Leading with Performance and Tradition

ASLA 2023 Professional General Design Honor Award. Grand Junction Park and Plaza. Westfield, Indiana. DAVID RUBIN Land Collective / Alan Karchmer

How to Talk About Climate & Biodiversity with Conservative Communities

By Jonathan Williams

Landscape Architecture 2040: ASLA Climate & Biodiversity Action Plan gives landscape architects a rigorous framework for high-performing, durable, and economically-sound landscapes that strengthen communities and manage resources efficiently. However, in many communities, the language used in the plan may act as a barrier to project approval and client engagement. This barrier is often more about unfamiliarity with our professional vocabulary than disagreement with what our work actually delivers.

This guide aims to help landscape architects communicate our climate and biodiversity action work more clearly to a conservative audience by moving away from jargon and toward language that reflects shared values - measured performance, regional land management traditions, and community benefits.

By using language that describes what our landscapes achieve, we can better align with community expectations and make it easier to move projects through the approval process.

Reframing: Lead with What Our Work Does

Every Landscape Architecture 2040 (LA2040) design strategy can be described in multiple ways. For instance, a bioretention installation serves simultaneously as stormwater infrastructure, soil management, maintenance cost reduction, native plant establishment, and habitat connectivity.

Landscape architects can develop documentation that articulates all of these benefits in language appropriate to the audience.

These three community benefits translate across virtually every political and client context:

Fiscal Responsibility

Reduced lifecycle costs, lower long-term maintenance costs, increased economic growth, right-sized infrastructure, and existing asset capital preservation.

Risk Management

Reduced exposure to flood, fire, and storm damage, property value protection, and lower insurance risk for clients and communities.

Local Value

Regional material sourcing, local labor, local nursery stock, and place-based design that builds community identity, long-term investment, and economic resilience.

ASLA 2018 Professional Analysis and Planning Honor Award. Iowa Blood Run Cultural Landscape Master Plan. Lyon County, Iowa. Quinn Evans Architects / Dan Williams

Quick Start Ideas

This guide is intentionally not organized as a word substitution list. A fixed list of approved terms creates its own vulnerability. The more reliable approach is to develop fluency in the multiple professional traditions that this work already belongs to:

• Land stewardship
• Fiscal management
• Natural resource science
• Engineering
• Agronomy
• Watershed management

When we lead from those traditions, the result is accurate, defensible, and built on genuine respect for the communities we serve, not dependent on any particular set of terms.

We can use entry points for building credibility with different communities so that discussion can occur on the strategies landscape architects provide. The language associated with LA2040 is accurate and defensible in the appropriate context. Use your professional judgement to determine when that context applies.

• This project follows the LA2040 Climate & Biodiversity Action Plan. Instead, lead with what the project delivers: "This project is designed to reduce long-term maintenance costs, manage stormwater on-site, and protect existing soil and vegetation assets."
• Climate Positive Design can be replaced with "optimized site design" or "efficient site design." This connects to engineering and fiscal management traditions rather than environmental advocacy.
• Low-carbon materials are "locally sourced," "high performance," "regionally appropriate" materials. Refer to specifications that are local to the project and commonly used in the region.
• Green infrastructure is "stormwater management," "a rain garden," or "vegetated drainage system."
• Sustainability at its core is "durable, low maintenance, resource-efficient, locally sourced."
• Net Positive is simply "measurable improvement over where you started."
• Biodiversity can be expressed as "native species establishment," "habitat connectivity," or "regionally appropriate planting."
• Equity or Environmental Justice at their core are an "infrastructure investment matched to community need," "placed-based priority alignment," and "local knowledge integration."
• Nature-Based Solutions can be described as "natural infrastructure," "low impact development," "vegetated stormwater management." Or describe the engineering function: "bioretention designed to manage the 100 year storm event on-site."
• Resilience can be expressed with specific performance outcomes: "a flood capacity of X," "defensible space zone compliance," "reduced temperature in X degrees," or "designed for a 500-year storm event."
• Ecological Restoration can be framed as land protection and agricultural stewardship, connecting with agricultural extension traditions: "management of noxious and invasive species per [state or local] noxious weed list designations."
• Ecosystem Services can be named directly: "stormwater retention," "erosion control", or "pollinator forage."
• Water Conservation as increased performance is better framed as "irrigation efficiency" or "reduced water demand."
• Community Engagement can be framed as professional due diligence: "local knowledge documentation," "stakeholder needs assessment," "landowner and adjacent property holder consultation," or "site context research."
• Adaptive Management as Environmental Commitment can align with professional monitoring standards: "per USDA Adaptive Management protocols," or be simply "monitoring and adjusting after construction."
• We are Committed to Sustainability aligns with most values. Alternative: "our projects are designed to documented standards that include monitoring after construction."
• Environmental Organizations and their acronyms are better replaced with technically credentialed partners, engineers, agronomists, water utilities, and extension offices. Identify partners who already want what our work delivers and can speak to it in their own professional voice.
• Carbon Sequestration is better described as "maximizing the long term value of trees and soil as living infrastructure."
• Urban Heat Island Effect can be expressed as "heat buildup in developed areas."

ASLA 2024 Professional General Design Honor Award. The Bay: "One Park for All" in Sarasota. Sarasota, Florida. Agency Landscape + Planning / HAPS agency / Michael Todoran

How to Apply This in Practice

Before considering coalition building, funding applications, or documentation strategy, the most important step is to identify and understand where your firm or organization's values and those of the client and community overlap.

LA2040 goals can be achieved with communities using a variety of strategies. The value system through which each audience arrives at these solutions will often be different. This section outlines approaches for achieving shared outcomes, which can only be accomplished through genuine understanding of the people and institutions you are working with.

Request for Proposal

The Request for Proposal (RFP) response is the first opportunity to establish shared values. Analyze the RFP to understand the client's value system, paying close attention to the language they use to describe the project and their core priorities. In your response, identify the shared outcome. Outline your objectives, provide evidence of what this type of work has historically delivered, and demonstrate how these results align with the client's request. A proposal that demonstrates shared values alongside technical competence establishes the foundation for a productive working relationship.

Pre-Design Documentation

The pre-design site assessment is where shared outcomes are first made visible and measurable. A rigorous site assessment of soils, hydrology, existing vegetation, ecological baseline, and maintenance history establishes the professional foundation for every design decision. In politically complex contexts, this documentation also establishes a defensible record of existing site resources. By focusing on the physical assets themselves, their protection can be framed as resource preservation, independent of any controversial or categorical label.

Multi-Audience Documentation

Develop layered project documentation that presents the full range of project values. The same project is a different story to different audiences, and the documentation should reflect that honestly. A technical report carries a full professional vocabulary. A client presentation leads with performance, risk, and cost. A funding application frames the program's specific evaluation criteria. This is not an omission or simplification. Each version is a complete and accurate account of the work, told through the value system used by the client.

Post-Occupancy Monitoring

Calculations of managed stormwater volumes, maintenance cost comparisons, plant establishment rates, and soil infiltration performance data provide the most compelling arguments for this work in any context.

Working with Funding Programs

Before submitting to any program, analyze its enabling legislation, stated evaluation criteria, and history of awards. Many programs are legally required to be funded based on technical performance metrics independent of political framing. Quantified performance against these criteria is the most sound application strategy.

Building Non-Traditional Coalitions

Coalition partners are most valuable when they bring their own value system to the project's shared outcome. Agricultural extension services, water utilities, hunting and fishing organizations, fire protection districts, and rural economic development entities may each arrive at the outcomes of LA2040 through their own professional traditions and institutional priorities.

The Adaptive Management Tradition

Monitoring and adaptive management frameworks have deep roots in natural resource management, forestry, and agricultural extension. Presenting post-construction monitoring within that tradition positions our work as professional practice with a long history of land stewardship that bridges science and field work.

Example Language

Hill Country Ranch, Kendall County, Texas

This 340-acre project began not with a design program but with a range health assessment. Working alongside the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) field office in Temple, Texas, and a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension range specialist, the design team documented existing range conditions against established site descriptions for the Edwards Plateau. This assessment identified cedar encroachment patterns reducing forage production, areas of degraded soil structure with diminished infiltration capacity, and riparian margins showing erosion and reduced aquifer recharge contribution.

The project goals that emerged from that assessment were aligned with the landowner's goals:

• Restore native grass and forb communities to improve range conditions.
• Implement a cedar management program to recover water yield to the on-site spring.
• Re-establish riparian vegetation to slow runoff and keep water on the land.
• Develop a prescribed burn management plan in coordination with the Texas Prescribed Burning Board.

The design documentation submitted to the local soil and water conservation district referred to range site descriptions, NRCS Plant Materials Center species recommendations for the Edwards Plateau, and AgriLife Extension brush management guidelines. Post-construction monitoring was structured around NRCS Range Health assessment protocols with annual photo-point documentation and infiltration rate testing at established transects.

The project delivered measurable improvements in forage production, a documented increase in spring flow volume over three years, and re-establishment of native grass communities across 180 acres. The wildlife response, including the return of quail populations to areas that had been functionally unproductive for over a decade, was documented through Texas Parks and Wildlife Managed Lands Deer Program protocols and shared with the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute as part of a regional game habitat connectivity study.

Suburban Development Edge, Bexar County, Texas

The client's primary concerns were insurance, drainage, and property value. The 22-acre mixed-use development site sits at the edge of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. It has a seasonal drainage feature running through the southern third of the property that had been channelized in a previous development attempt and which subsequently caused downstream flooding complaints.

The design team's pre-design documentation led with the regulatory and economic reality:

• Development within the recharge zone carried specific impervious cover limitations.
• The channelized drainage created quantifiable downstream liability exposure.
• The degraded riparian corridor represented an asset that, properly restored, would function as both an amenity and an infrastructure cost avoidance measure.

The project narrative submitted for Bexar County review referred to Edwards Aquifer Authority recharge protection standards, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood zone mapping, and a downstream damage cost estimate developed with the civil engineering team.

The planting design was specified using NRCS ecological site descriptions for the Blackland Prairie and Balcones Canyonlands transition. Species were sourced from a regional native plant nursery whose production stock was documented to local genotype provenance. The riparian corridor restoration was framed as on-site precipitation management to retain rainfall within the property boundary, reduce runoff velocity, and restore natural infiltration patterns to support aquifer recharge. The maintenance plan was written around a three-year native grass and forb establishment protocol drawn directly from AgriLife Extension revegetation guidelines, with prescribed burning included as a long-term maintenance option, pending city coordination with a certified burn manager.

The project received Edwards Aquifer Authority recharge protection credits, reduced its civil stormwater infrastructure costs by approximately $340,000 relative to the original engineered detention design, and was cited by the county floodplain administrator as a model for riparian corridor treatment in recharge-zone development.

Practice and Performance Resources

Landscape Architecture 2040: ASLA Climate & Biodiversity Action Plan
Cooperative Extension in Your State
Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Landscape Performance Series
Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP)

Jonathan Williams, ASLA, PLA, is founder of Outdoor Practice, based in Houston, Texas, and a member of the ASLA Climate & Biodiversity Action Committee Advocacy Subcommittee.