Blurred Borderlands: Sustainability and the Urban/Nature Divide at the Frick Environmental Center

Sustainable development is rhetorically framed as exhibiting natural processes, reflected both symbolically and materially. Taking the Frick Environmental Center of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a rhetorical artifact, I argue that spaces where sustainable human-made structures and human-cultivated landscapes meet, reflect blurred borderlands of a culturally constructed urban/nature divide. Considering the Frick Environmental Center as an experiential landscape, my mixed methodology of textual analysis and rhetorical field work identifies how naturalized framing of sustainability bridges the urban/nature divide, inviting restoration, preservation, and construction efforts that are more environmentally engaged.