Hi everybody! My name is Ben Ceci and I am a 3^rd year Landscape Architecture student, minoring in horticulture, at University Park. I was born and raised in Greenwich, CT and hope to use my education to add an architectural branch to my dad’s landscaping / site development business. As a designer of the outdoors, I think that it’s very important to learn about the land, how it functions, and how I can design in the best possible way to preserve the land. With the landscape architecture department focusing on sustainability, it would also be beneficial to learn about how humans are directly affecting the environment and how I can design in a more sustainable way. Although I’m from CT, my whole family consists of die hard Steelers fans and whenever the Steelers have a home game in the playoffs, we rent a bus and 30 – 40 of us buckle up and spend the weekend in Pittsburgh. I love to travel as well so learning about the geography in different areas interests me as well.

A big issue in the world today is the increase in population and how to deal with it. Everyday more and more people are born and more and more farmland is being developed. This is a recipe for failure because eventually there will not be enough resources to feed all of these people. Once the agricultural soils are developed, they are basically destroyed and no longer ideal for farming. This has a lot to do with scale because the population is increasing both locally and worldwide while the farmland is decreasing locally and worldwide as well. It is our generation’s responsibility to plan out development and design sustainably in order to allow the future generations to live in the same way that we do now, if not better.