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“WHY…is it so very obvious, that “ASLA” is….politically LIBERAL??? IMO, Landscape Architecture has not business being involved in the AMERICAN Political System…..Landscape Architecture should NOT be LEFT or RIGHT.
And, WHY do I also believe a vast MAJORITY of University Landscape Architecture Professors are also VERY LIBERAL! That they have “liberal agendas”, so that’s how many of their Graduating Students lean when they graduate….to the LEFT.
America is too divided enough as it is…..NOW, I see that Landscape Architecture has become DIVIDED politically. Just no excuse for it, IMO,
J. Robert (Bob) Wainner”
You propose that professionals should not have any involvement in politics. That’s exactly what the professions did in the “Progressive” movement in the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s was doing…. getting into politics and to establish licensure. There’s no separation between professions and politics or life, values, beliefs, and politics. This country was never truly UNITED. Europeans stole an entire continent engaging in biological warfare and in genocide to take this continent from those who were already here. The same very Europeans infestation that imported slaves from another continent.
Without political involvement, we would still have slaves and discrimination. We also would be using coal and oil for everything. We wouldn’t have the EPA, building codes, or any of that. Advocacy has been a part of professional associations since their conception. Yes, there was a time period were professions wanted to be apolitical. Apolitical is apathy and apathy is passively condoning the wrongs in the world instead of making the world a better place. Isn’t making the world a better place the mission and point of architecture and landscape architecture? Isn’t that what you are trying to do in your practice including by the client. Each client, an opportunity to make the world better one little project at a time.
In my opinion, there is no “Right”. There is the political “Left” and the political “wrong” (IMO). The Left isn’t always right. The other side is inherently and totally wrong these days because they rejected morality, responsibility, and any sense of giving two seconds of ones own life to care for others. They are Trumps and followers of that racist KKK ‘member’ who is also anti-“non-white” and supports and authorized and ordered the U.S. Border Patrol to engage in criminal kidnapping. These are the kinds of people who wants to reverse civil rights, re-institute slavery, women no longer having any liberties to work, and being gainfully employed and subordinate to men and non-whites have no rights.
If you know the history of the United States, it isn’t the b.s. you grew up learning in school because it was politically “WHITE-washed” and written in the perspective approved by rich white men who financed the criminal takeover of this continent and genocide of the various indigenous people of this continent along with also in South America where Europeans were likewise the same. Manifest Destiny was the inspiration and precedence for Mein Kampf. In World War II, the vast majority of every able man and even women took part in stopping the global takeover of Hitler’s plan for taking over the world for world domination of white supremacy, genocide, slavery/concentration camps, and so forth.
U.S. expansion was founded on atrocity. If you live west of the Atlantic seashore, a good chance is you are living on land that is the rightful property of native Americans that were here thousands of years before we came here. If we were to do what was morally right, this land would be given back to the native American and we go back to the lands of our ancestral history but that’s now complicated and is now unrealistic of happening.
The truth is we are divided and always have been. We have been only to some degree politically united but that’s not to say we are homogenous. There are people who will not want to be culturally neutered through culturally oppressive cultural assimilation processes like that which is the norm of American “unification” meaning…. all must become “white”. Talk like “white”. Believe like “white”. Dress like “white”. Work like “white”. It’s a complicated story.
I think as a profession advocating environmentally sound, and sustainable architecture & landscape, is something as a profession we should be advocating for and backing in politics relating to policies that impacts the environment and the world. We have a professional obligation to take every reasonable effort to make the world better. Much like doctors oath of not doing harm. We have a sort of similar obligation. I’m a building designer/landscape designer. Well, I kind of do building design, interior design, landscape design as part of a holistic design process.
