Five Minutes with Joe Chambers
We sat down with Principal and Landscape Architect Joe Chambers, to learn more about his passion for sustainable and resilient design.
Joe, what ignited your passion for fighting for environmental issues?
I was the PM for the new native plants garden at the New York Botanical Garden around 2012 or 2013. The well-known entomologist, Doug Tallamy, gave a speech at the opening ceremony about how certain insects are adapted to work with certain plants. Choosing non-native plants for our landscapes breaks the chain of species interactions at a critical point. Around the same time, I was walking the dog every morning through the woods near our house thinking ‘I only know about 5% of these plants”. Something just clicked. Having a kid starting a really good Junior High School science class had something to do with it, too – lots of questions I couldn’t answer.
What are the biggest issues that you’re seeing impacting climate action in the next five years?
We are in a race. The growing wealth of emerging economies is driving consumption up at an exponential pace. This part of the world is now more than half of our population, and the resulting carbon emissions and habitat loss is startling across the globe. At the same time, innovations from all corners of the earth are coming together, mixing, and creating solutions to these problems. For the next five years, we need to focus on getting new technologies in place, fast, in every sector of the economy. It is an exciting, frightening, roller coaster time in the world.
How will the MKSK LAB for Climate Change and Resilience help address these issues?
Action, action, action. Planners and landscape architects are the professional groups that sit nearest to the confluence of the Natural and the anthropogenic worlds. We need to integrate the exciting new practices that are coming out into our work, practices that work with Nature instead of fighting against it, and we need to show our colleagues and community that there are available solutions. It is just a matter of thinking differently about how we do our work, seeing the problems and taking them on. Problem solving like this is something the design professions do very well. We have most of the knowledge that we need in house already. It’s a matter of sharing it with each other, putting it into practice, and joining the innovators.
Working with clients on sustainability and resilience is a big component of the MKSK approach, how will you help your clients plan and design for the future?
We can’t affect any meaningful change without our clients. We need to talk to them about the environmental shifts going on in the world, especially the clients with long term agendas and widespread impact like government agencies and institutions. In the long run, most of the new practices are cost-saving rather than extra costs. We need to show them how working with Nature is better for everyone as well as better for the bottom line. In my experience, everyone is aware that this is going on and most would like to contribute to the solution. It’s a matter of showing them how feasible it is to help.
Joe Chambers is a Principal and Landscape Architect in MKSK’s DC studio. As the firm’s Director of Sustainability, Joe leads the MKSK LAB for Climate and Biodiversity Resilience. Over his 30-year career in urban, landscape, and architectural design, Joe has worked extensively on large-scale master planning and built works. He has also taught at Penn State and Rutgers Universities where he researched and wrote about landscape construction and the work of Frederick Law Olmsted.