3 Landscape Essays: mobile ecosystems for future climates

Today we find ourselves as unwilling passengers on the business as usual climate curve, whose most recent projections tell us that we have already missed the Paris Agreement’s target of 1.5 degrees of warming. In the Mediterranean, where our project is located, warming is 20% faster than the global average and, on this particular curve, that means we are witnessing the death of our distinctive climate. Given this impending climate crisis, our project asks a simple question: how do we live on this curve? Three Landscape Essays is a small intervention to think through this question by engaging with the basic contradiction we face: we must confront the material fact of the ongoing destruction of our environment while also cultivating a healthy and optimistic public forum, where creativity, joy, collective action, and social trust can empower us to meet this challenge. Our project is an attempt to build a public space that does both. Each of our three gardens consists of (A) plant species from a key ecological stage on the business as usual curve and (B) programmable public space in an underserved neighborhood. The first garden is composed of the quintessential plants of our Mediterranean Past and it offers a small experimental theater with a perimeter curtain and tiered seating. Second, the garden of our Extravagant Present showcases plants that have been imported to Spain from distant parts of the planet for their spectacular blooms, and offers seating for small informal meetings between friends. Finally, the third is the garden of our Pyrophytic Future, which curates a carefully selected plant list of pyrophytic plants native to Spain that will benefit from the increased frequency of wildfires caused by climate change. The pyrophytic garden has a gentle slope leading up to two sandboxes separated by a hill where children can play. From this vantage point, we can see where we’ve been, where we’re going, and discuss collectively and creatively what we should do.