The People Look Like Flowers at Last: Coweeta College, Assisted Migration, and American Loneliness

Abstract

This thesis posits that the bonded movement of plants and people can productively engage with American loneliness. The project expands Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in western North Carolina into a forestry college campus. As the country’s 10th “work college”, Coweeta herein adds the production and management practices of climate-ready species to the traditional university outputs of liberal knowledge and social bonds. The campus, near the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, leverages McKaye’s project at once as a climate transect and social region, where the college’s cuttings and seeds are available to the trail’s 3,000 annual “thru-hikers” for distribution to a network of 56 Appalachian Trail communities. Through an “aesthetics of the infinite”, the thesis suggests reciprocal relationships between representation and land ethic. As a grassroots reorientation of assisted migration, the thesis claims landscape architecture as the operative medium for tethering people to place in the age of the “Mega-Eco” project.