00:01A second, perhaps more personal legend when I was even younger was a gentleman who, for most of us...

00:09...invented many of the concepts of environmental conservation and the notions of using a methodology...

00:17...to do rational planning considering environmental factors.

00:24This person in the '50s and in the '60s was advocating concepts of bringing it all together, thinking holistically...

00:33...considering all of nature and all of its processes.

00:36He brought together at the University of Pennsylvania experts from social science and physical science and soils and geology...

00:45...and he mixed these people together in a new concept of multidisciplinary education focused not simply on academic understanding...

00:54...but on doing something about environmental planning as a method.

00:59Most of you will recognize the notion of map overlay or polygon processing, having its roots with what I believe, its founder, Ian McHarg.

01:12Ian McHarg has been a professor.

01:15He's been a professional practitioner.

01:17He's been a theoretician.

01:19He's been an author.

01:20He's been a visionary and he's given us guidance, especially me, in where we take this technology.

01:29Most of today, we've been overwhelmed by the technology stuff.

01:35I'm overwhelmed.

01:36I'm just guessing what you're feeling.

01:39And while the technology stuff is moving along, much of the underpinnings for it...

01:45...the concepts for integrating natural processes are not being shown today.

01:52They're being implied.

01:54And in many ways, the methods that Dr. McHarg has invented and theorized have yet to come to fruition in your practices and your thinking.

02:05Please join me in welcoming Ian McHarg, a landscape architect.

02:20And, and Jim could I have the lights turned up, please?

02:23Thank you.

02:24So that the entire room is lit.

02:28[indistinct speech]

02:29Thank you very much, Ian, for all of your contributions.

02:32Oh, my good man.

02:34What a wonderful fellow you are.

02:36Not exactly.

02:37Yes, the fact of the matter is who deserves the praise more?

02:40Nobody.

02:42There's a wonderful inventor and he...who started off as a modest young student I think at Harvard University when I was giving a lecture...

02:52...has parlayed this thing into a magnificent accomplishment and, of course, he's obscenely rich...

03:01...during which time...during which time I'm the same rotten, impoverished, miserable, misbegotten professor that I've been for 40 years.

03:14How much better of this give to be a large sum of money.

03:19Alright. I'm glad we've got the lights on.

03:22I hate these bloody sepulchral rooms where every self-respecting man as the lights dim...

03:31...closes his eyes and seizes that last best erotic fragment and lives it again.

03:40So have your five minutes.

03:41Let's have a little look at the watch.

03:43I could see it...five minutes.

03:45Well, a couple years ago I was up in Vancouver to get something called the Lifetime Achievement Award...

03:53...and somebody got up, oh the man who got it last year.

03:56He got up and said, you know, the fact of the matter is that Ian McHarg is the titular father of GIS.

04:05Of course, I have no role in paternity of this sort at all.

04:10But the fact of the matter is I didn't...I don't think I bred GIS.

04:13But what I did do was I discovered overlays.

04:17Why?

04:19Because I required the teaching environment and found to my astonishment nobody knew where their environment was.

04:25And so I, given the responsibility I had to teach young people about this from all the ends of the earth...

04:32...I then decided the way to teach would be to make a composite...composite teacher.

04:38And so I got a million dollars from Ford and I bought myself a meteorologist and a geologist and geomorphologist.

04:44Hydrologist, soil scientists, plant ecologists, animal ecologists...

04:47...and then I get another million from the National Institute of Mental Health...

04:51...and I hired an ethologist, ethnographer, cultural anthropologist, epidemiologist.

04:56There it was.

04:57At last, ha, ha, ha, we are capable of actually dealing with the environment because no single person could do it...

05:02...but these [unintelligible] of people if they could learn to work together, could.

05:05But then the question is, how could they work together?

05:08And I discov-...I'd gone to Harvard, of course, where I had three degrees which are no substitute for an education.

05:14And I was probably the only ha, ha, I was the only innocent [unintelligible] among all these scientists.

05:20But I realized there was one device by which the disparate insights of all these incredible people could be made causal and consequential.

05:30I discovered chronology.

05:32What an extraordinary discovery, because every study we don't do anywhere really has to involve a recapitulation...

05:39...and discovered that this utilization of chronology, using time as a unified rubric was very, very efficacious and so I started off...

05:49...by asking... the people with the oldest habit is geologists...to tell us about the geological history of the area under study.

05:56And then the geologists reasonably said, "You know, I can't do this alone.

05:59I need help from meteorology."

06:01So geology and meteorology, ha, ha, were able to develop the evolution to a point where you could reinterpret the data to reveal groundwater hydrology.

06:10Reveal the same data to reveal geomorphology.

06:13Reveal the same data to explain surficial hydrology, which point, of course, you're well on the way to understanding soils...

06:20...which leads you to the possibility of identifying environments and seeing them populated by the appropriate plants...

06:27...and also by appropriate environ...by appropriate organisms.

06:32The lights are not on, Jack.

06:33You know, I can't see the whites of anybody's eye.

06:36You could be dead for all I know.

06:39Is there nobody who could put the lights on in this sepulchral building?

06:45Nobody, Jack?

06:46Nobody can do it.

06:47I'll tell you a little poem.

06:48John Milton discovered this place a long while ago.

06:51He wrote a line and said, "Hence, loathed melancholy of Cerberus and darkest midnight born...

06:59...of stygian gloom forlorn midst horrid shapes and shrieks and sights unholy.

07:07Find out some uncouth cell where brooding darkness spreads her weary wings and the night raven sings."

07:16What an epitaph for this building.

07:24So it goes.

07:27So then, I discovered this wonderful conception of layers.

07:34But the environment, of course, is not divided, say by language and science...

07:38...but the divisions have fragmented the environment and so it has to be reconstituted using chronology as a device.

07:51Let's suppose about 30 or 40 years ago, I invented ecological planning and...

08:01...one thing we could say about it, having all these disparate scientists and so on, bringing them all together...

08:06...we were able to do really quite elegant ecological plans.

08:10And I think that which distinguishes them from many of the remarkable things I've seen upstairs and heard today...

08:16...is that they tended to be seriously systematic; that is, by going through the exercise of understanding geology and climate...

08:23...the interaction to reveal groundwater hydrology physiography, it's the original hydrology and so on...

08:29...you're engaged then in constructing causality, the end of which, if you do it well...

08:34...you'll understand how the place came to be, what it is, and where it's going.

08:38And that, I think, is a justification for talking about a system.

08:42And I'd say that the departure which Dr. Marble mentioned is an enormous com...commitment to technology...

08:51...and not quite as great a commitment to integration holism.

08:58I would say, of all the great people who are here today, perhaps the challenge you should accept is...

09:07...the dreams for a fully computerized ecological planning, which was able to undertake everything that had been done manually...

09:15...faster, cheaper, and better than ever before has not been fulfilled.

09:20I would say, I've seen an awful lot of plans in an awful lot of places, and I would say that by and large...

09:25...the ecological planning studies I did in '60s and '70s have not been equaled, far less surpassed.

09:31And I think there has got to be a challenge; that is, we've got to be able to learn to do at least as well for regions and for the nation...

09:40...and indeed for the global environment than we are doing at the moment.

09:50The fact of the matter is, of course, global environmental problems have exacerbated.

09:56As a population increases, as the demands of the population upon the environment increase, the problems are much exacerbated.

10:00...devotes itself to doing which, and resolves that in its succeeding century, ha, ha...

10:04However, I think there is reason for optimism.

10:07I think the fact of the matter is that the capability of environmental science, the capability of sensors...

10:14...of satellites, of computers, and not least of GIS, means that we have developed new and wonderful prostheses.

10:23For me, the great dream would be, if by the remaining years of this century...

10:28...the nation and the world concluded there should be a global and national ecological inventory...

10:39...all of us address ourself to greening, healing, and restoring the earth.

10:46So, that...

10:47Green, heal, and restore the earth.

10:49And I would love, 'cause I'd love to be there.

10:51I'm 76 years of age and my dream is that I get some [unintelligible speech], so that if the world concludes on...

11:02...undertaking an ecological inventory of the United States as an examplar for the world, and if there is a global ecological inventory undertaken...

11:11...and indeed if the country's determined to green, heal, and restore the earth, then about 30 or 40 years hence...

11:18...I will be invited as a very old man into space where, with a group of scientists, I will see, of course, the, ha, ha...

11:27...return of the primeval environment, the ret...the resurgent forest, clean atmosphere, oceans, coral reefs, and so on...

11:36...and all the lesions and welts and suppurations upon the earth, worldlike body diminishing.

11:47Alright. Now I'll finish it reading a poem.

11:51All of you are going to buy a book which I wrote.

11:56It's called Quest for Life.

12:01And it's my autobiography.

12:03It's published by John Wiley and I'm going to sign the things when? On Thursday.

12:10The reason for signing was very simple.

12:12By defacing them, they cannot be returned to the publisher.

12:21Here we are.

12:24So it takes Jack, just a couple of minutes.

12:27Do you mind?

12:28I was asked by the publisher to write a poem to the world's children, which I did.

12:33I sat down and wrote it.

12:35Dearest children, do you know that we have inherited a miracle?

12:41All matter, the heavens, the sun, the earth itself, is made from the ashes of stars, cycled by volcanoes and sea and air...

12:50...clouds, rain, rivers, rocks, and soils matter permeates us all...

12:56...including you playing, smiling children now.

13:01Exult in this prodigious unexpected world.

13:06Birdsong and butterflies, puppies and pandas, foals and flowers, dappled trout, time, the seasons, music, joy, laughter.

13:16You and me joined in this improbable universe.

13:20Recoil from the loathsome scabbed, mutilated and scabbed land, foul seas, rivers, air, squalid slums, wastes...

13:30...diseased tissues on the living earth. Repudiate them.

13:35Resolve to protect the earth.

13:36It's our home.

13:38All creatures are kin, brethren, gifted with life, aching for fulfillment, doomed to die.

13:46But our breath will fuel flowers.

13:50Our tears will join the magic cycle.

13:53Our cabin will find other homes.

13:55Our wastes will replenish.

13:58In this sense, we are mortal...we are immortal as is the earth.

14:03We are transients.

14:05But we can be guardians.

14:06We can protect and restore; it needs resolve, commitment, energy, and art.

14:12So you must aim to protect all that's wild and wondrous, to heal mutilation, salve wounds, restore the earth.

14:22Then bequeath a better legacy, a finer future for the earth and its creatures...

14:29...for all children now and forevermore.

14:33Make it a quest of life in God's name.

14:36Amen.