MICHAEL MEIHAUS

Principal and Lead Restoration Practitioner at Studio Balcones, Licensed Landscape Architect in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, Ponderosa Pine Partnership Award recipient for innovation in urban forest restoration, collaboration, and leadership, and Trail Foundation Eco Committee Member.

Michael Meihaus is a Landscape Architect and Principal at Studio Balcones in Austin, TX. Meihaus specializes in environmental restoration and recreation with experience ranging from design and construction of parks and trails to ecological and wild-land restoration implementation. Previously, Meihaus served with the National Park Service on the Elwha Dam Removal Project in Olympic National Park overseeing re-vegetation and ecological monitoring efforts. Then as Restoration Program Manager for Fred Phillips Consulting for four years, he helped design and build over 40 ecological restoration and recreation projects across the West and in Texas. 

Meihaus has a breadth of experience working with rural communities. His technical expertise combined with his humble approach to design make him a welcoming voice in a diverse array of rural spaces. Meihaus brings an on-the-ground ecological restoration perspective to the DIALOGUES that can be hard to find in academia and landscape architecture practice. When Meihaus isn't designing, he's most often unreachable - rafting, mountain biking or digging in the dirt somewhere in Texas.

Michael Meihaus (Image Credit: Fred Phillips)

Can you give examples of different scales of ecological restoration projects you’ve worked? What was the role of designers in these projects?

Sometimes very sensitive critical habitats like wetlands can be restored within just a handful of acres or less, in other cases it’s hundreds or thousands of acres. The scale of a project itself is often not very important and out of your control. Big or small you are often working within a greater effort to restore a whole eco-region, complex, or system. It's important to put individual projects into the context of the greater goal.

One example of scale is a "small" meadow restoration at a newly developed fire station here in Austin, Texas. We transformed a former parking lot into a respite and food source for pollinators, birds, small mammals and reptiles. On the one hand it's just a pocket prairie, but on the other it's one of many small patches of land that help infill the urban gap in a greater ecosystem. Sometimes all you can achieve is one small stitch in the many threads connecting the urban, sub-urban, rural and wild. Other times as a designer you can impact thousands of acres or more with enough time to listen and just a few strokes on the drawing board.

We are working with a Navajo led non-profit called the Hozho Center to restore 2,000 acres of Dine Churro Sheep pasture at Borrego Pass, New Mexico. A project scale like that can be intimidating. By listening to the histories people have to tell, and focusing on the vegetation, the soil, and our water resources within the landscape, we are helping a community decolonize a part of the traditional Dinétah landscape, exhibiting to the greater Dine community that it is still possible to revitalize traditional lifeways. The Dine already know how to live the way they want to live; the skills and knowledge are not forgotten. It's the resources for a traditional agro-pastoral life that were systematically dismantled, taken from them, and destroyed. With some simple illustrations and plans, we can remind people what is possible. Vision can be a hard thing to reconcile when you are stuck too close to the problem itself. At the Hozho Center, they are doing all the hard work themselves - we are just helping to demonstrate what they are already capable of to help garner more support and resources to create their vision faster. Design can be a kick-starter, but then you have to get out of the way and let the engine take over.

Back pasture stock pond - Hozho Center

How do you build trust when entering new communities and what happens to those relationships when the work is over?

It takes time and you're not always going to work with the comfort of having it. But every new project comes with lessons learned that can help you build trust faster in the future. One of these lessons for me was to trust myself first- my skills and my intuition. If you are comfortable with yourself and the job you are there to do, then others will tend to be more comfortable around you. Express yourself and focus on the positive. Humility is also key. Be humble and kind. Give people time and space to tell you their stories. And if they are reluctant, then tell some of your own. An unfamiliar community needs to know as much about you as you are trying to learn from them. After all you are the stranger, not them. In my experience a lot of project stakeholders are not getting paid for their time and expertise the same way I am. In fact, most of them are volunteering their time. A mutual and equitable exchange should be the baseline, but striving for fair compensation for all parties would really do wonders to build trust.

As a landscape architect, sometimes I feel the urge to explain what that means. My advice is - don't. Nobody cares and it won't gain you any credibility or trust. I often don't tell people I'm a landscape architect or explain the profession unless they ask. And when I do I make it a part of my story, my life's choices, why this and not that. But most times it's just better to be Michael - the big redhead who likes to stare at plants a little too long, talk about the last time it rained and kick the dirt.

Relationships with former clients and collaborators vary a lot. I love hearing from former clients years later - but I also have to take silence as a form of satisfaction. I like to joke that it's my job to work myself out of a job. To not be needed any more might mean you've passed the torch to the folks that live there and carry on the important work. As time passes it gets harder to stay in touch especially when working in far flung corners. I really have to tell myself it's okay to let things go and remind myself it’s okay to reconnect when you feel the urge. Photographs are a great way to stay in touch. I take a lot of boring pictures, but I get lucky once in a while. I make it a point to share those. And I like to ask folks to send me updates. Photographs are way easier and more effective these days than emails. Most folks I won’t talk to ever again, but at the very least I have their phone number and they have mine.  

Michael Meihaus at the Hozho Center Design Charrette (Image Credit: Dan Zedick)

What are the limits of designers in working with the scientific community? What are the opportunities?

I wouldn't necessarily say there are limits when working with scientists, but there are opportunities. Our regulatory agencies and laws that protect, say, endangered species or wilderness come with a lot of constraints, and for good reason. But many of those rules were written with a conservation lens, not a restoration one. In my work repairing degraded landscapes, even under the strictest jurisdiction, the scientists are often open to handling the rules in a manner that serves a greater purpose. As a designer and practitioner, I try to understand as much about science as I can without wasting anyone's time. It's less about bending the rules per se (which is definitely a waste of everyone's time) and more like finding new ways to use the rules alongside the experts.

My advice if you want to learn the science quickly is talk to the folks doing the fieldwork. More often than not, I've found the person doing bird counts or water samples for the last decade to be the most enlightening and to the point. No offense to lead biologists but sometimes they are not the best at talking to project stakeholders. As the one responsible for planning or design, you may also need to be an interpreter. I see this as an opportunity to wear another hat and fill a need - walk people through what it means for their land or project. And if you don’t know how to explain it then find the person who does and play interpreter. There is always an expert to be found and people like to hear from people, not reports.

It also seems relevant to mention the other ways of knowing that are outside of and predate western science. Working with indigenous folks in North America I’ve learned that project research often involves traditions of storytelling and prayer. It’s a kind of knowledge every bit as astute and relevant as the latest science. The Dine for example have a lot of stories, prayers, and entire philosophies about healing and the land. We make time for prayer and storytelling in our Hozho Center meetings. Those really resonate with me and offer a greater understanding of the place and people I am working with. 

The Hozho Center at Borrego Pass, NM - a landscape under threat of erosion and the impacts of climate change (Image Credit: Michael Meihaus)

The awareness of local knowledge is often discussed when working with rural communities. Can you give examples of how this knowledge has been used in projects?

Even in a town of 12 people there will be an expert on everything. And if you haven't found them yet then ask the other 11! It's your job to seek out the local knowledge. When you do find the experts, they will tell you stories and things you would never glean from maps or databases or reports. If they trust you enough, they may even tell you their ideas. For me this is gold - my ideas are usually crap anyway.

Just recently I was on a call with the Hozho Center project team. The clients invited another farmer from a nearby community to the meeting. After page turning through our most recent drawings the farmer chimed in with "I didn't hear anything about the soil." Ironically our entire drawing set was about controlling erosion and capturing rainwater. I kept using the words sand and sediment in the presentation, but I had nothing to back it up. I made too many assumptions without enough information and for that moment I felt foolish, but I was glad it was time for my lesson. We then learned that hidden beneath the sandy soil drifting from the mesa, is a richer complex perfect for growing peach trees - one of the very goals of the larger project. We had them in the wrong place and it could have taken a lot longer, and a lot more holes with a manual soil auger to figure that out. Sometimes you can get those answers a lot faster if you're not afraid of being a fool. 

A richer soil complex below the sandy soils of the Hozho Center lands “perfect for growing peach trees.”

What does your ideal future for the rural countryside look like?

Not to be too cheeky - but I don't live in the countryside, so I don’t feel it's my place to speculate on the ideals of others. I have occasionally lived a semi-rural life if you count minivan campers or 1970’s NPS employee housing, but only temporarily and only for work. But I can dream, and in my dream the rural countryside looks more wild… and with fewer cows. This is not a popular opinion in Texas, but I am unapologetically anti-cow. We are far above the bovine carrying capacity of the intermountain west, and we have all the polluted and denuded and eroded landscapes to prove it.

I also dream about a world of abundance, not scarcity. And while I’d like to see more widespread sustainable land management practices, I also think there is a real opportunity to let some rural places re-wild with a simple and passive approach. Especially the places where climate change will ultimately drive human populations downward - these may not be the wastelands we fear in the wake of catastrophic change in the weather, but maybe rather sanctuaries for the survivors in our absence. 

El Chausse Restoration Wetlands, formerly an old oxbow of the Lower Colorado River Delta overtaken by Salt Cedar. Project by Fred Phillips Consulting

Images provided by Michael Meihaus