Essays Archive

Broken and disparate urban landscapes are common experience. The multitude of issues and concerns that are causing such conditions are not new; neither are responses of those who are committed to ideas of sustainability. Yet, discussions of the causes and responses have to be repeated many times over, in order...

To plan resilient cities is a complex task. It involves making decisions that involve the built, social, economic, and environmental development of a territory, including unexpected changes, such as those caused by extreme natural events. The effects of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and fires, among other disturbances, need to be...

This is a tale of an experience I had in Alachua County, Florida. The challenge? How can we encourage the construction of more natural stormwater ponds, which offer more wildlife habitat and more efficient ways to remove pollutants? We have all seen conventional stormwater ponds—deeply dug ponds, with mowed turfgrass...

Most of the narratives on the crises of development are woven around rapid population growth in developing countries. Yes. The number of world citizens is over seven billion. The challenges that this number raises far exceeds national and intergovernmental agencies’ abilities to address them. Rapid urbanization is but one of...

Urbanization not only changes the landscape structure due to land cover change, fragmentation of natural habitats, and creation of artificial habitats, it also changes the physical patterns of the environment: temperature, wind currents, rain patterns, light levels, or noise levels. For example, urbanization increases average temperature by between 3°C and...

(Una versión en español, aqui.) In pondering the question: “Who should have access to the countless benefits and services that urban ecosystems provide?” We have put together a collection of eight first-person accounts that portray city dwellers’ dreams. This series of Sketches of life explores both individual and collective human...

The first time I visited the Méréville Estate and its Anglo-Chinese garden, created south of Paris at the end of the 18th century, I was struck by the interlinking of nature and culture in this amazing place. This National Heritage Site is the work of the Marquis de Laborde, who...

The food system is not as evident as other aspects of urban development. However, it involves many aspects of cities, such as mobility and transportation, commerce, land use, waste management, and, of course, food security. The food system refers to processes that begin with agricultural production and continues with the...

Volunteers. Exotics. Aliens. Weeds. Whatever happens to be your preferred nomenclature when describing the existence and behavior of spontaneous vegetation, it’s clear that many biases abound. We pluck, poison and mulch our landscapes to keep these decidedly untidy forces at bay. Yet have we also effectively mulched our mindsets?  Have we...

In August 2017, I spent three days at the very stimulating Resilience 2017 conference, listening to conversations between nearly a thousand attendees—students, scholars, practitioners, musicians and artists—interested in understanding how we can craft a more resilient and sustainable earth system, one that keeps its people and its ecology in good...

More than a century ago, urbanist Ebenezer Howard invented the concept of a “garden city”—a city with a bustling urban core, fanning out into green neighborhoods, and then farther out into farmland, all of it theoretically connected in a semi-closed sustainable cycle. As a kid growing up in San Jose,...

It’s a beautiful spring day as I sit on the bank of Fanno Creek watching a family of wood ducks motor across the glassy surface of a three-acre beaver pond. A Blue Heron stands in the backwater finding nourishment from the juvenile fish hiding among the willows while a pond...

Donald J. Trump’s administration has been very obliging in providing content for environmentalist outrage, never in short supply. In a bit more than six months, Mr. Trump put an anti-EPA litigator in charge of the United States Environmental Projection Agency, sanctioned hunting of bears and wolves in Alaskan wildlife refuges,...

Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking research established that it is possible to collaboratively manage common pool resources, or commons, for economic and environmental sustainability. She identified the conditions or principles which increase the likelihood of long-term, collective governance of shared resources. Although these principles have been widely studied and applied to a...

Leia uma versão em português aqui. About fifteen years ago I fell in love with watersheds. Then, my passion extended to the forests and ecosystems that sustain them. Then, I discovered the urban waters and biodiversity, and consequently urban ecology, when I started researching on urban blue-green infrastructure and how...

The “common good”—what an ambitious expression! As far as environmental protection is concerned, governments want us to believe that it is always performed precisely for the sake of the “common good”, or “public interest”. However, things are not that simple. From a socially critical viewpoint, environmental protection remains a dangerously...

Protecting remnant swathes of nature is not easy, and may often require concerted, vigorous community efforts. There are many threats: the most common of which seem to be highways and development, which are often backed by considerable financial resources and lots of momentum. So one takes notice when something unusual...

In 2013, the New York Power Authority razed the Charles Poletti Power Plant in Astoria, NY. In doing so, Power Authority removed what local elected official Michael Gianaris had characterized as a “symbol[] of pollution that haunted [the] neighborhood”. The characterization was an apt one. The Poletti Plant had for...

We walked approximately 1,500 kilometers in Iran, and something was noticeably missing: Graffiti. Scribbled names or tags, spray painted symbols, and thought-provoking political commentary were absent in cities, towns and villages from Sarakhs on the Turkmenistan border to Astara on the Azerbaijan border to the sprawling capital of Tehran to...

Cities have been recognized as key drivers toward the successful governance of resources and as the front line in combating climate change. But there is a huge urban-rural inequality in carbon emissions in the making, particularly in rapidly urbanizing developing countries. Thus, the political and economic divide between the Global North and...