The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) condemns racial injustice and police violence against black people and black communities. We are using this day to blackout in support of justice for George Floyd and many other black lives lost. #vote #BlackoutTuesday”
ASLA released the following statement on this weekend’s protests, from ASLA President Wendy Miller, FASLA:
“We are all horrified by the events that unfolded over the last several days. I am personally roiling with emotions, watching in real-time the injustices and inequitable treatment of people and communities who are in anguish because of centuries of racial discrimination. As landscape architects, we work to ensure that all persons have the right to equitable access to environmental and community benefits in the places they live, work, and learn. Now is the time for us to work to help ensure that these communities have fair and equitable treatment in all aspects of life.”
Read ASLA’s Public Policy on Environmental Justice.
Read more about ASLA’s work to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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All lives matter. You don’t need to give support representing all members to another organization that has done some violence in the past. LIFE matters. I’m having an ever more difficult time being a member of an organization that constantly puts out leftist sympathizing stuff.
You are correct, all lives matter, but some lives seem to matter more than others. Some are killed more than others. Some are punished more than others. All lives matter and black lives matter too.
From The DIRT article: The landscape architecture profession can play a critical role in reversing these trends.
I’m all for recognizing what happened and in making reparation, but wish that the ASLA would identify itself as playing a critical role as a leader and steward of bringing the human and natural world together for all people, for all lives that matter, for the last 100+ years.
LA has the unique position to transcend the political daily diatribe and elevate the conversation to a universal level; just by what we do. Everything that LAs and ASLA does is about every green discussion going on currently and for the last 25 years.
ASLA doesn’t not have to lower itself to fit into a political discussion, it needs to rise up and lead.
If Black lives matter, then I would like ASLA to show how that has happened and that we are already there.
In Greensboro, NC, NCA&T University has a tremendous history. The Landscape Architecture Program at North Carolina Agricultural Technical State University (N.C. A&T) is rooted in the university’s unique legacy, which includes its history as the largest publicly funded Historically Black College or University (HBCU) in North Carolina, as well as home to the Greensboro Four, who helped spark the sit-in protests that swept the South during the Civil Rights movement.
The program is also tightly tied to the University’s land grant status, and to the Morrill Act of 1890, which, for the first time in the nation’s history, made higher education in the agricultural and technical sciences a reachable goal for African Americans.
The program has produced more African American landscape architects than any other accredited degree program in the country. The N.C A&T Landscape Architecture Program thus has been instrumental in expanding diversity within the profession.
The program’s social and geographical context provides a unique framework for studying landscape architecture, which is carried forward in service-based learning projects that focus on underrepresented populations in the rural, urban, and suburban South.
I have had the distinct privilege to volunteer and become an Adjunct Professor at NCA&T University. I did not see color there; I saw students interested in learning about LA. They all had their own gifts and I felt like I was in that position to recognize them and help them.
If I was to come into a classroom with the attitude that black lives matter I would have been insulting the students, I was there for all of them 100%.
The LA profession has the systemic higher calling to unite a social and environmental justice, and literally save this country and world simply by doing what LAs do everyday.
We are stewards of the Earth and all creation. We will not get there by being political, period.
The high road that we can and must bring to all lives is beautifully landscaped.