| Interests
Professor Korostoff’s current foci are: abandoned mine lands and mine drainage in Pennsylvania; sustainable design and landscape systems; Latino and minority participation in the “Green Industry”; and the quality of student life at Penn State. He teaches advanced design studio; sites and systems regional studio; and “Plants, People, Place” a course on native plants in landscape design.
The legacy of 150 years of industrial coal extraction has left the Pennsylvania with 2,500 miles of polluted streams and 250,000 acres of un-reclaimed land. Poisoned by bizarre cocktails of heavy metals orange, lifeless streams, lace the landscapes of the Pennsylvania from the anthracite region of the northeast to the bituminous coal fields of the west. Scarred mine land remain un-reclaimed, decades after disturbance. Once thriving, ethnically diverse communities, experiments in industrial urbanism, are slowly fading to gray in the face of changing values and technology. As a Board member of the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds Neil Korostoff helped to address these issues by directing grants to watershed organizations for critical and experimental remediation projects for the past 12 years. Abandoned mine lands and abandoned mine drainage has also been the focus of advanced design studio projects and research on reforestation.
Sustainability is a hot concept in design today. Professor Korostoff is working with the ASLA’s Sustainable Sites Initiative to develop an advanced sustainability curriculum for Penn State. This curriculum will anticipate hoped for changes in professional accreditation and licensure that will reflect the values of sustainability.
Any casually observer will note that many if not most of the landscape workers in the “Green Industry” or are Latino, yet few of the design professionals share that ethnicity. In his recent paper “Social and Ethnic Stratification in the U.S. Green Industry – The Gap Between Elite Design Professions and Laborers” Professor Korostoff explores the dimensions of that gap for the future of the profession of landscape architecture. |
