By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

TERRACINA, Italy - Before Michele Assunto hauls in his fishing net from the banks of a reed-lined canal here, he uses a pole to push the garbage out of the way. “They really need to clean this up,” he growls.
In many parts of this affluent coastal region between Rome and Naples, canals dumping effluent into the Mediterranean from farms and factories coexist with fishermen and beachgoers. This area needs considerable work to return to a more pristine state. For places as far gone as this one, however, a new breed of landscape architect is recommending a radical solution: not so much to restore the environment as to redesign it.
“It is so ecologically out of balance that if it goes on this way, it will kill itself,” said Alan Berger, a landscape architecture professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was excitedly poking around the smelly canals recently.
“You can’t remove the economy and move the people away,” he added. “Ecologically speaking, you can’t restore it; you have to go forward, to set this place on a new path.”
Instead of simply recommending that polluting farms and factories be shut, Professor Berger specializes in creating new ecosystems in severely damaged environments: redirecting water flow, moving hills, building islands and planting new species to absorb pollution, to create natural, though “artificial,” landscapes that can ultimately sustain themselves.
Professor Berger recently signed an agreement with Latina Province to design a master ecological plan for the most polluting part of this region. He wants the government to buy a tract of nearly 200 hectares in a strategic valley through which the most seriously polluted waters now pass. There, he intends to create a wetland that would serve as a natural cleansing station before the waters flowed on to the sea and residential areas.
Of course, better regulation is also needed, to curb the dumping of pollutants into the canal. But a careful mix of the right kinds of plants, dirt, stones and drainage channels would filter the water as it slowly passed through, he said. The land would also function as a new park.
Professor Berger acknowledged that the approach was different from the kind normally advocated by established environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund or the Nature Conservancy, which generally seek to restore land or preserve it in its natural state, often by closing down or cleaning up nearby polluters. But that approach may not work in places that are already severely degraded, Professor Berger said.
“The solution has to be as artificial as the place,” he said. “We are trying to invent an ecosystem in the midst of an entirely engineered, polluted landscape.”
At first glance, Latina does not look like an environmental disaster zone. Bordered by mountains to the east and the Mediterranean to the west, it is a place of spectacular rural vistas and even a few famous beach resorts, like Sabaudia.
Indeed, the environment here is successful, in economic terms at least. Two thousand years of “water management” have turned the once-malaria-infested Pontine Marshes into a region, Latina Province, that is among Italy’s most prosperous. It is home to industrial parks, resorts filled with weekend homes, and farms - some of which make Italy the world’s leading producer of kiwis.
Latina’s prosperity is built on drained swampland, kept habitable by six pumps as huge and noisy as airplanes, put in place in 1934 by Mussolini. Each day they pull millions of liters of water out of the soggy ground, directing it into an elaborate system of cement-lined canals that ultimately dump it into the sea.
But prosperous does not necessarily mean sustainable.
Professor Berger came to Rome’s American Academy in 2007 on a yearlong fellowship to study the history of the Pontine Marshes. It was only after he started to collect data on the land and the water that he realized how damaged the area was.
Professor Berger found that half of the water in the system was severely contaminated, he said, with phosphorus and nitrogen levels that get worse as it runs through the canals toward the coast. Presented with his research, officials were surprised at the level of pollution.
“He studied the zone from a different point of view than ours,” said Carlo Perotto, the planning director for the province. “We had different people concerned with water, industry and agriculture. He opened a new way of thinking.”