States, grasslands historically dominated most of the land area that wasn’ t occupied with water. As we all know water has a tendency to frustrate the spread of fire. The neat thing is, fire benefited from the prairies 7 and the prairies benefited from the fire.
Fire needs dry fuel and lots of it with a lot of surface area for maximum spread. The prairies of the central United States would have been perfect for this, vegetation and fuel located low to the ground allowed fire to spread with maximum speed, minimal heat loss to the atmosphere, and comprised of tremendous surface area( a whole bunch of vertical surfaces, even more dense than would be found in a woods). But prairie, in turn, benefited from fire. other regions, it was common to create structures and places with the regional material resources available to the designers at that time. If your region was rich with timber resources, you designed and built with wood. Whereas if your region was a desert, you designed with sand and stone. For example, the brick used in many of the historic buildings in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is called cream‐city brick, it’ s the native color of the clay harvested from the Menomonee River and western shores of Lake Michigan. And it’ s the color of the clay that was used to make the bricks that gives the older buildings in the region a distinct color. In fact, many of the structures or places we value most for their historical significance are of the place. They have a look, a material that defines the region.
In addition to suppressing many woody vegetation species that might have otherwise dominated the system, the prairie benefited from the cleaning; the charred, blackened soil warmed faster in the spring and allowed plants to sprout sooner; and burning forced plants to invest a lot of energy in deep root systems 8 that pushed prairie species to deep subsoil water reserves, permitting prairie species to thrive drought and desiccation. Furthermore, the heat from fires was needed for the seeds of some species to split and germinate. A pretty cool ying and yang relationship shaped the look of the prairies, and prairies were an ideal fuel source for fire.
How could this rule apply to us?
First, let’ s think about a“ what if” scenario: Imagine a concrete or asphalt that responded to routine traffic with improved stability and longevity; it didn’ t crumble or erode over time but got stronger while remaining pliable enough that it could be moved or even removed if desired.( What does that even look like, and how is that possible? I have no idea. But if we aren’ t asking the question, we’ ll never try to achieve it.)
A more pedantic example of how we might apply Rule 1 could be: while the annals of design history are rife with examples of structures and places that“ borrowed” from
Today building material resources are global but designing highways, buildings, parks, and homes that are of the place is still the best practice in most cases. The idea, of the place, might seem easily applied to structures or landscape, but does it make sense for other design professions? How would a highway“ of the place” in Colorado differ from one in Florida? As design
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Prior to European settlement, fires dominated the landscape of the United States. So many acres were burned annually by lightning strikes, or started by First Nation’ s people, that when European settlers began suppressing fires in the United States, the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere from fires cooled the planet. This led to an event called the Mini Ice Age. And it wasn’ t just prairies that burned. Many ecosystems in the United States thrive on fire( Anderson, 2002).
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We often think trees, they are big, have the deepest root systems. The idea that a tree’ s branch structure is mirrored below ground is simply not true. While the spread of a tree’ s crown may approximate the spread of its roots( even this isn’ t really true, under good growing conditions root spread can easily exceed crown spread), most trees tend to have pretty shallow roots. Many prairie species have much, much deeper roots. Where trees might linger in the 3-5’ depth range, many prairie species set roots in the 8‐10’ depth range. This is why prairies or native grasslands in general tend to be much larger carbon sinks than forests. It’ s also why the central United States has been one of, if not the most, successful agricultural regions in the world.
4 | LEARNING FROM NATURE