Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Constructive voices, the podcast for the construction people with news, views and expert interviews. This is Charlotte dancer for constructive voices. Today's episode features Alexandra Stead, who was shortlisted for the Sir David Attenborough Award, highlighting her dedication to preserving and enhancing biodiversity and ecosystems.
She is a renowned, multi award winning landscape architect and the author of the groundbreaking book portrait to a landscape strategy to reframe our future.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: This is Maxwell Alves, also here to welcome you to the first ever book series by constructive Voices.
Joanne Proft, associate director, community planning Campus plus community planning at the University of British Columbia, said of this book, Alexandra.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Stead offers a compelling, well researched, and passionate argument for securing a future for life on earth by making a fundamental shift in our relationship to nature from a selfie oriented portrait perspective to a more all encompassing landscape perspective.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: This episode is the first in a four part series that delves deeply into the groundbreaking book portrait to a landscape strategy to reframe our future.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: The author has generously offered ten books for our giveaway. Be sure to check out the information on the constructive Voices website constructive dash voices.com and on social media hosted by Jackie de Burke.
[00:01:24] Speaker C: So I'm really thrilled to have Alexandra Stead with us today. She's the author of an amazing book that I've absolutely found loads and loads of pearls of wisdom in. She's a passionate landscape architect who has a very deep commitment to the transformative power of landscapes. Now, she's the author of the book that I've just mentioned. I'm not going to give you the title because the title is quite special and I prefer for Alexandra to speak about that herself. However, just the beginning of one of the reviews that I came across says Alexandra Stead offers a compelling, well researched, and passionate argument for securing a future for life on earth by making a fundamental shift in our relationship to nature from a selfie oriented portrait perspective to a more all encompassing landscape perspective. First of all, Alexandra, I'd like to say thank you so much for being here today. And if you'd like to just elaborate on who you are both personally and professionally.
[00:02:29] Speaker D: Oh, thank you, Jackie. It's such a delight to be speaking with you.
Right, well, so personally and professionally. I am a lover of nature, I'm a lover of art, and I'm also a mother of two sons who I adore.
And I think that it's all interconnected for me. I've been a landscape architect now for about 25 years and I'm still as passionate about it now as I ever was. It's allowed me to take my love of art into what I think is the most exquisite medium. And that is working with the land itself and sculpting and collaborating with the living world to create these living works of art is how I see it. So that's what I'm really passionate about.
[00:03:23] Speaker C: I must just comment on your illustrations in the book. They are absolutely wonderful.
[00:03:28] Speaker D: Oh, thank you so much. I find them really helpful to sort of clarify the ideas, even for myself, but for others, too.
[00:03:37] Speaker C: Sure, sure. So let's talk a little bit about your professional background. You have your own practice as well as obviously being an author, so let's just discover a little bit more about that side of you.
[00:03:52] Speaker D: Right. Well, as I said, I've been in the field of landscape architecture for about 25 years now. I studied at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where I'd already done a degree in art. And then I decided that I wanted to take my art sort of into the public realm and into the landscape to make what I kind of see as the most interactive and experiential artworks.
And so I've been doing that for 25 years. Initially, I worked at the city of Vancouver Greenways department, which in those days was a very innovative idea to bridge engineering and planning, and then to bring landscape and arthem into that, to create cycling and pedestrian routes through the whole city. So to create a network of these green and beautiful routes that people could travel through the city on. So I did that for a few years, and then I moved to London 20 years ago, and I worked in a variety of practices there. I first worked in an urban design practice. Then I worked with a wonderful landscape architect named Martha Schwartz and ended up running her studio in London.
And then following that, I worked with Acom, and I ran the design studio there, and I had a huge opportunity there to work internationally and to experience working at a very grand scale. The projects we did were very large. And so then I brought all of that kind of experience with me when I started my own practice called Urban back in 2013. And I did that because I was so passionate about creating environments to bring beauty and joy to people's everyday lives.
So that's what I've been working on ever since.
[00:05:48] Speaker C: So, yes, what an amazing story. And what brought you, first of all, to write a book? Because, of course, you've painted a very busy and colorful professional life up until up until this point.
[00:06:01] Speaker D: Yes. Well, I think I'm very fortunate that I have a very good team working with me at Urban. And so I felt the company was in a place where it was running very smoothly. I had some excellent people leading the projects, and I thought, well, this is an opportunity now that I can work on a book, which I'd been wanting to do for a few years. And I think I was really starting to feel the pressure of time catching up with me and ideas that I thought needed to be sort of disseminated in the world very quickly and urgently, because the book is a call to action, really. And I thought, if I don't do it now, I'm going to have missed the opportunity.
So I did feel some urgency around that, and I decided, okay, well, I'm going to take this year, which, you know, it was basically about a year, that I spent a lot of energy on the book at the same time working in the practice, but it was a busy year.
[00:07:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I can absolutely appreciate that. Now, let's get to. Because I deleted the idea of putting the title in at the beginning of your book on purpose, because the title is very special. What is the title of your book and what is it about? Alexandra?
[00:07:17] Speaker D: Right. Well, it's called portrait to landscape, a landscape strategy to reframe our future.
And so the phrase portrait to landscape became a defining phrase for me, and it helped me sort of hinge everything in the book on that perspective. So really, portrait to landscape, for me, means two things. One is a shift in our perspective from looking at things, kind of. You know, if you understand a portrait orientation, it's vertical and really focusing on ourselves and then flipping to a landscape orientation that's much broader. And it's a wide angle landscape lens where you include the living world around you, your environment, and your context. So that's one way that I envision that phrase. But also, to me, it means flipping from just looking at ourselves. So a very kind of inward focused, more selfish gaze outwards to the fuller community. And not just the community of people around us, but the full community of life that is so often ignored by all of our economic structures, our financial structures, our political structures. That full community of life is often just ignored and seen as something to support us rather than support us financially or in terms of what we can extract and take from it, rather than thinking about how we are so interconnected. So that's really what I wanted to convey in that phrase, portrait to landscape, as a shift in our perspective and in our worldview.
[00:09:16] Speaker C: Okay, now, I think that the title obviously is absolutely brilliant, and the book is absolutely brilliant. But for those who haven't read it in a very quick explanation, what is it about elevator pitch?
[00:09:34] Speaker D: It is, well, as the title says, it's a landscape strategy to reframe our future. So I'm a landscape architect. What I know how to write are landscape strategies. I don't really know how to write books.
So what I did was I framed the book as a landscape strategy. I provided a vision for how we could create a new earthen. I then went to describe our baseline and our current situation.
I looked at how we came to this current situation. And then the book goes on to explain how we now then can transform that current situation into something much more beautiful and much more wholesome and integrated.
And I do that by outlining design principles that I would normally do in a landscape strategy and then moving from there to five key actions that we as individuals, as communities, as nations, as a global humanity that we can take then to lead us towards a more positive and hopeful and regenerative future.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: Fantastic. Now, who do you perceive Alexandra as your book's target audience?
[00:10:57] Speaker D: Well, I didn't want to write it just for other designers so often as a landscape architect, I'm sort of speaking with other landscape architects at our conferences, at award ceremonies, at, you know, webinars, that sort of thing. And we all sort of understand very similar things, maybe have some have, you know, differences of opinions. But of course, you know, I'm already speaking to the converted when I do that. And what I really wanted to do was to explain to the rest of the world why landscape is so important. And at the moment, I don't see that landscape really gets any attention in the press.
It certainly doesn't have a lot of attention in terms of the development world. And what I wanted people to understand is why they should care and how. How important it is in terms of the possibilities.
And if we focus on it, how we can really overcome many of our current environmental challenges. But it's beyond that. It also extends into so many of our social challenges and economic challenges as well. So I wanted people to see all these marvelous benefits that landscape can bring when we pay attention to it and when we really focus on it in terms of human development.
[00:12:27] Speaker C: So, of course, we're recording this in May of 2024, and it'll be released in June of 2024. But, you know, people tend to listen to these podcasts for years afterwards. So that's why I'm marking the date. No other reason for it. But at this time, we're only a few months after the law, the biodiversity neck gain laws come out in England. And in a sense, that's like, okay, that's a little bit of.
It's a little bit of admission that, okay, we need to consider the landscape when we go to do developments now because we really have messed up massively and now we need to sort of do something. Whilst it's not enough, it is something. And I guess, you know, I guess that brings us in a way to. It's like this tiny realization. And whilst, as I say, I don't believe it's enough at all, it brings us to the big question of, like, humanity and the relationship with nature. We've got to the stage where we think we have to make a law to do something that will make a small difference, not necessarily even a big difference. That brings up the huge question about what is our current relationship to nature? What do you think?
[00:13:36] Speaker D: Well, thank you for bringing up the biodiversity net gain because as you say, that really is a significant step forward. I was speaking to Professor David Hill last week actually, during an online webinar, and he is the person that was really advocating for biodiversity net gain. He's an ecologist, and so he was working with the government to advocate for this legislation for 20 years. So it's not a new idea. And unfortunately, it didn't really pan out the way he saw it either. It's much more now limited and the focus is on, on site gains rather than off site, which. Anyway, that's a whole other.
[00:14:18] Speaker C: I was just going to say the same. Possibly another conversation if we're allowed to reveal.
[00:14:23] Speaker D: Yes, but yes. The point of that is that I see that this whole situation that we found ourselves in this, this awful predicament in terms of climate change, global warming, ecological collapse and so many other things, in terms of plastics pollutions and the way we're seeing the arctic ice melts. And there's so many environmental issues now. And I really see that all stemming from the worldview that most of western society has, which is a very dualistic construct. So it's humans, us versus it nature, and it's this mindset that I think it has centuries, maybe even millennia of history of seeing ourselves as dominant over and as sort of the conqueror over nature. And that nature is really just there for our use and that it doesn't have value apart from the use that we give nature. So that is why in all of our sort of driving structures, in our systemic structures in the western world at least I'll only speak from that perspective, is that we now find ourselves in a place where we have just been taking and extracting and exploiting and withdrawing and never investing back, you know, and now nature is just completely overwhelmed.
There was quite a time period where nature was able to absorb all of the contaminants and pollutants and all of the waste and toxins that humanity was dumping into it. Now there's so many humans on this planet and there's so much waste and so much pollution that nature cannot absorb it any longer. And so now that's why we're starting to see all these changes. So, you know, we've really worked ourselves into a mess that we now need a different way of thinking to be able to come out of this mess. We can't start, we can't keep going back to our same sort of thinking of, oh, we need to come up with more technological solutions. It's really thinking about how do we now work collaboratively with nature and how do we see ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it, which indeed we are. I mean, we completely are reliant on the food that we eat, the soils that grow that food, the air we breathe, the fresh water that we drink. Hopefully, many people don't have access to fresh water, but all of these things are integral in our bodies. You know, they're what, what nourish us. They're what keep even our own bodies going and give us life. So it's completely inseparable. And yet, and yet somehow we've made this construct that, that we are separate. Now we need to overcome that. And that's what a big part of the shift from portrait to landscape is about.
[00:17:50] Speaker C: I'm going to throw something in there that's not really part of your book, but it's interrelated in the sense of, yes, there's the dualistic, obviously, relationship that you've discussed. And then there's the catch 22 that the majority of people of a certain age, let's say a working age, need to earn money. And therefore they're stuck in this kind of like, you know, cycle of needing to earn money. And they don't necessarily have a lot of chance to start to change their perspective, even if they read your book or they take on, you know, some other forms of media.
How much time do people have to actually shift and realize, do you know what I'm saying?
[00:18:34] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, it's a good question. And of course, it's something that I think it's a shift that has to happen internally. And once that has happened, I think your whole perspective on life changes. And then, for example, what you choose to do for your work might be something very different than what you had chosen previously, how you choose to eat, you know, that will change how you choose to get from a to b. You know, perhaps rather than choosing to drive and to use fuel, you might choose to walk or to cycle and actually get exercise and, you know, sure to nourish your body that way as well. So there's all these things. When we start to have a different perspective with our lifestyle will then, I think, start to evolve as well. And I know that's happened in my own life. You know, more and more and more just different aspects of that mentality then are integrated into my life and just become part of my daily routine, which I don't even think about then any longer. But I think, well, going back to the question of work and careers, there's actually a huge amount of opportunity for people getting involved in different green types of approaches. And for example, the government and governments around the world have said that by 2030, we need to have protected 30% of land and 30% of seas, and yet there are very, very few people trained in conservation, in park management and that sort of thing. And yet we'll have all these protected nature space spaces with very few people that know how to manage it. So there is a huge lack of experience and skill. So we need now people to start going into those fields that in the past had very little funding, had very kind of few routes of education through, but now those are picking up and so there's many, many opportunities that way. That's just one example of the type of career that people could maybe get.
[00:20:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it's a great answer. What you said previously about, you know, once you start to adapt, you know, one or two of the smaller changes in whether it's food or taking a walk rather than the car or cycling, and it is just like an exercise or a diet regime, once you start, you know, to get over the regime bit and it just becomes part of your life. So that's an excellent point. Now, probably we should have a conversation in 2030, if not before, meaning to see where we're all at in 2030. But that's just throwing it out there because it is only six years away. Obviously, we're going back to the book. Obviously. Let's talk about landscape as a living canvas.
[00:21:31] Speaker D: Right? Well, I like that expression too, because, well, for me, it resonates very well as somebody that was trained as an artist first. So I understand the process of arthem and the process of painting. And what I love the most about landscape is its ability and its inherent quality of constant change.
So while it is fundamental and so robust, it's also something that's constantly changing and adapting to various influences that are received. And we have the opportunity to then work with the landscape as a living campus and helping to sculpt it in a way that is healthy and that will bring about restoration rather than decline. You know, at the moment, you know, the landscape is always being changed.
But at the moment, whether it's sort of incidental or intentional, most of the inputs and most of the influence that we're having on landscape is changing it in a way that is for, you know, that is negative, that sort of causes the decline of ecosystems or, you know, that sort of rapes the landscape. But we have this opportunity to completely change that and to sculpt it and to create, as you said, a living canvas, something that is very beautiful and that is nurturing and growing and that we can help to stewards. So we have this opportunity to be stewards of the earth rather than sort of its biggest perpetrators.
[00:23:26] Speaker C: So one of the quotes that you use in the book, Albert Einstein, a human being, is part of a whole called by us universe. That's only a short little part of the quote that you've included that goes back to what we were talking about, really, that we do feel separate from nature.
How do you see that we can get over that? I mean, in terms of, you've talked about, like the walking and the cycling, are there other tips you've had you would have for viewers and listeners how they can suddenly or more quickly get closer to nature?
[00:24:04] Speaker D: Well, that's a great question.
I know it's so difficult for so many of us. You know, living in London, I often didn't even have a garden, maybe not even a patio or a deck. And I know there's many, many people around the world that are disconnected from the land, disconnected from the soil, and it can be really, really tough. And so, I mean, I'm currently in Vancouver. I think at the moment you can see all these leaves behind me. In a city like Vancouver, it's much easier to connect to nature because you go outside and a few minutes away, there's probably a stream corridor to walk along. And there's the opportunity to just kind of absorb the beauty of the forests around you or looking out at the sea and feeling the liberation of that. But in a city, I would suggest just finding those moments. I found that because I walked most places when I'm in London, that gives me the opportunity to connect with the land more. So I would choose routes, for example, that go through the squares, that go through the greener streets, that possibly go along the canal or by the river. I'm making these choices about how we travel, actually, is a wonderful way to connect with nature. Another way, I would say is even if you don't have a garden, just putting a few plants on your windowsill and watching them grow and sort of tending to them, that in itself really helps you kind of connect back to nature. Often I'll have a plant sitting on my desk, and throughout the day, I love having an orchid on my desk, for example. So I'll just kind of gaze into the flower, into the blossom itself when it's in blossom, and find that those moments that I have just to connect back just even to that one flower, really helped to ground me and to kind of bring me back to what is important and.
And to see my interconnectedness with other life forms and other life. So, you know, it can just be those moments that we take to focus on other life forms. So, you know, if you have a dog, that can be a wonderful way of connecting. Or cat. Animals often really help us connect back to ourselves and to connect to other things. So I would say, if you can garden, that is a wonderful thing to do. Getting your hands into the soil and seeing the richness there and the life within the soil itself can also be wonderful.
So there's many little things that we can do. And I think if you start small, and then hopefully, over time, can build up that connection.
[00:26:56] Speaker C: Yeah, there's some really good advice, and that's the whole thing is breaking it down into some little, small beginnings that are achievable regardless of where you're living. So that's a, you know, that's obviously very, very helpful. You do use an analogy in your book regarding the human visual system, which I found fascinating. Can you elaborate on this?
[00:27:17] Speaker D: Yeah, well, right. I forget now how I use that analogy, but, you know, I have a lot of books on my bookshelf, some that I don't always read in other. So every once in a while, I'll, I'll pull something off the bookshelf and I'll think, oh, wow, you know, this book is nothing about, like, my field of endeavor, but yet sometimes you just capture these key gems, don't you? So there was a book I had on my shelf. I think it was grand design by Stephen Hawking, and in it, he's talking about our visual perceptions and how they are actually as much about the observer us, as they are about what we're observing. The natural phenomena around us in the world, even the act of seeing. So we have all of this visual phenomena bombarding us. Not just visual, but all sorts of sensory phenomena bombarding us every moment. And we somehow then have to filter that through our eyes. And there's actually a place, I think it's where the optic nerve joins the retina. So when we observe the world around us, there's actually a big hole in that point where the optic nerve meets the retina. And so our mind then has to work to fill in all those gaps. And it does so by having certain sort of convenient and simplistic constructs so that it can bypass going through reams of data and a very long process for us to be able to understand the world around us. So, anyway, this has caused us. This is just one example of how our mind then fills in the gaps and it tries to simplify something that is actually very complex. And I think this is one of the reasons that this dualistic construct of humans versus nature is so easy for us to grasp, because it does make something that is very, very complex. Nature is very complex. It is completely. Well, not completely, but it is an unknowable.
It is unknowable to us. We'll never understand everything about nature. And so we put these constructs into place that help us understand and filter this information. I think that's one of the reasons why we've ended up in this situation. And so now we have to add more complexity to understand that, yes, we are individuals, but we are also part of a whole. And so we need to then have this much more complex understanding of our place in the world.
[00:30:07] Speaker C: Fantastic. Now, going back to the early stages of your book, you talk about widening our circle of compassion. What happens when we do this?
[00:30:19] Speaker D: Well, that is a line that I got from Einstein's quote that you mentioned earlier, and I absolutely love it. When I read that quote from Einstein, I thought, wow, you know, everything that he's saying here, he says about how.
How humans have an optical delusion of consciousness, that we are separate from nature, and that our task then must be to embrace all of nature and its beauty. And, you know, he says it. He says more than that. But I found that that quote really encapsulated everything that I've been thinking about in terms of what our current situation is, what our current challenges are, and then how we can overcome them by embracing nature. And so there's many other people that talk about similar ideas, Aldo Leopold being one of them. Wherever I. He is.
Well, he is one of the most known conservationists, he's from America and sort of was living in the 19 hundreds. And he came up with this idea of ecocentrism. So that's moving away from just focusing on people, which would be anthropocentrism, and looking instead at a much more holistic and integrated view of the world, which is ecocentrism. So de emphasizing the importance of humans only and emphasizing the importance of all living creatures and all of the land. So the soils, the water, the air, the plants, animals, all of these things are important to life. And so that's really when I think about embracing all of nature, it's mostly about that change of mindset again, that paradigm shift that sees us just as one part of the biosphere, of this much larger, interconnected web of life.
And once we've done that, then we can much more easily embrace it, and then embrace it not only in our minds, but through our actions. But I think it really has to probably start in the mind first and then be manifest physically through our actions.
[00:32:53] Speaker C: Fantastic. Now, finally, for this introductory episode, because we have a couple of episodes coming up on your book, because it deserves it, what is the land ethic?
[00:33:04] Speaker D: Ah, right. Well, excellent question, because that is something that Aldo Leopold put forward. So he had worked all of these years as a conservationist, and he found through all of his work that it's actually changing people's understanding and mindset that will have the most fundamental effect and change.
So he wrote this land ethic that states something along the lines that, you know, we have ethics around how individuals interact one with another. We have ethics around how individuals relate to the community of people around them. But what we don't have is an ethic about how we, as people interact with nature and the land. And so that is missing. So we have things like the ten Commandments, the golden rule, that help to guide us and give us a moral compass in terms of how we behave in the world, but we have nothing that helps us sort of control our behavior towards the land. And so his land ethic that he included in a book that he wrote called Asand County Almanac, it sets out how we must really embrace this land ethic to help steer a new course and to understand that we are all residents on this planet. It's not just human residents. We are all residents, all of nature residents on this planet, and we must protect and control our own behavior in order to protect the rest of nature. And so I think that's a really fundamental element there is about learning to control how we behave and how we interact and how we inhabit this earth. And until we are able to do so, we will keep sort of wreaking havoc on other life forms.
[00:35:17] Speaker C: That's a slightly depressing but very true point where we can finish this episode. Obviously look forward to future episodes where you know, you're going to be laying out a lot more of the nitty gritty as to how we can get ourselves out of the mess.
And also very interesting, you know, when people look, as we'll discuss in a future episode, when people actually look at the history of the human race, it's actually quite small in perspective to the whole and that's something we'll be talking about in a later episode. Alexandra, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you.
[00:35:51] Speaker D: Oh, thank you so much, Jackie. It's a pleasure.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: This is constructive voices. Constructive voices, the podcast for the construction people with news, views and expert interviews.
