| Oh! Home on the Range! Our American Landscape---that place which so defines our national character---has been commodified and consumed by the hungry till of industrial agriculture. Her remains are reduced to disconnected pockets hidden among the infinite irrigated mathscape of agribusiness.;Ironically, some of our richest remaining natural landscape can be found on remote sprawling military bases in the west: under lock and untouched by the plow. The Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot is one such site, and the site for this thesis. Slated for closure later this year, this ecologically valuable and culturally unique place now, too, faces that destructive plow.;This thesis confronts that threat by putting forth a reconception of the relationship between human being and landscape. Instead of some distant object for profit, the land is regarded as a complex composition of natural systems with which we must intimately interact. Thoughtful stewardship of these systems---permaculture---brings forth not only lasting nourishment for our bodies, but a place to call home.;This reconception of landscape is embodied in the design of a permaculture community at Umatilla---a demonstrative subversion of commodity culture. It will be a self-sustaining, walkable dwellingplace that reconnects people to the land and each other through intensive cooperative organic gardening. It is a place where impetus is not personal profit but the common good, and one's worth is measured in sweat not dollars.;In practice, it is a healing gesture. Forward-looking optimism is juxtaposed over the eerie material remains of the site's military history to tell a story about hope. This is the poetry of terra recognita: reconceiving the past into a more sustainable future. |
