Whitesides, AmySchwartz, Eric James2024-05-2120242024-05-162024Schwartz, Eric James. 2024. The People Look Like Flowers at Last: Coweeta College, Assisted Migration, and American Loneliness. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.31298805https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37378620This 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.application/pdfenDesignAmerican studiesForestryThesis or Dissertation2024-05-21