As the internet came into being; Microsoft released Word; CDs appeared in our shops and Buckminster Fuller, inventor, philosopher, author, designer and futurist died aged 87, so our organisation was being created: the Landscape Design Trust. By coincidence, as the Trust was born, 1980s synthpop band Depeche Mode were in a Basildon recording studio laying down the track, ‘The Landscape is Changing’. By the time the band had re-recorded the song, nearly 25 years later, vinyl was but a distant memory and the music industry was struggling to reach audiences with new means.

The Trust too finds itself operating in a very different world to that of the 1980s. Our core mission however, to promote landscape for the benefit of the environment and the community, remains the same. No-one can say that being a small and relatively fragile organisation in the midst of a revolution is not an interesting place to be. History shows that new, experimental ways of working are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. It may be that one of our leading lights in landscape will set out a vision that proves, one day, to have been the start of a new approach, in much the same way as printing books in a smaller format had such an impact on the democratisation of the printed word, expanding the market for all.

The pace of change is speeding up. We find ourselves in the middle of a revolution not only affecting print media, but also the role of landscape and its potential to change our world and way of living. The existing ways of doing things may not be working, but we are still struggling to find new ways to replace them.

The internet has meant that the complexity and expense of making information available to the public is no longer a problem. The old economics have gone and organisational structures perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with others optimised for the digital world. If the experts and revolutionaries don’t know what is going to happen to the printed word, then far be it from us to make predictions.

One thing we will hazard is that there will still be room for an impartial voice and for organisations like the Landscape Design Trust to provide a forum for debate and quality content. As for the world of landscape, a cursory Google for the most pressing environmental issues we need to address reveals climate change, overpopulation, species extinction, energy conservation, habitat destruction, food and farming, pollution, land use, resource depletion and waste. The pace and scale of change of our planet outstrips even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change and the scale and timeliness of our response has so far been woefully inadequate. We need to adopt some revolutionary thinking and lifestyle change fast, and landscape planning design and management has a key role to play here.

To sign off in the words of Buckminster Fuller: “We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer, unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”

From an article in Green Places by Jane Friend, former CEO of the Landscape Design Trust