Essays Archive

It’s December 12, 2035. I woke up in my apartment, in the middle of the city and there was a mountain. Yes, a mountain with a forest, greenery everywhere. I opened the windows and I could listen to the birds singing. I could smell the moist ground, the same smell...

There is a close relationship between the three Es―economy, employment, and environment. Economic growth and jobs rely heavily on environmental resources, but a myopic focus on either of these aspects often results in environmental degradation. Green jobs have been seen as a way to buffer the adverse effects of economic...

In a world where every route is optimized, where algorithms predict our movements, and speed becomes an unassailable norm, the detour stands out as an act of resistance. It is the assertion of reclaimed freedom, a refusal of systematic efficiency that reduces our experience of the world to a digital...

Serina Fast Horse and Toby Query met as employees at the City of Portland in 2018 while working on an innovative project that centered Indigenous voices and perspectives. This project, Shwah kuk wetlands (which means frog in Chinuk Wawa, a local indigenous trade language) intertwines Indigenous (or relational) and Western...

Places, much like nature, are in a constant state of change. This is especially true for Rocinha, Brazil’s most populous favela, home to approximately 200,000 people. Perched on steep hillsides in Rio de Janeiro’s Southern Zone, Rocinha is a vibrant, multi-layered community where life unfolds within a dense network of...

Biodiversity has always been important to environmental scientists, conservationists, landscape architects, and others but only recently seems to have entered the public domain. It took a long time for Australia to accept the climate emergency. It is pleasing to see that the biodiversity crisis has been accepted more readily. There...

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that 19 to 23 million tonnes of plastic waste end up in lakes, rivers, and seas annually[1]. This staggering number highlights the urgent need to tackle plastic pollution. The growing production of waste, inadequate disposal methods, and the slow degradation of plastics significantly...

Commoning and climate justice The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in Canada is bustling with youth-based climate action and advocacy. From bringing lawsuits against governments to advocating for fossil fuel divestment and spreading awareness about intersecting crises such as housing insecurity and climate impacts, young people are emerging as powerful voices...

Cities are, at their best, collaborative masterpieces, aren’t they? They emerge from the interplay of diverse professions, ways of knowing, modes of action, governments, and, most importantly, the people who call them home. They are cultural, ecological, human, and non-human. Together (ideally), these forces shape cities based on shared—and sometimes...

Love, a complex and profoundly influential emotion, has been widely explored in a variety of academic fields including sociology, psychology, anthropology, as well as human and physical geography. In geography, love is explored in several ways, including love of place and of nature (tophilia and biophilia) (see Tuan, 1974 and...

The UK’s new Labour-led government has pledged to tackle the country’s long-standing housing crisis head-on, with a bold promise to deliver 1.5 million new homes in the next five years. This plan comes in response to the mounting pressures of soaring demand, limited housing supply, and ever-increasing prices that have...

Each time our editorial team gathers to publish an issue of SPROUT, we reflect on the role of poetry to comment on the current state of the eco-urban. When we read through the submissions, we feel that our original vision and mandate for the journal is confirmed by the special...

The world is still reeling from the massive mortality and setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing political invasion and violence between Nation states. Polarized geopolitics has steered us in a dismal direction. Added to this, natural and human-made emergencies are creating further uncertainties. We would have thought that...

The Nature of Cities focuses on creative approaches to greening urban environments, what that means, why it is important, who is involved, and how, including Roundtables on “cities and pollinators“, and regenerative urban agriculture. The focus of this piece is 18 fruit trees installed for 6 months in an art...

In 2020, to halt the building of a logging road in Canada, a group of activists set up blockades to protect woodland in British Columbia. A Pacheedaht elder named Bill Jones was quoted in The Guardian as saying, “We must not stand down”. He went on to call ancient trees...

The notion of giving voice to more-than-human communities has long been of interest to artists, activists, and change-makers worldwide. Though still emerging, movements like the rights of nature have increasingly advocated for granting natural entities—rivers, forests, ecosystems—legal standing, akin to the rights given to people or corporations. Over the past...

Obesity imposes a heavy burden on individuals and societies (Boutari and Mantzoros, 2022). Since obesity is difficult to cure and often coexists with other chronic conditions, public health efforts to prevent obesity are needed (McNally, 2024). However, a strategy focusing on individuals, simply telling people to eat less and exercise...

I have come to believe that in the fight to save trees and forests in our cities, it is necessary to better understand what I am calling the “psychology of trees”, those factors and influences and patterns of thinking that affect the decisions individuals, developers, and even entire communities, make...

Did you know that baby housemartins speak in their sleep? I did not ― until some nights ago in early July. I was walking down the deserted main road outside Varese Ligure, an old-fashioned Italian mountain town. It was the evening of the day I had arrived. Following the dimly...

I recently attended The Nature of Cities Festival (TNOC Festival) in Berlin, Germany, where I hosted a session with colleagues on the Global Roadmap for the Nature-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene (NATURA), a National Science Foundation research initiative co-led by the Urban Systems Lab. TNOC Festival uniquely...