Landscaping has a benifit depending on the perspective.

As I was listening to the last lecture, I couldn’t help but get sucked into the idea that any form of altering the ecosystem that already exists in a given area will have a negative effect; although that is true, it means we need to change our whole system for commercial/residential planning. Because home owners associations often require occupants to meet specific requirements on how their property looks it prevents property owners from allowing biodiversity to develop on their property. The same applies to commercial businesses. They have specific guidelines they must abide by that are established by the city.

There are small steps that can be taken to try to alleviate the monoculturing of landscaping like encorperrating a variety of plant life that is native to the area, but that doesn’t avoid the fact that it’s still landscaping and it’s a humans perspective of what the ecosystem needs to be to support all the organisms that will inhabit the area. Emily mentioned this briefly in her blog (A World In One Cubic Foot) from one of the references she used where it stated that farms are creating biological deserts to supply resources for one species. I guess the point I’m trying to make is we (humans) cannot know everything that other life forms need for survival. We can already see this just by going to a zoo. We try to mimic the environment that the animal would have in its natural habitat, but we fall short every time because we are separating the animals from all the other life forms that normally exist with them, so the best way for an diverse ecosystem to thrive is to allow the inhabitants of the ecosystem to shape it themselves without humans determining what they need for survival..

Getting back to landscaping in a residential areas. It’s nessisary to do so to minimize maintanence cost that is required for the upkeep of a home. By landscaping you are creating a monocultural ecosystem, but this limits the number of biological life like termites, field mice, and others that can eat away at the foundations of a home and in turn extend the life of the home, or cut back on the number of times a home owner will need to call in pest control or foundation repairs.

Of course this is a anthropocentric perspective, and I believe the best way to turn around the destruction of the global ecosystem is to fully convert to a ecocentric perspective, but depending on if we can determine how much time we have left before major catastrophes occurs that effect our existing anthropocentric life, can we gradually transition to a ecocentric life, or do we need to take more extreme measures to transition.

Eric Burgstrom