Nebraska Professors Document America's Biggest Landscape Architecture Project

Curt Bright Author

05/17/2017 Added

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A Depression-era project to stop the dust bowl led to the nation's largest landscape architecture achievement.

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[00:00:00.301](bright, inspirational music)
[00:00:05.726]A shelter belt is a row of trees
[00:00:07.540]that provides a wind break
[00:00:08.909]that typically protects plantings, livestock, and housing.
[00:00:13.456]In the 1930s, the majority of the shelter belts
[00:00:16.420]that we see in our landscape
[00:00:18.125]were planted as part of a New Deal program.
[00:00:20.736]It was nicknamed FDR's Great Wall of Trees,
[00:00:23.967]so it was championed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
[00:00:27.069]And then it was a planting effort that was six states wide,
[00:00:30.835]starting in Texas all the way up to the border of Canada.
[00:00:35.492]The headquarters was Lincoln, Nebraska.
[00:00:37.949]And the effort planted over 200 million trees
[00:00:41.220]on over 30,000 farms.
[00:00:43.797]It was planted to mitigate the Dust Bowl.
[00:00:47.148]And they were trying to preserve the soil
[00:00:49.501]that was rapidly eroding.
[00:00:51.206]So they were windbreaks to stop soil and soil erosion.
[00:00:54.546]And then they've turned
[00:00:55.379]into a much larger ecological system.
[00:00:58.198]Currently, they're close to 80 years old today.
[00:01:00.907]So we were interested in identifying the current status
[00:01:03.923]of the shelter belts
[00:01:05.016]and understanding both through historical development
[00:01:08.666]but also current practices
[00:01:10.378]the existing condition of them.
[00:01:12.590]So it started with just our basic research question
[00:01:15.242]of what has happened to the shelter belts.
[00:01:17.296]And then, through archival mapping,
[00:01:19.746]we were geo-referencing each archive
[00:01:23.263]with current-day GIS data.
[00:01:25.829]So we were able to get a really great picture
[00:01:28.237]of the state of Nebraska and what the current condition is.
[00:01:32.038]And that led to just writing a general history
[00:01:35.171]for a very broad audience about the project,
[00:01:37.855]about the New Deal, and about the Great Plains.
[00:01:41.734]Whether it's in architectural form or in landscape design,
[00:01:44.725]an awareness of how we touch the ground
[00:01:46.509]and how we make space is important.
[00:01:48.274]And trees are very much a part of that.
[00:01:50.537]The challenge with the shelter belts
[00:01:52.355]is they need to be maintained,
[00:01:54.117]because they're in desperate need of restoration,
[00:01:56.979]if they haven't been removed.
[00:01:59.163]Some of them have been partially removed,
[00:02:01.616]so they may not be functioning to their best ability.
[00:02:04.802]And the ones that are fully intact are quite large
[00:02:08.066]and are gonna be very expensive to restore.
[00:02:10.978]My hope is that the story is told about the Depression era.
[00:02:15.948]And it really talks about the individual landowner
[00:02:18.352]as conservationist, which isn't always told,
[00:02:22.145]and informs people of where these shelter belts came from,
[00:02:26.044]that they're not natural,
[00:02:27.378]that they were actually designed and built and constructed,
[00:02:30.526]and that there's an opportunity to think deeply
[00:02:33.432]about how they're restored and if they're restored
[00:02:37.545]and how do designers like landscape architects
[00:02:40.149]and architects participate in that conversation.
[00:02:44.234](bright, inspirational music)

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Nebraska Professors Document America's Biggest Landscape Architecture Project

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