NINA-MARIE LISTER

Nina-Marie Lister, MCIP,  RPP,  Hon. ASLA - Professor of Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, Founder and Director of the Ecological Design Lab at TMU. Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s GSD. Founding principal of PLANDFORM and the 2021 Winner of the Margolese Prize

Nina-Marie Lister is a great connector. Originally trained as an ecologist, Lister quickly found herself working alongside designers and planners. She has since become a registered professional planner focused on applied research, teaching, design activism, and professional practice. 

Lister is a Professor of Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she founded the Ecological Design Lab, in 2006. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, teaching a graduate research studio on (re)wilding.

Alongside her academic roles, Nina-Marie is the author of over one hundred scholarly research articles and professional practice publications (cited at the end). She is the editor of three books, including The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability, and Projective Ecologies. She is also the founding principal of PLANDFORM, a creative practice that emerges from transdisciplinary collaboration alongside ecologists, artists, landscape architects, engineers, and planners. 

Nina-Marie has spent her career connecting and exploring the relationship between ecology and design, wild and non-wild, and human and non-human. Much of her work addresses these themes across urban landscapes, but in 2010 her work alongside ARC Solutions brought design focus deep into the heart of rural landscapes. She and her interdisciplinary team created the world's first International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Competition, which received entries from big-name firms throughout the United States. The competition posed many questions to the design community. How can design serve our non-human counterparts? Can design representation be leveraged to draw attention to non-human issues? And how does design address the infrastructural needs facing rural territories?

Nina-Marie's trailblazing work has inspired the design community to embrace complex ecological systems. In doing so, she has shaped and positioned the professions of landscape architecture and planning to tackle the immense environmental challenges facing us today. We walked away from our conversation with Nina-Marie, inspired to hold the world's most pressing issues at the forefront of our minds, and empowered to use our toolkit as designers to address them.  

[The following is transcribed from a conversation we had with Nina-Marie Lister on January 24th 2023]

An ecologist by training, how did your life and work get so intertwined with the Design professions?

As many people do, I probably fell into an area of practice that spoke to me without knowing it was a defined discipline. I spent a long time in my undergraduate years in the natural sciences and ecology section of the university library stacks, roaming in the QH75 section of the library (though I guess many people might not know what that is anymore because they don't necessarily go to a physical library). Most of my interests were in applied ecology and field naturalist observation. It was about watching and drawing the world as well. Photography, notational observations, and drawing (ok, really poor sketching on my part), because that's how you observe the living world, although I did so without realizing that's also a type of art practice. I graduated with an undergraduate degree in environmental science and resource management and a minor in applied ecology. The degree was not itself in ecology per se but in interdisciplinary life and physical science, and I also majored in classical civilization. So I was always interested in how science meets art at the intersection of the cultural and the natural, the built and living world. 

I was intuitively attracted to the design arts but never took courses in them. I was dissuaded partly because, as a female student, I was generally good at math and sciences, so I got proactively streamed into those disciplines and enjoyed them. I excelled at it and was drawn to taxonomy, order, classification, and observation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was naturally good at field work, and I really enjoyed being outdoors. That is important to understand, as what draws you into a discipline is sometimes different from how it turns out to be as a practice. During my coursework and research in the natural sciences, I found myself increasingly pulled into the landscape architecture section of the library without having any idea what that field was or meant. My interests were really about shaping and making landforms and landscapes with the material palette that you might expect given how architects are trained. 

Landscape architects work in the material palette of the living world. They share these materials in common with the natural sciences. Following my undergraduate degree, I did postgraduate and professional training in terrestrial and wetland ecology, becoming a certified wetland evaluator. I worked for Parks Canada for the National Park System for a few years. Basically, I rotated through all three levels of government between my degrees as a practicing field scientist informing policy. I was always dismayed that no one was really listening to the field science, as far as I could tell. I became more interested in how policy could either use the best available evidence or ignore it. 

I left practice briefly to do a Master of Science focused on landscape ecology and environmental planning, but I stayed grounded in conservation ecology, continuing on to doctoral research. I was particularly interested in the emerging field of complex systems ecology and its implications for planning and design. My work, interestingly, was always at the physical edges of ecosystems as much as the disciplinary edges. The edges where wetlands meet drylands, salt and sweet water – or more broadly, the nexus of policy and design, art and science. Interesting things happen in these ecotones, edge-places with high diversity (and often more stress!). I was fascinated by those synergies. Through my doctoral research, I published my work as scientific research articles and conceptual essays speculating new praxis areas. One of these papers focused on complex systems and adaptive ecology and their implications for design and policy. Jim Corner cold-called me in 1999 after reading this paper. He wanted to talk about complex systems and design. We had an amazing conversation, and I remember coming away from that call thinking there was a new world out there: if we could embrace complexity and uncertainty, we could design for diversity, for the living landscape and emerging ecosystems. I'll say too that Jim gave me a gift in telling me my science needed art.

He asked me to join his team for the Downsview Park Competition, where we collaborated as a finalist team. The rest, as they say, is the future. The park was never built, but that is how landscape architecture found me. The practice I have now grew out of that interstitial space between landscape design, urbanism, ecology, and resilience—none of which exist without the rural. In fact, the rural has more relevance than we might imagine, despite so much emphasis placed on the urbanizing landscapes of the anthropocene. Just as today, future landscapes won't be sustained or resilient without a healthy and flourishing rural culture, including its agro-ecologies. 

Ecology diagram from the Downsview Park international design competition in Toronto. Image Credit - James Corner & Stan Allen with Nina-Marie Lister, 1999

More recently, I've come to have a deep appreciation for cultural landscapes, including the rural. It's easy to think of our urban landscapes as principally or exclusively cultural. From a socio-ecological systems perspective, we know that the rural landscapes, even if they blur into what we imagine to be wild places, are still cultural places as they are cultivated, inhabited, and lived in by people. We tend to think of "rural" in the North American sense, as the farmstead, the rural hamlet, and the town as the gateway to North America's urban culture. From an indigenous perspective, living in a way that relates to and respects other beings, plants and animals alike, is living "with all our relations." Whether you call it rural or non-urban or simply living on the land, it is primordial and informs our relationships with everyone, human or non. 

On the topic of the non-human, you were an early contributor to ARC Solutions and ran a Wildlife Crossing competition that brought nationally recognized designers into the conversation around Wildlife Movement and Landscape Connectivity. How did you get involved in this work, and what hoops do you have to jump through to try to make this work happen?

We're still working hard and trying to jump those fences and remove those barriers. Disciplinary barriers, political obstacles, and agency silos are all in the way, and the inertia is powerful, so we're not there yet. Although after a decade of work since the world's first wildlife crossing design competition, I'm really proud of the team at ARC, with more than 25 partners in our network, and the work happening now. 

It is estimated that automobile collisions with animals kill over 1 million terrestrial animals daily and 200 human lives per year on US roads alone. In the 1950s, France built the first overland Wildlife Crossing to combat these collisions, and many European countries followed suit. In the United States, the adoption of wildlife infrastructure has been slow to take off. However, in 2021 the Biden Administrations INVEST in America Act infrastructure bill set aside $350 million in wildlife crossings, underpasses, and other animal-friendly infrastructure. 

[Learn more in the following two Vox articles entitled, 'Animals need infrastructure, too' (2021) and Wildlife crossings stop roadkill. Why aren’t there more? (2017)]

Initially, I was hired as a consultant by Jeremy Guth, the founder and now a director of ARC, and Tony Clevenger, a conservation biologist with Parks Canada, to help expand a program of wildlife crossing infrastructure using design as a catalyst. Both had worked to support and develop the first wildlife overpasses built in North America in Canada's Banff National Park in the 1990s. Although Parks Canada had built the overpasses, they had only committed to several years of monitoring. Yet it had become clear that it takes time for wildlife to adapt to and use the structures. Guth and Clevenger initiated and carried out a longer-term monitoring program to provide evidence that the crossing structures worked. The results were clear: the data showed conclusively that, when sited for the target species and fenced appropriately, wildlife crossing infrastructures are more than 95% effective at preventing wildlife-vehicle collisions and, therefore, allowing safe passage for wildlife and motorists alike. 

One of the findings from the early studies undertaken by Clevenger and others showed that when wildlife adapt to a crossing structure (either an overpass or an underpass), not only do they learn to cross and use them, but they teach their young, and they are in turn followed by other individuals. So we know there is a kind of social learning that happens among wildlife populations and crossing infrastructures work is now well-established in the scientific literature and the road ecology community. But it wasn't and still needs to be better communicated. Guth and Clevenger realized that with species-specific design, they could better communicate these findings and reach new opportunities to scale-up the infrastructure, out of the park and into the landscape at large. With Jeremy Guth's leadership, they launched the world's first design competition to 'build a better bridge' for wildlife. I was retained as the professional advisor for the design competition. We launched the ARC competition in 2010 with the challenge to "build bridges" across disciplines and with architects, landscape architects, ecologists, and engineers, to use new thinking, new materials, and new methods to move people and wildlife safely. 

I was certainly familiar with and experienced in design competitions, usually for civic infrastructures of parks and waterfronts. But I was compelled by this challenge: why wouldn't we have a competition to design a solution for a problem that has international significance? Wildlife vehicle collisions cost North Americans $8 billion annually and pose a serious threat to biodiversity, which is already in precipitous decline globally. So why are we not focusing on design that not only makes a difference, but accelerates a new class of infrastructure where it's desperately needed? Importantly, this infrastructure is primarily and urgently needed in rural areas. We know where WVCs happen and the majority of crashes are more likely to be in rural and peri-urban landscapes. 

Our measure of success for the competition was to ensure that the public would see these infrastructures as beneficial to both humans and wildlife – as a "win-win" investment in infrastructure. For me, it was also important that the practices of planning and design, of ecology and landscape architecture would be seen as integral to the team of professionals delivering these infrastructures. 

We knew the competition was a success when we landed on page 3 of the New York Times, a review in the Wall Street Journal, the cover of Fast Company Magazine, and an article in the Harvard Gazette. But my personal favorite is still our coverage in Today's Trucker Magazine! That was all great media coverage of the competition, but the project itself, located on the I-70 in Colorado at the Vail Pass, was never built. The state redirected earmarked funding to rebuilding after the catastrophic floods of 2013. But this project, even as a competition, spawned a new class of landscape infrastructure. A decade later, we are contributing to the design of the Walllis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Los Angeles. Situated over the Pacific 101 freeway, it will be the world's largest "super crossing." Fittingly, the design team will be led by landscape architect Robert Rock, who was also on the team that won the Arc design competition. It took a decade—but we are making progress! 

Patience is required, and so is deep collaboration across the disciplines. So many partners from road ecology, conservation biology, engineering, transportation planning, and landscape architecture are involved in the ARC network. We are all committed to public and agency education, advocacy, and sharing and transferring technical information to build these structures. Most of them are urgently needed in rural areas, outside parks and on public and private lands, so planning and delivering these infrastructures is a significant challenge. We're constantly faced with the same challenges as there is no single integrated planning protocol, funding mechanism, or agency in charge of these structures. This is not a problem of technical expertise or design but a problem of political will and the understanding that these structures save lives, reconnect landscapes and provide resiliency in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises ahead. They provide hope. 

Wildlife Crossing. Photo Credit - Ecological Design Lab

Wildlife crossings are important for more than just wildlife. How have the surrounding rural communities engaged with the concept of these projects?

Yes, to the extent that people everywhere don't want to hit and kill animals on the road. Everyone needs to get where they are going safely, and it's clear that wildlife crossings save human and animal lives. Our research has also shown that people don't want roadkill. It's dangerous as well as traumatizing to people. The loss of human life and wildlife can be catastrophic, whether it's an economic loss for insurance companies, trucking companies, or people and their families. Once they hear about these structures, people generally understand that wildlife crossings are a necessary mitigation with multiple benefits. 

Research has also shown that investing in wildlife crossing infrastructure, is money well spent when one structure fixes a recurring problem of WCS. The investment pays off, eliminating the annual costs of roadside cleanup, insurance premium increases, hospitalization bills, road closures, traffic clearing, etc. Again, the cost-benefit analysis reveals WVCs are an $8 billion problem annually in North America alone. Implementing crossings structures once fixes the problem and prevents future losses – it's a benefit that continues over the lifetime of the infrastructure. From a life cycle costing point of view, the investment case is easy to make. For whatever reason, there is a political struggle over who pays for the infrastructure, which depends on the state and the political culture. The case is easier to make when there is a robust public investment in infrastructure and an acceptance of green infrastructure. In some states, we've seen that it's been easier to implement these structures where the private sector has taken the lead in funding because there is greater tolerance for risk than in the public sector. 

For example, we're seeing this in California on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. Only in Hollywood could they raise over $100 million in private funds to build what is effectively public infrastructure. This was in no small way made possible by the fame of P-22, the charismatic mountain lion who was effectively "fenced in" by highways, roaming the Hollywood Hills for a decade without a mate. While he captured the hearts of Angelenos, Beth Pratt, the executive director of the California chapter of the National Wildlife Federation, told his story and raised the funds for the wildlife crossing. She did so with an incredible campaign that personalized the wildlife crossing as freedom for P22, and a campaign for co-existence with cougars across California.

Visual Renderings of the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing in 2020. Image Credit - Living Habitats

While certainly not rural, the Los Angeles wildlife crossing drew attention to the entire California highway system which fragments mountains from the desert to the ocean. Outside of the unusual case of P22, most cougars are rural and wilderness creatures, yet they follow their prey. The rural and peri-urban edges are where most deer collisions happen. In suburban communities in the northeast, for example, insurance companies recognize the cost of hitting a deer and are certainly willing advocates for (if not yet funders of) wildlife crossings. Getting state governments to invest should not be so difficult as these infrastructures become more common across North America. Most will not be iconic bridges over ten-lane highways for charismatic mega-fauna like the cougar. Still, we hope to see networks of crossing systems, most likely underpasses, smaller land bridges, or fiber-reinforced plastic bridges that serve multiple species, even bikes, and pedestrians. We need safe passage for everyone, which means a system of landscape infrastructures serving diverse species in many ecosystems. Imagine the typologies of crossings possible: over, under, at grade… a rewoven landscape that reconnects habitats and species across roads, from bison in Yellowstone, to lynx in Colorado, salamanders in Tennessee, frogs in Ontario, and tortoises in the desert. It's a very hopeful prospect, and it's entirely possible.  

How do you get community buy-in?

Buy-in is about communication, stories of hope, and opportunity. Landscape architecture has incredible agency through visual communication, bringing the imaginary to life in living colors. It's essential to communicate to many publics in different places to share the benefits of wildlife crossing infrastructure beyond the economics. The image of a bridge is powerful, metaphorically across people and places as much as physically. The image of how we reconnect a landscape visually, ecologically, and functionally, not just for one species but for a landscape, is a powerful tool. Yet context matters, whether we are proposing a bridge to alleviate a burgeoning problem of deer collisions in suburban-rural areas or whether it's to save a species in decline or at risk from a highway expansion or to safeguard a reintroduced species such as the Canada Lynx in Colorado or wolves in Yellowstone. As we see more effects of climate change, the evidence suggests that many migratory species will be forced to adapt their ranges, needing connected routes to new territories – and with these, the freedom to roam, to breed, to feed, to forage, to survive, to thrive, to flourish. Those are all parts of the story. 

Our polling shows that people respond to those stories. We know that's part of the bigger "bridge building." We also need precedents that challenge our idea of what infrastructure and landscape are supposed to look like. The California wildlife crossing does this, the Banff bridges do this, and more recently, Nelson Byrd Woltz has done this in Houston with the Kinder land bridge. This project is a compelling example of a bridge that is also a landscape, a public park, and a vital, accessible connection between communities once severed by a road. It's also a new horizon, literally a visual connection across an iconic park in the heart of the city. At the edge of climate change, facing an extinction abyss, I hope we can all understand that connectivity is critical. 

But connectivity also ought to be beautiful, joyful, and hopeful as much as practical. We deserve it to be public, such that infrastructural investments provide lasting public benefit. This is perhaps most pressing in rural communities, which are typically under-invested. Perhaps such interventions are principally about safety or a benefit to farmers. Can we design wildlife crossings that benefit adjacent agriculture and farming practices, steer wildlife to safe routes, extend habitat, and establish pollination corridors, for example? 

Visualizing Connectivity CoLab a collaboration between Ecological Design Lab, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, Arc Solutions

You are running a studio with Chris Reed this semester at the Harvard GSD called 'Wildways.' The subject matter regards connectivity through the lens of other species and wilding. How do you define 'wilding' in this sense and the essence of the studio?

The Wildways studio grew out of a seminar I offered last year, during which we interrogated various notions of wilderness and wildness in the Anthropocene. It posited that human-wildlife relations are evolving, and that emerging notions co-existence, entanglement, and kinship necessitate more contemporary relational ecologies. The studio takes on this premise and develops design applications for new relations between humans and non-humans, exploring landscape infrastructures for connectivity – social and ecological.

The question of (re)wilding underpins the studio. It is both contemporary and important and unpacks the nuances of connectivity. How much connectivity do we need, and where? Where and how should we facilitate connections to "wilder" messier landscapes, supporting and seeding spontaneous landscapes? What scales are we talking about in different ecosystems? Let's use a rural example: Industrial agricultural practices have a very different expectation of connectivity (or lack thereof) than smaller or mixed "family" farms, which tend to be finer-grained with more diverse land-based practices. These are getting scarcer as large-scale agro-industry grows globally. Maintaining a diversity of scales of rural agriculture (both human and landscape cultures and their associated agroecologies) is critical under climate change. It's part of a resilient systems approach to adapting to climate change. When we lose the small family farm or communal farms, we're losing incredibly important aspects of our cultural heritage and our cultural landscape heritage, through which humans have shaped their relationship with ecology for millennia. 

Climate change forces a renewed focus on an integrated approach to agriculture and biodiversity or agroecology. Connectivity matters in this context, that is, in linking rural landscapes functionally through corridors and patches. We know we're losing insect diversity, thereby putting pollination at risk. That's a vital agricultural benefit that's not captured in our economic model. If we're going to practice large-scale agriculture that requires us to move bees around and know we are seeing colonies collapse, we might consider that ecological connectivity is critical from a landscape perspective.

Whether we're talking about wildlife bridges, underpasses, pollination pathways, or migratory corridors (even for birds, for example, using green roof structures as "stepping stones" for feeding and forage), these are all aspects of designing for connectivity. Whether it's along a gradient that connects the rural landscape to the peri-urban or the urban, connectivity is essential for species mobility, especially under climate change. As habitat ranges shift and the constitution of plant communities change, our ability to stay connected and be resilent is dependent on adaptation. Landscape architects have a crucial role to play in designing for resilient connectivity. This starts with building relationships through stories of connectivity: how we're connected to our past, to each other, to our pre-colonial roots, and, urgently, in a time of catastrophic biodiversity loss, through our relationships to plants and animals. Perhaps we do this through technical drawings of infrastructure or through visual stories. For me, those are all parts of designing for a (re)connected world. One that goes beyond merely surviving to thriving and flourishing. 

Those are all fascinating points, and they provide a nice transition into our interest in your work as a form of 'ecological activism.' How did you jump from being an activist in your personal life to bringing it into your professional life? Why is it important to bring activism into your work?

Thank you for asking that question. It allows me a platform to advocate. I started my professional practice as a scientist believing that it was possible to stay objective and separate from the phenomena being observed. As climate change has inexcusably accelerated during my professional lifetime, I am unwillingly complicit in this, despite having dedicated my professional life to opposing it. The climate crisis is here, and we have no choice but to actively oppose the forces and agents that continue it. As professionals engaged in making and shaping landscapes, we have an ethical responsibility, a moral code of practice, and an obligation to do everything we can to slow and oppose climate change, and to slow, reverse, and halt biodiversity loss. We must use whatever tools and tactics we have to engage equitably and responsibly. 

That said, it's important to qualify that I'm in a position of privilege as a tenured professor and my job affords me the right to speak freely, as an advocate if I wish. I'm not dependent on clients whose work might compromise my ethics of practice. In fact, my obligation as a public servant is to inform and support evidence-based decision-making in our field. Based on the evidence, I will therefore advise, support and advocate for practices that stop, reduce, mitigate, and foster adaptation to climate change, including those of retreat and unbuilding and those that halt, reverse, protect, and restore biodiversity. For me, design activism is an obligation and part of leadership. It's also part of the wisdom that comes with age. If I don't provide my students and new graduates an opportunity to do this work and advocate for its importance to professional practice, then I'm not doing my job. 

Certainly, law and planning programs require courses in professional ethics. Do landscape architecture programs teach ethics? More courses now focus on climate justice and the biodiversity crisis – now collectively termed the polycrisis or cumulative crises of social and ecological injustice and loss. So I'm advocating for an explicit commitment to an ethics of care and intentional activism to confront the polycrisis. When you asked about how this manifests in professional practice, some of the ways we've talked about are tangible and obvious: for example, designing infrastructures that contribute to net-positive biodiversity, ecosystem rehabilitation, or net-zero carbon. The bigger challenge is more nuanced, implicit, and less visible, for example, advocating for a reconnection to nature, to living landscapes through public awareness, storytelling, slowing down with intention, "two-eyed" seeing and embracing multiple ways of knowing a place. Some of this we can design into the making and delivery of our infrastructures. We can ensure they are legible and they tell place-keeping stories in a way that engages the public imagination and inspires people to live in good relations with other species and the landscapes that sustain us. That, again, is something that landscape architects are eminently capable of doing. The profession ought to be ethically obligated to do it. So let's provide those venues. Let's provide practices that make space and share voice for that. 

Here's an example of design activism that spilled over from my personal life into my professional, and it offers insight into your question about rewilding. My family's front yard became the center of public debate when an anonymous neighbor (or several) complained to the city that our "lawn" was unkempt and full of "weeds." As a result, we were served with a notice of violating the property standards bylaw. The problem, according to the city bylaw, is that we don't have a lawn, we don't have turf grasses, and we don't mow the plants to the required 8 inches. What we do have is a meadow with mostly native perennial grasses and herbaceous flowering plants. We also have many songbirds, rabbits, squirrels, frogs, toads, crickets, ground-nesting and bumblebees, butterflies, and many other pollinating insects. Our yard is healthy and biodiverse. We also learned that it doesn't conform to the expectation of a garden which is principally a lawn. [Read more about this story here] 

Nina-Marie’s wild garden. Photo Credit - Nina-Marie Lister

The irony was pretty thick: as a professor, I had spent years researching biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, and landscape ecology, and I had developed design applications in support of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. As the director of a graduate program in urban planning, this presented an obvious opportunity to challenge my city on the validity of a bylaw that effectively reduces or even destroys biodiversity in favor of social conformity. We were successfully able to demonstrate that this bylaw was unconstitutional. The city stopped pursuing my case and instead asked me to help them write a new bylaw. It also helped that this came during the confinement of the pandemic when the one freedom people had was to be outdoors. There was a general surge of interest in gardening and a groundswell of motivation to plant native species and create habitats for all the creatures we'd suddenly "seen" in our communities. We argued that a natural garden or a rewilded yard was a human right. What better place to feel you have agency to do something positive for biodiversity and the climate than at home, in your front yard, on your balcony, or in your community garden? 

What became clear during my campaign for a new bylaw that would support biodiversity rather than destroy it was that this problem is widespread. Most municipalities across Canada and the United States, many of which are suburban, periurban, or rural, all reinforce an ultimately colonial idea of how our front yards should look. Far from rewilded, our lawns are enforced models of conformity: neatly clipped, tidy and homogenous, and consuming more water than any other crop in North America. Despite many policies that support biodiversity on public lands, most municipalities regulate private property through ordinances that denude or destroy biodiversity. In this case, naturalizing the lawn or rewilding your front yard is both a personal act of agency and resiliency against climate change, and an obvious place for design activism. [Here is what we did.] 

This case was a blessing in disguise: it spawned a three-year research project on bylaws for biodiversity that has had some rewarding (and wonderful) uptake in many towns and cities in Canada and is part of a growing movement across North America. Some of it is coincidental, but we're adding our voice to the movement through my lab to provide sample bylaws and materials that people can download. Is it really about offering something small, showing people what they can do outside their front door or within their community

Yes, we can grow food, support pollinators, attract the birds, slow and hold water, stop erosion, plant native species, and learn to relate to the land again. The bylaw I challenged was the antithesis of biodiversity. Speaking out against it and providing an alternative was not only easy but also essential, especially with a leadership position in a university. I would have lacked courage, and it would have been unethical not to take this on. 

Those were fun articles to read.

They were fun but also stressful. My family's yard was vandalized, and we got hate mail and nasty comments online. But I got far more fan mail, love letters to the meadow, and even a song. There was a terrific outpouring of support from people working on this issue for years whose voices had not been heard. I still get calls from desperate people whose rewilded gardens, lovingly tended, are threatened with destruction through arcane and unconstitutional ordinances -- laws that enforce homogeneity rather than supporting biodiversity. 

As someone who has taught design studios on these subjects throughout Canada and the United States, do you see interest or a desire to address rural issues from your students?

Yes. I see an incredible yearning to access land and community in my students, many of whom come from a rural background, whether in this country or elsewhere, along with a lack of access to the natural world, whether in a rural community or a wilderness environment. That's both a liability for the future and a limitation of experience. Wherever possible, if there's an opportunity to reconnect to the land that sustains us, there's a need, a hunger, and an earnest desire. I see, for example, real inspiration in farm collectives, people who are learning to farm for the first time on shared land, moving back to rural communities, or farming on temporary land under speculation. We're seeing more farm-start projects where even in an urban agricultural context, people are able to reconnect with sowing and growing. There is also a growing recognition that urban areas are sustained by rural areas, particularly so under accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss. We know that rural communities are critical for sustainability and resilience. Our planning program certainly emphasizes those connections. Even in our Urban Development program, for example, we have courses in food systems planning, rural planning, and agritourism. 

Context is important though: I live in a region with 155 growing days, so we are acutely aware of food insecurity for climate reasons as much as social equity. In Canada, most of our population lives within a two-hour drive of the US border. We have minimal land to grow crops, i.e., 1% of the land base is considered prime agricultural, and we have a very short growing season. Our connections to the hinterlands and rural communities have historically focused on food production and resource extraction. More recently, this connection is about finding places to live more affordably in smaller communities that may also be perceived as healthier. Yet Canada's rural communities in the southernmost populated part of the country are on the path of increasing urbanization and on a collision course with the most affluent areas of biodiversity. The rural future is the urban future. Maintaining healthy rural communities is integral to planning for a sustainable and resilient future. 

What does your ideal future for the rural countryside look like? We're hoping connectivity is a part of it.

Certainly, it's connected, culturally and ecologically, to its roots, to place, and to the species and peoples that shaped and made it. It's also a rewilded rural, but importantly, it is not restored to a previous state (even if possible, it's neither desirable nor equitable). The future is by definition, not backward-looking, so it doesn't romanticize an idealized past or laud some misguided notion of a pristine condition where humans and other species were kept separate. The future of a robust and resilient rural countryside must be about reconnecting materially and culturally with the lands and waters that sustain us and, through this, engaging a relational ecology of respect, reconciliation, and kinship with other humans as much as other species. 

Books

Reed, C., & Lister, N-M. eds. (2020) Projective Ecologies 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University GSD and New York: ACTAR. 384.

 *Reed, C., & Lister, N-M. eds. (2014) Projective Ecologies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University GSD and New York: ACTAR. 380p. Named to the American Society of Landscape Architect’s List of Best Books of 2014.

 *Waltner-Toews, D., Kay, J. J., & Lister, N-M. (2008) The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 383p.

Selected Journal Articles

*Newell, R., Dale, A. & Lister, N-M. (2022) “An integrated climate-biodiversity framework to improve planning and policy: an application to wildlife crossings and landscape connectivity.” Ecology and Society27(1):23. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12999-270123 

*Bell, M., Ament, R., Fick, D., & Lister, N-M. (2020) “The Use of Fiber-Reinforced Polymers in Wildlife-Vehicle Collision Mitigating Infrastructure”. Sustainability 2020, 12, 1557; doi:10.3390/su12041557 

*Lister, N-M., Brocki, M., & Ament, R. (2015) “Integrated Adaptive Design for Wildlife Movement under Climate Change. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment”, 13(9): 493–502, doi:10.1890/150080. 

 *Lister, N-M. (2015). “XING: New Infrastructure for Landscape Connectivity”. LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture (1): 44-53.

 Lister, N-M. (2015). “Resilience: Designing the New Sustainability”. Topos: International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design. 90:14-21.

 *Reed, C. & N-M. Lister (2014) “Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies”. Places Journal. April.  doi.org/10.22269/140414

 *Lister, N-M. (2012). “Crossing the Road, Raising the Bar: The ARC International Design Competition for Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure”. Ecological Restoration, 30(4): 335-240.

 *Lister, N-M. (2012). “Reconciling Mobility: Redesigning the Road, Reweaving Landscape”. Minding Nature, 5(1): 19-29.

 Lister, N-M. (2011). “New Wildlife Crossing Structures”. Topos: International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design. 74: 82-89.

Selected Book Chapters

Lister, N-M. (2022). Generative Lineages: A Conversation with Nina-Marie Lister. Part 2, Chapter 9 in: Monacella, R. and Keane, B. Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures. New York: Routledge. 

McCartney, S., Lister, N-M. and Herskovits, J. (2022). Codesign, Collaboration and Systems Change: Reflections on Innovative Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Practice Centred on Action in Landscapes of Conflict. In McCartney, S., Solano, S., Vangjeli, S. and Zander, H. (Eds) A Landscape Approach: From Local Communities to Territorial Systems. pp 249-262. ORO Editions. 

*Luka, N., Aird, B. and Lister, N-M. (2022). Complimenting Citizen Engagement with Innovative Forms of Professional Coproduction: A Case for Transdisciplinary Charettes. In Kong, H. and T. Monforte (Eds.)Sustainability, Citizen Participation, and City Governance:  Multidisciplinary Perspectives. University of Toronto Press.

*Boudreau, S., Gransaull, G., Lister, N-M, and Pritchard, G. (2022). Preparing students for interdisciplinary work: green infrastructure curricula at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Chapter 10 in Vacca, J. R. (ed) Smart Cities Policies and Financing. Elsevier, pp 135-153. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128191309000401?via%3Dihub

Lister, N-M. (2021) Feeling the Heat: Transforming Cities for Healthy Climate Resilience. In C. Reed & M. Bellame (eds) Mis-En-Scène: The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Places. Los Angeles, CA: ORO Editions. 

*Lister, N-M. (2019). “Design on the Edge: A Dance Between Emergence and Extinction”. Chapter 21 in: F. Steiner, R. Weller & B. Fleming (eds) Design with Nature Now. Lincoln Press, pp 272-280. Named to the American Society of Landscape Architect’s List of Best Books of 2019.

Lister, N-M. (2019). “(re)Think (re)Design for Resilience”. In E. Mossop (ed.) Sustainable Coastal Design and Planning. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, pp 35-50.

*Lister, N-M. (2019). “Watermarks”. In M.P. McGuire & J. Hanson (eds) Fresh Water. Chicago, IL: ARD Press / Oro Editions, pp 192-196. 

Bélanger, P., Alton, C. & Lister, N-M. (2018). “Decolonization of Planning”. In: P. Bélanger (ed). Extraction Empire: Undermining the Systems, States and Scales of Canada’s Global Resource Empire. Boston, MIT Press, pp. 438-520.

 Lister, N-M., & Bélanger, P. (2018) “Promises, Promises: An Interview with Thomas Berger”. In: P. Bélanger (ed). Extraction Empire: Undermining the Systems, States and Scales of Canada’s Global Resource Empire. Boston, MIT Press, pp. 540.

 *Lister, N-M. (2018). “Resilience and Design: Post-Urban Landscape Infrastructure for the Anthropocene”. Chapter 20 in: T. Haas & H. Westlund (eds) In the Post-Urban World: Emergent Transformation of Cities and Regions in the Innovative Global Economy. London: Routledge, pp. 304-321.

 *Lister, N-M. (2017). “Landscape and Ecology: Interview with Nina-Marie Lister”. Chapter 13 in: J. Zeunert (ed) Landscape Architecture and Environmental Sustainability. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 64-65.

 *Lister, N-M. (2017). “Of Wilderness, Wild-ness, and Wild Things”. Chapter 4 in: The Landscape Architecture Foundation, The New Landscape Declaration: A Call to Action for the Twenty-First Century. Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books. pp

 *Lister, N-M. (2016). “Resilience Beyond Rhetoric in Urban Landscape Planning and Design”. Chapter 13 in: F. Steiner, G. Thompson, & A. Carbonell (eds) Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Planning and Design. Lincoln Land Institute, pp 296-319. Named to the American Society of Landscape Architect’s List of Best Books in 2016.

 *Lister, N-M. (2015). “Is Landscape Ecology?” Chapter 5 in: C. Waldheim & G. Doherty (eds) Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape. London: Routledge, pp. 115-137