Neeco

“The New Nature that we are designing in our cities is not a copy of old romanticized images or idealized perceptions of nature past; the New Nature is truly new. We call this New Nature City Nature. It is man-made nature to correct man-made errors. It is a New Nature designed equally on the basis of deep biological, anthropological, sociological and ecological knowledge and on a strong artistic knowledge, experience and approach. It is a New Nature optimized to solve today's hardest urban challenges while creating genuine quality of life for humans. It is a New Nature that is not too concerned with how it looks but rather how it feels and how it functions. (10)”
― B. Cannon Ivers, 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know

“The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. The reasons for this are threefold: (a) the existing delicately balanced order of nature within the biosphere, or protective envelope of the planet, is being disturbed by the activities of man, and it seems that only his own exertions can restore a balance and ensure survival; (b) these exertions call first for ecosystems that are no more than a return to an efficient animal state of sustained existence; and (c) man's destiny being to rise above the animal state, he creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas.”
― Geoffrey Jellicoe, The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Enviroment From Prehistory to the Present Day

“Sure enough, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a botanical aspect. Actions such as planting, uprooting, preferring one species over the other and even nature-protection laws reflect the conflict and impact on it. Perhaps the most notable of these actions is the massive foresting of lands nationalised by the state of Israel in the 1950s, previously belonging to Palestinians who fled or were forced out of their villages during the 1948 war. This transformed large parts of the country into coniferous forests, comprising mainly pines. The main objectives of this foresting action were political-tactical (obtaining control over the land) and economic (forestry as a work-fare programme for incoming Jewish immigrants). At the same time it was an act of erasing the previous landscape, with all its cultural meaning, and introducing a new monoculture landscape that was mean to represent the "melting pot" of the newly founded state. (34)”
― B. Cannon Ivers, 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know

“Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation. (11)”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed