Part III – The consuming city

The last post focused on the surprising lack of conservation research on cities and biodiversity, given the rapid urbanization of mankind. Beyond direct habitat fragmentation, the other significant way in which cities impact biodiversity is through consumption.

The global footprint of cities is growing.

This is partly a function of sheer numbers: most people on the planet now live in urban areas. Three out of four Americans (United States) reside in cities and suburbs; two thirds of Latin American residents live in urban areas. By 2030, China will have more than 220 cities with a million or more inhabitants.

According to a Nature Conservancy study in 2008, urban growth around the world threatens biodiversity.

“While the effects of urbanization are very localized, cumulatively it is a big threat to biodiversity,” says [Robert] McDonald, the lead-author of the study. “Our urban footprint covers much of the globe and is coming closer to stomping out many endangered species and posing new risks to protected areas and parks.”

But it’s not simply population that creates the footprint.

Welcome to the Overshoot

Last Saturday was Overshoot Day (or Ecological Debt Day), which marks when the humanity’s consumption of the world’s resources surpasses the annual productive capacity of the planet. Or as RP Siegel writes:

In a way, it’s a bit like finding out on August 21st that you’re not going to get another paycheck until next New Year’s Day. How would you deal with that?

Mathis Wackernagel, the president of the Global Footprint Network, applies this concern to the state of the planet.

The situation is no less dire when it comes to our ecological budget. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and food shortages — these are all clear signs that we can no longer finance our consumption on credit. Nature is foreclosing.

Overshoot Day is a useful concept to explain the impact of human society. The fact that “it now takes the Earth one year and five months to regenerate what we use in a year” is pretty sobering. It’s also important to remember that the ecological debt is cumulative: the planet’s resources do not reset every year. Furthermore, the burdens created by the well-off tend to fall on more vulnerable communities elsewhere.

Finally, the rate of consumption is accelerating: this year the human footprint has reached “overshoot” a month faster than the previous year.

What drives the Overshoot?

So does population or overconsumption have the greater influence? It’s not necessarily a simple question. A couple recent items by David Biello (here) and Jonathan Foley (here) thoughtfully address the issues.

What is clear, however, is that cities have a key role in this relationship between humanity and the Earth’s resources.

Consumption driven by cities deepens the pressure on global systems. City dwellers tend to have higher incomes (and greater income disparities) and inhabit new social relationships. This combination fosters new markets and encourages consumerism — a kind of hyper-consumption stoked by advertising.

Supply chains radiate like tentacles from urban areas (themselves sprawling) to the farthest reaches of the planet. Food mile calculations start in distant landscapes and terminate in urban supermarkets and restaurants.

While large cities are notably energy efficient, the gains of urban density can be quickly outweighed by the increase in total embodied energy of goods consumed. According to the UN Environmental Program (UNEP),

One third of the average US household’s carbon footprint is due to emissions caused abroad producing goods imported into the US market.

Urban dwellers in the US, Canada, Australia, and other developed nations have a much larger footprint that city folk in other countries. Wackernagel and William Rees estimate that

a typical North American city with a population of 650,000 would require 30,000 square kilometres of land—an area roughly the size of Vancouver Island, Canada—to meet domestic needs alone without even including the environmental demands of industry. In comparison, a similar size city in India would require 2,800 square kilometres.

The UNEP study suggested that agriculture and energy are the primary forces of environmental change.

“How the world is fed and fueled will in large part define development in the 21st century as one that is increasingly sustainable or a dead end for billions of people.

“Current patterns of production and consumption of both fossil fuels and food are draining freshwater supplies; triggering losses of economically-important ecosystems such as forests; intensifying disease and death rates and raising levels of pollution to unsustainable levels.

And it is an urban penchant for consumption that continues to drive resource extraction, manufacturing, and their related impacts around the globe.

A recent study (also here) found that the primary forces driving deforestation are the rise of big cities and international trade. Increasing urban demand for agricultural products and biofuels greatly impact land use.

“The main drivers of tropical deforestation have shifted from small-scale landholders to domestic and international markets that are distant from the forests,” said lead author Ruth DeFries, a professor at the Earth Institute’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. “One line of thinking was that concentrating people in cities would leave a lot more room for nature. But those people in cities and the rest of the world need to be fed. That creates a demand for industrial-scale clearing.”

This vast shift is now happening primarily in the global South.

But the demand itself is not solely from developed nations. While cities in the developed world have a larger footprint, this pattern is being mirrored in the developing world, as more people funnel into urban areas. The food demands of cities in the emerging economies of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), in particular, will push agricultural expansion.

Agricultural output in the Bric nations will grow three times as fast as in the major developed countries, the joint United Nations-OECD study said.

And rising incomes and urbanisation in developing states will drive growth.

“Developing countries will provide the main source of growth for world agricultural production, consumption and trade,” the report said.

“As incomes rise, diets are expected to slowly diversify away from staple foods towards increased meats and processed foods that will favour livestock and dairy products.

“For virtually all commodities, the projected growth in imports and exports of developing economies [over the next decade] exceeds that of the OECD area,” said the report.

The vast demand encourages agribusiness-driven exploitation. Where the main causes of deforestation were once the cumulative impacts of individual actions, now large-scale land grabs and conversion to agriculture have become a primary concern. Opportunistic agribusiness tends to exploit nations with weak governance structures. So this is not simply an issue of urban-driven demand, but also one of land tenure in the Global South, distribution, and a global food system.

Not just mega-cities

It’s uncertain (at least to me) whether the hyperconsuming mega-cities or the small to medium-sized cities — where most of global population growth during the next few decades will occur — will have a greater collective footprint.

The carbon footprint — and impact on land use and deforestation — of the megacities may be larger given the consumption levels. The sheer number and distribution of smaller cities, however, may end up disrupting more habitat and contributing more to biodiversity loss.

The rapid expansion of cities will test the capacity of urban governance (i.e., haphazard systems, untrained managers, corruption).  Small to medium-sized cities may face the “double whammy” of rapid, unplanned expansion and a “brain drain” of more talented or educated individuals to larger cities. The urban response will determine the scale of social and environmental impacts.

In any case, the future of humanity will be found in cities. As Robert McDonald from the Nature Conservancy concludes:

“Only by addressing this growing conflict between cities and biodiversity can society achieve genuine conservation in an urbanizing world.”

Related posts:

1. Biodiversity and the City 2
2. Biodiversity and the City

This is the Amazon rainforest. Or at least a part of it.

Last week, an item in the Guardian (UK) highlighted a surprising connection between the Amazon rainforest and the Sahara desert — how one region in Chad supplies the Amazon with half of the rainforest’s mineral nutrients.

Around 40m tons of dust is carried by prevailing winds from the Sahara to fertilise the Amazon basin each year. This is a very satisfying finding, since the extraordinary fertility of the Amazon rainforest – one of the richest and most biodiverse places on earth – has been a puzzle. Tropical rains leach nutrients from jungle soils, and the soils of the Amazon forest are notoriously poor, which is why clearance for cattle farming is such a bad idea. Biologists had calculated that the forest needed at least 50m tons of fresh mineral nutrient each year to keep its trees tall and in leaf. In 2006 an international team of researchers established that at least half of this annual mineral supply is quarried from one tiny location in the Sahara, the Bodélé depression in Chad. A combination of fortuitously placed mountain ranges that flank a basin of diatomite sands so focus the winter winds as to scour the depression and lift from it an average of 700,000 tons of dust each day, and air-freight it across the Atlantic.

So for thousands of years, and without any fuss, a tiny part of one of Africa’s poorest countries has annually subsidised the growth economy of one of the world’s most richly endowed. This discovery is yet another insight into the intricate dance performed by earth, air, fire and water in the service of life; and another reminder of the enduring intercontinental interdependence that sustains human civilisation. We should respect the IUCN’s [International Union for Conservation of Nature] concern for the deserts. Without green things, we could not breathe. Without deserts, there might be no forests.

NASA’s Earth Observatory posts satellite images of massive dust clouds — including the one above — blowing from deserts (and other brilliant photographs from space).

According to the Climate Matters blog of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, scientists from a wide range of disciplines convened earlier this summer to coordinate their research on dust, much in the way that the oceanographic community came together in the 1990s to collaborate more effectively. Why dust?

Dust is a global phenomenon. Where it comes from, where it goes, and how it impacts climate and the biogeochemistry of land and oceans are questions that span all the realms of earth science.

More:

Dust influences the radiative balance of the planet in two different ways, either directly by scattering and absorbing incoming solar radiation, or indirectly by changing the optical properties of clouds, themselves an important player in the climate system. Dust also contains iron, a limiting nutrient in many areas of the ocean, so when dust falls onto the ocean, it can act as a fertilizer for the growth of algae, or phytoplankton, which uses CO2. Dust not only affects climate, but also is influenced by it: its production, atmospheric transport and deposition are sensitive to climatic conditions.

During Earth’s history, dust has been strongly linked with climatic conditions: Ice cores and marine sediments tell us that the ice age world was much dustier than today’s world. Thus dust is both a driver and a passive recorder of climate change under different climatic regimes of the Earth’s past. However, its exact role in past climate change remains poorly constrained. Understanding the links between dust and climate in the past will be crucial to evaluate the future impacts of dust on the Earth’s climate system in a warming world.

One could add a recent study (here and here) that suggests soot may be the second greatest contributor to global warming — behind carbon dioxide, but ahead of methane. Produced by the combustion of fossil fuels and borne around the globe by winds, soot helps to accelerate the melting of glaciers and Arctic ice by absorbing more of the sun’s radiation. Controlling soot may be the most effective short-term measure to slow warming.

On this ceaseless swirl of land, air, and water, everything is in motion. The movement patterns are part of the relative stability of the climate system around which life has evolved and upon which we rely. Climate change’s uncertain impacts on the atmospheric and oceanic flow and upon the well-timed relationships between plants and animals naturally raise great concern. Wind and water also transport pollutants across state and national boundaries and even from continent to continent. Whether they involve global warming or specific pollutants, these vast connections make all life “downstream.”

No related posts.

Part II – In an urban world, where are the ecologists?

What happens to biodiversity in areas that become more urban? The short answer, not surprisingly, is that urbanization decreases biodiversity.

In a review article published in Science a couple years ago, Nancy Grimm and colleagues wrote that urban land use tends to

reduce both species richness and evenness for most biotic communities, despite increases in abundance and biomass of birds and arthropods. Because the urban footprint extends far beyond municipal boundaries, urbanization may also reduce native species diversity at regional and global scales.

Cities have a huge impact through local habitat loss and fragmentation. More broadly, urban consumption helps to drive global environmental change.

The longer answer, however, is that we don’t know enough about urban biodiversity and how to protect ecological systems amidst urban growth.

This is significant, because the Earth is more and more an urban planet. The Population Institute recently forecast that the human population will grow to nearly 9.5 billion by 2050. Between natural increase and migration, most of the population growth will occur in cities in developing nations. By 2030, two thirds of humans will live in urban areas.

Climate change/destabilization, biodiversity loss, and agricultural land grabs (stemming in part from food demand from urban areas) may drive much of the urban migration in the developing world.

“Ecologists shun the urban jungle”

While tools like wildlife corridors and habitat conservation plans can help to preserve ecosystems facing rapid urban growth, several recent items highlight the vast challenge of supporting biodiversity in an urbanizing world.

First, conservation research is simply not looking at urban areas.

An item in Nature News suggests that only one in six papers on conservation addressed regions used by humans and only 4% studied urban or suburban areas.

The world’s top ecologists are failing to study the landscapes that most need work, and they risk delaying conservation efforts and making their subject irrelevant.

That is the stark message from US researchers who have quantified the extent to which ecologists devote themselves to pristine wilderness at the expense of inhabited regions. The bias is a major problem for both the field and the environment, they say, because it is areas used by humans — which take up most of the Earth’s land-mass — that are in most need of conservation.

The piece discusses work presented this past week at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). According to Terry Chapin, the new president of the ESA:

It is really important that ecologists do research on areas populated by people. I would hate to go so far as to say studies of pristine areas are not important, but we clearly need to know much more about the direct ways in which we are affecting the biosphere.

There are undoubtedly ecologists whose research focuses on the urban landscape, but this still appears to be an emerging field of study. This article mentions five research “nodes” addressing urban environments as social-ecological systems (including the previously quoted Nancy Grimm):

Marina Alberti’s at the University of Washington, Nancy Grimm at Arizona State University, Stewart Pickett and colleagues at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, Mark McDonnell at the Australian Research Center for Urban Ecology, and Herbert Sukopp in Germany.

Second, as a post on Conservation Bytes suggests, conservation studies rarely lead to actual conservation, in part because of the siloed approach of researchers whose communication primarily echoes within the academic arena. The presentation cited was specific to tropical forest research, but the post also discussed considerations for all researchers.

These tidbits reflect the recent state of biodiversity research, which may in turn highlight the traditional bent of academia and its funding sources, as well as the difficulties of studying complex urban-ecosystem interactions. They also say little about the efforts of ecologists working for nonprofit organizations, such as Conservation International or the Nature Conservancy or especially local conservation groups, or for local or state departments of natural resources/environment/parks.

But the two realizations above may contribute to a significant third item: While there has been an increase in the number of protected areas around the globe, little progress has been made towards the goals set by the Convention on Biological Diversity (2002).

On a positive note, 2010 and the International Year of Biodiversity have brought relative successes on the biodiversity front, even as climate change’s roller coaster year continues (Copenhagen, Climategate, climate bill in the US Congress, etc.). The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study brought attention to the economic benefits of biodiversity and ecosystem services. A June conference in Busan, Korea, has led to the creation of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) — basically an IPCC for biodiversity. IPBES promises to bring greater coherence to fragmented conservation efforts.

Given the growing human impact on living systems across the globe, more foresight, research, and action is needed to ensure that governments (and individuals) protect urbanizing landscapes for biodiversity as well as climate change resilience.

—

Part I focused on a wonderful video promoting the Biodiversity Campaign from the European Commission on the Environment.

Related posts:

1. Biodiversity and the City
2. Biodiversity and the City 3

Part I

On Worldchanging, Amanda Reed posted this remarkable video from the Biodiversity Campaign that the European Commission on the Environment launched earlier this year.

It’s a lovely piece that I hope reaches a large audience. What is surprising is the explicit focus on connecting urbanization and biodiversity loss. The ad seeks to shift the ways in which city dwellers envision the world.

This is brilliant. Now that more than four billion human beings — half of the human population — live in urban settlements, fostering a deeper understanding of connections between humans and nature and our intertwined futures has become increasingly difficult. Yet this remains a central challenge for our civilization, as it continues to press alarmingly against planetary boundaries.

According to the description of the video:

Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth including ecosystems, species and genes. We are part of biodiversity and our lives depend on it. And this life supporting biodiversity is disappearing from our cities at an alarming rate. Today it is the sparrow, but tomorrow it could be us.

Amanda Reed writes in the Worldchanging article:

While the video above is more about a problem than a solution, I think it is a compelling way to communicate the issue of biodiversity and interconnectedness to a large audience, which in turn can perhaps spur greater action and interest in solutions. The trick though, is to grasp the large scope of the issue, and spur action at the right scale and speed.

Reed goes on to suggest that the actions for change recommended by the Biodiversity Campaign are overly limited to the individual scale and, hence, insufficient to address the “large-scale systems of industry” that drive global biodiversity loss. Indeed, the problems are in large part systemic, making change necessary at many levels.

Business decisions make sense from a narrowly economic perspective optimizing the path from source to market. New reports connecting business and biodiversity — such as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) — will help to educate the business community and policy makers, expand consideration of ecosystem services, and tip businesses towards less harmful options.

Campaigns that reframe our relationship with nature – specifically as an urban species – serve as an important complement.

Related posts:

1. Biodiversity and the City 2
2. Biodiversity and the City 3

Architect Bill Reed recently spoke at the Living Future 10 conference in Seattle. Reed, a principal at the Integrative Design Collaborative, was a founding board member of the US Green Building Council. Julia Levitt from Worldchanging wrote a nice piece about Reed’s talk, which was part of a panel entitled, “Integrating the Whole System — The Practice of Living Systems or Regenerative Design.” (A video and transcript will be forthcoming on the Living Futures website.)

Reed was just one of many fascinating speakers at what must have been a marvelous event. Check out this item from Worldchanging for more coverage.

Some excerpts of Levitt’s piece:

[Reed] opened by offering two big questions to the audience: if sustainability is about sustaining life, then what is life about? What will our design practices and organizations look like if we are intentional about sustainability?

“Sustainable” and “regenerative” are words which, when spoken conscientiously, evoke a much more comprehensive and long-term vision than “green,” “recycled,” or even “energy efficient.” Even “carbon neutral,” he argued, isn’t really his idea of sustainability. If the ultimate goal is to replicate nature and to create systems for sheltering and feeding ourselves that are truly regenerative, it’s important to recognize that sustainability is not the same as zero.

“‘[D]o you want to do LEED, or do you want sustainability?’

It seemed that in his experience, many have simply become so used to thinking at the level of individual, segregated components that they’re unable to easily see the system or their place within it. In order to think systemically, one needs to reestablish relationships; to feel connected and to care; to be personal and up-close rather than academic and arm’s-length. To underline this point, Reed quoted Wendell Berry: “no one ever called his home an ‘environment.’”

As he put it, it’s important to remember that “living systems aren’t just about buildings and things. The people who work on them are regenerated, also.”

Earlier this year, Reed spoke on “The Practice of Living System Design” as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects. His talk addressed “the need to redevelop a conscious understanding of the whole system of life-giving processes that shape the places we live in order to reintegrate our building—and our communities—with life on Earth.”

William Reed: The Practice of Living System Design from BSA on Vimeo.

A couple of tidbits from the talk:

Sustainable design “is not just carbon neutral…it’s fundamentally about our relationship with place.”

Restoration…doesn’t mean restoring something to its original condition…It actually means restoring an ecological subsystem to the condition where it has the ability to self-organize and evolve.

The talk is well worth watching. Reed imparts his wealth of knowledge and experience about integrative ecological design.

No related posts.

With its focus on regional stewardship and “re-inhabiting the land,” the following item from Peter Brastow resonated with me.

Brastow directs Nature in the City, a project of the Earth Island Institute that focuses on local ecology and stewardship in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nature in the City recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.

Last week I experienced an acute episode of realizing that our message of community-based ecological stewardship is missing still, not only in the public-at-large, but also even within the environmental activist community. This realization repeats itself over and over again and in fact, was largely the justification for the Nature in the City Symposium at World Environment Day 2005.

Peter Berg of Planet Drum expresses eloquently that real sustainability must be grounded in a bioregionalist perspective whereby people are aware of and living in harmony with the natural systems of which we are all a part. But the broader environmental community seems to continue to limit the definition of sustainability to green buildings & technologies, recycling and clean energy.

The lack of attention to protecting and connecting with our city’s ecology is a function of our larger society’s fundamental and wholesale disconnection from nature. We have culturally evolved as a species to become totally separate, physically and psychologically, from the rest of nature. Most humans nowadays pretty much operate in the modern human realm as sort of a layer on top of the rest of nature, uncaringly and/or unknowingly exploiting the rest of the biosphere. We go about our daily lives without the slightest understanding of the nature and biodiversity all around us; including while performing all of the critical “green” tasks of installing solar panels, achieving zero waste, and closing the “ecological” loop, as it were.

“Green” and “ecological” are in quotes because well-meaning folks use the terms without any understanding of our local ecology, of the native plants, animals, and habitats that characterize San Francisco’s natural heritage. Inspired by the philosophy of bioregionalism, we at Nature in the City aim to demonstrate the way to break down the nature-culture dichotomy by physically, materially connecting people and nature where we live, everywhere.

When we physically re-inhabit the land, we derive mental, physical and spiritual health and well-being and a deepened sense of place and meaning in our lives, learning more intimately how we are interconnected with all other living things; we restore a more positive relationship of mutuality whereby local nature also benefits from our careful stewardship by becoming healthier and more abundant. Two weeks ago, we learned that the Green Hairstreak butterfly found its way to one of our brand new stewardship sites at 14th and Pacheco along the corridor between its two remaining populations in the Hawk Hill and Rocky Outcrop natural areas. We photographed an individual on a coast buckwheat – one of the two host plant species for the butterfly – that we planted between the streets!!

Re-creating healthy, positive relationships with nature is revolutionary, because it means rethinking how we live on the planet, globally, and in our own communities, neighborhoods and backyards. Evolving a new culture of community ecological stewardship is ecological sustainability. If we are to survive on this planet amidst natural beauty and abundance, we must learn how to recreate an actual physical, sustainable relationship with the rest of nature by taking care of the land and healing our ancient human-nature relationship, becoming, literally, part of the natural history of San Francisco.

[links and highlights are from the original note]

Next, I’ll post some thoughts inspired by this letter.

Related posts:

1. An urban nature lesson from Philadelphia

This morning I found myself in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, not two blocks from home, looking at a stack of books by Annie Dillard, whose works I have not read.

I opened up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which won Dillard a Pulitzer Prize) and landed on this passage:

The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously, and we vertebrates are positively piteous, like so many peeled trees.

This oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed as by Pliny, who writes of nature, “To all the rest, given she hath sufficient to clad them everyone according to their kind: as namely shells, cods, hard hides, pricks, shags, bristles, hair, down feathers, quills, scales, and fleeces of wool. The very trunks and stems of trees and plants, she hath defended with bark and rind, yea and the same sometimes double, against the injuries both of heat and cold: man alone, poor wretch, she hath laid all naked upon the bare earth, even on his birthday, to cry and wraule presently from the very first hour that he is born into the world.”

I am sitting under a sycamore tree: I am soft-shell and peeled to the least puff of wind or smack of grit.

Humans are a dynamic, weedy, and increasingly urban species.

Soft-shelled, we armor ourselves with technology. We build humancities, our correlate to anthills and beehives. As a social species, like ants and bees, our well-being depends upon mutual aid, social networks, and cultural adaptations — of which technology is a manifestation.

Winston Churchill’s oft-quoted aphorism applies here: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization celebrated its annual World Health Day. This year’s theme was “Urbanization and health: urban health matters.”

The 21^st century will be the urban century. By 2030 three out of five people worldwide will live in cities. In Latin America, already three out of four live in urban areas. In China alone, more than 100 cities currently have a population over one million. As the world population expands from just over six billion to a projected eight billion people, virtually all of that additional growth will occur in urban areas.

How cities shape consumption, promote health and equity, and nurture creative collaboration may determine the arc of the planet’s future. Urban management may be the ultimate multiplier, either minimizing poverty and supporting equitable cities or hastening the collapse of ecosystems. This may be especially true in small to medium cities, where most of the population growth will occur; these cities, however, will also face a dearth of skilled managers.

Learning to shape our cities is a great human challenge.

***

A few flicks of the thumb took me to this passage:

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people—the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, “next year…I’ll start living; next year…I’ll start my life.” Innocence is a better world.

Not having read the entire book (something I now intend to do), I wonder whether Dillard equates “innocence” here with forswearing the city and living with nature? [English majors/readers weigh in.]

Urbanism may once have been consonant with a “sophisticated,” inward-gazing disregard for anything beyond the city, including a disconnect from the sources of materials and cycles of nature and an obliviousness to the externalities of a consumptive lifestyle. In American society, however, a form of this mentality has become pervasive. Nature deficit disorder is the norm. Life occurs inside the armor.

Does the rise of an urban planet suggest humanity is losing its innocence?

This transition may be implied by the proposed name of a new phase in global history, the “anthropocene epoch,” which seems to be gaining traction. The anthropocene (or “new human”) epoch recognizes that mankind’s collective impact is having an impact on the interdependent global processes and may potentially surpass “a safe operating space for humanity” (full article here). Humanity is certainly not apart from nature.

Thoreau wrote in Walking, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

How can cities and wildness thrive in tandem? Can cities be the salvation of the world?

A self-conscious (and self-preservationist) response to the anthropocene era broadly demands more extensive global management or stewardship — including fostering better cities, cordoning off critical wilderness, and even reintegrating wildness and cities. The developing understanding of socio-ecological systems is an extension of human cultural adaptation. (Check out the work of Nobel prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, and of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.) Whether institutions and collective behavior will be able to adapt is now the question.

Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com calls for “bright green cities,” choosing to focus on how we can move forward with optimism and human ingenuity, as opposed to dwelling simply on the myriad environmental and social threats. Steffen prioritizes the challenge of harnessing collective problem solving in pursuit of a positive vision.

***

One last passage, again serendipitously found:

In the lower Bronx, for example, enthusiasts found an ailanthus tree that was fifteen feet long growing from the corner of a garage roof. It was rooted in and living on “dust and roofing cinders.” Even more spectacular is a desert plant, Ibervillea sonorae—a member of the gourd family—that Joseph Wood Krutch describes. If you see this plant in the desert, you see only a dried chunk of loose wood. It has neither roots nor stems; it’s like an old gray knothole. But it is alive. Each year before the rainy season comes, it sends out a few roots and shoots. If the rain arrives, it grows flowers and fruits; these soon wither away, and it reverts to a state as quiet as driftwood.

Well, the New York Botanical Garden put a dried Ibervillea sonorae on display in a glass case. “For seven years,” says Joseph Wood Krutch, “without soil or water, simply lying in the case, it put forth a few anticipatory shoots and then, when no rainy season arrived, dried up again, hoping for better luck next year.” That’s what I call flying in the teeth of it all.

Perhaps with global urbanization, we are “flying in the teeth of it all.”

The ailanthus, also called the “Tree of Heaven,” is a weedy species, famous for its role in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The ailanthus is not native to Brooklyn; it’s an invasive species that can flourish in urban areas. (I live in Brooklyn, but, unlike my wife, I am not native to this place.)

Cities have always been nodes of commerce and international transport (once by ship, now also by plane) – which has also abetted the spread of invasive species. But I believe cities can coexist with and foster diversity. Most human settlements have grown up along coasts and rivers, many originally near rich, diverse habitat.

New York City rests — if one can imagine New York resting — amidst one of the most remarkable estuaries on the continent. It’s also one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. But, yes, the “clatter of quickening stimulus” can easily crowd out any awareness of the natural world and its remarkable patterns.

I’m interested in reconnecting urbanites—including myself—with nature (easier said than done), certainly aligned with the current efforts to combat nature deficit disorder and rethink food systems. These are opportunities that should be available to all communities in the diverse cities; much can also be learned from the various cultural approaches to nature.

Of equal interest to me and this blog is the question (to which I have few answers), how can the underlying natural context for human society and the natural connections between places be integrated better into our way of thinking?

Rapidly growing urban areas, especially in developing nations, have often squeezed development into every last square meter of the city. The economic and social concerns squeeze out interest in the natural world. The “shifting baselines” phenomenon eliminates knowledge of nature from cultural memory, as can urban migration. Conversely, preserving biocultural diversity can support efforts to promote resilience by maximizing approaches to identifying problems and solutions.

Ultimately, I wonder: if urbanization is one of the forces driving the global future, can our weediness be tempered by wisdom?

[As I was writing this, a tweet about David Quammen's piece "The weeds shall inherit the Earth" in The Independent (also published in Harper's as "Planet of Weeds") crossed my desk/screen. H/T @BillNigh and @InvasiveNotes.]

Related posts:

1. A tale of (two) cities

Last week, my almost-three-year-old daughter glanced out the window and cheerfully shouted, “Look, the tree is making leaves!”

The first buds on the branch or leaves in the garden, the first purple martin or monarch butterfly or hummingbird…these little changes in our natural surroundings grab our attention and herald the arrival of spring.

Each first sighting triggers a kind of awakening. “Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment,” wrote Ellis Peters.

In order to take in spring’s sweep across the land (and seas), however, you often need a higher vantage point — perhaps a hilltop or an aerial photo.

Or sometimes, with just a few shared observations by Citizen Scientists, a map, and a little imagination, you can begin to appreciate spring’s steady march.

Here are a couple of sites reporting the first sighting of birds migrating northwards:

Purple martin sightings (as of 4/1/2010)

Hummingbirds (as of 4/1/2010)

Several migration sites, including one for hummingbirds, can be found at Journey North, a wonderful educational resource.

For the flora-minded, Project Budburst collects observations of “phenophases” of trees, shrubs, flowers, and grasses.

Some Citizen Science projects I find intriguing are the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Celebrate Urban Birds and a study of American eels in the Hudson River.

Also, check out the the USA National Phenology Network for more about phenology (“nature’s calendar”) and climate change.

Monarch butterflies

Of special note this spring is the monarch butterfly. The monarchs have begun their journeys along several migration corridors and can travel thousands of miles. But according to several news articles (here, here, and here), the monarch population faces a dire situation.

This year may be one of the worst for the monarch butterfly, experts are reporting. Severe hailstorms in Mexico (one of the monarch’s winter home) followed by fifteen inches of rain has left the population decimated by up to 50 percent this year. Add to that the ongoing issue of habitat destruction, and the future of the monarch begins to look a little shaky.

If you’re interested, check out Monarch Watch and participate in the Monarch Waystation Program (also here) to create, conserve and protect monarch habitats.

Citizen Science works

The convergence of backyard naturalists, academics, and the internet is fueling the growth of Citizen Science, which involves the participation of nonscientists in research, including the crowdsourcing of observations of nature.

From the News and Observer:

Nonscientists like Bragg [Benton Bragg, who is helping out with a barred owl study] throughout North Carolina and the nation are participating in a smorgasbord of projects, studying birds, amphibians, plants, mammals, chemistry, dinosaurs, climate change, light pollution, the galaxy – the list goes on.

Citizen science involves nonscientist volunteers gathering and reporting data for scientific studies. Less often, they help analyze it. Participating is a two-way street. It not only funnels data to scientists faster than they could accumulate it using only trained researchers, it also gives citizens a window to science.

An article in BioScience magazine (March 2008) asks “Citizen Scientists, Can Volunteers Do Real Research?”

In the end, what have citizen scientists achieved? Has their labor actually helped advance scientific knowledge? Yes, says Bonney [Rick Bonney of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology], pointing, for example, to complete and accurate maps of the breeding ranges of every North American bird. And with the help of volunteers in gathering data, researchers have been able to track the progress of conjunctivitis in house finches, the first time scientists have ever followed a disease in a wild animal. Citizen scientists have also collected data that helped scientists develop guidelines for land managers to preserve habitat.

Treehugger also published a nice piece on Citizen Science last year:

Where Big Science works by putting a few very highly trained people with a lot of money at their disposal in charge of rare and expensive machines, Citizen Science works by sending nearly anyone you can grab into the field with a simple task, simple equipment to do it, and a willingness on the scientists’ part to sort through the results. It’s messy, at times, but it works.

Beyond supporting research, Citizen Science projects promote scientific literacy and conservation efforts. Citizen Science encourages individuals, families, and schools to engage with local nature; it can reveal the ways in which nature’s networks connect communities across the continent. In this era of both global environmental change and “nature deficit disorder,” Citizen Science offers a way for folks to take steps forward together.

Happy spring!

Other projects

Birders World lists over 100 projects for birders interested in participating in citizen science.

National Projects (a sidebar to the News & Observer article):

Firefly Watch: Project based at Boston Museum of Science. www.mos.org/fireflywatch
Frog Watch USA: Learn about wetlands and help conserve amphibians by reporting the calls of local frogs and toads. www.aza.org/frogwatch
Project BudBurst: Track the first leafing, first flower and first fruit ripening of a diversity of trees, shrubs, flowers, and grasses in your area. www.windows.ucar.edu/citizen_science/budburst/index.php
Open Dinosaur Project: Help create an online database of dinosaur limb bone measurements used to investigate questions of dinosaur evolution. opendino.wordpress.com
Great Backyard Birdcount: Annual program to identify and count birds where they live over four days in mid-February. www.birdsource.org/gbbc
Project FeederWatch: Put up a bird feeder, watch the birds that use it and report your sightings online. www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw
eBird: Report bird sightings to help create an online globally accessible database showing bird distribution and abundance. ebird.org
Galaxy Zoo: Global program for armchair astronomers to sort and classify a million different images of galaxies according to shape. www.galaxyzoo.org

More projects: ScienceForCitizens.net or www.eenorthcarolina.org/presentations/citizenscience.pdf

[Note: The examples listed leaned heavily to the Eastern United States. Any suggestions for projects or migration maps from other parts of the Americas (or the Earth) are welcomed!]

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All Life has its roots in the meeting of earth and water. –TH Watkins

When you look at photos of the Earth from space, what do you see?

Does the ocean frame the land? Or does the land frame the ocean?

This question relates to an aspect of vision called figure-ground perception. You probably have experienced figure-ground questions in visual illusions like this image. As creatures of the land, we’re inclined to consider the land as the primary object, or figure, and the seas as background. The seas seem relatively flat and uneventful, although belying tremendous mountain ranges (more here) and teeming life hidden beneath the surface. Yet from space, Earth is a blue planet. Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.”

What do you look at when you stand at the ocean’s edge?
If you’re like me, when you arrive at a coastline or beach, you’ll look first across the vast expanse of water towards the gentle curve of the horizon. Then your eyes will scan to the right or left and follow the meeting of land and water off into the distance.

The shape of that coastline — whether sandy beach, rocky shores, or precipitous bluffs — reveals a history of interaction between land and water, a relationship uninterrupted for eons. The coastline connects.

I’ve recently come across two ambitious journeys — one by land and one by sea — that are focusing attention on our world of water: how we are affected by the health of our oceans and the potential social and ecological impacts of sea level rise.

One by land: Atlantic Rising

A trio of young explorers has taken the terrestrial route, basically driving their Land Rover around the Atlantic Ocean to engage students and bring attention to coastal areas, habitats, and livelihoods along the Atlantic that will be affected by sea level rise.

Atlantic Rising explores what will be lost around the Atlantic Ocean if sea levels rise by one metre. Our work in low-lying communities around the ocean rim is journalistic and educational. We are creating a network between 15,000 pupils; enabling them to build friendships, share experience and collaborate on climate change projects. We are also reporting the stories of people whose lives are already being affected by sea level change and providing a platform for marginalised voices.

Sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society, Atlantic Rising follows the Atlantic’s potential coastline across 31 countries. The journey so far has taken the trio from London to the West African coast. Along the way, they have encountered threatened wetlands, vulnerable villages, and inspirational conservation efforts. From Ghana, they crossed the Atlantic by container ship to Brazil and will now follow the one-metre contour to North America.

In February, Atlantic Rising released Message in a Bottle, a satellite-tracked buoy that contains letters from students living in communities along the Atlantic. Students can follow the buoy’s path to learn about ocean currents, as well as engage with children from other participating schools.

Our project draws upon the historical connections between Atlantic countries to build new relationships around the Atlantic rim. It confronts pupils with the different global experiences of climate change and shows them the realities of sea level change in other Atlantic countries.

While sea level rise will ultimately vary significantly depending upon topography, wind and current, Atlantic Rising’s journey brilliantly highlights the fragility of ecosystems and the interconnected future of all people living by the sea.

One by sea: Around the Americas

In the tradition of Darwin’s HMS Beagle, Nansen and Amundsen’s Fram, and the HMS Challenger, the crew of the 64′ sailboat Ocean Watch has undertaken a modern voyage of discovery, called Around the Americas. A project of the Pacific Science Center and Sailors for the Sea, Around the Americas is circumnavigating the American continents “with the mission of inspiring, educating, and educating citizens of the Americas to protect our fragile oceans.”

A permanent crew of four highly-experienced “nautical geezers,” led by Captain Mark Schrader, and rotating scientists and educators staff the Ocean Watch on its 25,000 mile (40,200 km) voyage, which launched from Seattle in late May 2009. The crew’s logs make for fascinating reading.

From Baffin Island in the Arctic Sea to the Straits of Magellan near the tip of South America, the Ocean Watch is traversing every possible climatic region of the seas. The crew is conducting science experiments on subjects as varied as polar science,  jellyfish populations, ocean currents, pollution, and underwater ambient sound.

Schrader: “We hope the adventure of the trip will get people’s attention, but then we need to demonstrate with good science that we’re approaching a critical time for the health of our oceans.”

The Ocean Watch is now one of six small boats to make it through the Northwest Passage, west to east. Back in 1982, Captain Schrader circumnavigated the globe. At the time he wanted to sail the Northwest Passage.

But with the Arctic ice pack, it wasn’t possible at the time. In the past 100 years, only about 100 boats have made the passage, most of them Coast Guard ice breakers. Now, the conditions have changed dramatically. We need to make people aware of what’s happening in the oceans before we lose the Arctic ice pack all together, before conditions become irreversible.

Last month, the Ocean Watch was sailing off the shore of Chile between ports of call, when the earthquake hit and tremors raced undersea. The quake and tsunami savaged the land and triggered alerts thousands of miles away; the crew, of course, did not feel a thing. Please read the log entry about Chile.

Seascape, Straits of Magellan

This off-hand comment by one fisheries researcher captures in simple terms the need to understand better the oceans:  “It’s a big black box out there. Things have been wacky.”

Check out David Thoresen’s beautiful photographs on Flickr. And for the latest position of Ocean Watch, look here.

H/T to @eclecticechoes, @geographile for “Mountains in the Sea” link

Credits: “Blue Marble,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Atlantic Rising photos, courtesy of Atlantic Rising; Seascape, courtesy of Around the Americas, ©David Thoresen

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1. photo of Ilulissat Icebergs, Disko Bay, Greenland (Flickr/CC photo by kaet44)

Every year, 20 billion tonnes of icebergs calve off the Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier and pass through the Ilulissat Icefjord.

2. Understanding deep ocean circulation and climate modeling

If you follow the latitude lines from much of Europe westward across the Atlantic, you tend to run into Canada. Even if you go to the southern tip of Spain, you’re not much further south than the Virginias. Canada, of course, has a reputation for being rather frozen and inhospitable, while Europe goes to pieces if it snows for more than an hour or two. The difference is mainly due to ocean currents.

At the north edge of the Atlantic Ocean, warm surface water cools off and sinks, drawing in more warm surface water from the south, generating a warm surface current along Europe’s Atlantic coast. Portions of this current comes in from the tropics near Africa and South America, and more is drawn in from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In addition to making Europe a pleasant place to live, this current also provides the main source of ocean mixing—that is, these currents act to cool the ocean surface temperatures and heat the deep ocean.

More on thermohaline circulation, also known as the “ocean conveyor belt.”

See also: “Freak Current Takes Gulf Stream to Greenland”

3. World’s Longest Migration Found–2X Longer Than Thought

Miniature new transmitters recently revealed that the 4-ounce (113-gram) [arctic tern] follows zigzagging routes between Greenland and Antarctica each year. In the process, the arctic tern racks up about 44,000 frequent flier miles (71,000 kilometers)—edging out its archrival, the sooty shearwater, by roughly 4,000 miles (6,440 kilometers).
…
Since the birds often live 30 years or more, the researchers estimate that, over its lifetime, an arctic tern migrates about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers)—equal to three trips to the moon and back.

See also: The Arctic Tern Migration Project

Bird of the Sun, a beautiful photographic tribute to the arctic tern by Carsten Egevang

4. A Year of Global Shipping Routes Mapped by GPS

Scientists have come up with the first comprehensive map of global shipping routes based on actual itineraries. The team pieced together a year’s worth of travel itineraries from 16,693 cargo ships using data from LLoyd’s Register Fairplay and the Automatic Identification System, which tracks vessels using a VHF receiver and GPS.

A few hot spots logged the majority of journeys. The busiest port was the Panama Canal, followed by the Suez Canal and Shanghai.

5. The Mariana Trench to scale

Click on the link for an amazing graphic of the deepest point in the ocean.

via kottke:  “representation of how deep the Mariana Trench is. Turns out it’s really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really deep.”

Related posts:

1. Loosely Knit : 16 February, 2010
2. Circumnavigate This! Two Ocean Voyages: One by Land, One by Sea