Ecological Planning Method - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 246

that there should be no structure to planning methods. Rather, working planning methods
should be viewed as something analogous to a jazz composition: not a fixed score but a
palette that invites improvisation.
The method offered here has a landscape ecological, specifically human ecological, bias.
As noted by the geographer Donald W. Meinig, “Environment sustains us as creatures;
landscape displays us as cultures.” 50 As an artifact of culture, landscapes are an appropriate
focus of planners faced with land-use and environmental management issues. Ecology
provides insight into landscape patterns, processes, and interactions. An understanding of
ecology reveals how we interact with each other and our natural and built environments.
What we know of such relationships is still relatively little but expanding all the time. As
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers have observed, “Nature speaks in a thousand voices,
and we have only begun to listen.” 51
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