I could be wrong about this, I suppose, but I’d say that the ASLA’s continued fixation (“a state of crisis”, “international embarrassment”) on the quality of the turf grass at the National Mall (which remains, despite the patchy grass, a perfectly functional space, as demonstrated recently by the Inauguration) is symptomatic of the kind of thinking (we shrub up and decorate) about the profession of landscape architecture which will ensure that the profession remains irrelevant and impotent for decades to come.  If, at a moment when there is more opportunity to affect real change in national transportation funding priorities than at any other time in my lifetime or to reconsider both the social and spatial consequences of an economy based on the mirage of ever-rising suburban housing prices or to confront problematic infrastructures which treat water as a problem to be shunted rapidly away from cities, rather than as a resource, the primary body representing landscape architects as a whole chooses to focus on the quality of the carpeting in a symbolic space, then we deserve our irrelevance.

And continued irrelevance would be a real shame, because landscape architecture possesses a combination of disciplinary interests (ecology, urbanism, infrastructure, a history of subtlety, etc.) and a set of the analytical tools which could give it real relevance to the challenges designers and cities will face in those coming decades.