Randy Hester, a professor at UC Berkeley, is founder of SAVE International. He is a former associate professor at NC State University and was once elected to the Raleigh City Council.

Two irrepressible forces underlie my work: the human desire for participatory democracy and ecological limits. There are many more democracies in the world today and resource limits are more critical, complex, and misunderstood. More than any other factors, democracy and limits shape public landscape design.

Ecological Democracy

My vocation is to design for ecological democracy, which integrates design with nature and environmental justice. This necessitates a process-oriented design that depends on civic involvement and adaptive science-based environmental management. Ecological democracy focuses on multiple potentials and consequences of actions; interconnected thinking, community stewardship, voluntary inconvenience, systemic coselfishness, and conspicuous nonconsumption inspire each design decision. I have written about these ideas (see "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sustainable Happiness," Places vol. 9 #3 1995 and "Democratic Design in the Pacific Rim," Ridge Times Press, 1999) and tested them most recently in creating a greenbelt plan for Los Angeles, and a green economic plan for coastal Taiwan County in Taiwan. Both plans are based on spatial principles of conservation ecology and local social nuance. Every design action is politically motivated by some anthropocentric and too often exclusively economic bested interest. Environmental impacts on human well-being are poorly considered. My goal is to make environment and well-being central to the political choice.

Design Implications

The design implications of ecological democracy are straightforward. Inhabited place must have a center, a locally-derived character, a clear limited extent, and a permeable boundary via which critical resources and externalities are monitored for impacts on sustainability and justice. In the Los Angeles greenbelt, the driving force is creating a clear limited extent. In Tainan County, the primary force is choosing an economic future based on the distinguishing locally-derived character. Instead of a petrochemical industrial complex, we proposed a green economic alternative based on traditional fishing and agriculture with new ecotourism and technology industries placed carefully to avoid negative impacts on a rare bird, the black-faced spoonbill. We have waged a grassroots and international battle to implement this plan and are hopeful of a successful political resolution.

A Day Without Drawing

NC State University provided me the skills to design for an ecological democracy. The curriculum in landscape architecture required ecology and related courses long before that word was popularized. Courses in sociology grounded my thinking in social desire and incorporated the civil rights movement. Drawing developed spatial thinking that is my most important tool. But drawing is more than a tool of my vocation. The School of Design taught me that a day without drawing is a day diminished.