Planning and Development of a Desert Wetland Park in the United States - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 207

for the design to capture opportunities for interactive learning about the restored
environment in order to help ensure that future generations would become stewards
of the repaired land (see France 2005 for more about the importance of education in
fostering stewardship).
A series of collaborative charrettes was completed to help generate the physi-
cal form for the project's intended structures, based on exploring the materials and
development patterns of the Native Americans and the early European settlers in this
region of Iowa. So the result is a place that immerses visitors in the landscape by both
preserving and containing views, through creating places that give a sense of what
this place had originally been like. Also, the work of the early “prairie school” of
designers provided the vernacular form for the visitor center and for the three outdoor
classrooms which resonate with the broad horizontal character of this landscape.
The project also uses natural processes to support the land (Zimmerman 2004),
by using constructed wetlands to filter waste as described in chapters 18, 19, and
20, while the solar orientation of the buildings with the earth-berm design provides
some natural cooling and heating for the visitor facility complex. Eroded stream
banks were reshaped, regraded, and reformed in order to accept the extensive amount
of reseeding that would occur on the site. Native seed was collected by hand from the
few remaining original tall-grass plant species that were still found on the surround-
ing landscape. Today, volunteers still continue to collect that seed.
There are now more than two hundred indigenous plant species established back
on the site. Significantly, the few remnants of the original and rare tall-grass ecosys-
tem not only have survived but also now have actually flourished. With a thriving
population of dry-land buffalo (occupying a similar ecological and anthropologi-
cal role to the water buffalo of the Iraqi marshlands), the restored landscape has
become a refuge for both wildlife and people. And this is what is most important in
this project by Design Workshop in terms of addressing the original premise: plans
without people are just plans. One can create places to celebrate species, but a great
deal of social benefit (or natural capital sensu Aronson, Milton, and Blignaut 2007)
is lost if opportunities to interpret and provide education about that environment are
not simultaneously advanced (Zimmerman 2004; France 2006). In the end, places
without people are just spaces. It's often the ability to enjoy a place that really creates
the long-lasting benefit.
Places are also composed of the palimpsest of layered history, nowhere thicker
than in southern Iraq (France 2007b). As in Iraq, sometimes the historical aspects
of an environmental landscape have been wiped clean. It is necessary to celebrate
these landscapes of memory by telling the story of the site's ecological and cultural
history. By allowing people to see and interact with educational displays, history
becomes part of their future (Zimmerman 2004). Educational interpretation is there-
fore a critical vehicle to allow people to connect to and envision their role in shaping
the places in which they inhabit (France 2005). And at Clark County Wetlands Park,
historic events and people's dedication to direct environmental destiny have made
a difference and have produced what may be the signature success story in desert
wetland restoration.