Doing real and permanent good in landscape and urban planning: Ecological wisdom for urban sustainability

If Landscape and Urban Planning (LAND) offered an award recgnizing individuals throughout human history whose practice in cological research, planning, design, and management achieved paramount level of “do[ing] real and permanent good in this orld”, to borrow a phrase from the American industrialist and hilanthropist Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie, 1889), who would be its ecipients? A long list of viable candidates would include – among any others – Ernst Haeckel, Aldo Leopold, Shijun Ma (Jiang, Li, Polunin, 1991), Arthur George Tansley, Eugene Pleasants Odum, nd Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., but two individuals stand out in articular for their celebrated work in ecologically inspired planing and design: the Chinese planner and engineer Li Bing ( ) nd the Scottish American landscape architect Ian Lennox McHarg. Li Bing lived in China during the Warring States period (480 C–221 BC). As the general manager of Shu county ( , in modernay Midwest Sichuan Province) in the Qin Kingdom ( ), he asterminded the construction of one of the world’s oldest large cale ecological projects that has provided real and permanent good Cao, Liu, & Er, 2010, p. 5; Peng, 2008, pp. 539–542, p. 544; Zhang, Yi, iu, & Wang, 2013, p. 539). The Dujiangyan ( ) irrigation system, rst built in 256 BC under Li’s leadership and further developed and xpanded over the past 2269 years, lays out an ecological infratructure on the Chengdu Plain that grants the 6687 km2 region roughly the size of the state of Delaware in the United States) permanent immunity against natural liabilities of deluge and rought, and offers tens of millions of people across generations he benefits of agricultural irrigation, municipal water supply, navgation, aquatic production, ecological conservation, and tourism Cao et al., 2010, p. 5; Peng, 2008, p. 542; Li & Xu, 2006, p. 291). ith these blessings the Chengdu Plain has been and remains one f China’s fertile bread baskets, earning itself the fame of “Tianuzhiguo” (“ ”, “the land of abundance”) (Cao et al., 2010, p. 3; eng, 2008, p. 540; Zhang et al., 2013, p. 539). The sustained real and permanent good provided by the rrigation system is well documented throughout history, and is idely recognized both domestically and internationally. In the lassic Chinese history book Shiji (〈〈 〉〉, Records of the Historian), istorian Sima Qian ( , ca. 145 BC–86 BC) [Sima, 1959] docuents the successful operation of the Dujiangyan irrigation system century after its construction, and praises the many benefits delivred to people in the region (Peng, 2008, pp. 540–541). British istorian and sinologist Joseph Needham writes, upon visiting the ujiangyan irrigation system in 1943 (Cao et al., 2010, p. 5), that . . .[The Dujiangyan irrigation system is] one of the greatest of Chiese engineering operations which, now 2200 years old, is still in