Pamela Conrad is out to restore nature to our cities?and help them face future ecological disasters Growing up on a 100-acre farm in rural Missouri, Pamela Conrad spent virtually all of her childhood outdoors. Wading through swollen creeks in springtime and helping her father bale hay during harvest, she developed an early awareness of the often precarious relationship between humans and the powerful natural world.
?Living that closely to the environment helps you truly understand life and death,? she says. ?If your garden fails, you don?t have food. If the cows get out, you might get hurt.?
Majoring in plant science at the University of Missouri, where she became the first person in her family to attend college, Conrad started to see how the land around her could not only sustain life but also be deployed as a tool for engineering a better society, from restoring fragile watersheds to combating rising temperatures. An internship for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took Conrad to Los Angeles, where she earned a landscape architecture degree at nearby Cal Poly Pomona and collaborated closely with biologists to restore ecosystems ravaged by LA?s rapid urbanization. After working in Portland, Oregon, and Shanghai, Conrad landed at CMG Landscape Architecture in San Francisco, where she joined a project that kickstarted bigger regional conversations about water and resiliency: a plan to redevelop Treasure Island, a former military property situated just adjacent to the Ba...