Rob Holmes

In the book Next Nature, Koert Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink argue for a reclamation of the Greek notion of physis over and against the later Latin conception of natura. Natura, like most contemporary understandings of nature, distinguished primarily on the basis of origins: the born is natura, the made is not natura. Physis, contrastingly, distinguished on the basis of behavior, focusing on distinctions between what is controlled and what is beyond control.

Setting aside the fashionable question of whether to use the word nature or not, this altered focus on behavior over origins has significant implications for design. 
The relationship between design and nature has, historically, been plagued by a conceptual binary between humans and nature. For instance, “wilderness”, in the United States, has long been defined — philosophically, practically, and legally — as land that untouched by human action. Given the massive scale of anthropogenic change today, from continent-spanning pipelines and forest management regimes to levees that control entire river systems or the globalized effects of fossil fuel emissions, very little land qualifies as “wilderness” under such strict definitions.

A shift toward wild behavior over wild origins, however, opens a broad field of hybrid landscapes to both design and appreciation. Such landscapes — forests cultivated for future climates, marshes nourished by dredged sediments, cities that accommodate floodwaters — may be built in part by human hands, but they, along with the flora and fauna that inhabit them, are nonetheless wild in crucial ways. 

This new American wilderness can and must be cultivated.