Have you ever wondered how the plants we grow can help combat climate change? How factors like soil health can play a role in making our communities greener and cooler? And what we can do to design better landscapes for a more climate-resilient world?
As we experience the very real impacts of climate change in our daily lives, these questions are top of mind. TreePeople wants to help answer them with our new course Climate Gardening 101: Assessing How Urban Landscapes Impact Climate Adaptation.
Led by TreePeople’s research team and outside guest lecturers, the course will take a deep dive into climate gardening, a landscape management strategy that accounts for human impacts on the land and climate, and how that land impacts us in return.
Blending lectures, in-person experiences, and discussion, the course aims to help students better understand why our landscapes look the way they do today, how historical landscape management practices might be contributing to our current climate crisis, and how we might adapt these practices to make our communities more resilient.
The course will cover landscape typologies, principles of ecosystem ecology, urban ecosystem ecology, and the socio-cultural considerations inherent in landscape design. Using Los Angeles as a case study while maintaining a broad view of the field, students will engage with the following learning objectives:
- Understand urban landscaping history and contemporary influences of policy and environmental concerns
- Analyze the tenets of Climate Gardening as a framework for evaluating how our managed landscapes impact climate adaptation
- Assess water, soil, and plant traits in a (residential) landscape and investigate their connection to different climate factors
- Observe and assess the physical and living properties of different landscape types
- Articulate how we as land managers, and the systems we cultivate, are in relationship to our ecosystem and our collective capacity for climate adaptation
- Describe the local context pertaining to climate, resources, and socially contested futures
Learn more and apply today!