The primary cause of youth alienation and drug-taking is that young people aged 11 to 17 have been "designed out of" society - "until they are old enough to get into the pubs", it was claimed yesterday.
Mr Terry O'Regan, founder of Landscape Alliance Ireland, told an Earth Week seminar in Dublin there was "nowhere for kids to gather because we design nothing for them. The signals we send out to that age group is that `we don't want you'."
Young people were being "pushed out of society" and this was creating a sub-culture. As a result, it was hardly surprising that bleak open spaces installed in housing estates had become venues for "feeding horses, taking drugs and holding cider parties".
Dealing with wider issues, Mr O'Regan said people were becoming hysterical about landscape change. Their wish to preserve the status quo was evoked by a line from Van Morrison's song, Coney Island: "Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?" In the past, landscape design was "a privilege enjoyed by a select but powerful minority through royal inheritance, gross wealth and/or force of arms". But the "movers and shakers of landscape change today are still largely the wealthy and the powerful".
However, he conceded that individuals were also having a huge impact on the landscape through "Bungalow Blitz" and said we had not faced up to this phenomenon. "How are we going to get services to people all over the countryside when they're old and grey?"
Politicians seemed "curiously blind and are continuously surprised by the negative impacts of poorly designed landscape change", whether it involved a new factory, housing estate or power station, while "people power" only erupted sporadically after the changes were decided.
Mr O'Regan blamed the limited scope of environmental impact statements on new developments, saying the process was seriously flawed. It should be carried out in two stages - first, to look at the constraints of a site and, second, to assess the impact of developing it.
He also condemned the "culture of retention", under which developers built first and only then sought permission to retain the new building. The only way to eliminate this was for every local authority to "have a bulldozer at the ready" to demolish illegal structures.
There was also a need for more detailed photographic records of the landscape to measure changes, such as France was doing to monitor the retreat of glaciers in the Alps. But the only way of reconciling people to landscape change was to persuade them that it would be better.
Referring to the US U-turn on climate change, Mr O'Regan said the landscape of the planet would be shaped by those who backed George W. Bush, "a simple, fundamentalist person controlled by powerful forces much more dangerous than the Taliban in Afghanistan".
As for the future of biological diversity on the planet, he said God could be seen as a "Big Brother" who had put all of the Earth's species in one room "at least until they start voting each other out - and who is to say that the one that's left will be the human race?"
