But the problem of land use was predominately urban. What would environmentally sound development look like? Though Ian McHarg made a start toward answering that question in Design with Nature, few environmentalists followed McHarg’s lead until the 1980s. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 987

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Land-use problems resisted the technological fixes that made pollution law politically feasible — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 983; Place-based and critical pedagogies split along rural-ecological versus urban-social lines. — David A. Gruenewald, The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical…, 28; Environmental history has privileged rural production over metropolitan land use — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 14 (+2 more)