What Can Planners Give Back to the Land?

The planet does not depend on us for survival, but we do. If we expect Earth to keep giving, planners must consider how they reciprocate and nurture the land.

In the Viewpoint, "Planning With the Animacy of the Land" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 91, No. 4), Keisha Maloney proposes a pathway for reorienting urban planning to better connect with and honor the land as a way to also honor Indigenous land relations. She proposes fostering a planning practice that shifts its basic assumptions from authority over land and toward a relationship of understanding land as a living entity.

Identifying Pathways to Reconciliation

Urban planners continue to address the degradation of the environment from colonial and capitalist ways. According to Maloney, planners in Canada are called to advance reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada issued the report 94 Calls to Action, many of which can be addressed at the municipal level. The report requests that all levels of government adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Maloney urges planners to question hidden beliefs in the field, particularly how planning processes transform land into a commodity and sever the built environment from nature. Through such reflection, planners can begin to reconcile with Indigenous peoples by respecting land relationality while advancing sustainable cities.

To advance reconciliatory work, planners are increasingly inviting Indigenous peoples to participate in decision‑making processes, often engaging with Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge. Although there is no agreed‑upon definition, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) can be understood as "the ever‑evolving corpus of observations, practices, and beliefs held by a group of people about the lands and waters where they live" (Conservation and Society, 2017, Page 43).

Learning from traditional ecological knowledge in sustainability planning means pausing to consider and address the implications of our actions for more‑than‑human kin.

Two-Eyed Seeing Framework

Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall suggests using the Two‑Eyed Seeing framework, which recognizes the value of both Western and Indigenous ecological knowledge. This approach allows us to plan in dialogue with animate land, thinking of future generations of human and more-than-human kin.

Drawing on two different ways of knowing is difficult. Maloney warns that planners must actively resist the colonial tendency to reduce Indigenous knowledge to fit the status quo. Selecting individual principles from traditional ecological knowledge can become another mode of assimilating and rendering invisible Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is not extractable information; it is a relational and holistic process.

When improving urban livability, planners can center on more‑than‑human coexistence. Rather than commodifying nature as a service for humans, they can use planning to support the mutual flourishing of humans and more‑than‑human beings as a response to the climate crisis.

Applying Reciprocal Planning

Planning with the animacy of the land recognizes the land as a living entity that holds stories and knowledge in its sedimented layers. The motivation for engaging with land is not to enhance the ecosystem services for human benefit, but to support ecosystems' internal flourishing. In this way, planners can honor Indigenous land relations while advancing more just and sustainable solutions.

Maloney offers the scenario of a planner working on a waterfront redevelopment project and offers possible steps for engaging with the land as a living entity. Recommendations include working with First Nations to grant legal personhood to land and ecological features; engaging with the land to observe more-than-human patterns and needs; investigating archival land records; identifying areas for restoration, human access, and protected ecological areas; and working with Host nations to create informative signage about the history of the land and how to care for the land.

Maloney encourages planners to challenge dominant norms by asking, "How is my praxis giving back to the more‑than‑human relations that sustain us?"

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