林江泉

《绿色的悖论》Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State
Author：Gareth Doherty
Publisher:University of California Press; 1 edition (February 7, 2017)
Publication Date: February 7, 2017
Print Length: 216 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0520285018

英文“Barings”和“Bahrain”在中文中的翻译是一样的，都叫“Ba Lin”。关于“巴林”这个名字，在笔者的阅读史中有两个重要的案例：一个是哈佛商学院案例教学中的巴林银行（Barings Bank）倒闭事件；另一个是哈佛大学Gareth Doherty教授关于巴林的《绿色的悖论》。两个“巴林”，前者是一位英国爵士的名字，后者是一个岛国名字。这两个不同领域的“Ba Lin”看似没有关系，但在巴林银行事件中，有一句强势理论的总结：“事情往往朝着最糟糕的方向发展”让笔者找到了与巴林的《绿色的悖论》有某种事物发展的内在规律。

景观学科在人类与自然原初的关系被技术扰乱后才更为凸显其特征和路径。在景观逻辑成立的过程中，Gareth Doherty教授的《绿色的悖论》从事物的剖面出发，揭示“绿色现实”的存在：绿色通常被认为是与灰色城市环境相反的，然而绿色并不总是对城市有利的。从环境角度看，在干旱环境中表现出的绿色往往与“绿色”直接冲突;这个悖论是《绿色的悖论》的核心。由于在干旱区(包括城市)维持绿色所需的资源，提供绿色往往要付出重大的环境代价。在巴林这样的干旱环境中，这种矛盾变得极端，甚至不可持续。《绿色的悖论》的出色之处在于类推和让人看到事物的另一面或反面，比如，《绿色的悖论》让我们从巴林安林可以看到其他非干旱环境国家在执行绿化进程中殊途同归的结果。作为人类集体生存的基础背景，景观不是风景画，它是通过社会力量对自然资源进行“编辑”的结果，是自然和发掘自然之间的界面。将景观设计作为环境科学的子学科的定位，“生产性景观”也开始在新自由主义经济体崛起的大背景下和逐渐衰退的福利国家模式中，被视为不符合实际。为什么？在很多时候和很多情况下，理性的生态规划项目被视为超验主义，或被解读为反都市行为，最终甚至都被视为非理智的行为，成为了另一种不可持续。这是由于在通往理性生态城市规划的方向，景观设计师主要作为环境倡导者出现，这被证明是远离人与自然初觉方式，缺少意义回旋之地的景观是不幸的迂回。建筑师汤姆·梅恩说：“两点之间最快的距离是迂回的，而不是直线。”要证明这一点，也许可以在《绿色的悖论》中寻找答案。巴林的绿色悖论和笔者从其中反推出其他发达城市的绿色悖论正呼应了巴林银行案例的那句话：“事情往往朝着最糟糕的方向发展”。

具有广度和厚度的《绿色的悖论》提供了清晰的思想结构，给我们带来三个以上思想点和多个富有启发性的绿色悖论。比如：在巴林，不合理的绿化(比如大片的草坪)是与当地气候不符的。虽然表面上绿地面积增加，但实际上伤害了这里的生态系统；又比如：用于灌溉绿地而大量开采地下水，不合理地建设水利设施，其实也是不可持续的做法；再比如：巴林的夏季极端和干旱的气候，人口增长与城市发展迅猛，大量的原始树种枣椰被砍伐，以建造新的房子，但是Gareth Doherty认为即使重新种上这些枣椰，原来的生态效益和当地人对这些植物的情感和文化活动都不复存在了。这些调研结果表明了绿色的在地性，即是《绿色的悖论》的核心理念：将设计实践、地理学与人类学三者结合，同时驱动。

《绿色的悖论》成为了逻辑的极限，是景观逻辑与存在之间的差异。概念和逻辑是存在的，但《绿色的悖论》却不局限于概念和逻辑。经过验证，不难发现景观的现实中充满了矛盾、冲突和异质混杂。《绿色的悖论》最终带出了事物的悖论，不仅对风景园林带来更新的意思，对各个学科都带来启示。Gareth Doherty从美学、建筑、环境、政治和社会等多个角度对绿色及其意义进行了多学科的研究，是一种以负片显影的方式来取得丰饶角（Cornucopia）内壳空间中绿色的所在和绿色各个面相，他的悖论和现实是一一对应或“一多对应”的。Gareth Doherty穿越了单向性的思考维度，以洞悉自然的透镜和重建当代的媒介，通过绿色的悖论进入了现实的深度，承载了时间的厚度。除了在《绿色的悖论》中看到挑战逻辑极限的思考方式，也看到景观学科的包容性。许多景观设计项目在景观生态学方面的营造仅仅是为了满足建筑学理论的需要。以此种方式实践的景观设计师身上体现出对多种看似相悖的生态理论抱有包容态度，这已经成为一种趋势。近年来，景观设计之所以拉近了与都市主义的联系，而不是向以环境为导向的区域规划靠拢，根源在于其对于设计文化的包容。

《绿色的悖论》不止是一种颜色悖论，而是多种颜色的总和悖论，这是本书的重要启示。每一种颜色都是Gareth Doherty的思辨景深。他在研究上有一种民主意识，对每一种颜色都持平等态度。他以长期的景观田野调查为基础，探索了巴林的“绿色”景观。在那里，绿色代表了大量隐含的人类价值观，与其他文化和环境意义重大的颜色和色调之间存在着辩证的张力。《绿色的悖论》六个章节集中在蓝色，红色，棕绿色，草绿色，米色和白色。在他的书中隐含的论点是“颜色”和“物体”的概念是相互定义的，因此关于绿色的讨论变成了关于空间的讨论。《绿色的悖论》让景观从边缘性的绿化背景，转变成更积极的前景空间，进而有效地参与城市空间的发展，使得景观能够扮演一种城市主义的主导形式。信息化给人们带来了彼此间的隔膜呼应和虚拟比照， 同时，人们在生活中共同担任的角色感又产生了扁平化，这是因为我们真实的日常在过剩的信息量中进入知识焦虑，《绿色的悖论》无疑缓解了人们的知识焦虑。

The limits of green logic

— on Gareth Doherty’s the paradox of green

Lin Jiang Quan

Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State
Author：Gareth Doherty
Publisher:University of California Press; 1 edition (February 7, 2017)
Publication Date: February 7, 2017
Print Length: 216 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0520285018

The English “Barings” and “Bahrain” translate the same in Chinese, both called “Ba Lin”. There are two important cases in my reading of the name “bahrain” : the collapse of Barings Bank in the case of Harvard business school;The other is the green paradox by professor Gareth Doherty of Harvard University about bahrain. the former the name of an English Sir, and the latter an island nation. These two different areas of “Ba Lin” seem to have nothing to do with each other, but in the bahraini bank event, there is a strong theory that “things tend to go in the worst direction”, which makes the author find out the internal law of development of something with bahrain’s “the green paradox”.

Landscape discipline highlights its features and paths after the original relationship between human and nature is disturbed by technology. In the process of establishing the logic of landscape, professor Gareth Doherty’s paradox of green reveals the existence of “green reality” from the perspective of the profile of things: green is generally considered to be the opposite of the grey urban environment, while green is not always beneficial to the city. From the environmental point of view, the green in the arid environment is often in direct conflict with the “green”;This paradox is at the heart of the green paradox. Resources needed to maintain green in arid areas (including cities) and to provide green are often costly to the environment. For example, the Green Paradox shows that Bahrain and other non-arid countries have different results in the implementation of greening process. In a dry environment like Bahrain, the contradictions become extreme, even unsustainable. The remarkable thing about the green paradox is its analogism and its ability to see the other side or the other side. As the basic background of human collective survival, landscape is not landscape painting. It is the result of “editing” natural resources through social forces, and it is the interface between nature and exploring nature. Taking landscape design as a sub-discipline of environmental science, “productive landscape” also began to be regarded as unrealistic in the context of the rise of neoliberal economy and the declining welfare state model. Why? In many cases and in many cases, rational eco-planning projects are seen as transcendentalism, or as anti-urban behavior, and eventually even as non-rational behavior, becoming another kind of unsustainable. This is because in the direction of rational eco-city planning, landscape architects appear mainly as environmental advocates, which has proved to be a way away from human and nature. The landscape lacking meaning convolution is unfortunate roundabout. “The fastest distance between two points is a detour, not a straight line,” says architect Tom meine. To prove this, perhaps we can look for answers in the Paradox of Green .Bahrain’s green paradox, from which the author reverses the green paradox of other developed cities, echoes the saying of the bahraini bank: “things tend to go in the worst direction”.

“The green paradox”, with its breadth and thickness, provides a clear structure of ideas, bringing us more than three ideas and a number of illuminating green paradoxes.In bahrain, for example, unreasonable greening (such as large lawns) is not compatible with the local climate. The increase in green space on the surface actually hurts the ecosystem; For another example, the unreasonable construction of water conservancy facilities, which are used to irrigate green lands and exploit large amounts of groundwater, is actually an unsustainable practice. Another example is bahrain’s extreme and arid summer climate, population growth and rapid urban development, and a large number of the original tree species of dates were felled to build new houses, but Gareth Doherty believes that even if these dates were replanted, the original ecological benefits and local emotional and cultural activities towards these plants would be gone. These research results show that the greenness is the core idea of the paradox of green: combine design practice, geography and anthropology, and drive them at the same time.

The paradox of green became the limit of logic, and the difference between landscape logic and being. Concepts and logic exist, but the paradox of green is not limited to concepts and logic. After verification, it is not difficult to find that the reality of landscape is full of contradictions, conflicts and heterogeneity. The Paradox of Green finally brings out the paradox of things, which not only brings the meaning of renewal to the landscape garden, but also brings inspiration to all disciplines. Gareth Doherty has conducted a multidisciplinary study on green and its meaning from the perspectives of aesthetics, architecture, environment, politics and society, which is a negative development method to obtain the location and various aspects of green in the inner shell space of Cornucopia, and his paradox and reality are one-to-one or “one-to-one correspondence”. Gareth Doherty traversed the unidimensional dimension of thinking. With his insight into the lens of nature and the reconstruction of contemporary media, and through the paradox of green into the depth of reality, he carries the thickness of time. In addition to the way of thinking that challenges the logical limits in the paradox of green, we also see the inclusiveness of the landscape discipline. Many landscape design projects are built in landscape ecology only to meet the needs of architectural theory. It has become a trend that landscape designers who practice in this way are tolerant of many seemingly contradictory ecological theories. In recent years, the reason why landscape design draws closer to urbanism rather than to environment-oriented regional planning lies in its tolerance of design culture.

Paradox of Green is not just a color paradox, but the sum paradox of many colors, which is an important revelation of this book. Each color is Gareth Doherty’s speculative depth of field. He had a sense of democracy in his research, holding an equal attitude to every color. He explored bahrain’s “green” landscape on the basis of a long-term landscape fieldwork. There, green represents a great deal of hidden human values, and there is a dialectic tension between colors and tones that are of great significance to other cultures and environments. The six chapters of Paradox of Green focus on blue, red, palm-green, grass-green, beige and white. The implicit argument in his book is that the concepts of “color” and “object” are mutually defined, so the discussion of green becomes a discussion of space. The green paradox changes the landscape from a marginal green background to a more positive prospect space, and then effectively participates in the development of urban space, enabling the landscape to act as a dominant form of urbanism. At the same time, people’s sense of common roles in life has been flattened again. This is because our real daily life enters knowledge anxiety in the excess information. The paradox of green undoubtedly alleviates people’s knowledge anxiety.