Long before the recently coined epochal Anthropocene, architects, planners, and what today would be called environmentalists, wrote alarming and prescriptive screeds, intended to redirect the pace, character, and scale of how humankind was altering, not only the face of the planet through construction, but the deeper means by which the planet self-regulated. Yet, for many advocates of ecological design practices – an approach singularly associated with Ian L. McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969) – the book seemed as if it had burst forth fully grown, absent precedent. This chapter briefly situates McHarg’s seminal work among post-war architectural treatises that preceded and influenced it, along with several key earlier precedents, explores its place today, amidst contemporary discourses, particularly in relation to its absence or misrepresentation, and why this should matter. A series of autobiographical testimonials and large-scale technocratic case studies, Design with Nature’s opening and closing chapters reveal something more. Its well-mapped case studies notwithstanding, at its core is a difficult balancing act; McHarg proposes that the longstanding anthropocentric view of Nature (which he severally traces back to The Book of Genesis in an obsessive Judeo-Christian manner) which requires the acquiescence of nature to human artifice, must be replaced by humankind “listening to nature” – ideally an equal weighting of the “anthropocentric” and “ecological views.” Whether McHarg resolves this equation is another matter. Throughout Design with Nature, he jettisons the anthropocentric with withering pejoratives at every turn. In 1969, this was a novel proposition that captivated generations.