His early experiences with the bifurcated landscapes of Scotland—the smoky industrial urbanism of Glasgow and the sublimity of the surrounding environs—had a profound influence on his later thinking.
[2] It was not until after his term in the Parachute Regiment, serving in war-stricken Italy during World War II, however, that he was able to explore the field of urban landscape architecture.
[4] The course featured leading scholars whom McHarg invited to his class to discuss ethics and values, as well as other ideas ranging from entropy to plate tectonics.
In 1960, he hosted his own television show on CBS, The House We Live In, inviting prominent theologians and scientists of the day to discuss the human place in the world, in a style similar to the one he honed teaching "Man and Environment."
Design With Nature was the first work of its kind "to define the problems of modern development and present a methodology or process prescribing compatible solutions".
Always a polemicist, McHarg set his thinking in radical opposition to what he argued was the arrogant and destructive heritage of urban-industrial modernity, a style he described as "Dominate and Destroy."
In 1971 McHarg delivered a speech at the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Portland, Oregon, called "Man: Planetary Disease".
Of man, McHarg said, "He treats the world as a storehouse existing for his delectation; he plunders, rapes, poisons, and kills this living system, the biosphere, in ignorance of its workings and its fundamental value.
Lest this statement be construed as anti-religion, he cites Paul Tillich (Protestantism), Gustav Weigel (Catholicism), and Abram Heschel (Judaism) as noted religious scholars who are also in agreement with him on this point.
This community was developed from timberland located thirty miles north of Houston, by George P. Mitchell, who hired McHarg to consult on the project and, as a result, the original plans featured many of his unique designs.
Located in a north western area of Tehran, Pardisan still remains as a large, relatively un-designed, green space but McHarg's designs were never implemented.
He was also instrumental in the founding of Earth Week, and participated on task forces on environmental issues for the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations[14] McHarg died on 5 March 2001 at the age of eighty from pulmonary disease.
In the summer of 2017, the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design launched a new, interdisciplinary research center in McHarg's honor.