Resource competition in the Kennett region of Pennsylvania

Landscape Planning, 8 (1981) 175-192 Elsevier Scientific Publsihing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The NetherIands

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RESOURCE COMPETITION IN TIIE KENNETT REGION OF PENNSYLVANIA

DAN ROSE

Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (U.S.A.]

(Accepted 24 June 1980)

ABSTRACT

Rose, D., 1981. Resource competition in the Kennett region of Pennsylvania. Landscape Plann., 8: 175-192

This essay examines resource competition and problems of social justice in the mushroom growing Kennett region of Chester County, Pennsylvania. It is urged that planners and designers be aware of uncertainty in professional practice and of the Hobbesian competition for natural resources they must confront in their pursuit of aesthetic design and in the allocation of scarce resources. The methods by which to address these problems have been summarized by the United Nations Programme on Man and the Biosphere and addressed by the author in other publications.

INTRODUCTION

“But the highest passion in a man is faith, and here no generation begins at any other point than did the preceding generation, every generation begins all over again, the subsequent generation gets no further than the foregoing--- in so far as this remained faithful to its task and did not leave it in the lurch. That this should be wearisome is of course something the generation cannot say, for the generation has in fact the task to perform and has nothing to do with the consideration that the foregoing generation had the same task - - - unless the particular generation or the particular individuals within it were presumptuous enough to assume the place which belongs by right only to the Spirit which governs the world and has patience enough not to grow weary ” (S&en Kierkegaard, 1843).

Few critics would deny that landscape planning embraces an uneasy alliance between art and politics. The alliance is uneasy because one is reminded of Socrates’ thoughts about the poets in relation to politics. He considered them unfit to rule, a sentiment that seems equally apt today. Nevertheless, landscape planners are now saddled with the unenviable responsibilities of trying to achieve on the land an aesthetic order and at the same time a just distribution of scarce resources. It is nowhere more difficult to achieve these

0304-3924/81/000+0000/$02.50 o 1981 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company

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two laudable objectives simultaneously than in the United States where planning and design of natural and social systems remains extremely frag- mented and subject to the vagaries of the capitalist marketplace. There is lively competition between different sectors of the economy, between the public and private domains, and between veto groups (people who are organized along some special line of interest} to effect materially the course of projected development. The fierce competition is ~~avated by the fragmentation of public agencies responsible at the local, county, state, and federal levels, The tenuous nature of the landscape planner’s position is exacerbated because he has neither a single institutional home base nor an established constituency. Citizens through their special interest associations compete with the trade associations of private industry in legislatures, ad- ministrative offices, and the courts for access to and control over scarce natural resources (Haefele, 1973).

This chaos is praised in the U.S.A. as ‘the American Way of Life’ and ‘democracy’, where nature is caught up and used predominantly in a complex jockeying for power with thbse with enough money to fend off the competitors. Certainly, it would be understandable to cite Hobbes rather than Rousseau at this point. Hobbes, of course, is justifiably noted for his view (1651) of the Commonwealth as a solution to the war of each human against the other. The state ameliorates the constant competitions of humans with one another; he expressed it this way:

“A restless desire of power in all men. So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this, is not always that a m.an hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.”

If a social contract attempts to provide the rules of civility as Rousseau proposed, then constantly subverting those rules are those Hobbesian competitors who will beg, borrow, or steal, or all three, to acquire power. For the land planner, the beggars, borrowers, and thieves include those com- panies, cities, agricultural concerns, or suburban developers that employ scarce resources in their struggle for power and material wealth. At least in the U.S.A., the landscape planner and designer becomes intimately involved in the game as a broker, a consultant, a mediator, expert witness, or designer, i.e. an aid to those competing in the public or private sectors for power over nature.

Several uncertainties face planning professionals as they attempt to effect just distributions of resources and to achieve aesthetic order in the landscape. They must:

(1) attempt to allocate scarce resources to those other than the powerful; (2) create tasteful order in uncertain, highly competitive conditions;

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(3) secure their own power base whilst engaged in these attempts. By drawing upon Hobbes, the author is suggesting that competition over water, air, access, dumping of residuals etc. is the human stuff we are made of; it is instructive to further complicate the challenges that confront the planning and design profession. Montaigne (1572-1574) understood it well and he claimed convincingly that human behavior is always uncertain. He wrote in one of his essays at the close of a long life of public service that:

“Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstance carries us.”

In the opening of the essay Montaigne pointed to the circumstances that constantly vary and affect human outcomes. In the latter part of the essay he further complicates his view, and ours of human nature, by showing that human desires and interests are also variable, thereby affecting circumstances. Cleverly, he introduced a double indeterminacy into human life suggesting that it comes from within and from without. The moral is that human life itself is indeterminate. For the planner indeterminacy is as difficult to handle as is competition, and failures brought on by unforseen circumstances often seem more pronounced in planned projects than do dramatic successes. The prediction of human behavior has proved elusive and seems to work only in situations of tight political control. The reality of planning in the U.S.A. is that there are no rigid controls, much less binding legal ones, and situations are as Montaigne reflected, highly changeable, indeed uncertain.

It can be argued that the profession of landscape planning and design must confront the human realities of competition for scarce resources and that the humans for whom plans and designs are prepared are, if not capricious, certainly unpredictable and now, rapidly changing. Although the call is not to address these human characteristics directly, there is increasing demand for planning methods that are adequate to the complexity of human dwelling sites as integral components of larger ecological systems. The United Nations Organisation is at the forefront in this urgent task, and has published scholarly calls for holistic means to study and plan within the highly complex nature-human relationship. The most adequate response to the trouble- some realities of resource competition and indeterminacy in the course of human affairs would seem to be an ecological one, as the U.N. has clearly recognized.

In a report (U.N., 1975) ecological site planning is outlined and quoted here at length because this and other authors who have contributed to this volume have directly grappled with a holistic theory and body of methods in order to describe, analyze, and plan for human settlements in their natural settings (McHarg, 1969; Rose, 1981).

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“As systems, human settlements are dynamic and therefore change through time. Yet all change should not be seen as adaptive responses to external conditions. It is import~t to emphasize historical processes and effects which influence settlements patterns and structure. Human settlements are also reeog- nized as ecological systems, in the sense that they are ‘habitat systems’ for human populations, which may be directly comparable with ‘natural’ ecosystems. As systems, human settlements include both intra- and intersettle- ment structures and processes. In systems terms these are all part of a nested system hierarchy. The relevant structural aspects of settlement systems include their physical, biological, economic, social and cultural components. In comparison with natural ecosystems, culture is a major and domin~t fea- ture of human settlements as ecological systems. Settlements have previously been modelled and measured as systems in terms of flows of energy, people, material and information, etc. The importance of an ecological approach is not in the elaboration of any one of these models as much as the attempt to:

(1) integrate these various approaches with holistic studies located in defined geographical areas or settlement systems, while maintaining a concern for the analysis of the multiple interrelationships...”

STUDY OF RESOURCE COMPETITION

This paper reports very briefly on a substantive, holistic study which employed the techniques of ecological anthropology, developed in conjunc- tion with ecological planning. Some of the methods have been described elsewhere (Rose et al., 1979), and there is neither need nor space for reiter- ating them (see also Berger, 1978). The purpose of this paper is rather to illustrate the results of a study which was conducted for several purposes, one of which was to make competition clear to planners in order to make planning more effective, and more socially just. By making studies of soci- ety and its relation to nature, a further task is placed upon the profession, that of acquiring deep, systematic knowledge. The added knowledge comes from an evolving human ecology (Rose and Jackson, 1978).

“It holds out the possibility that the linkages between nature and culture can be shown to be systematic and to covary according to natural and cultural laws.”

For ecologically-trained landscape designers must not only deal with uncertainty and the conflict of competition, but they must also carry the weight of an integrated form of thinking, i.e. models of how complex human system-ecosystem relations actually work.

Rather than merely inventory land uses and arrange them on a master plan, the methods of a human ecology require that the actual flow of energy and material be traced from the ecosystem through settlements; and primary

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within settlements are the industries that control the major flows; these energy and material sources and forces affect the natural systems and the social order. The idea is to find those resources using and controlling units on the landscape that take directly from nature and understand them as the sources of dynamic change in the relations between humans and nature. By penetrating to the sources of change and understanding their functioning operations, the role of the planners can be made more effective; since they can acquire enhanced knowledge through models of cause and effect in resource use and allocation, they can more accurately and successfully inter- vene with the aim of helping to achieve ecologically sound, socially just outcomes.

To realize these results, planners must understand resource control and the way social power is acquired and they must comprehend the competitions over natural resources that Hobbes, while not considering the ecosystem, understood so well. Adams (1975), who has studied the institutions that take energy and matter from nature and return entropic wastes, offers a definition that alerts us to the link between natural resources and social power:

“Social power, the ability to get somebody else to do what you want him to do through your control over energetic processes of interest to him, is the central issue in all these organizational processes.”

Armed with the awareness of competition, albeit bounded by rules sometimes broken, sometimes not, and by an idea of the way in which power is acquired (by access to natural resources) and mindful of the indeterminacy of human actions and circumstances, this paper reports on an industry located west of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. that deeply affects in the natural resource base of the region, that competes for scarce water supplies with downstream users, and that creates social problems as well as environmental ones, close at hand and far beyond its borders. The industry is an agricultural one that grows fresh mushrooms for domestic and commercial uses and supplies the eastern seaboard with these delicacies.

The mushroom industry in general and the region in particular, pose planning problems, for the management of surface waters, and for the pro- vision of housing and badly needed services to the unskilled, nonEnglish- speaking migrants who work in the mushroom growing houses.

The study area

The region called Kennett in (Fig. 1) the original study (Rose et al., 1979), has a history of competition and succession of human uses. English Quakers settled the Philadelphia area and its hinterland in 1682, pushing the Lenni Lenape Indians westward, and established an agricultural and commercial city and countryside that rivalled London. Quaker merchant-farmers produced

East Marlborough

London Grov

PENNSYLVANIA

DELAWARE

LOCATION SCOk, .-c-p.

IOMtles N

Fig. 1. Regional orientation of the Kennett area.

foodstuffs for world markets, a pattern that prevailed in the Kennett region where farming held dominion until the early years of the 19th century when the DuPont family, fleeing from the French Revolution, settled in the Brandywine Valley, mostly in the State of Delaware, south of the Quaker agricultural hinterland. Upstream the Quakers and increasingly other settlers from Scotland and England farmed, while downstream the DuPonts manu- factured first gunpowder, then chemicals, building by 1979 the 16th largest firm in the United States, the largest chemical company in the country, and an awesome multinational corporation. Ecologically, what is paramount here is that agriculture and villages, and further north some iron industries, were located, and downstream, the City of Wilmington where the chemical firm DuPont was headquartered, and the chateau area housed the rich Du- Pont families. A classical competition has evolved over upstream and downstream demands on rather modest surface water flows.

The waters of the Brandywine Creek continue to be the resource for which there is competition, and the surface waters flowing downstream into DuPont country are polluted by mushroom farms, dairy farms and the horticulture industry (Fig. 2), as well as more distant industries, land fills, towns and subdivisions, thereby limiting downstream access to clean water resources. Numerous dairy farms (Fig. 3) are at the headwaters of small streams that

Fig. 2. Horticultural greenhouses amone mushrooms mowine ‘doubles’.

Fig. 3. Dairy farm (note suburban development at right of picture).

flow into Delaware, the Brandywine Creek being the largest of these. Figure 4 illustrates the relationships between water resources and demand in the Kennett region.

There is competition in two major dimensions: different sectors of the

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HORSE ESTATES

DA’1 R Y FARMING

Kennett Square MUSHROOM INDUSTRY

cut flower Industry I I \

surface water flow \ DUPONT CHATEAU COUNTRY

SUBURBANIZATION &

TANDYWINE CREEK

JILMINGTON IELAWARE

Fig. 4. The relationships of water resources to demand in the Kennett region.

agribusiness, e.g. mushroom growers, horticulture, dairy, need access to fresh groundwater and a cheap place to dump toxic wastes, while the production sectors such as the farms compete directly with consumption sectors, such as the estate area just to the north and the DuPont chateau region, and the growing suburban developments around Kennett. Thus, the search for amenity conflicts directly with the need to make money in business and to provide jobs for workers.

The mushroom industry

The mushroom industry provides a good example because it represents the most dynamic force on the immediate upstream landscape. The scale of the geographically concentrated farms (Fig. 5) is impressive and the resulting alterations to the ecological and social relations of the region have been far reaching and fraught with difficulty.

The commercial mushroom grown in the U.S. is the Aguricus bisporus. It is a rather large, tasteless mushroom and presently dominates the market. Employing this English-derived strain, the industry as a whole continues to grow dramatically, partially by limiting foreign imports. In 1962-1963 there were 44 million pounds of mushrooms (drained weight) grown, and in 1974-1975 there were 84 million pounds grown in the U.S.A.*. In 1975 the crop was valued at 147.2 million dollars, with Pennsylvania producing 60% of the crop. Within this 12-year period, U.S.A. production was nearly doubled. Such phenomenal growth may have been responsible for the disappearance

*These figures are taken from a petition by the Mushroom Canners Committee of the Pennsylvania Food Processors Association and the Mushroom Processors Tariff Com- mittee to the United States International Trade Commission, 1975.

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Fig. 5. Some of the numerous mushroom growing houses.

of imported French mushrooms, the delicacy once served by discriminating North American cooks. The Kennett area of Chester County registered the accelerated production; the county was first in production in the state in 1974, with no close second; and it continues to be the most productive mushroom growing county in the nation according to the United States Department of Agriculture and the Pennsylvania Department of Commerce. In the U.S.A. there are 575 mushroom growers, and in Kennett there are 275 by conservative count. The mushroom growing houses, called ‘doubles’, lie dispersed across the landscape like the old series of rural farmsteads, but in more compact proximity since their acreage is smaller than a family farm of pre-war America. Ten acres will support a family business, and the family can achieve a middle-class lifestyle.

In all, it has been estimated by the American Mushroom Institute, the industry’s representative body, that there are 14 million square feet of growir space in the Toughkenamon Valley of the Kennett region. Twenty percent

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of these houses grow three crops a year under partial air conditioning, thereby adding to the immense output of mushrooms of which the region is ca- pable. Forty-two percent of mushrooms grown are distributed fresh on the eastern seaboard; the brokers who purchase the fresh mushrooms straight from the growers insist on washing and a plastic overwrapping. These value- added processes increase costs by 1072, but, in their estimation, increase the appeal to the consumer. The remainder are locally canned, and the trend estimated by informants was to a 50/50 ratio of canned to fresh mushrooms. This contrasts well with the San Francisco area, where 90% of the mushrooms are produced to be marketed as fresh mushrooms without the middle- man connection of the brokers. In Kennett, about 45 000 tons of mushrooms are canned annually, each ton consuming nearly 3000 gallons of water. The whole production process requires enormous water resources, in compost making (Fig. 6), mushroom growing, cleaning, and canning. It is no wonder that the industry is primarily sited over a limestone acquifer with high water yields.

PresentIy, the American Mushroom Institute is attempting to further curtail foreign mushroom imports, particularly imports of canned mushrooms from Taiwan by appealing to the U.S. Inte~ation~ Trade Commission which moves on such momentous matters, While no individual grower can achieve a monopoly due to technological limitations, the growers and canners, when cooperating, can lobby for a virtual industry-wide monopoly to limit imports from other countries. This, of course, has the benefit of inflating prices. Because prices have been high, competition within the country between

Fig. 6. Composting and topsoil operations.

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regions is stepping up. Other sections of the country are building mushroom industries and developing regional markets. Some of the most recent are located in the arid and semi-arid regions of the country, Utah and Oklahoma. Industry leaders in the Kennett region respond to these new centers of op- eration with the capitalist philosophy, “We’ll just have to compete harder,” to maintain and strengthen their regional and national share of the market.

The industry is indeed a vigorous and healthy one, and its successes are built upon the rising affluence of U.S.A. consumers who use the mushroom for a garnish, for stuffings, or on pizza. Despite its great growth, the mushroom industry members are worried by the fact that the mushroom has no proved nutritional value. It is, even to undiscriminating palates, a luxury, if only defined negatively as being unnecessary in the diet. This culinary luxury item, while providing a source of labor for workers and affluence for the large operator, also carries a number of costs. Surface waters are polluted by the very toxic leachates from the compost that is used in the mushroom growing beds (Fig. 7). Tons of very rich topsoil are removed each year for compost-making, and the suburban homeowners near these operations are upset by the blight and erosion that results. There are hazards in the work- place for the unskilled laborers who face cold temperatures, chemical dis- infectants, and pest controllants in the mushroom houses. Respiratory and skin diseases plague the long-time workers.

The industry, however, recycles chicken feathers from the vast number of large chicken farms in southern Delaware, and uses horse manure from

Fig. 7. Compost making and polluted surface waters (looking south toward the state of Delaware).

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local and New York racetracks, and from the adjacent estate region where a large number of horses are kept for racing. The mushroom growing compost while acidic in its early phases can be reapplied to the land once the salts have been leached. The bothersome mushroom fly, which can penetrate any window screen yet devised, and a continuous stench from the doubles cause many suburban homeowners to damn rather than praise the industry.

While it is possible to limit the physical problems resulting from the industry despite the expense, the social problems appear less tractable. Mush- room growing requires intensive manual work from unskilled laborers. When the Quaker horticulturalists found mushrooms growing under their flower- pots before the turn of the century they began the mushroom industry. Facing a labor shortage, they recruited Italian immigrant men to work in the dank growing houses. Trapped by the First World War, the Italians remained in the U.S.A., sent for wives, and began acquiring mushroom houses alongside the Quakers. By the end of the Second World War, the Italians

Tig. 8. Spanish migrant workers in cement block barracks.

had become Italian-Ame~c~s, acquiring that uniquely American status of a successful ethnic minority. Both they and the Quakers then required additional unskilled laborers to handle the crops. Growers went to the Appalachian Southland and recruited illiterate Scotch-Irish descendents from Mountain City, Tennessee, who worked around Kennett for several years before finding better paying jobs in Delaware at an automobile assembly plant, and in other semi-skilled occupations. Pressed again, the growers recruited Puerto Rican migrant laborers (Fig. S), some of whom have become permanent residents; and in the continuing search for ever-cheaper labor sources, growers have now turned to illegal Mexican aliens to replace the Puerto Ricans.

Thus the industry has moved a number of people into the area and these people have impacted the social services, existing institutions and cultural values. A Hobbesian conflict could only be ensured by this continual im- porting of new groups. The settlement pattern has been modified, conflict between people has intensified, and one whole town has been converted into a slum-like place, its houses now converted to dormitories housing single men who are employed in the highly-seasonal industry. Needless to say, labor-man~ement problems continuously make headlines in the regional newspapers, and fact-finding probes launched by the Pennsylvania State Legislature and various social service agencies frequently recur, usually without lasting results.

The laborers remain essentially powerless as a ,result of their seasonal movement for work and the blocking of social services by the owners. As the industry has increased in overall size and been more highly organized by the American Mushroom Institute, the owners have acquired more social power. They can now manipulate markets, the social justice system, housing, regional media and opinion, political representatives, and the labor force. Members of mushroom grower families also hold positions in the local legal system. If laborers come into conflict with the owners the justice system is biased toward the owners, The Catholic Italian-Americans have also been able to put pressure on the local Church to prevent them from initiating an outreach program to the equally Roman Catholic Puerto Rican and Mexican workers. Housing and thus the settlement pattern is manipulated directly by the owners for they provide barracks, or trailer houses for the workers (Figs. 9 and 10). The conditions range from uninhabitable to merely adequate in the housing provided. Social service agencies are concerned with the housing problem and with other services such as bilingual education. Legal aid is also a problem, as is health care. In brief, the necessities and amenities of the expected middle- ctass style of life in the U.S.A. are absent or frustated in the mushroom growing district. By acquiring social power, members of an industry also acquire access to the scarce resources in the environment, and frustrate competitors in so doing.

The dispersed agricultural settlement design, inadvertant and unintended as it is, militates against the formation of worker community, and even family

Fig. 9. Living quarters of workers.

Fig. 10. Trailer camp for Spanish mushroom workers.

life, though both do occur (Fig. 11). Spatially divided from small farm to small farm, housed at the whim of the owners, underpaid, marginal, and often migrant, the mushroom workers have difficulty meeting and associatir to further their own interests. Labor union organizing has been consistently

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Fig. 11. Puerto Rican family in mushroom growing district.

frustrated by the owners who threaten to greet organizers with shotguns at the edges of their property should they appear. As a result, there is no union presence, no central community gathering place, and even the spiritual com- forts of the Church have been denied them. Most, because they do not speak English, do not know of the social services that have been made available, and those who do are discouraged by the owners from taking advantage of various agency programs.

In the United States, the political economy is designed so that there can be no major interventions in the productive sector: the mushroom growers cannot be forced to incorporate the workers into the ownership processes in order to redistribute profits and income. It is expected that if the production system in the private sector creates inequities that the public sector, the state and federal government will redress the problems through social service programs in health, education, and welfare, if not in offering the organization skills minorities need to manipulate the programs. The mushroom growers themselves have a model of the world that resembles that portrayed by Hobbes. They say that if the Puerto Rican workers want to lead a better life then they ought to compete to acquire mushroom growing houses and ‘steal’ the industry from them, in the way that the Italians were said to have stolen the industry from the Quakers. Interventions to achieve social justice, when they do occur, must evolve after the fact, it seems. In the U.S.A., it is expected that groups will self-organize for their own interests to place pressure on the relevant agencies and industries to redress their grievances.

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Those in positions of power immediately adjacent to the mushroom area are largely suburbanites employed in the chemical industry and DuPont family members who, due to superior wealth and social organization, have intervened institutionally in the landscape to secure their resources and to spatially contain the whole mushroom growing region. The strategy most visible among the affluent has been to develop associations called ‘watershed associations’ and ‘nature conservancies’ to aid them in realizing the type of benign environments that their version of amenity requires. Both the watershed association and the conservancy are non-profit-making institutions that have identified an affluent. constituency of young, highly-salaried professionals within a given watershed. They hold regular meetings, raise money through benefits and dues levied on members, and they lobby with techniques of persuasion for their environmental point of view with businesses, and with government at all levels. Their value system holds that the landscape is private and only the owners should be able to choose what developments should or should not occur on their properties. As a result of increasingly stiff penalties for environmental degradation imposed by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources, citizens groups and associations such as these may actually bring to prosecution those businesses that pollute surface waters or cause other environmental damage.

Some of the complexities of resource competition in the Kennett region have been discussed alluding to both ecological and social consequences. Increasingly, the profession of landscape planning is being called upon to address the full ecological range of problems, from the natural environment to housing, to whole settlements, particularly under the stimulus mentioned earlier of the United Nations Programme on Man and the Biosphere. This case study hints at some of the complexities that ecological planners and scientists are asked to address. Through methods developed in the U.S.A. and other parts of the world, human ecological science promises to provide a powerful resource to meet such a challenge.

CONCLUSION

This paper has addressed a few aspects of the competition over resources and the social ramifications Mthin a small, but important humid region of the United States. The methods were developed from ecological anthropology, a science contributing to a human ecology. The programmatic summary of approaches called for by the UN (and published previously by the author and others) revealed a site on which conflicts over resources and their linkages to human communities were largely hidden to casual observation. It is pre- cisely at the completion of this kind of study and others of even greater detail that the landscape planner and designer steps in to fashion as consciously as possible alternative futures, and to work toward their realization.

The quote at the beginning of the essay, taken from Kierkegaard, begins with the phrase, “But the highest passion in a man is faith . . .” and goes on

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to explain that “every generation begins all over again.” In a sense, landscape planning resembles the condition of Kierkegaardian man, the man of faith who struggles to achieve that faith because it is recurringly prob- lematic and which cannot be passed from generation to generation. The professional planner is consigned to begin all over again, remedying the errors of the past and anticipating the evolving, deeply uncertain human and ecological relationships and issues of the future. The profession as a whole continually faces the moral problem explored by wiser men of an earlier age. Translated into contemporary terms, the profession is challenged again and again to holistically design and plan landscapes, settlements and human relations in order to achieve aesthetic enhancement, ecological viability, and social justice. But the landscapes and natural resources are subject to competing interests, to the terrific prizes of social power that resource access affords.

In the author’s observation, the landscape planner is akin to Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ rather than his ‘tragic hero’. The tragic hero, by a single act, grasps the universal in a moment of self-sacrifice. As Kierkegaard notes, he is assured forever a place in the eyes of those who observe his dramatic sacrificial accomplishment. But the landscape planner is much more involved in the temporal world, cannot achieve social goals in a single, albeit heroic, self-destructive act. The ethics of the job, calibrating man and nature aesthet- ically and justly, call for the tireless knight of faith. While it is beyond this paper to discuss the knight of faith and his absurd bond to God, it is enough to say that Kierkegaard knew him to act alone with a courage and singleness of purpose that eludes other men. Of course the planner cannot act alone, in isolation from teams of social and natural scientists, but the vision, the act of faith is isolating, is indeed a lonely calling. For the planner, for members of the planning and design profession, the complex, holistic vision of order, justice, and a viable natural world demands the highest moral responses. To achieve justice and effect it on the human landscape requires the difficult, visionary battles, ecologically informed knights of faith who with Montaigne can never be finally certain of the outcomes of their action.

REFERENCES

Adams, R.N., 1975. Energy and Structure. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 353 pp. Berger, J., 1978. Toward an applied human ecology for landscape architecture and regional

planning. Human Ecol., 6: 179-199. Haefele, E.T., 1973. Representative Government and Environmental Management. Johns-

Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 188 pp. Hobbes, T., 1651. Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth

Ecclesiastical and Civil. Collier, New York, NY, 551 pp. Kierkegaard, S., 1843. Fear and Trembling. Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 278 pp. McHarg, I.L., 1969. Design with Nature. Natural History Press, New York, NY, 197 pp. Montaigne, M., 1572-1574. Of the inconsistency of our actions. In: The Complete

Essays of Montaigne. Doubleday, Garden City, NY, Vol. 2, 593 pp.

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Rose, D., 1981. Energy Transition and the Local Community. University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 210 pp.

Rose, D. and Jackson, J., 1978. Human ecology for ecosystem management. Proc. Symp. Coastal Zones, 1978. Am. Sot. Civ. Eng., New York, NY, Vol. 1, pp. 484-499.

Rose, D., Steiner, F.R. and Jackson, J., 1979. An applied human ecological approach to regional planning. Landscape Plann., 5: 241-261.

UNESCO, 1975. Task force on integrated ecological studies in human settlements. In: Programme on Man and the Biosphere (MAB), Rep. No. 31, Unesco, Paris, 66 pp.

Documents

Resource competition in the Kennett region of Pennsylvania