Interview: Nina-Marie Lister

Professor Nina-Marie Lister is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Ryerson University and Associate Director of Urban and Regional Planning. She is also Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto as well as Harvard University (2009–2013). As the founding principal of Plandform, a studio exploring the relationship between landscape, ecology, and urbanism, Professor Lister's research, teaching and practice focus on the confluence of landscape infrastructure and ecological processes within contemporary metropolitan regions.

Many branches of ecology have or are subscribed to theories and practices such as climax states, nativist or xenophobic approaches to species classification and restoration—we could say that these might be based on white male British or European colonization worldviews or baselines, false notions of wilderness, static notions of time and so on. Although many of these notions are still widespread, ecological theory and practice appears to be slowly taking a broader and more flexible perspective. Should we be focused on cultivating a more adaptive and opportunistic approach to ecological design rather than one based in theories that don’t necessarily equate to human conditions and practices?

Yes! For a number of reasons we could say that normatively, this might be useful. There’s so much that has been written on hierarchical dualisms that relate to our destruction of nature and wilderness and that relate to our epistemologies of how we know and understand and make sense of the natural world. Of course, a lot of it relates to our histories of colonization (depending on which cultural perspective you’re talking about), so I think there’s a huge part of our cultural history at work in the way we have structured our understanding of the natural world. In my own work, I’ve tended to refer to those to as the child or children of a Newtonian deterministic way of knowing about the world. This has served us very well in terms of the modern amenities that have given rise to our civilization, industrialization and our economic system and also the pathologies associated with that. So yes, we should be focused on thinking about renewing and engaging our relationship with the natural world and our understanding of its ecologies, insofar as how they relate to a very diverse and complex set of cultural and social conditions. We are no longer a world of colony and colonies, the Empire and the colonies, we are many of those. We move now around the world at faster speed, we interbreed, we intermarry, we immigrate, we emigrate and there isn’t really the kind of insulation, isolation and for lack of a better word—homogeneity—among individuals or groups that we used to see or could rely on. In fact, globalization is from many perspectives, disturbing in its homogenization of everything, but on the other hand, we see a tremendous amount of diversity within the population and in the way that we relate to the natural world. There are huge opportunities for making sense of and interpreting what is left of what we understand to be wild or wilderness. Arguably more important is the landscape that most of us recognize as home—the urban and urbanizing—and these may be the only landscapes that we really understand. I think there’s an enormous incentive to have a different, more flexible, nuanced and adaptive approach to engagement with those landscapes.

Why do we expend resources destroying ‘weeds’ plant species that we see as ideologically undesirable, especially in non-conservation and urban areas, when we could be working with the various positive plant capacities of plant colonizers (for soil stabilization, for food and fuel sources, soil and water remediation, oxygen providers)? Is this still a major paradigm shift for us? Conversely, in urban contexts we typically deploy horticulturally bred, sterile, hybrid and ornamental plants, why is that?

We see what we call weeds as ideologically undesirable and therefore we eradicate them. We have not typically understood the particular species to have value or, more to the point, we have seen them as destructive to a particular goal we have in mind, whether it’s farming a particular crop at a particular scale that requires this eradication, or an invasive species that we label a ‘weed’.

It leads to an interesting set of psychologies around what it is to garden and what it is to design and to control. At the heart of that is a deep sense of a need for order and control. You can see it in our modernist traditions, across architecture, music, artistic work, engineering—the desire for order and control is deeply embedded in a Newtonian deterministic world that resulted from the Enlightenment. We have in the Northern and the industrial world (let’s make clear that we are speaking principally about the dominance of British and Western culture) a deep need for order and control that is associated with modernism at large. The cacophony and noise of nature is disturbing to us, and that is also from a history of colonialism, the desire to go forth and civilize, urbanize, homogenize and so we weed out that which is different. We do it with people, we do it with plants. That is a gross generalization but it is a fair one across the pattern of colonization, whether you’re speaking about the xenophobia that relates to pathological forms of slavery and genocide or whether you’re talking about in a garden where the gardener seeks order, control, predictability, homogeneity or even for artistic purposes in planting across plants that have the same color or height arrangement or that are aesthetically pleasing. It is not to say in any way, shape or form that that the practice of gardening is somehow pathological or bad, but that it is extended in a very casual and vernacular way to the public. This is understood (in the British tradition) with the icon of the lawn. There has been plenty written on the subject of the idea of the British screen, the lawn, as a place where you took pleasure for an aristocratic or leisurely stroll. It wasn’t associated with toil and labor, and yet the lawn has come to symbolize so much of the American dream, the suburban dream, yet as we know, it is hugely consumptive of everything from pesticides to machinery (as opposed to a goat!), all of which tend to homogenize and simplify the otherwise complex ecosystem of the prairie. The symbol that we attach to order, control and civilization, urbanization, comfort and luxury, tend to be those which are least ecologically productive and diverse. I think there’s an incredible and deep understanding of history and psychology as well as culture that helps us to understand why we do those things and we are only recently aware of the ecological cost of some of that particular approach to simplifying the complex. There is a legacy that we are dealing with.

When you ask whether it is a major paradigm shift, I think what you’re asking is the recognition that the cost or the trapping of pursuing an approach to gardening based on ornamental control and order, is the recognition of that cost is something new. I would say yes. I would also say that—particularly in countries of the British Commonwealth—in Canada, in the US by extension, certainly in Australia and New Zealand, people who arrived here literally did battle with insects and plants that were unfamiliar, and in some ways, quite literally dangerous. So the temptation to bring the species from home for comfort and companionship and predictability is understandable. That legacy still lives large. I can think of numerous studies and examples of where in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the British colonists brought species that were highly-destructive in their non-native environment. They also brought incredible psychological comfort to colonists who would probably never set foot on their home soil again. I understand the temptation to do this but the legacy that it has left is deeply embedded in our culture of preferring English heirlooms to, for example, native shrubbery that are much hardy, prolific and more likely to survive a harsh Canadian winter, yet at the garden centres every year are the most ridiculous species that require coddling and nurturing of a kind faraway to the British Isles. I think that’s well understood and there’s been a lot published on that but it’s interesting to understand that even in our municipal design approaches to public park landscaping we have still have the hangover of the need for species that are a hundred years old in their cultural history. I think it’s also thoroughly simple to say that there is an economic and class distinction that goes with ornamental and hybrid plants that typically have been associated with those who could afford them, a lifestyle of leisure and wealth. Whereas the scraggly Eucalyptus in Australia—looking unkempt and common—so we don’t want them in our garden; if you can find them on the verge of the highway, why would we want them in our garden? We want something special and different and more glamorous. I think that is a tendency of Northern and Western ideals of what it is to have achieved status and wealth and plant material tends to reflect that. We don’t see the beauty of a common plant growing out of a crack in the pavement in the alley, with its pervasive dogged determination to survive the cracked asphalt as anything less than a common and undesirable result.

What are hybridized ecologies and how can we shift our understanding to work with novel ecosystems and hybrid ecologies? What benefits might this provide?

The way in which I have been using that term comes from both agricultural and resource context—the hybridization is the crossing of different species which result in something different and perhaps more adapted to a changing context. Sometimes it is more useful and I tend to think of hybridization as an opportunity to adapt and in many cases particularly in the urbanized environment when landscapes have in many cases been made and remade and often done so after a period of abandonment in a derelict state. There are necessarily emerged combinations of species that are more tolerant of difficult conditions that are associated with contamination or previous abuse, misuse or disuse. Once established, the species can help to complement and build soil in the same way that a native species can. There are benefits to fast-growing hybrid species that can take advantage of harsh conditions that may in the short term improve soil quality, reduce erosion, anchor soil, ameliorate flooding and provide a range of services that we see from a human perspective as valuable and necessary. They may not be aesthetically beautiful in the tradition to which we are accustomed, but they may provide a set of services in their hybridity and contribution to the emergence of a novel set of conditions. They may exist on the edges or help to move an ecosystem towards a more complex succession. These of course aren’t ever-permanent states, they are always transitions in time. During that transition, particularly on urban sites that have been challenged, contaminated or left fallow, they can provide a range of benefits, whether it’s shading, cooling (and the benefits you mentioned), or also an aesthetic quality that hasn’t been present before. In rapidly changing urban environments that are shifting demographically and culturally, the recognition that these kinds of hybrid environments and the landscapes that result from them add value becomes important, particularly at a time when, for example, we don’t have the same kind of municipal budgets that we used to have for ornamental landscapes. We need to look to longer lasting, hardier shrubs and in some cases plants that produce food products, that give color over four seasons and don’t have to be annually planted. There are of course changing attitudes toward gardening and landscaping on a larger scale that reflect hybridity. We might see this as an example of people who are environmentally inclined or interested in the processes of ecology who suddenly appreciate these benefits, reflecting a paradigm shift in the last 15 years. Benefits, for example, of pollination, seed dispersal, four season color. They appreciate urban wildlife like butterflies and bees and a variety of songbirds in the garden and are therefore less inclined to put their pesky lawn to the required centermetage and effectively challenge the municipal by-laws about what is acceptable in the garden. So the lawn no longer needs to be a strict species and we may select native species from our area, prairie plants that would occur in our region if left untended. While these might have been perceived as unkempt or messy at one time, we are now re-writing our by-laws to realize that not only do homeowners have choice, but it is a useful thing to do from the perspective of biodiversity and all the aforementioned ecosystem services.

Are productive ecologies a helpful model to break the dualist separation of humanity from nature to transition from this established, anthropocentric worldview?

I still wrestle with terminologies. Hybridization is different but related to the notion of productive. A productive landscape from an ecological perspective is one that I generally understand to be flourishing and has integrity, is resilient in the face of routine or a punctuated period of disruption. It bears fruit metaphorically and sometimes literally, plants repopulate, animals colonize, the flora and the fauna exhibit and feature diversity, it has complexity in the structure, and this of course varies from one ecosystem to another. Productive can mean many things, but in a cultural sensibility that as humans we recognize value from those types of ecology, in that landscapes are not singular in their purposefulness, they’re not merely to be viewed from a distance (although beauty I would argue also offers productive and aesthetic landscape values). We can recognize a whole suite of values. I think productive for me means a layered set of values and benefits, so we have a park for purposes of recreation, pleasure-taking, relaxation, leisure, spiritual respite, aesthetic value, but also, perhaps it produces material for human consumption—fruits or vegetables—rather than color alone. It may also provide storm-water management, erosion protection, soil anchoring, in addition to all of the other things, so we suddenly recognize the ecosystem service value of pollination as something to be actively engaged in the design plan. Planting pollinating plants has become almost de rigueur over the past ten years of municipal park design whereas ten years ago I would never have seen someone arguing that the presence of bees or honey bees or butterflies add value. By productive ecologies, I think I’m pursuing the notion that there can be multiple values added through the recognition and of legibility of ecological services and functions. We make these legible to bring understanding, as this gives the opportunity of stewardship and caretaking.

Is it more about the understanding and education to perceive these benefits from novel, hybrid and productive ecologies rather than what is simply visually apparent?

I’m struck by the tension between the pursuit of the spectrum of different ecosystems from urban to wild; there is a continua in places that are more or less inhabited by people. In Canada there is a very large land base of over 10,000,000km2 and a very low population density relative to that number, we have a different understanding of wildness is. When we say ‘park’, we could mean a national park that has very few people per square kilometer—or even per seasonal cycle—than a more urban place, where the continuum of that spectrum is much broader. When we talk about productivity, we could equally talk about the productive wild places as we might talk about hybrid, novel, or highly human-dominated ecosystems in the city. In the urban context, I think it is incredibly important to recognize—and again, I’m speaking from a British Commonwealth tradition—that we are a relatively new country with a high degree of immigration with a high degree of ethnic and cultural diversity. In Toronto, for example, more so than most places on the planet, people bring to the city very different sets of cultural values as they relate to the natural world, the outdoor, the garden and the landscape. I think we are challenged to find ways to communicate “what does ‘productive’ mean in the urban landscape? to our people and our public.” One thing we can do is to create a common set ofunderstanding; [ok?] we can’t hope to have stewardship and care for the landscape in any context, without a common sense of understanding and meaning-making. That doesn’t mean that we all have to agree on it, it means that we needs some common ways of interpreting and understanding a language that we share. Without that language, whether it's Anne Whiston Spirn’s notion of the language of landscape, or Jane Wolf’s excellent concepts of legibility and meaning-making, we need a shared understanding, without which there can be no possibility of stewardship with care. The work of designers can make legible these functions, so it becomes really important. There is enormous untapped potential for landscape design in the 21st century urbanizing world to understand the relationship of what different types of ecologies offer different cultural perspectives and how can we make these legible, understood and of value. Once we can give a name to them, and an understanding to the different types of productive values that they offer us, then we can begin a conversation about stewardship and care.

Do you think there’s a danger from economic terminology infiltrating environmental discourse (such as ecosystem services, natural capital, asset classes, ecosystem classes, green infrastructure) does this approach push us further into a problematic system?

That is always a risk, with these terminologies we should gently proceed with caution. It is important to also understand the ways we can distinguish cost from value or service from value. When I say value, I also mean inherent or intrinsic value, or worth. When I talk about productivity and ecosystem services, I think it’s very easy to quickly assume that we need to assign an economic cost or pricing to those services. Certainly there is a temptation to do that. It is very difficult to sell a park to a public in an era of declining public investment. It is very difficult to sell a park as something of beauty. And yet that beauty has social value so we are constantly striving to find ways to make it legible and clear what those sets of values are. I think that there is a profound risk in turning it exclusively into an economic exercise in pricing the very thinking of which has brought a number of the problems that we face. That same thinking has caused a lot of the problems that we have to resolve with it, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to resort to a market-based pricing system as a strategy for valuing the natural world. So yes, it’s always a risk, but I think that at the same time, it provokes us and should inspire us to have meaningful conversations about what the values are to whom and for what, so that we can have conversations about legibility and stewardship that go to a range of cultural appreciation for the natural world. I think that that’s the only way to overcome the hierarchical dualism between culture and nature that has brought so many of the problems that we are struggling with.


With humanity seemingly out of control, is it helpful to see the earth as a landscape that we inextricably need to manage?

That’s a loaded question! Humanity being “out of control”; are we out of control with our population, do we have an obsessive compulsive desire to manage the world to oblivion? I think we can assert that there are aspects of the Western industrial way of being that take more than their fair share, we might say, that there are aspects of greed and a need for immediate gratification at the expense of others. These are problematic and have long-term implications for the earth’s ability to provide for our resources. At the same time, I think it’s hugely important to understand that as humans, we are inextricably tied to the biota of the planet. We depend on it for our very ability to breathe, to excrete and to drink and to survive for longer than 24 hours. We need those fundamental services, we need that intimate relationship with the natural world. We are born of it and we are not separate from it. So it does us good to see ourselves as profoundly tied and dependent on the landscapes that we feel we need to manage but the question then becomes whether or not we manage, or design, or curate or garden, but how we do it. Do we do it respectfully, do we honor the landscape that sustains us, or do we deplete it, to the point where our very survival is at risk? There is a benefit in the conversation, I think, to being somewhat selfish in that we recognize our own need in order to honor the world on which we depend. We are not separate from it and yet nor is it really in our ability to manage in any Newtonian deterministic way. I tend to ask the question of not whether or not we can manage the ecosystem but how rather do we manage ourselves. The challenge is how do we manage ourselves and our interactions with the ecologies that sustain us, not to maintain the hubris that we can actually manage that complex a system, but frankly, if we do a bad enough job of it, it will simply eliminate us. Then we will simply be variables. We may find that all (or the few) species remaining around us breathe air that is different, or excrete toxins that will kill us. Will we be the ones that are selected out of the picture? I have no doubt about the continuation and pervasiveness of the ecology around us, I just think that it will look very different and it won’t be very hospitable, so it would be good if we paid attention to how we manage ourselves.