Sustainable landscape construction
A guide to green building outdoors
Third edition

Between the release of the first edition of Sustainable Landscape Construction in 2000, the second in 2007, and this third edition, the world has changed.

Both the environment in which green builders operate and green building itself have gradually changed over nearly two decades.

The principles around which Sustainable landscape construction is organized, however, have not changed, nor have the main issues that the landscape professions face in trying to achieve sustainability.

Much of what was said in the preface to the second edition remains true today, for better and for worse.

For context, in 2000, Y2K had fizzled, and 9/11 hadn’t happened.

Hybrid cars were experimental, GPS a clumsy novelty.

Al Gore hadn’t made a film, let alone won an Oscar.

By 2007, the first iPod had been released, as had the last Harry Potter book, and the housing bubble was in the process of bursting, taking so much of the economy, and especially the construction sector, with it.

When Bill Thompson and I first decided to write a book treating landscape construction as a value-driven activity, we weren’t quite crying in the rapidly shrinking wilderness.

Neither were the streets overrun with like-minded professionals. It took hard work to find some hundred firms whose mission and focus revolved around sustainable design and construction.