Erin Addison
addison | usufruct

Erin Addison is a landscape architect, writer, and environmental steward with over 25 years of experience in cultural and natural heritage conservation. As the founder of Addison Usufruct, she specializes in sustainable landscape design, arid land planning, and environmentally responsible landscapes.

I grew up on the edge of Santa Barbara, when the place we lived was still essentially rural. I loved to walk in our foothills, and I loved plants. I was a 4-H girl, into cooking and raising chickens. I had fifty hens, and my first business was an egg route — I went around my neighborhood with a red wagon full of egg cartons, delivering to my customers. I had a rooster that was two-foot-one and weighed fourteen pounds, won a blue ribbon at the county fair, and chased my little brother (bonus).

Many years later I am an historian and landscape architect, researcher and writer. I wrote my dissertation on apocalypticism in the ancient Mediterranean world. My academic career brought me to Jordan, where eventually Fulbright research on Umayyad period water politics drew me into work on Jordan’s contemporary water concerns.