Essays Archive

Ok, if you can look past my anthropomorphic statement that wildlife make decisions, the topic I would like to address deals with the adoption and use of ecological principles by the design community. Patch size, landscape connectivity, edge effects, corridor ecology, landscape ecology, and metapopulation theory are just a few...

Changes that cause major disruptions in human settlements, such as those triggered by earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, can give rise to new landscapes that reveal a natural cycle, which is part of the territory where cities grow and develop. These landscapes emerge particularly in cities exposed to recurrent natural...

Local governments planted millions of young trees on urban streets throughout the United States during the first decade of the 21st Century. From Los Angeles to New York, large cities made prodigious investments in urban reforestation and wrote off the expense as a relatively thrifty way of dealing with some...

A new vision of ecologically sophisticated cities has been gaining momentum. Today, in increasing numbers, scientists, designers, and practitioners create useful knowledge about the nature of cities through research and action that inspires public debate and decision makers. More citizens are becoming more engaged in the conversation about urban nature — a conversation...

Another revolution  the “ecological revolution” is required to go back and live in co-existence with nature. Recently I have been to Auroville, an experimental universal township in Tamilnadu and Puduchhery of southern India. This was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa known as “The Mother”. Auroville came to be known...

By all rights a one-eyed bald eagle is a doomed bird. Imagine trying to catch a salmon or a brush rabbit with no depth perception. Oh eagles will scavenge and occasionally steal food from one another, but roadkill and kleptoparasitism will only get you so far in life…or so the...

Graffiti, revered and loathed by turn, provides insights into societal attitudes and perceptions. In this short photo essay I present nature-related graffiti from the City of Cape Town. Cape Town still bares the hallmarks of apartheid with significant race-based development and wealth discrepancies. It is situated in the middle of...

Popular descriptions of urbanization these days often describe humanity as having entered a “new urban era“, with more people living in cities today than they do in rural areas. Urban areas have a large footprint of impact on the rural countryside, and the line between the urban and the rural is...

Nature provides immense emotional, spiritual and health benefits to residents of cities. There is little wonder then as to why many of us in the urban planning and design fields see nature as central and essential to all that we do and to imagining the future of cities. The concept...

While we have been focused on the nature of cities in cities and its sublime paradoxes, one could perhaps also enlarge the city nature question to reflect on the gradual urbanization of planet Earth.  Whether it is global appropriation of Earth resources by humans — human activities now appropriate nearly...

When the first European colonists arrived on the islands of New Zealand a little over 150 years ago they were met by an essentially forested landscape with very unfamiliar plants and animals. The dramatic and breath-taking scenery ranged from geysers, boiling mud pools and volcanoes in the north to magnificent,...

Ecologists who study how ecosystems change over time know there is a balance between resilience and adaptation.  Resilience is a measure of how long it takes for an ecosystem to return to a previous state.  For example, how many decades will it take for a forest to regrow after a...

Em Português. Urban food production is gaining momentum with launching of books, seminars and congresses, websites and social media. Some cities have programs to promote people-nature direct contact through vegetable gardens — common or in allotment gardens. Urban dwellers are becoming more and more engaged in cultivating and collaborating in common...

This article presents an alternative perspective on urban nature that extends the debates on ecology in cities to ecology of cities. In Africa, and particularly Kampala, where we have undertaken research on various aspects of urban development, we are increasingly confronted by a realization that urban built up components are...

The question of what exactly we are working towards when we talk about nature in the city has been bothering me for some time now. I work as a research fellow in conservation science at RMIT University, Melbourne, and much of my time is spent working on challenges to do...

A few weeks ago I visited Austin, Texas to participate in the SXSW Eco conference. Staying across the street from Austin’s large and beautiful convention center, I was astonished to discover a green ravine immediately adjacent to the mammoth building, at the bottom of which was a slow moving creek...

China’s rapid urbanization in the last 30 years has brought about many problems. The country is now facing a huge challenge to balance economic development with environmental conservation and social stability. Sustainable development is in the spotlight: how can we build a better city that can provide a better life...

Lessons from a small city Much of the urban ecology literature focuses on the world’s largest cities, and many of the Nature of Cities bloggers have written about these places. Blog posts have discussed the challenges of conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services in London and New York City, planning for...

I have planted lots of trees around schools in Cape Town. Each experience has been profoundly different from the next, but there have been common threads running through each experience — muddy feet and hands; the strong stem of a young tree as I carry it from the bakkie to...

In 2002, I was working full-time as a social science researcher for the US Forest Service in New York City.  My colleague Lindsay Campbell and I visited with leaders of the urban greening movement at that time — from community gardeners and park volunteers to environmental justice activists and tree...