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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. Favor Living, Flexible Materials

Authors : Kim Sorvig, J. William Thompson

Published in: Sustainable Landscape Construction

Publisher: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics

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Abstract

Plants are the only truly productive organisms on Earth. Their ability to photosynthesize—the original solar-powered production—is the ultimate source of all food and fuel on which humans, and all other animals, rely.¹ As the Bible puts it, “All flesh is grass.”² It often seems, however, that we as modern humans are busily forgetting our debt to the plant kingdom—biting the frond that feeds us.

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previous chapter Heal Injured Soils and Sites

next chapter Respect the Waters of Life

Technically, there are exceptions. Some would count salt and a few other minerals as foods; in addition, fungi are often plant-like in form, but they belong to their own biological kingdom and are not capable of photosynthesis. Neither minerals nor mushrooms, however, is a major food, nor nutritious enough to rely on exclusively. Electricity can be produced without fuel from wind, water flow, or photovoltaics, all of which rely on solar energy (which causes the temperature differences that drive wind, and the evaporation that raises water to high elevations). Uranium is called a nuclear fuel, but fission is quite a different process than combustion; in “fuel cells” the fuel is hydrogen, and again, the reaction is quite different. In any case, the technological evolution that gave rise to all high-tech energy production could not have happened without many generations of activity based on fuel (and food) directly from plant sources.

Isaiah 40:6. The verses immediately following focus on the fragility and impermanence of human life, which result, in part, from being completely dependent for survival on things outside ourselves. The humility of such a lesson is at the core of sustainability, but even greenies persist in assuming that our own technology can free humans from reliance on the rest of the global ecosystem.

Billie Leff, Navin Ramankutty, and Jonathan A. Foley, “Geographic Distribution of Major Crops Across the World,” Global Biogeochemical Cycles 18, no. 1 (Mar 2004).

This site is useful for a wide variety of climate change analysis tools. Click on Tools: www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/.

Thomas A. M. Pugh et al., “Effectiveness of Green Infrastructure for Improvement of Air Quality in Urban Street Canyons,” Environmental Science and Technology 46, no. 14 (2012): 7692–99.

Peter Aspinall et al., “The Urban Brain: Analysing Outdoor Physical Activity with Mobile EEG,” British Journal of Sports Medicine 49, no. 4 (2015): 272–76.

Sarah Lozanova, “Green Spaces May Deter Crime, Urban Studies Reveal,” EBN, Jan 2017, 11.

Tina Susman, “A Tree Grows (and Dies) in Brooklyn,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2009. Online at http://tinasusman.typepad.com/tina_susman/page/5/. Similar tree vandalism has been reported in other cities; apart from politics, different ethnic groups seem to have widely different feelings about urban trees.

Calling these plant-focused construction methods “bioengineering” butts up against the use of that term to mean genetic engineering; expanding to “soil bioengineering” does not dispel the problem. “Biotechnical erosion control” is a far more accurate term, but a mouthful; I suggest an alternate abbreviation, Btec.

Still useful, these guidelines are available from sites such as these: www.studioizzo.org/geoplus/2015/03/12/software-per-ambiente-e-paesaggio-software-for-environment-and-landscape/?lang=enwww.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_PLANTMATERIALS/publications/idpmcpussbfglpa.pdfwww.blm.gov/or/programs/nrst/files/Soil%20bioeng.pdf.

Donald Gray and Robbin Sotir, Biotechnical and Soil Bioengineering Slope Stabilization (New York: Wiley, 1996), 3.

Ann Riley, Restoring Streams in Cities (Washington DC: Island Press, 1998), discusses the history of these methods, including the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps.

Information is from www.landlifecompany.com/ as of 2017.

These points were culled from USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Soil Bioengineering for Upland Slope Protection and Erosion Reduction (Washington DC: Natural Resource Conservation Ser-vice, 1992), 18-1 through 18-8.

USDA, Soil Bioengineering, 18-5.

Caroline Chiquet, John W. Dover, and Paul Mitchell, “Birds and the Urban Environment: The Value of Green Walls,” Urban Ecosystems 16, no. 3 (Sep 2013): 453–62.

Booklets are at www.jakob.co.uk/solutions/view/green-walls/.

The National Gallery, London, “Van Gogh Painting Brought to Life as ‘Living Wall,’” www.nationalgallery.org.uk/van-gogh-painting-brought-to-life-as-living-wall, posted 26 May 2011.

“Cost–Benefit Analysis for Green Façades and Living Wall Systems,” Building and Environment 70 (Dec 2013): 110–21. Price/area unit conversions are by me.

Gray and Sotir, Biotechnical and Soil Bioengineering Slope Stabilization, 149.

Ibid., 148.

USDA, Soil Bioengineering, 18-31, 18-32.

EKOL, the division of Tessenderlo that manufactured these walls, as well as site furniture, compost bins, and similar products, listed each item with the amount of recycled plastic it repurposed. Active in 2007, at http://ekol.mediabeheer.be/, EKOL was sold by Tessenderlo in 2010, and may have gone out of business.

See www.krismer.at/01/en_Sonderkonstruktionen_03.html. Krismer appears to be represented in the United Kingdom by a firm called Terraqua; it does not seem to be available in the United States.

It is almost impossible to resist making jokes about the anti-environmental president of the same name—but we won’t go there.

Theodore Eisenman, “Raising the Bar on Greenroof Design,” LAM, Nov 2006, 22.

Michael Hough, City Form and Natural Process (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984).

Tom Liptan et al., Integrating Stormwater into the Urban Fabric (Portland OR: American Society of Landscape Architects, 1997), 89.

Eisenman, “Raising the Bar.”

Ibid.

Underground or earth-bermed houses (such as the one in which I live, near Santa Fe) may have several feet of soil over the roof, maintaining a year-round baseline temperature of 54°F, easily solar heated in winter and cool in summer.

See www.lid-stormwater.net/greenroofs_cost.htm, a toolkit site developed by the US EPA.

Rick Scaffidi, “Beware the Published Costs of Stormwater BMPs: Dig a Little Deeper, Engi-neers!” Living Architecture Monitor, Winter 2016, 35.

Erin Weaver, “Green Roofs Improve Solar Panel Efficiency,” EBN, Dec 2012, 3.

Candace Pearson, “‘Blue Roof’ Adds Stormwater Detention Alongside Green Roof in New York,” EBN, Oct 2013, 14.

Both studies are cited in Living Architecture Monitor, Winter 2016, San Francisco on p. 26 and Port-land on p. 30. Separating the private and public benefits is my interpretation of the Arup data.

Christopher Hawthorne, “Building Designers Add Pizazz to Views from Above,” Los Angeles Times, 10 Nov 2006.

Alex Wilson and Mary Rickel Pelletier, “Using Roofs for More Than Keeping Dry,” EBN, Nov 2001.

Questions about both hydrogels and wind erosion are raised in Wilson and Pelletier, “Using Roofs,” ibid.

Jacklyn Johnson and John Newton, Building Green: A Guide to Using Plants on Roofs, Walls, and Pavements (London: London Ecology Unit, n.d.), 64.

See Linda McIntyre, “Greenroof Guru,” LAM, Jan 2007, 64, which reviews Snod-grass’s work.

2016 GRHC Awards of Excellence were published in Living Architecture Monitor, Winter 2016; the Edgeland project is on pp. 20–21.

Theodore Eisenman, “Chicago’s Green Crown,” LAM, Nov 2004, 106.

Intensive greenroofs fall between thin-soiled extensive greenroofs and roof gardens, but they are closer kin to the former in intent, structure, and plant choices. Their deeper soil can retain more stormwater but is not suitable for trees.

Lisa Owens Viani, “Prairie from Ground to Sky,” LAM, Dec 2006, 28.

A proposed repurposing of the abandoned Vallco Shopping Mall in Cupertino CA will, if it ever is built, have thirty acres of greenroof and be by far the biggest US greenroof; it was voted down in 2016 by citizens ob-jecting to potential traffic and school congestion. The phrase “world’s largest green-roof” has been trademarked by SubTropolis, a converted limestone mine that rents underground storage space; the management seem bent on thumbing their noses at genuine green building.

Lorraine Johnson, “The Green Fields of Ford,” LAM, Jan 2004, 16.

Under section 319(h), Clean Water Act.

Theodore Eisenman, “Sedums over Baltimore,” LAM, Aug 2004, 52.

In her contribution to Landscape Architectural Graphic Standards (New York: Wiley, 2007), “Living Green Roofs and Landscapes over Structures,” p. 713, Susan Weiler of Olin Part-nership prefers the term “landscape over structure” for roof gardens with soil deeper than eight inches. She states that greenroofs and landscape over structure should not be compared. I agree that comparison should not be adversarial, but all sustainability-oriented landscapes benefit from deliberate evaluation, some of it necessarily comparative.

The interview with Prof. Khire was part of www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/a-green-roofs-checkin/62fa16e6-e97c-4e4e-a969-04c3d67be4a9. The MSU greenroof research team has a long research history on performance of greenroofs, much of it de-scribed at www.greenroof.hrt.msu.edu/staff/index.html. Khire is currently with the Energy and Environment Cluster at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Jacklyn Johnson and John Newton, Building Green: A Guide to Using Plants on Roofs, Walls, and Pavements (London: London Ecology Unit, n.d.), 48. Over 10 million square feet of German greenroof are older than 1989, for example.

Ecover, The Ecover Manual (Oostmalle, Belgium: Ecover Publishing, 1992), 24.

For information on waste-treatment greenroofs, see www.wwuk.co.uk/grow.htm. GROW and GROW2 are modular wetlands, in effect, and can be installed on roofs or in other ways. Concept development for this product was under the auspices of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (www.epsrc.ac.uk), but the council’s published findings appear to be archived beyond recall.

Miller’s interview was part of The Green Machine’s Season 1, Episode 3. Transcript at www.pbs.org/e2/episodes/103_the_green_machine_trailer.html; for video, go to YouTube and search for fbTE6FyFhX4. For the GRHC Top Ten, go to www.greenroofs.com/virtualsummit/2011/virtualsummit2011-agenda.htm; then look in the list of videos for a link to VS2011#2—2011 Top 10 List of Hot Trends in Greenroof & Greenwall Design (on YouTube). Going directly to YouTube and searching for VS2011#2 brings up the same video.

Trying to encourage sustainability by skimping on other compliance is risky even with good intentions. “Streamlining regulation” has disguised Reaganite bad intentions against environmental and social laws.

Cutler is cited in an in-flight magazine, possibly itself a first for any landscape architect! Quote and statistics on urban forests are from Charles Lockwood, “Save the Shade,” Hemispheres Maga-zine (United Airlines), Sep 2006, 60–63. The article is available online at http://selecttrees.com/outside_literature/Save_the_Shade.pdf.

Darryl Fears, “Americans Once Moved Away from Forests. Now Forests Are Moving Away from Americans,” Washington Post, 22 Feb 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/22/americans-once-moved-away-from-forests-now-forests-are-moving-away-from-americans/?utm_term=.1159768de6d4.

R. J. Hauer, R. W. Miller, and D. M. Ouimet, “Street Tree Decline and Construction Dam-age,” Journal of Arboriculture 20, no. 2 (1994): 94–97.

The author and date of this study are not known.

Pimentel’s study was published in BioScience; reported in John Yaukey, “Environment’s Output Placed at $2.9 Trillion,” Fort Collins Coloradoan, 14 Dec 1997.

The study is credited to Dr. Rowan Rowntree. It may be from E. Gregory McPherson et al., “Quantifying Urban Forest Structure, Function, and Value: The Chicago Urban Forest Climate Pro-ject,” Urban Ecosystems 1, no. 1 (Mar 1997): 49–61, one of the one hundred or more publications Prof. Rowntree authored or coauthored. Download for a fee from Springer, or for free via ResearchGate; search Publications for the lead author’s name. Rowntree, McPherson, and others at the US Forest Service Center for Urban Forest Research (www.fs.fed.us/psw/) have made numerous useful contributions to understanding this field.

Statistics are from Lockwood, “Save the Shade.” The US Forest Service study is by the Center for Urban Forest Research.

Blanc’s excellent lectures were compiled in Alan Blanc, Landscape Construction and Detailing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996).

Phillip J. Craul, Urban Soil in Landscape Design (New York: Wiley, 1992), 1.

Ibid., 122.

Silva Cell 2, introduced in 2015, replaced the discontinued Silva Cell as of October 1, 2017. DeepRoot’s website supposedly has “all the information you need,” but downloading anything requires you to register for the privilege of getting marketing e-mails.

Silva Cell is rectangular, 48 × 24 × 16 in. (1,200 × 600 × 400 mm); Strata Vault is 600 mm (about 24 in.) square by 404 mm (about 16 in.) deep; and Strata Cell is hexagonal, 510 mm (about 20 in.) across and 250 mm (10 in.) deep.

This section is an updated version of Kim Sorvig, “Soil Under Pressure,” LAM, Jun 2001, 36.

CU-Soil is a registered trademark. Like all other trademarks referred to in this book, it remains the property of its developers. “Structural soil” is a generic term.

H. F. Arnold, “The Down and Dirty on Structural Soil,” LAM, Aug 2001, Letters, 9–11. This letter responded to my “Soil Under Pressure.” The article, focused on the CU-Soil patent and enforcement controversy, did not discuss Arnold’s system. This gave the mistaken impression that neither the historical nor the horticultural aspects of Arnold’s work were appreciated. Hopefully, that misapprehension can be laid to rest here. Arnold gives general concepts for site-adjusted soil mixes in his book Trees in Urban Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992).

“Gap-graded soil,” based on sieved angular sand, provides golf greens’ smooth, consistent surfaces. Porous paving (aka “open-graded friction course”) uses asphalt or cement to bond “no-fines” (single-size) aggregate to produce pavement with voids through which water drains easily. Structural soil is unbonded, and soil fills the voids.

Nina Bassuk, “Using CU-Structural Soil to Grow Trees Surrounded by Pavement,” posted at the website of the Ecological Landscape Alliance, www.ecolandscaping.org/01/soil/using-cu-structural-soil-to-grow-trees-surrounded-by-pavement/.

Interestingly, soil mixes are essentially recipes, and recipes cannot be copyrighted because they are simply lists of common ingredients and known procedures. To patent a recipe, the ingredients, processes, or out-come must be significantly different than common practice. UHI’s strategy, called a “defensive patent,” is not uncommon; Xeriscape was trademarked in a similarly unsuccessful attempt to enforce consistency. Given the near-infinite site-specific variations possible and necessary with almost any horticultural process, enforcing such patents is nearly impossible.

Nina Bassuk and Peter Trowbridge, “Soils, Urban and Disturbed,” in Landscape Archi-tectural Graphic Standards, ed. L. Hopper (New York: Wiley, 2007), 646–61.

Bruce Ferguson, personal communication. Ferguson is probably the greatest US expert on land-focused stormwater management and one of the few landscape architects to pursue “hard” research on such subjects.

My article (see note 70 above) apparently made UHI defensive. The text of that article, edited without permission to express Nina Bassuk’s objections to my conclusions, was reprinted under my name (!), in City Trees, journal of the Society of Municipal Arborists, Nov 2003. The City Trees version is extremely misleading, contradictory to my researched findings, semi-incoherent, and intellectually dishonest. Anyone concerned with evaluating structural soils fairly will avoid the City Trees article.

So far as I can determine, none of these installations have been dug up or monitored with instrumented methods, but they do provide strong observational evidence.

A consummate gentleman, Craul names no names, to avoid embarrassing the designers.

The title of this section is a nod to that panel. See www.asla.org/uploadedFiles/CMS/Meetings_and_Events/2010_Annual_Meeting_Handouts/Sat-B1The%20Great%20Soil%20Debate_Structural%20Soils%20Under%20Pavement.pdf.

J. Urban, personal communication.

Here’s the math. V_b is the baseline volume of soil at 100 percent soil efficiency. E is soil efficiency, as a decimal: the percentage of volume available as soil of a given method, mix, or system. P_b is base price, from suppliers, converted to price per cubic foot. V_b/E = actual required volume. P_b/E = price per effective cubic foot.

The guidelines are summarized from James Urban’s contribution to Ramsey et al., Architectural Graphic Standards, 10th ed., 177–82.

I have seen recommendations for an establishment period as long as seven years for some regional species. Always get local expertise and aim to wean plants off human assistance gradually.

Wild accusations have been made that defining plants as natives and aliens is comparable to racism against “alien” humans; see Kim Sorvig, “Natives and Nazis: An Imaginary Conspiracy in Ecological Design,” Landscape Journal 13, no. 1 (1994): 58–61.

See entries for Abies magnifica in Elbert Little, Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, Western Region (New York: Knopf, 1980); and John Kricher, Ecology of Western For-ests (Peterson Field Guides, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

Contact Western Polyacrylamide or the Colorado Forestry Department for studies on polymer use.

From the 1999 seed catalog of Wildseed Farms, www.wildseedfarms.com.

Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York: Norton, 2006), 7. Steinberg is also the author of the wonderful Slide Mountain: Or, The Folly of Owning Nature and several other books tracing our often comical social and legal attempts to corral the natural world.

The root cause of drought, along with other extreme weather, is probably the greenhouse effect and global climate change. Water-use restrictions such as those that have made artificial turf popular are being passed both by legislators who deny global warming and by those who recognize it. Evaluating the sustainability of local drought measures requires looking at their larger-scale and longer-term implications.

Jessica Boehland, “Which Grass Is Greener? Comparing Natural and Artificial Turf,” EBN, Apr 2004. Unless otherwise noted, statistics in this section are from Boehland’s article. I agree with her conclusion that neither conventional nor artificial turf is particularly sustainable.

Charles Vidair, “Safety Study of Artificial Turf Containing Crumb Rubber Infill Made from Recycled Tires” (Sacramento: California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, October 2010).

See www.actglobal.com/aviation-turf.php. The quote is from an earlier version of the website, but the current one states substantially the same thing, in more detail.

The speaker is Chris Reuther, a botanist and science writer at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. The original source appears to be a 1999 article, title and publication unknown; Reuther was quoted in both EBN and LAM discussing artificial turf issues.

Washington Post, “1 Out of 8 Plant Species Faces Extinction, Survey Says,” Santa Fe New Mexican, 8 Apr 1998, B-1.

Title: Favor Living, Flexible Materials
Authors: Kim Sorvig
J. William Thompson
Publisher: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics
Book: Sustainable Landscape Construction
Print ISBN: 978-1-61091-925-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-61091-811-4

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-811-4_4

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