about the places where we choose to live
and found our cities we really wouldn’t
live anywhere near the places we call
home today I mean who in their right
mind would found one of the world’s most
prolific tech capitals in a place
riddled by seismic faults like San
Francisco or for that matter who would
build a metropolis of over 22 million
people on a lake on a body of water and
we’re actually no better we’ve chosen to
live in a place that’s riddled or at
least threatened by tropical storms five
months out of every twelve every year we
call this home as the bramble of storm
tracks that you see here these are all
the winds over 75 miles an hour that
was born and raised in Puerto Rico on
the south coast and when I was a kid I
used to think that the mounds in the
distance were sleeping giants they would
leap out in any moment from their sleep
and we used to ride horses and make our
own slingshots and actually I remember
one time when we put a Manitou fit a
baby calf in the backseat of my father’s
VW Beetle and drive it around the farm
so I’ll give you a moment to think about
that image for a second it really is
amazing that we survived from Puerto
Rico we moved to Venezuela and spent
some amazing years there and then it was
time to move again first to Texas then
to Colorado then to Virginia my folks
finally settled there and then I went on
to study my undergrad in engineering and
once I graduated I became a u.s. naval
officer and I had a chance to sail the
Atlantic the Persian Gulf in Southeast
Asia I lived in Japan for three years is
the last of three three the last three
years of those four and I learned a lot
during those those years really was
about a profound respect for the natural
world for the ocean and for the
diversity of the world’s landscapes so
when I look we fast forward today my
professional arc has taken me from
engineering to landscape architecture
it’s allowed me to design and build
places like this where
art and environment come together and
nature’s give it a place a place that
allows for us to transform the places
where we have where we work where we
come together it makes them feel much
more complete and it kind of respects or
brings in the irrepressible qualities of
our natural world ultimately I believe I
have great hope that when we combine our
fundamental legacy as problem-solving
human beings with our creativity and our
desire for innate beauty I think that’s
a really powerful mix and so people have
done this beautifully before this is
alexander von humboldt whom geez you
just heard about and when done right
science can be this beautiful thing that
explains our natural world and actually
it’s it’s remarkable because if you
think about it a couple hundred years
ago we relied on stories we relied on
poems we relied on prints and paintings
to explain the natural world and that
was enough that was enough to propel you
know empires to bet their fortunes and
seeking new frontiers in this new age of
exploration of the natural world
and so today it’s a little bit different
but we have access to amazing amounts of
information it seems like dozens if not
hundreds of books and websites and
documentaries get published every year
and so you’d think that this remarkable
amount of information coupled with our
technological prowess would somehow have
solved all these global and
environmental issues that that continue
to plague us and so when you think about
that it’s not that all this technology
has been applied to get us closer to the
natural well in a way it’s kind of
gotten us a little bit farther from it
and out of sight has become out of mind
and so when you think about the fact
that over half the world lives in cities
today and much of it in this tropical
and subtropical band where 3 billion
people live today and that projections
expected to rise to 6 or 7 billion by
2100 I mean we’ve seen in the last year
how we’ve
battled with natural disasters of all
kinds it’s equally true that there’s an
environmental crisis as much as there is
a crisis of communication about these
things and more precisely a crisis of
visualization at a time when ironically
we consider ourselves a visual culture
and so for the last decade I’ve been
working on the ecological atlas which is
a visualization model a tool that tries
to understand the patterns and the
seasons and the logic of the natural
world a tool that tries to bring
together this formidable combination of
art and science and technology together
to help us understand what’s around us
to most people the natural world is a
mystery you see this confounding amount
of you know information that is a little
off-putting and overwhelming and trust
me I’m a landscape architect I know this
and I felt that way before I became a
landscape architect so if we could take
that information and organize it in a
logical and intuitive way and you see
here this is a visual calendar that
shows from January to December from left
to right when things change when they
flower when they lose their leaves when
they bloom you could if we were in Miami
in March walk outside see this yellow
bright blooming tree and know
intuitively that it was tabebuia Kariba
that it was native to Brazil that it
wasn’t so great in hurricanes and maybe
with this knowledge armed with this
information maybe we would plant in more
protected areas or maybe we would
diversify our palate so that when we do
have a storm we would have a more
survivable landscape outside on a
summer’s day we might go on and walk and
see this bright red flower and
immediately immediately be able to tell
that it was a native flower
Beach Blanket flower that it was great
for soil stabilization wonderful for
storm surge maybe you would plant other
things that were more vulnerable and
still retain a certain palette that had
this robust
to survive we could do that for all of
these living things as we’ve done here
this is an alphabetical catalog of
wildflowers of Florida we’ve catalogued
over a hundred of them organize them
alphabetically so that you can look them
up but that is data that you could just
simply rearrange if you wanted to know
for example bloom times on the far left
the calendar here is on the vertical
axis you understand when the early
bloomers happen and when the late
bloomers happen on the far right and
this slow gentle drift would allow us to
design landscapes that had an overlap in
terms of their bloom time so we would
have interests year-round that same
information could be arranged by color
so if it was important to you to plant a
garden that was native to Florida
drought tolerance that bloomed from
February to May and it was lavender you
could sift through this terabytes of
information and quickly identify what
your choices were and who wouldn’t want
that and who would want to do that when
you have to contend with all this
information to rely on experts and web
sites and all these sources that are
truly overwhelming we’ve done this in a
way that I affectionately call an
artisanal way we’ve assembled this data
by hand and as the next step in the
process we’re looking to to create a
digital tool that will automate that
frankly I can’t wait for that to happen
because if lunch looked this good and
you knew that it was local and it was in
season and there was a way for you to
know that it was both you might not care
about farm-to-table or sustainability or
resilience you certainly want to have
that lunch though and so we’ve taken
that information and we’ve catalogued
things like butterflies and birds and
fruit and fish and while understanding
these things individually is extremely
valuable it’s far more powerful to look
at this as a complement of relationships
and look at for example over 350 birds
like we have for Florida
and map them in such a way that when you
see two birds together you know that
it’s mating season and when they’re
almost invisible they’re not migrating
through our state and we could do this
for any part of the world because the
data is out there we just have to find a
way to orchestrate it and show it
intuitively and we’ve had the fortune to
show our work through galleries and
exhibits and museums and people
immediately respond to the aesthetics of
the project and then they realize that
it’s basically a DNA signature of their
environment and you know there’s no
amount of projection or facts or figures
that will convince us to do the right
thing but when you show it in a
beautiful and intuitive way you get much
farther ahead and being able to make the
right decision and that’s at the core of
the ecological atlas we’ve taken that
information we’ve organized it here to
both space and time and tune to show a
typical section of the coastline so then
on the vertical axis again we see the
seasons of how things change we go one
step further and we arrange the
different plant communities as you get
close to the water and we see how they
change from a maritime forest all the
way down to beach dunes and near shore
and seagrass beds we think this can be
an amazing teaching tool we’ve also used
that information to catalog the
wildflowers in Florida for example in
South Florida in particular and out of
84 if we remove all the ones that are
not salt tolerant we see that 84 turns
into 31 and that’s striking in its own
right but then we use that information
to map out the relationships between
those plants and the habitats that it
supports on the left hand side that
green tangle of lines or all the
connections between the plants and the
butterfly and the butterflies I use them
for hosts so that there
lay eggs there and caterpillars can feed
on the right as adult butterflies those
are the nectar plants and again if we
take that data that information we
filter out we take out the things that
are not solved tolerant this is what
we’re left with and so immediately when
people look at this I think abstractly
you understand that our environment will
change and it’s changing but then you’re
able to illustrate it and show it in a
way that immediately brings that to the
fore and you understand that it’s not
just one thing it’s all the
relationships that come as a result and
so throughout this project I’ve learned
that the things that threaten us the
things that call into question our
ability to survive or both a source of
fear as much as the our source of
inspiration we choose to live in
beautiful yet threatened places it’s not
because it’s rational or logical but
because it pulls it or it makes our
hearts race and it makes that magnetic
allure of the natural environment think
differently about the places we we call
home so when I look at Puerto Rico and I
see how it’s affected my family my
friends my Puerto Rican landscape my
fellow American citizens I can’t help
but think of a more perfect time to use
that powerful mix of art and science and
technology to better imagine what’s
around us better understand it and
better conceive of the possibilities of
what already surrounds us thank you [Applause]