The following is a transcript of Jay Wu’s interview with Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Director of CCNY’s Graduate Landscape Architecture Program. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q. How did you become interested in sustainability?

A. I have a long history of traveling through various aspects of architecture and landscape architecture. I earned my undergraduate architecture degree at Cooper Union in New York and went on to Princeton for my graduate degree. I worked in Europe for a while — first in Paris, then the American Academy in Rome. It was there that I really started to see that my work was landscape architectural in spirit. I had never been to an institution that actually offered that degree. I had always been interested in this intersection of landscape and infrastructure, and that’s really what I was working on while I was in Rome. It was also the first time I connected with landscape architects. They told me “You’re a landscape architect! You just have to learn cut-and-fill, a little grading, you’ll be fine.” When I came back to New York, I worked in architecture for a while, at Pei Cobb Freed and Partners (I had previously worked with Raimund Abraham, during my Cooper days), but eventually got itchy feet again and went off to Brazil on a Fulbright to study the work of Roberto Burle Marx. He’s probably the most well-known modernist landscape architect in Latin America, and that experience affirmed my interest in landscape architecture.

I’ve written a number of articles as well as a book about Burle Marx and his role in environmental preservation and conservation. He had a very long career, but much of his preservation and environmental defense work was done during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s. I was interested in learning from these complex histories where policy and environmentalism collide or intersect. In fact, much of my work today considers questions of public health and politics and how these connect with the environment, ecology, and the climate emergency. 

After my Fulbright, I taught at Cooper Union, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Princeton while running a little practice. At some point I thought to myself, maybe it’s time to take that cut-and-fill class. I remember talking to my husband, who brought up the program at City College. I looked it up, and sure enough there was a long-standing undergraduate landscape program here at CCNY that M. Paul Friedberg started around 1970, and Len Hopper was teaching a site technology class. I enrolled in the program and over a number of years took the courses I needed to achieve a landscape architecture degree, and eventually I was licensed in both architecture and landscape architecture. 

Q. I’m curious if you can tell me more about the relationship between CCNY’s Urban Sustainability and Landscape Architecture programs. 

A. The sustainability program is only eleven years old, while the landscape architecture program has been around since the 1970s. The program transitioned from an undergraduate to a graduate program around 2005, with  the first class of master’s degree students graduating in 2008. We always try to think about which of our electives might be of interest to sustainability students, and we cross-register a number of classes in the landscape and sustainability programs. I think there is an affinity between the programs: both ask how we can think about ecology in the broad sense of that word, consider finite resources, and address how these can be best leveraged in urban environments. 

I cringe at the neoliberal use of words like “resilience” and “sustainability” sometimes, because we don’t want things to stay the same or return to a pre-existing condition, right? We need to actually take action and make change—this is ecological regime change. But I think both resilience and sustainability are driving at the same sort of questions. What is it we need to do to lighten our footprint? How can we think about our presence on the earth as humans, as part of a larger suite multispecies suite of elements—nonhuman, microbiotic, and even abiotic  minerals—that are working together? And how can we be more cognizant of these relationships given an indeterminate future with a rapidly changing climate?

Q. I wanted to get into some recent news. Do you have any thoughts on the Suez Canal tanker?

A. The ship just got out! I loved following this story. A wind storm twisted the ship and knocked it into those muddy canal banks. The Egyptian government took a lot of credit for freeing the vessel, but they also had to acknowledge it was the moon and the super high tide that allowed them to budge that big tanker. This really demonstrates the power of working with natural cycles and systems. The idea that we are fighting against nature is really not productive. The fact that a natural force allowed that ship to lift is really significant. 

Our global networks of logistics are so fragile, yet so broad-reaching. We see it in everything that we do, in everything we order from Amazon. I’m working with my students now on the Amazon fulfillment center site out on Staten Island. When you study logistics and think about these corporations, the situation is completely fraught. There are a lot of questions of labor and resources—different types of exploitation playing out at the same time, all tied to these global networks.