5 things, to get started
Adapting the 'The Landscape Project' for climate repair
The listicle comes for us all. In my case, I wanted to have something substantial up on baselayer before publicising it. I did not, however, want you or I to get bogged down in long-form details (yet). This post is about how the late Australian landscape architect Richard Weller’s understanding of ‘the landscape project’ might inform the work of climate repair.
Richard Weller was born in 1963, the same year that Joan Eardley died. Like Eardley, who I discussed in the intro post, ‘baselayer’s baselayer,’ Weller’s original ‘romance’ was with painting. However, he gave it up to pursue another plein air occupation: landscape architecture. Weller was influential in pushing the profession to interface more closely with ecological and climate science, and in drawing its attention toward what were previously held to be ‘unappealing’ urban and industrial landscapes—including some of the landscapes of industrial carbon removal. Only a few years before his death in 2025, he helped publish a collection of essays, The Landscape Project, from students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Landscape Architecture, which he chaired for nearly a decade.
Weller’s titular piece in that collection (available online here) is, no huge surprise, about landscape architecture, not tech-heavy climate repair work. (In fact he once joked, in a piece about carbon management, that “landscape architects can’t do much about the heavens”). Still, I think his essay has much to offer for those who (like me) can neither paint, nor draw, nor design so much as a cabbage patch, but still want to engage with landscape—or perhaps don’t realise that they are, already.
If the ‘landscape project’ is, as Weller says, about designing the ground, then climate repair is about designing the atmosphere through the ground. And if that’s true, then we should really begin with the ground itself. He writes:
[It] is best not to start with landscape as a picture or a sphere, but rather with what is right beneath one’s feet. And that there isn’t much to see down there is precisely the point . . . One has to be humbled, but not incapacitated by its density and its deep time. But above all, the landscape architect has then to look up and answer the question, “What now?”
Anyway, I said I wouldn’t do long-form. In my reading of Weller’s essay, he lays out 5 interlocking principles for answering ‘What now?’—a question I feel confident is common to landscape architects and climate repair-ers. These principles show us how we can think about what a ‘landscape approach to climate repair’ might look like in practice. They are:
1 - Object → System
‘from the mere proliferation of objects to the redesign of systems’
For climate repair, we could restate this as from the mere deployment of technologies to the redesign of systems. We are familiar, of course, with our technologies’ potential contribution to the climate system. But all technologies are also, as Weller puts it, ‘derivatives of and contributors to’ a variety of other systems (he uses example of the anonymous plastic bottle). For climate repair, this means going beyond the classic ‘obstacles’ of finance, regulation, and renewable energy supply—which, as recent events have thoroughly demonstrated, must be changed as well as ‘navigated’!—to extraction and production of materials, computation, ecology, water, and labour (physical and academic). The object → system move refuses to let the core chemical mechanism or ‘tons CO2e’ stand in for the full design of a project.
Example: ACAN Natural Materials Group
2 - Site → Planet
‘appraising a site as a frame through which to foreground relationships between where I stand and the earth system as a whole’
This second point mirrors the first. Unlike landscape architecture, though, climate repair is hardwired to focus too much on the planetary scale rather than too little. Still, the site, for both, is—definitionally—where the work is done. Even measurement and calibration are ‘sited’ the moment they involve physical sensors (or physical servers). ‘Landscape’ is the intermediate, flexible frame which manages the tension between site and planet. It is what allows us to see the systems at play, and where we might best begin redesigning them.
Example: Real Ice
3 - Adaptation
‘we can no longer just rely on the old adage that landscapes get better over time’
This particular naïve view was never very common in climate repair circles. However, it has a close cousin: the climate will change, but the site will probably stay about the same. This is another symptom of an inadequate landscape view. If the climate changes, the landscape changes, and projects must be designed to adapt accordingly.
Example: Vortex Bladeless
4 - Confrontation
‘the landscape project must critically question, not automatically seek to coalesce with its cultural context’
Climate repair projects, as I’ve come across in my own research, have largely tried to position themselves, aesthetically and rhetorically, as ‘non-confrontational.’ The problem with this approach, though it often (but not always!) serves the (usually very well-intentioned!) goal of addressing community, regulatory, and investor objections, is that it risks various kinds of landscape lock-in. Climate repair is different, and, at the scales which it will require to be effective, will necessitate a hearty amount of confrontation and creative design. But that does not mean it will be ugly. Rather, a landscape approach does not pretend that there is nothing to argue about.
Example: Tributes to Weller himself
5 - Experimentation
‘In order to win space for greater experimentation, the norms as to what landscapes can look like and how they are expected to perform have to be challenged’
Experimentation, like confrontation, is a frightening word in a PR context. Nevertheless, every climate repair project is an experiment, not just studies and FOAKs and pilots. On the flip side, of course, the status quo is also experiment—not ‘What now?’ but ‘How far can we push it?’ For Weller, ‘experimentation’ is the more honest word for ‘solution,’ and there is no such thing as a ‘model’ project. So, a landscape approach doesn't get us out of experimenting. Instead, it maintains that experiments can be done well. As Weller writes elsewhere, “every landscape architect should personally build a retaining wall.”1 What should every person involved in climate repair do? I’m not sure, to be honest, but they should start by looking at the ground.
Example: all of them
250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know, no. 228.