Warren Bacon ('62 BLA) belongs among the important recent leaders in landscape architecture.  After 1970, landscape architecture saw a period of tremendous evolution from a small, declining enterprise mainly concerned with small projects and aesthetic and private goals to a rapidly growing profession critical to achieving many social goals for environmental protection and comprehensive planning in public and private projects at many scales.  A few landscape architects, like Ian McHarg, Lawrence Halpern, and Phil Lewis, are identified as leaders of this movement, and the UO College of Design should recognize a place for Warren Bacon among them. 

Warren's work in the development of landscape architecture occurred inside the Federal government where it is too likely not to be noticed.  Early in his career he more than anyone else uniquely and incisively recognized the special requirements of making landscape architects effective players in implementing new environmental laws.  Landscape architecture was ill-equipped to surmount new challenges related to administrative law, evidentiary accountability, public processes and property rights, politics, and competition among diverse resource values and associated professionals based on old, exploitation-based sciences.  Private-sector leaders in the field did not effectively deal with or even address these very real problems but Warren led the way. 

Warren Bacon was the most prominent landscape architect in the U.S. Forest Service from 1974 till his retirement in 1998.  He led the development and establishment of three major administrative tools for landscape architects:  The Visual Management System, the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, and the Scenery Management System.  These are now widely employed and emulated worldwide as foundations for dealing with scenic and recreation resources in public lands and landscapes.  Warren recognized more clearly than anyone else that visual and recreational resources needed to be adopted as resources par excellence, just as other resources were adopted by their own professionals in his agency.  He saw that these values needed every bit as rigorous and effective an advocacy by landscape architects as other established values, and that failure would ill serve important social needs and the success of land management. 

Warren was quiet, but persistent and tireless in pursuing this agenda.  He constantly traveled the country, generously mentored landscape architects, built teams, and leaned against inhumane policies and practices toward public lands everywhere he went.  He led the development and writing of more than ten manuals for landscape management on topics from timber harvests to ski areas and power lines.  Within the Federal government, these, more than anything else, demonstrated how landscapes could be dealt with holistically as places subject to public scrutiny.  He was the chief landscape architect and/or recreation planner for two Forest Service regions, was offered the position of chief landscape architect for that agency on several occasions, but chose to remain where he could stay in touch with real problems and develop young landscape architects. 

Celebration courtesy of Robert Ribe, FASLA, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture