How Green Is Your Magazine?

You’ve probably seen them: the “green” issues of Vanity Fair, Elle, Glamour, Town & Country, and Sports Illustrated, among others. “Green” has suddenly become trendy in the world of glossy fashion, sports, and shelter magazines. Film stars, even rock stars, appear on magazine covers to advocate for the global environment.

Is it time for a “green” issue of Landscape Architecture?

“But every issue of Landscape Architecture is green!” you may say. Well, yes, the editors have striven mightily in the past few years—I do hope you’ve noticed—to integrate information on LEED, porous paving and stormwater gardens, native plants, nontoxic building materials, and other environmental topics into LAM. And we go out of our way to publish environmentally progressive projects. (Check out “California Mission” in this issue as an example.)

So what would a “green” LAM contain that it doesn’t now? Perhaps more to the point, what kinds of built work should we not publish—as you flip through the current issue, is there any type of article you would edit out?

Be careful what you answer, because whatever you say will reflect on this profession, which, at LAM, we work hard to reflect in all its breadth and diversity. Within that green-to-gray range, there is much built work that no one would call sustainable or regenerative. Nor are landscape architects themselves uniformly concerned about the environment.

In fact, it may surprise students and others new to this profession that, throughout the 1990s, there existed a schism between the “green warriors” in the profession and the “artistes” who looked on environmental concerns as a hindrance to what they viewed as landscape as art. The good news is that schism seems to have subsided—at least, I no longer hear the “artistes” openly quarreling with the “greens.” I even hear some of our most avant-garde designers, who used to view ecology as an antiaesthetic nuisance, starting to talk a “green” streak. Skeptic that I am, I do wonder about their commitment. If they are responding to trends that they see in the design marketplace, will they still be advocating green design when the market moves on to the next trend?

The real question, as always at LAM, is what our readers want. What’s your pleasure, reader: a magazine that reflects the profession in all its gray-to-green breadth or one that moves the profession’s environmental mission forward?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor / bthompson@asla.org