A green space does not mean it’s eco-friendly

A lush front yard full of buds and blossoms might be pretty, but a manicured surrounding is not always the greenest option.

Landscaping is the process of modifying the visible features of any area of land and there's almost no end to the options for making an urban or rural space aesthetically pleasing.

However, just because a landscaping design involves flora does not mean that it's actually helping the environment in a sustainable way. Watching grass and flower patches replace centuries-old trees might not raise eyebrows, but in the wake of our designs and desires, people often step on the toes of natural ecological processes or endemic species that bear the brunt.

This doesn't mean that urban design and landscaping are going to stop, but according to Brady Crooks, an American student of landscape architecture at Pennsylvania State University, "Landscaping can be approached in a way that our impact is a positive impact ecologically, as well as beneficial to the human population."

Brady focusses on ecological projects in urban landscape design, and he says, "We have to stop thinking of ourselves as unnatural and start seeing ourselves as a part of the environment, because we are." With this kind of thinking in mind it won't only be the landscaping industry that cuts their ecological costs.

There is urgency involved when it comes to environmental preservation and it's not only the earth that will soon start to feel the impact. Recycling may help in the reduction, but every time plastic is recycled it degrades and eventually the process cannot be continued, thus, making it non-sustainable. As Crooks put it, "If we just replaced plastic bottles with a biodegradable material like soy, a simple technology, then you could throw the used bottle anywhere and two months later it would be gone with no ecological cost."
Ecologically-based urban landscaping follows the same principles. In any ecosystem everything co-exists in an interdependent way.

Everything feeds off of the waste of something else and provides some resource for something else that lives in that environment. Urban landscaping follows this model but includes humans' aesthetic and productive needs as part of the process.

For instance, if an urban landscapist is faced with a body of water that has been heavily polluted with waste, one solution is to use old plastic bottles to make a mesh material. This mesh can be used to create a 'bio island' on which aquatic plants can be grown. These plants feed on the high nitrogen levels in the waste which transforms from a pollutant into a source of fertiliser. The plants bring with them bacteria that feed on other aquatic pollutants and slowly the water becomes purified.

Furthermore, the 'bio island' produces plants that can be used for bio diesel and once the water has been through the purification process long enough other beneficial plants can be used and harvested for to meet human needs. In this way, the ecology of the water body benefits from the purification and humans are presented with a small agricultural centre, like a Spirulina patch – a plant that's very rich in vitamins A and B-12.

And who said landscaping had to be limited to yards and parks? Rooftops are another great place to focus on the ecological use of space management. Because 15 per cent of a building's heat can come through the roof, a collection of cooling plants above you is a great way to reduce energy costs and produce an ecologically sustainable urban space. 

Brady believes that while ecological landscaping processes may be scarce here in Bangalore, "India has a lot to bring to the concept. With 70 per cent of Indians living in rural conditions, the need for people and ecology to meet each others’ needs without conflict is being effectively noticed and understood in a big way across most of the country."

"We might be making money these days, but if we're not careful in our planning now, our future will mean spending that money to fix the problems we've already created," says Brady.