To Our Cadence Community,
As we enter 2017, many of us are declaring new year’s resolutions for ourselves, our families and our businesses. Please take a moment and consider reading this design and environmental based resolution. By reading and signing, you join designers from around the world in asserting the vital role of landscape architecture in solving the defining issues of our time: climate change, species extinction, rapid urbanization and inequity. We hope you are inspired by the history of this Declaration and see it as the beacon we do for guiding our profession into the future and find hope in the powers of collaboration to solve complex issues our society and the environment face today.
In 1966, the Declaration of Concern was the result of the imperative need for a small, yet influential group of leading landscape architects to voice their concern and solutions for the future of our American environment. Fifty years later, over 700 landscape architects from around the world gathered at the University of Pennsylvania to follow in the leadership roles of the six landscape architects of 1966. The New Landscape Declaration revisits many of the same critical situations they saw climaxing in our country but now examines how we address them globally.
In October 2016, I was honored to accept a four year appointment to the Board of Directors for the Landscape Architecture Foundation. Now in it’s 50th year, the foundation and its mission to ignite action by spreading this declaration come at a most poignant time in the current state of our world and nation. We ask our community, no matter your profession, to take a moment to read and join us in signing the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s NEW Landscape Declaration.
We pledge our services to each of you with profound hope for the future.
Warmest Regards,
Rebecca Bradley, PLA, ASLA
Cādence Founding Principal
2016 Landscape Architecture Foundation Board of Director
THIS IS OUR CALL TO ACTION
“Everything that sustains us comes from and returns to the landscape. What we do to our landscapes we ultimately do to ourselves. The profession charged with designing this common ground is landscape architecture.”
DECLARATION OF CONCERN
“After centuries of mistakenly believing we could exploit nature without consequence, we have now entered an age of extreme climate change marked by rising seas, resource depletion, desertification and unprecedented rates of species extinction.”
THERE IS A PROFOUND HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
“As designers versed in both environmental and cultural systems, landscape architects are uniquely positioned to bring related professions together into new alliances to address complex social and ecological problems.”
AS LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS, WE VOW
“to create places that serve the higher purpose of social and ecological justice for all peoples and all species. to create places that nourish our deepest needs for communion with the natural world and with one another. to serve the health and well-being of all communities.”
