1. Keep Healthy Sites Healthy

Conversely, Ian McHarg often compared humans to a planetary disease, noting how sprawling modern cities seen from on high look like mold growths.

Paul R. Ehrlich et al., “No Middle Way on the Environment,” Atlantic Monthly, Dec 1997, 98–104. See especially p. 101, which lists environmental services and states, “These services operate on such a grand scale, and in such intricate and little-explored ways, that most of them could not be replaced by technology—even if no expense were spared, as Biosphere 2 showed.”

Hard figures on this perennial subject are surprisingly rare. Federal courts have ruled that loss of a single mature tree reduced property value by 9 percent, and have ruled on tree-specific financial losses in other cases. The Urban Land Institute, in a study cosponsored by ASLA (but involving only architects and devel-opment experts in actual research), considers the perception that landscape adds to property value as be-lievable but unproven due to lack of quantification. Developers interviewed for the study indicated a 5 percent increase in value for individual gardens and a 20 percent increase for public landscape amenities affecting the whole development (this increase equals six times the extra construction cost for the amenities). Presumably these figures relate to newly installed landscaping. Lloyd W. Bookout, Michael D. Beyard, and Steven W. Fader, Value by Design: Landscape, Site Planning, and Amenities (Washington DC: Urban Land Institute and American Society of Landscape Architects, 1994). Other anecdotal evidence tends to be in this range, though I have heard realtors state that mature landscapes can add 75 percent to the sale price of a home. Appraisers are more likely than developers to know values for mature landscapes, and a study of appraising formulas would probably be revealing. Some wonderfully varied estimates of the value of specific trees are shown in Table 3.1, p. 158.

James S. Russell, “Wetlands Dilemma,” Architectural Record, Jan 1993, 36–39. The architect was Elide Albert.

Daniel Tal, “More Than Toys,” LAM, Mar 2017, 38–40.

For more on Public Lab, see Jennifer Reut, “Open Invitation,” LAM, Oct 2016, 66–74.

Herb Schaal, FASLA, is a master of such methods; see K. Sorvig, “Drawing the Experience of Place,” LAM, Oct 2005, 170–78.

Jonathan Lerner, “The Toolmaker,” LAM, Apr 2017, 92–104.

Stuart H. McDonald, “Prospect,” LAM, Sep 1993, 120.

Robert L. Thayer Jr., Gray World, Green Heart (New York: Wiley, 1994), 46.

John Schaeffer, ed., Solar Living Sourcebook, 9th ed. (Ukiah CA: Real Goods, 1996), 374–76, 546.

Knight Ridder News, “Devices Will Let Households Generate Power, Experts Say,” Santa Fe New Mexican, 7 Jul 1999, A4.

Phillip J. Craul, Urban Soil in Landscape Design (New York: Wiley, 1992), 135–37.

William Thompson, “A Long Road to Freedom,” LAM, Feb 1998, 50–55.

Ann Brenoff, “Locution, Locution, Locution,” Los Angeles Times, 14 Jan 2007, dis-cusses various effects of wording in real-estate listings.

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.

Craul, Urban Soil, 137.

Robert Adams Ivy Jr., Fay Jones (Washington DC: AIA Press, 1992), 35.

Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: The House and Its History (New York: Dover, 1985).

Karl Vick, “Closed-Door Deal Could Open Land in Montana,” Washington Post, 5 Jul 2008. Through at least 2015, Plum Creek’s dealings remained in the news, in part because the company merged with Weyerhaeuser.

Kathleen Corish, Clearing and Grading Strategies for Urban Watersheds (Washington DC: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 1995). European laws protecting trees, forests, and special land types are also worth studying.

Alex Wilson, “Dewees Island: More Than Just a Green Development,” EBN, Feb 1997, 5–7. Descriptions that follow are from this article.