ECLAS Conference Call 2020: Stop and Think

WE LIVE in extraordinary times. Our lives are longer, safer, and healthier than at any point in human history. And yet, we worry. For these are also confusing times, scary times. We are richer but less equal, more tolerant but more envious. Politics are in turmoil, our leaders technicians or tyrants. We dwell among flickering images, readily ceding our lives and politics to machines (and the elite that programs them). Through it all seeps the terrible realization that, day by day and thread by thread, our species is undoing the fabric of life on Earth. Forget Pascal’s ‘thinking reed.’ We are a thinking asteroid.

IN 2020 the European Conference of Landscape Architecture Educators will consider what landscape architecture, and landscape architects, say to this – their and our shared – moment. We will pause, remove our professional masks, and reveal our values, our hopes, and fears. We will put aside practical aims and ambitions to talk about what really matters – for ourselves, for our discipline, and for the world we leave to others. We will call things by their proper names and hear ourselves saying what we dare not say elsewhere. If only for a moment, we will stop and think.

WE INVITE you to stop with us.

WE LOOK forward to joining you in Uppsala in 2020!

The ECLAS 2020 Organizing Committee