​Leaves are turning, the days are getting shorter, and COVID is on the rise in most states, including mine. The “everybody outside” strategy was great for reducing coronavirus transmission during the summer, but what about the months ahead? 

Landscape architects like me know that outdoor spaces are almost always designed for warm weather, even where it’s only really warm for a few months. Spring and autumn are gorgeous in many places, yet it’s rare to find an outdoor space designed for use during these shoulder seasons, forget winter.

Last time we looked at the basics for an outdoor space for cold weather.  This time it’s about the frills. 

What does a good winter space need - the extras that make it special?

Look good in low light 
Use lighting to highlight the assets, and let winter’s low light hide everything else. 

Plants with winter interest 
Yes, summer’s flowers are fading, but evergreens of all kinds carry on. Dried seedpods and grass plumes, shrubs with bright berries that persist, and trees with colorful or peeling bark all brighten up the cooler months.

Materials with winter interest 
Brighter colors, textures, lights again, reflective qualities. We tend to think that everything needs to be drab during winter. Don’t do that. The time for bright colors is now. 

Plan for winter views, screening, and extent 
When the leaves fall off the trees, every view becomes bigger. This is an asset if you suddenly have a water view from your deck. Not so much if you now have a view of the neighbor’s dumpster. 

Encourage wildlife, both birds and critters 
Birdfeeders and food for squirrels and other backyard wildlife are a real highlight of the cooler months. Don’t forget that some of those plants with winter interest are also attractive to birds. 

Fire 
Fire gets a special mention, because it’s such a draw. Warmth, light, but also our fascination with the flickering lights and the companionship of feeding and tending something that seems almost alive. Obviously, be safe with open flames, but don’t underestimate what a firepit or bank of candles can do for your winter space.

Need more inspiration?
​Check out the Winter Cities Institute, old pros at this outside-during-winter stuff, probably in places far colder than where you are.

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​“But what about winter?”

Every conversation about moving activities with people outside ends with this, whether it’s about school, working at home, or anything else. This was true even before coronavirus attacked the planet, back when I was teaching college students about research on people and environments. Nature does a lot for us, including making it much harder to catch COVID. But what about the half of the year when nature itself is a hazard? 

Landscape architects like me know that outdoor spaces are almost always designed for warm weather, even where it’s only really warm for a few months. Spring and autumn are gorgeous in many places, yet it’s rare to find an outdoor space designed for use during these shoulder seasons, forget winter.

Is it possible to be comfortable outside in cold weather? 
What’s a good winter space even like?


Good winter spaces… 

…function in winter
Choose seating and tables for all-weather use and attractiveness. Stone or concrete gets cold; metal of any kind gets even colder. Plastic and wood are better choices. Or use cushions.

Design for ice: textured pavement, excellent drainage. Ice becomes a problem as soon as night-time temps drop below freezing, which can happen well before it gets too cold during the day. Dark pavement holds the day’s heat longer and will freeze later and melt sooner.

If you live where it snows, have a plan for how to move that snow and where to put it. If there’s piles of snow every winter, make sure those piles are out of the way and everything still works around them. 


…are comfortable
Maximize sun and southern/southwestern exposure. Make the most of the heat you have.

Use thermal mass to hold heat - stone, brick, and any kind of pavement are what you need, either as walls or on the ground. Don’t forget building walls. These will keep an outdoor space warmer for a while after the sun sets. Again, any kind of dark material absorbs more heat from the sun, giving it the edge here.

Windbreaks, primarily to north/northwest/west. A calm space is a warmer space, because wind chill exists. Plenty of restaurant patios could get another month of use with a simple wind break.

Shelter from snow and ice. Roofs, canopies, and tents can hold in heat and block wind, but they also block the warm sun, so be careful with them. 

Any heat source, including fire. Fire is psychologically warming and hard to resist on a cold night, but it’s also, y’know, fire, so proceed with caution.

Good lighting. Five pm in November is a lot darker than 5 pm in July. Lighting can do a lot to make a space attractive, even magical, in ways it’s not during the daytime, so don’t just go directly for the big floodlights. Lighting comes in cool and warm tones, as well - use warmer tones. ​


Remember: active people are warm people. Social distancing makes this difficult, but if you can, let people move around instead of being stationary. Lots of days are too cold to sit outside, but warm enough to walk. 

Next time: how to take your winter space beyond these basics.

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​This week we’re back to working at home, specifically more about making yourself a great workspace outside. Why now, at the end of the summer? Because, as a lifelong outdoors person, I can tell you September and October are some of the best weather for outdoor living, especially after this brutally hot climate change summer. Plus you can push comfort in outdoor spaces farther into cold weather than you’d think, something we’re all keenly interested in this year, and something I’ll be posting about soon. 


Without further ado, here’s your landscape-architect-approved…
 
Five More Ways to Make a Great Outdoor Workspace: 
(or Study Space, for those still-at-home kids)

Fan/heater 
For real luxury, add an electric fan to that outdoor workspace. This can be as simple as plugging a portable fan into an extension cord, or as elaborate as installing a ceiling fan into the porch ceiling. Fans help with flying insects, too, if that’s an issue. You know about patio heaters and other heat sources outside, but let me point out two things: 

1) if you want a patio heater, buy it immediately, because as soon as this extra-hot summer wanes, there is going to be a big demand for those this year.

2) working by a firepit sounds delightful, but from personal experience, it doesn’t happen. Nothing is as distracting as fire. You’ll have a marvelous relaxing few hours sitting by the fire…and doing no work at all. 

Storage space
Outside you can’t leave papers and electronics spread out for days, which is both a plus and minus. You’re forced to be more organized. There are outdoor cupboards and such on the market, but I’d approach this like working in a library or coffeehouse or other public setting: you bring it with you and you take it with you. 

What you need therefore is a good bookbag or a portable file box or something of that sort. You’re at home, so this storage could be more fun: beachy tote bags? A clean wheelbarrow? Those bike panniers you never use (and the world’s shortest bike commute)? 

Space for a guest
Whether that’s a sibling, a spouse, or someone genuinely from the outside world, you need a place to sit - a movable chair - and maybe a spot for a cup of coffee. If you’re having in-person conversations with anyone you don’t live with, outside is the safest place to do it. For kids studying outside, that guest is likely to be you, helping with lessons and technology. Make yourself comfortable while you try to remember math about fractions.

Fun stuff
There’s a whole universe of patio, pool, and backyard accessories out there to liven up your outdoor space with. Maybe keep the inflatable pool toys out of sight of your Zoom camera, but there’s still plenty of space for some strings of lights, flags, or flowers, which brings me to:

Use the nature you’ve got 
​Looking at or being near plants and non-threatening animals makes humans like us more relaxed, less depressed and anxious, and less mentally fatigued. Has there ever been a time when we needed this more? What you need is some greenery in your view most of the time. Trees are better than just lawn, but even a flower pot is worthwhile. Extra credit for backyard birds, maybe attracted to a birdbath or feeder. 

​
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​Back in the early part of the lifetime that this pandemic has surely lasted, I posted about working from home. What if you want to do that outside, and take advantage of this global emergency to conference call in the fresh air? 

Plenty of people I know are asking a similar question about spaces for their kids to do school work outside, at home. Good news: it’s a pretty similar set of requirements, regardless of the size or age of the worker. So what do you need?

A good school/office workspace outside needs:

Freedom from distraction, especially noise.
Don’t face traffic. Think about where the air conditioner is and don’t sit right next to it. If you’re going to be on the phone or talking via Zoom, put yourself somewhere you don’t feel like you’re constantly being overheard. Consider investing in a speaker or two to boost your computer’s sound, in case of neighboring lawnmowers or other loud phenomena. 

Comfortable place to sit.
Better yet, a selection of comfortable places to sit, each suited to a different task or time of day. Maybe a chair for using a laptop, a soft seat for watching videos or interacting via Zoom, and a lounge or hammock for reading. The material of these seats makes all the difference in how comfortable they are in different conditions: metal is cold yet also hot; plastic is neutral (though not as durable); cushions are far more comfortable in cooler weather (but take them in when it rains).

Table or other stable, flat surface for laptop, books, writing, and so on.
The right height for this is essential, and the relative height of chair and table is also essential. It’s the difference between fatigue and hours of comfortable use.

Good light.
That means no glare in the direction you are looking, no baking in the sun, but also enough focused light to read and do other non-screen tasks. Even during the day, a comfortably shady spot can be a bit dim to read in. Outdoor lamps exist, but lanterns or even headlamps can be fun alternatives that will be easy to repurpose when all this is over (or light your way through the zombie apocalypse, whichever).

Not too windy, not too stuffy and still.
Since this is personal taste and can vary with the day’s weather, the best way to handle this is to let the worker customize shelter to suit his/her tastes at the moment. Freestanding screens can work. Making the various chairs and seating themselves mobile will work, too, since it lets them be shifted to a warmer or cooler spot. 

Electric outlet(s) and solid wifi + cell service.
Providing an outlet can be as easy as plugging in an outdoor-grade extension cord. If you do, take the time to route it where it won’t be easy to trip over and/or tape it down. Fun additional resource: a solar bank charger, probably useful even on cloudy days, and another way to sneak a bit of science into the home-school day. (Also handy the next time the power goes out. Ask me how I know.)

Last bit of advice: ergonomics matter outside, too. No one wants carpal tunnel as a souvenir of the pandemic.

More tips coming soon in Part 2!

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​Church or other worship services outside is a new 2020 idea that isn't new at all. From a COVID-19 perspective, indoor worship as usual has some problems: lots of people, indoors, in close proximity, for an extended period of time. Singing, shaking hands, hugging - all a viral playground. 

Move the service outside, and it’s a lot less risky. In my career as a landscape architect, I’ve designed plenty of prayer gardens, memorial gardens, and other outdoor spaces for churches and temples. Here’s a place to start:

Five ways to make church outside work:

Make people comfortable 
Shade, air circulation, comfortable seating (maybe everyone brings their own chairs). Less obvious: make it easy to look at what you’re supposed to look at, when you expect people to be there. So no glare behind the pulpit or other spot where the speaker will stand. Facing the morning sun of the east has historical meaning behind it, but facing north or south is a more practical choice for minimizing the squinting for both leaders and congregation. What do you do if it rains - a tent? Umbrellas? Cancel? Make a decision and work that into the plan.

Quiet really matters 
You need to be able to hear people talking, without amplification, so no spots next to the highway or the loud HVAC units. If your service includes music, people need to be able to hear it. Don’t make anyone yell. Basically, noise = amplification = more trouble and expense in AV equipment. But also, sound is important to creating a spiritual atmosphere. Maybe that’s windchimes or bells, or the wind in the trees, or the whispered prayers of the other parishioners. 

Accessibility
Outside is full of potential obstacles to those with mobility problems. Make sure your worship space is as level as possible, with a smooth surface that allows those using canes or walkers to navigate it. No steps, especially between parking or drop-off and the space. Also important for people with infants in strollers and for anyone setting up and tearing down before and after services. 

Restroom access
You’ll need it. Glorious as it might be to have a service in the woods way out behind the building, the trek to the restroom will be less glorious for every small child, pregnant lady, and older man with prostate trouble. No steps between the restroom and the space, either. 

Tap into outdoor traditions
The difference between being forced outside into a miserable substitute for normal and having an enriching and meaningful new tradition is mostly attitude and a little bit of effort. What’s your faith tradition’s history of outdoor worship spaces? From ancient rituals and gardens to 20th century camp meetings and revivals, there are a lot to explore.

Finally: yes, it is absolutely worth it to create an outdoor worship space in places where it snows. It’s August. Snow is months away, and the effort you need could be as little as having people bring chairs to set up in a shaded spot. Once this long hot infectious summer finally wanes, there’s ways to create a good Winter Space, too, and if necessary, that could include spaces at your church. Another post on that, coming soon.

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​My sister is a teacher, so my messages are filled with the latest last newest update on her school’s ever-changing plan to reopen in a few weeks, or not, or sort of, or maybe not. It’s in flux, it’s maddening, and it’s very high stakes. I bet your school is the same. 

Flexibility helps, and outdoor spaces could give your school just that, since   coronavirus experts agree that outside is safer. If you’re against restarting in-person instruction, maybe the most vital in-person activities could be done outside. If you’re in favor of in-person instruction, but want lots of safeguards, moving some activities outside can help with that. If you’re one of the many people in the middle of this debate, meeting in person but outside is kind of an in-the-middle solution. 

I spent years designing outdoor spaces for schools and teaching others how to design them. It’s not just playgrounds and ball fields. 

Think about: 

Small meeting spaces
If everything else is virtual, but you just have to have a certain conversation or lesson or demonstration in person, this is place to do it. You don’t need much: a couple chairs, maybe a small table, but for maximum sanitation, people could provide their own folding chairs (and sanitize the table before and after). A chalkboard or whiteboard would be helpful, and fine outside as long as temperatures are above freezing. Position this space somewhere as free of distraction as possible, perhaps facing a wall of the building or an area of trees, not the parking lot or a road with traffic, with shade and protection from wind. A small elementary school might want three or four of these spaces, distant from each other as well, maybe marked with large colorful signs to make it easy to determine which one you’re headed for.

Teacher/staff lounge
Think of your deck or your favorite restaurant patio - that’s an outdoor lounge area. At a school it’s vital that this area be screened off so that kids and parents aren’t constantly wandering in, and you need some audio privacy - not next to the playground or the main entrance from the parking lot. All outdoor lounge spaces need shade and protection from harsh winds. Since hand sanitation is the name of the game right now, a sink would be ideal to include, but if water isn’t available nearby, at least a big jug of hand sanitizer needs to be included. 

Outdoor classroom 
A lot of schools have one of these already, but they were more popular years ago than now, so it’s probably older and maybe not used much. This could be the time to change that. Look for a semi-circle of simple benches somewhere, and be advised that if those benches are wooden and old, they may be tough to adequately sanitize between uses. Also be advised that putting a tent without walls over the outdoor classroom could make it a lot more useful. 

Small-scale gyms 
A spot to run around with a couple other kids or siblings could be really valuable, especially at schools where many families don’t have yards of their own. Playground equipment is problematic as shared surfaces that lots of little hands touch, so you need somewhere else. Maybe shared equipment is out, but you can do a lot with marking paint on the ground.  A bench here for adult supervision is a nice touch. 

Many paths to entry
Schools usually funnel all foot traffic to certain entrances, kids here, teachers there, visitors here. Social distancing demands that we do the opposite, and disperse that traffic as much as possible. Schools are required to have a lot of fire exits, so there’s plenty of doors, but think about how people get to those doors, especially from parking lots, local streets, and bus stops. You need lots of signs, maybe color-coded ones, maybe even temporarily repainting the doors to match that color-coding or painting lines on the ground like hospitals do. The trick is to make these many new paths to doors work with these other new outdoor spaces, so that visitors aren’t walking through the small meeting spaces and so on. You’ll likely need a master plan, a map of the school grounds with everything drawn on it. 

But it snows here!
Yes, many places in this country have at least a few months of the year where it’s too cold or too wet or both to be outside. But it’s less than you think. All the techniques used to make your favorite restaurant patio comfortable on chilly nights work for outdoor school spaces, too, like portable heaters and wind barriers. Most schools have at least some masonry on their facades, which holds heat from the sun, so any spaces next to a west- or south-facing wall will stay somewhat warmer. It should also be said that it’s well worth putting on a sweater and hat to bring COVID cases and deaths down. 

And if you can’t get enough of all of this, my final statement to you is:  forest kindergartens 

​
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​At this point, there’s more or less consensus that if you have to be around other people during this pandemic, the best place to be is outside. Ergo countless ad hoc outdoor spaces for dining, working, and just hanging out. You know who’s really great at creating outdoor spaces that aren’t ad hoc, ones that actually work well? You, the landscape architect. This is your moment.

Before the list, a note: a full-scale professionally designed outdoor space is a major endeavor, taking time, plenty of money, and usually licensed contractors. It’s a lot for a business to take on right now, and of course, we need everything outside right now, not in 6 months or next year. Enter the ad hoc part.

But consider: anyone can carry a folding chair outside. Someone with skill can place that folding chair where it works the best, looks the best, and is the most comfortable. That someone is you. It’s a great moment for minimalist projects using that skill with off-the-rack furnishings, repurposing what’s already at hand, and making the most of what’s already on site. 


Five potential projects from the pandemic

1) Outdoor gyms and workout spaces 
In my town, people are using the area around the high school track for burpees, strength training, agility courses - all the stuff they used to do at the gym. I’ve also seen people doing yoga on mats spread on the gravel parking lot of a local park. Clearly there’s an unfilled need.
 
2) Outdoor meeting spaces, at offices and other businesses
A conference room outside needs what a conference room inside needs, plus shade, shelter from wind, and hopefully at least a little privacy. Bonus points for any kind of calming vegetation. 

3) Outdoor dining, obviously. 
You knew this one, but realize that so much of this is done terribly, even before the pandemic. It needs to be comfortable for the diners and the servers, and right now that means giving waitstaff plenty of space. As customers tiptoe back into eating out, outdoor dining needs to not just be safe, but *look* safe, as well as inviting. Sound challenging? That’s why you hire a pro to design it.

4) Outdoor hair salons/barbershops
The nation is crying out for a haircut, and the safest way to do that is outside. We can do better than a folding chair on the sidewalk next to the parking lot, can’t we?

5) Outdoor school spaces
A big category that’s super-timely, as debate roils about what’s going to happen come fall (fast approaching,  regardless of what the seasons say). We’re familiar with outdoor classrooms, but schools are composed of many different spaces serving different functions: cafeterias, play areas, bus loading, drop off/pick up, staff lounges, gyms, auditoriums, and those classroom spaces. Having at least a few spaces outside could provide vital flexibility for schools navigating the first fall of the pandemic.

It’s October. Every door creaks, every picture has eyes that follow you, every call is coming from inside the house. Night falls sooner, mist swirls, dry leaves - or footsteps? - whisper along every path. Bats fly out of the tower on the old house at the edge of town, and surely phantom hitchhikers wait along every lonely road. 

Picture these spooky scenes. Where do you see them happening? Everybody knows a spooky place. A place that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Not just dangerous, but eerie. Maybe not now, but years ago when you were a child, you knew a place like this - the haunted house, the old cemetery, maybe just the basement or attic. 

Remember it, then ask yourself: have you really outgrown spooky places? What scares you, and where is it? Maybe it’s Area 51. Or your favorite Bigfoot hotspot. Or Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or (the former) Edmonson, Kentucky. 

We’re justified in fearing some places, because they are contaminated, a scarier scare for the fully grown than whatever’s going bump in the night. Paranormal or aliens or radiation, eerie places are fascinating in a way that your run-of-the-mill dangerous place is not. Show me a dangerous intersection, and I’ll show you a place you avoid but never think about. But what’s eerie combines fear with mystery - and mystery is a potent, enduring universal attractant. 

Mystery, in fact, is one of the aspects of landscapes we find attractive, according to research on the subject. That general rule is this: that we are intrigued by scenes that we can’t immediately understand fully, because they invite exploration and hint that there’s more to be learned from them. Spooky places are mysterious, but they also scare. Two reasons to notice them, remember them, and care what happens to them, for good or ill. Another general rule: we place less value on what’s overgrown and unkempt, because those places look like no one else values them. But what good is a well-maintained spooky place? It’s just ordinary. A greater feeling of abandonment makes an eerie place eerier, and perhaps that much more mysterious/frightening. Our feelings about them are, in a word, contradictory. 

Also contradictory is that spookiness can protect a place. We aren’t indifferent toward places we fear, and indifference is the real enemy here. Indifference is what makes a place invisible, and that invisibility makes it ripe for a new Wal-Mart or subdivision or what have you. That protection can create a space for nature. To see this in action, you wanna see something really scary. Like Chernobyl.

In 1986 an accident at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant caused one of its reactors to explode. At least 50 people were killed immediately, and 120,000 residents were evacuated. The site remains radioactive today. A vast 1,000 square mile exclusion zone surrounds the site, including the abandoned city of Pripyat.  

Today, Chernobyl is famous not just for the disaster, but also as a haven for wild horses, elk, boars, bison, and most especially wolves. There’s room for them to live and thrive (radiation notwithstanding) because we humans are too afraid to enter that place enough to disturb them. Chernobyl is the perfect example, because we’re afraid not just of the place, but of objects and resources, like timber, that might be extracted from that place, and it’s a big place - 1,000 square miles! Big enough for wolves to thrive. 

Nuclear contamination is authentically terrifying, but there’s also a thousand horror stories about mutants, people or animals or viruses, and about you yourself becoming mutated. We can’t see radiation or contamination, so we can’t tell if it’s gone or increasing or creeping up behind you. That’s sinister. At this point, thirty-odd years on, the sheer size of the abandoned area around Chernobyl is unnerving because who knows what’s really in there? If you go in and get into trouble, no one can hear you scream. It’s self-perpetuating spooky.

Bring contamination closer to home, subtract the radioactive wolves, and you come to Love Canal. Love Canal is a former subdivision near Buffalo, NY, made infamous as a toxic waste disaster. The homes and, incredibly, an elementary school, were built on the site of an abandoned canal project (hence the name) that was used as a chemical waste dump in the 1940s and 1950s. A disease cluster in the neighborhood prompted grass-roots investigation, revealing that chemicals were leaching through groundwater into area basements and yards, as well as the school playground (!). A lengthy and intense struggle by neighborhood activists (mostly women) led to the relocation of over 900 families, and eventually to the creation of Superfund by the federal government in 1980. The disaster exponentially increased public awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution, particularly in working-class areas (like Love Canal) and minority neighborhoods.

Today the site of these vanished homes is a parcel of approximately one square mile, comprised of meadow, more or less, and scattered trees. It’s a savanna with crumbling driveways and roads, surrounded by chain link fence. A landscape that’s terrifying, if you’re old enough to remember Love Canal as breaking news; unsettling, if you are one of the residents across the road wondering about the genesis of their ailments; welcoming, if you are a rabbit or possum or deer. 

Industrial contamination is scary stuff, and the nature of pollution underground, in ground water, or in the soil, or in your basement courtesy of your sump pump, is, again, hidden and mysterious in its extent and severity. They say it’s gone. Is it? The idea that we’ve unleashed dangers we can’t control, be they industrial or nuclear, is a very disturbing one - and a fascinating one, as illustrated by most Twilight Zone episodes, a lot of science fiction, and any scary story about repeating names while looking in a mirror.   

Spooky/ nature spaces don’t have to be famous. I used to live near Split Rock, an overgrown abandoned quarry and industrial ruin in Syracuse, New York. Already you see the eerieness, right? - “abandoned quarry,” “industrial,” “ruin” - but there’s more: in 1918 a factory making explosives for World War I exploded, creating a horrific fire that killed fifty men and critically injured fifty more.

Today the Split Rock  quarry is a big blank spot on the map, approximately 900 acres of woods and brush - and according to some, paranormal activity. It’s a place where roads dead end, with a few rusty “Danger - no trespassing” signs for atmosphere. There’s plenty of good reasons to leave the place alone: old quarry cliffs and holes, industrial ruins, worrying contamination from that munitions plant, and the very real danger of getting lost in the deep, dark, possibly haunted woods.  While not truly urban, Split Rock is close enough to the city to keep me alert for urban ills. There may be a few of those there, plus the occasional ghost hunter, and surely mountain bikers using the unofficial trails. But mostly, Split Rock is left to the deer and the coyotes and smaller creatures. 

Set aside the specters and the chemicals, look at these places as natural landscapes, and you’ll find they look pretty good. Sinister places benefit us just like any natural area, benefits like cleaner water, reduced flooding, less urban heat island, and carbon sequestration, the whole ecosystem services  bundle. These processes are going on in each of these places; some of them are doing all three. They benefit us even while we fear them, and their enduring mystery helps keep us from destroying them, thus protecting their ability to continue helping us. 

Fear can create space for nature to recolonize, recover, even thrive. Contaminated sites are especially good at discouraging development, partly because they tend to have sticky legal issues about what’s there and whose fault it is and who should do what to clean it up. 

Yet plenty of eerie places have no natural value. Most buildings reputed to be haunted are just buildings - ecologically speaking, the most haunted house is just a house, unless it’s got an overgrown yard. Lots of horrifyingly contaminated brownfields are redeveloped  into utterly mundane things, like freeways or strip malls, and people forget what they were. Even the sites of authentically horrific events like Civil War battles, can struggle against encroaching development. Sites like Chancellorsville, where 24,000 men died in 1863, arguably could benefit from being more spooky, thus helping preserve them. 

What makes the difference, turning an unsettling place into a natural space as well? Is there a way to harness spookiness to help preserve natural areas? Can we use this without it backfiring and creating a place so eerily fascinating that people love it to death? 

Back in the ‘90s, there was an interdisciplinary effort to design a warning landscape to scare away humans (or any other intelligent life) in perpetuity from nuclear waste storage sites like Yucca Mountain and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has since gone kaput as a doomsday nuclear storage facility, but the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in neighboring New Mexico is socking away nuclear waste underground, and still asking how to keep people away long after our civilization and language have crumbled into dust. 

Fear, made to act as a warning. Spookiness to save your life. Think about it, maybe while you ignore the tapping at the window and tell yourself the shadows on the stairs aren’t moving.

Also posted on Medium.

I'm writing a section for my next book about climate change predictions for the US by region. Wanna know what those predictions are? Look out the window. 2018 has been a real preview of the future, with above-average temperatures everywhere, soaking rains in the East, and drought and fire in the West. What matters is the long-term trend, not any individual year, but still, 2018 gives us a chance to see which everyday systems are not going to work for the warmer world. Ordinary things we take for granted. Like what happens in your yard when it rains.

Although I started my career as a landscape architect, full disclosure: I have always found stormwater management a little dull. These days precipitation of all kinds has become way more exciting, in the worst way, due to the increasing frequency of seriously scary storms. I write this with one eye on updates about Hurricane Florence inundating the Carolinas. My house up here in Connecticut has weathered nearly 50 years of coastal storms, including Hurricane Irene, in 2011, and Superstorm Sandy  just a year after that. Average annual precipitation here is about 47”. In recent decades, the Northeast as a whole has seen a marked increase - more than 70% - in the amount of rain falling during storms. This is a surprise/not a surprise, because these more frequent, rainier storms are part of climate change predictions for the region. And climate change, as you know, is a show already in progress. 

My house is in the woods between two seasonal creeks, with a walkout basement.  The whole property is sandy soil full of New England rocks, so drainage would seem to be a no-brainer. The previous owners of the house certainly thought so, since this house came to us with its sole drainage strategy as standard gutters and downspouts. This utterly predictable set-up is supposed to catch the water as it runs down the roof, funnel it through to eight points around the base of the house, and dump it out on the ground there, at the end of the downspouts. Those downspouts? They end 8” from the foundation of the house. A few have splash blocks that carry the water 24” from the foundation, if they don’t overflow. An absolutely typical setup, found on countless houses, maybe even yours.

What’s wrong with this? It works as intended, which means all the water captured by the gutters is dumped right next to the foundation, at the end of those downspouts. There the water can infiltrate into that rocky, sandy soil and go on its way through the hydrologic cycle and out of my life, and that works fine - most of the time. The walls of our basement testify that it didn’t work fine once, maybe twice, in the life of the house, when a flooding event marked the walls a few inches above the floor. Hmm. 

So we extend the downspouts, which is ugly, easy, and temporary. We need something more permanent, which would, in the past, have meant running those downspouts into a set of pipes to take that water, underground, to one of our creeks. The easiest way to route those pipes is across the driveway, which a landscaper suggested we do. You don’t really know what’s under a 50-year-old gravel driveway, but it’s probably not solid bedrock, a distinct possibility anywhere else in the yard. 

But wait: think about that tried-and-true set of underground pipes and the gutters in 10” (Irene) or 20” of rain? (Sure, 20” is a lot of rain, but Hurricane Harvey (2017) dumped up to 60” of rain on Texas, so…) Simply: everything overflows, and everything backs up. Only so much water can fit through those pipes at once, then water starts to pool. Water coming from the house and backing up means way too much water around the house’s foundation, and that means way too much (ie any) water inside the house. 

If you don’t want a lake in your basement, you need drainage meant to handle a deluge-worth of water. Yet it’s overkill to run the LA River through your yard. It’s hideous, and it’s right outside your house, and also: groundwater recharge is a thing. Sure, Connecticut’s had two badass storms in the last seven years, but it’s also just emerged from a two-year drought, because climate change is about weirder weather, not just warmer weather. Who wants to spend the next drought staring at a yard built for floods? 

A layered system seems to be the answer: a normal rainy day system to work all the time, with a gullywasher system for the next epic storm. The gullywasher layer doesn’t have to work very often, but when it’s needed, it really has to work, because it’ll be that epic storm. When the deluge comes, you’ll need to get in and out. Maybe that’s the classic supermarket run for bread and milk, but it could be for emergency services to rescue you. It could even be for you to evacuate. It’s important, that rare thing in home landscaping that actually is life or death. So nope, keep that pipe away from the driveway, aka the sole route in and out. Look around and imagine a foot or two of rain, and give it somewhere to flood that isn’t where you’ll be or how you’ll get out. 

My strategy is something like this: some of those underground pipes attaching to the downspouts, but with the ground surface sloped to form swales that will move the water away from the house and into the creeks when all hell breaks loose. An old idea, the dry well, may come into play here, too, as a way to provide a place for water to pile up, so to speak, in the epic storm, and a place for water to infiltrate the rest of the time. Circling back to that recent drought, this also could be a good place to install a cistern, if the next drought or the one after that is worse. 

If climate change affects simple home landscaping to this extent, it really does affect everything. The strategy of layering everyday systems with ones for catastrophic events is a good one, and maybe one that can work elsewhere. Your yard seems ridiculously trivial, but aren’t you likely to shelter at home if/when the big one hits? A little planning can create a lot of resilience, or at least more than you’ve got now, exactly where you’ll need it when the storm comes.