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Essay

Right after I graduated from Cornell, I took off for the North Cascades wilderness. First as a student and later an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School, I spent summers in Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, ice climbing out of crevasses, backpacking through Pacific Northwest old growth forests, and scaling ancient...

“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.” Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home. His paintings are typically about nature: swamps and forests and backyards that include...

Parks have been significant sources of open space in urban history, ranging from private, even sacred spaces to fully public spaces serving as central points of social interaction and recreation (Stanley et al. 2012). On any given day, many thousands of people spend several hours outdoors in their local park...

A review of Public Produce: Cultivating our Parks, Plazas, and Streets for Healthier Cities, by Darrin Nordahl. 2014. Island Press, Washington. ISBN: 9781610915496. 224 pages. When Darrin Nordahl first published Public Produce: the New Urban Agriculture in 2009, most urban agriculture took place in community gardens, backyard gardens, and urban farms....

For all the critical scholarship that is written about the harnessing of volunteer labor in caring for urban trees (see, e.g., Perkins 2009), it never squared with my experience of engaging in stewardship. Following attendance at a human geography panel on ‘powerful objects’, I came to realize that my leisure...

Every day, citizen scientists contribute their time and energy to support thousands of research projects around the world (Bonney et al., 2014). They collect, categorize, and analyze data, generously volunteering their time and their personal resources in return for little other than recreational enjoyment or the personal satisfaction of helping...

Once you start talking about bees, you open Pandora’s box…You’ll find small and very delicate stories behind them. Each one is interesting. — Josep Perelló, associate professor and project leader of OpenSystems UB at the Universitat de Barcelona If Josep Perelló is right about discovering the stories behind bees, Barcelona’s...

Hello. Come in. What’s on your mind? Why have you come to chat with me? “We have such different backgrounds” Ecologists’ interest start with an exploration of the natural world, its structure and function. Architects and landscape architects start with human needs and how constructed features can answer those needs....

A review of Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor, Revised Edition, by John Waldman. 2012. Fordham University Press, New York. ISBN: 9780823249855. 160 pages. 38 black and white illustrations. New York Harbor is a murky place by nature. The mixing of fresh and salt waters,...

While it is undoubtedly true that thousands of cities around the world share a wide spectrum of common denominators, from garbage to biodiversity, from air pollution to sophisticated bike-path networks, or from unemployment to entrepreneurship (to mention only a sample few) it is perhaps important to examine common urban denominators...

India is on a rapid path to urbanisation. While currently only 30% of India’s population lives in cities, this is changing rapidly. Plans have been recently announced to build 100 new “smart cities” across India, with an ambitious plan that includes the proposed investment of 1.2 billion US dollars in...

In reviewing the wildlife habitats of British towns and cities for my recent book Nature in Towns and Cities (Harper Collins 2014) I became acutely aware that many of the UK’s most spectacular urban wetlands resulted from industrial activities. The most extensive of these are newly created lakes that formed...

Also available at iTunes. Story notes: Cities face many challenges with competing solutions: climate change, economic inequality, lack of access to resources and opportunities, and social and political conflict. Can we plan and design for outcomes that serve nature, provide nature-based solutions to real urban problems, and support human rights?...

Over time, cities originated wherever indigenous cultures agglomerated and planned links between their settlements and peri-urban ecosystems for the provision of water, food and other goods and services. Not by coincidence, these settlements often occurred in biodiversity hotspots—and we know that historically cities were hotbeds for innovation of all sorts....

Urban waste management is a crucial component of our constant interaction with the environment within and around our cities. Managing waste efficiently and sustainably is a unique challenge for us all that depends on development trends, socioeconomic composition, political situation, and a host of other factors. This dependence is especially...

There has been a rapid decrease in the amount of open or natural space in Japan in recent years, particularly in urban areas due to the development of housing. Preserving these areas as wildlife habitats and spaces where children can play is a very important issue nowadays. I wrote about...

A review of Urban Acupuncture: Celebrating Pinpricks of Change that Enrich City Life, by Jaime Lerner. 2014. Island Press, Washington.  ISBN 13: 978-1-61091-583 / ISBN 10: 1-61091-583-6. 143 pages.  For traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture is a method to stimulate specific points of the body to change or regulate a specific pathology and benefit the...

Recently, a popular concept called conservation development (CD) has gained traction in many planning and design fields. CDs typically are developments where homes are clustered on small lots with the remaining areas conserved as open space, as opposed to traditional development, where homes are spread out, fragmenting the original natural...

Measures taken in cities to improve their adaptation to drought and for carbon sequestration are usually based on general standards to reduce water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and/or to reach an efficient use of water and energy. Normally, these proposals are introduced using ‘globalized’ technologies, which are applied everywhere...