India is experiencing rapid change as a consequence of 21st century urbanization. Making steady inroads into fertile farmlands, lush forests, thriving wetlands, and productive grasslands, urban expansion is steadily converting biodiverse lands in shades of blues and greens into swathes of gray concrete. The United Nations World Population revision estimates that by 2050, an additional 404 million people will squeeze into India’s already stuffed cities and towns. This adds to the substantial increase in India’s urban population since the country’s independence—the proportion of India’s population that is urban has almost doubled between 1950 and now. Far from tapering off, urbanization will, if predictions prove correct, swiftly accelerate in the coming decades.
Three challenges from India’s urban centers illustrate the urgent need for a new ecological wisdom based on transdisciplinarity.
While India already has three of the world’s ten largest cities (Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata), it also now contains three of the world’s 10 fastest growing cities (Ghaziabad, Surat, and Faridabad). Although urbanization is a relatively recent phenomenon for these smaller cities and towns, they represent the face of urbanization to come.
Unprecedented urban growth has given rise to a suite of environmental challenges, ranging from air pollution to flooding, and from feral animal control to epidemic outbreaks. Dealing with these challenges demands a better understanding of how ecological processes interact with social drivers and outcomes in cities. Such knowledge is in short supply. In general, ecologists have tended to ignore cities. Despite the growing attention to urban ecology, there are massive gaps in our knowledge. Cities cannot run well without attention to ecology and to ecological science. And ecological science, in turn, demands a great deal of social science, as well, to glean what people want from cities and from their urban commons. In short, we need more multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary urban ecological research.
For cities to survive, we need to develop a new ecological wisdom. And that requires a concerted focus on data gaps and new ways of integrative thinking that recognize the importance of technology and science, but which are equally cognizant of, and bounded by, societal needs and requirements for social justice. Three ecological challenges facing Indian cities today—air pollution, flooding, and disease epidemics—illustrate the need for this shift in thinking.
As I write this in November 2016, Delhi is suffering from alarming rates of air pollution, by far the worst experienced by any Indian city so far. Schools and colleges have been ordered closed for a week, and all new construction has been banned while the city struggles to put together a comprehensive plan to combat air pollution. These challenges are not unique to Delhi, of course. A new meta-analysis of data from 245 cities finds that air pollution is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths annually in urban areas worldwide. Nature can serve an important role in combating environmental challenges like air pollution. A number of studies show that trees and plants can play a major role in reducing outdoor and indoor air pollution.
Yet there is still a lot to learn. For instance, much of the research assessing the role of trees on reducing air pollution has been conducted in parks. In comparison, street trees, which may have a greater role to play in reducing air pollution by virtue of their location along conduits of high traffic, where air pollutants are often concentrated, are less studied. Nor do we have a consensus on the types of trees that are most efficient at reducing outdoor air pollution, in contrast to our knowledge of how to combat indoor air pollution via plants. Adding to the health challenges of air pollution is the problem of urban heat islands, which are caused by unchecked concretization, and are linked both to the disappearance of lakes and wetlands and to the clearing of trees. Faced with one of the worst heat waves in recorded history this year, Indian cities faced exceptional maximum temperatures in summer due to a vicious combination of extreme events triggered by climate change and urbanization.
Air pollution and heat strokes affect the poor and homeless much more than the wealthy, making the already substantial challenges of environmental injustice in cities worse. Heat waves make people angry, stressed, and deeply depressed, another side effect of urbanization that is exacerbated by the foolishness with which we disregard our environment. We need local research that can identify the best tree and plant species for urban heat island mitigation and air pollution remediation in different cities, taking into consideration local ecologies, the characteristics of local architecture, and sources of pollution. This requires investment by local municipalities, which is deficient because of the lack of awareness of the importance of finding natural ecological solutions to urban environmental problems.
Identifying a set of recommended species for urban planting is not just a question of ecology; it involves economic and cultural preferences as well. Often, urban planners and planning documents count numbers of trees, and plan targets for millions of trees to be planted, quite as if one tree were the same as another. Thus, New York has a Million Trees Program, while Mexico City has recently announced plans to plant 18 million trees to combat air pollution. Yet, there is little description of what species they plan to plant.
Bigger, more established trees provide more ecosystem and socioecological services. Photo: Harini NagendraYounger trees with smaller canopies provide less shade and, therefore, less cooling. Photo: Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Trees come in a range of shapes and sizes. A street lined by majestic trees that are close to a century old, with massive canopies, will receive much greater shade and protection from pollution than a street lined by young trees with small canopies that only shade the median. Similarly, our discussions with street vendors and city walkers alike suggest a strong preference for trees with shade (understandably so). Business districts with street cafes and restaurants value trees, especially in hot cities where a street vendor located under the strategic shade of a tree can expect to do brisk business. But trees mean much more to people than the size of their canopies. Along with science, social science research must play a role in helping planners to understand what trees to plant.
Cultural preferences for species vary across cities. In Bangalore, people prefer the honge (Pongamia pinnata), whose shade is believed to be good for health, and the neem (Azadirachta indica), whose air is believed to heal breathing disorders. The South African city of Pretoria is covered by tens of thousands of beautiful Jacaranda trees, which turn the city’s skyline purple during the flowering season from September to November. Despite being imported from Brazil, these trees form a beloved part of the city’s cultural identity. While cherry blossom (Prunus spp.) trees are famous in their country of origin—Japan—many cities across the world, including São Paulo, Hamburg, Vancouver, and Washington DC have areas planted with cherry blossom trees that are prized by the city. Can we prepare a list of species for each city that satisfies local socio-cultural and ecological requirements? Species that are relatively hardy, stress tolerant, provide shade, and reduce air pollution, that people also like to see, sit under, and walk around? Such information should be easy to collect, yet the published literature on this is lacking.
Other urban ecological issues urgently demand the generation of new local knowledge through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations. Flooding and drought constitute widespread challenges across cities. Severe floods put most of Chennai under water towards the end of 2015, for instance. Many cities, including Bangalore and Chennai, have become dependent on ground water. Both flooding and drought can be controlled by the reclamation of urban wetlands and lakes, which have become casualties to urban development.
The municipality of Bangalore recently undertook a much-publicized demolition drive to remove illegal encroachments on wetlands and connecting stormwater channels. Many vulnerable local residents lost their homes and life savings during this time Yet, as many argue, the topography of the city has already been profoundly altered by construction. City planners rely on maps that are over a century old to reconstruct the hydrology of water bodies that were built to supply a city that held a fraction of its current population. In addition to transformations in topography, transformations have taken place in the hydrology of most urban water bodies. From being largely seasonal and rain fed, they have transformed into essentially perennial and sewage fed. Such fundamental transformations in the ecology and hydrology of urban water bodies requires research to determine new ways of management. This necessitates collaborations between hydrologists, ecologists, landscape architects, and urban planners, along with community activists who can help figure out management solutions, such as alternative options for urban hydrology that can help vulnerable residents avoid the risk of demolition of their homes.
Vector borne disease epidemics constitute a third ecological challenge of increasing magnitude. Malaria, chikangunya, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, and other diseases—some known, others unknown—have swept across Indian cities from north to south and from east to west. We do know that it is a wicked combination of heat, rainfall, poor sanitation, and poor drainage that play a role in the spread of mosquitoes. But mosquitoes have proved very difficult to control. Many cities rely on insecticide fogging around lakes, garbage dumps, and other places where stagnant water may persist. Fogging is only a short term solution, and a partial one at that; it leads to other problems of toxicity and insecticide resistance over time. What we need instead is better insights into the altered mechanisms of spread of the mosquito in urban areas. Anecdotal reports suggest that the Aedes aegypti mosquito (the main carrier of dengue and chikangunya), which was originally a daylight feeder, has adapted to urban environments with artificial light, and now actively bites at night in areas that are well lit. Other studies suggest that urban mammal companions—such as dogs, cattle, pigs and goats—act as incompetent or dead end reservoirs for the virus, slowing down disease transmission. Both these points suggest that some diseases may, ironically, spread faster in wealthier environments with bright night lights, and which are kept free of stray dogs and free ranging livestock. In the absence of research on the social and ecological factors that influence the spread of mosquitoes in crowded urban environments, we can only speculate. Cutting edge research on urban diseases is urgently needed, and requires focus by municipal authorities, public health officials, and epidemiologists. Trandisciplinary, collaborative research could go a long way in solving urban disease challenges.
Some of the research questions that emerge, such as which are the best trees to plant to reduce air pollution or urban heat island effects in specific cities, are local problems that require local studies. Others, such as understanding the role of urban livestock and artificial lighting in disease transmission, or the impact of changing hydrology on the management of urban wetlands, have global and regional implications. Yet all of these are critical for urban sustainability and greater livability and well-being in cities. Why, then, is urban transdisciplinary research so hard to find? Part of the reason may lie in the lack of attention by municipalities and funding agencies, who need to be educated on the importance of ecological research and urban ecological design for providing adaptive solutions to many pressing urban environmental challenges. But another problem is that such research is often rather unattractive for scientists. The information it provides is relevant locally, rather than internationally, causing such research to have a reduced likelihood of acceptance in well-cited international journals, an important currency of recognition for scientists.
Urban sustainability demands sustained, bottom-up transdisciplinary research, driven by collaborations between scientists, community members, urban activists, city planners, and corporate actors—as well as poets, visual artists, musicians, and writers. We need dialogues within cities, but also across cities. Here is where conversations, such as those seen in many of The Nature of Cities’ blogs and roundtables, play a role. Transdisciplinarity requires being in for the long haul. It demands the building of trust between disparate actors, such as activists, corporations, and state officials—many of whom have been traditionally at loggerheads with one another—developing a shared language. None of this is easy, which is why it has not been done before. But it is urgent. We need to learn from the past, but look to finding solutions for the future. We need old wine—a richer understanding of traditional social-cultural preferences for urban ecology—in a new bottle, shaped by cutting edge scientific research.
From red foxes in London and wild boars in Berlin to cockroaches in New York City and slugs in Miami, Feral Cities is full of stories of urban wildlife. Some of the animals are familiar ones, such as the fruit flies you can’t keep away from your bananas, while others, such as Monk Parakeets in the middle of Brooklyn, are surprises. Until recently, cities were widely regarded as bereft of value for wildlife, but Donovan turns that belief on its head with his tales of both urban animals and the people who interact with them on a daily basis.
The book opens with the story of a day spent with Bryan, a rattlesnake catcher in Phoenix, Arizona. A web designer during the day, Bryan spends his spare time serving as a snake-removal service for the serpent-infested homes and businesses of the desert city. Bryan’s stories of wrangling snakes in suburban garages and gardens and his interactions with residents reveal how little some people know about these creatures, despite living in close proximity with them. During one such episode, a homeowner who found a gopher snake in a sprinkler lid asks, “Do they have bones?” Another story—of a diamondback rattlesnake in the garage of a terrified family—exhibits the high levels of fear that encounters with urban wildlife can elicit. Overcoming this aversion to wildlife in our cities is of major concern. As cities continue expanding into natural habitats, close encounters with wildlife will only increase in frequency. Human urbanites will have intimate experiences with animals they never noticed or even knew about.
Donovan says that he “wanted to show people who barely even think about urban wildlife what was there in their midst.” The book certainly accomplishes this goal. After introducing Bryan, the urban snake wrangler, the book expands to stories from locales as diverse as Berlin, Miami, Cape Town, Mumbai, and Los Angeles. These stories capture the truly multifaceted nature of the urban wildlife question. Topics as varied as economics, culture, architecture, and politics, in addition to biology, influence the study of wildlife in cities.
One of the most complicated of these factors is human attitudes toward urban wildlife. Donovan does well when portraying the varied relationships between urban wildlife and people. In India, monkeys are viewed as an incarnation of the Hindu god Hanuman. Therefore, Indian authorities are reluctant to wage war on urban populations of these mischievous city inhabitants, even though they have caused multiple deaths, including that of Mumbai’s deputy mayor in 2007. In another sympathetic case, teams of volunteers in Chicago sacrifice their early morning hours roaming the streets of downtown, rescuing migratory birds that have collided with high-rises.
On the other end of the spectrum are the almost militaristic efforts of the city of Miami against feral chickens and snails. Brought to the Americas by Europeans, chickens have taken to urban, suburban and rural areas via escapes from captivity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Miami; some neighborhoods have literally thousands of chickens roaming the streets. The city has made multiple attempts at freeing the city from the clutches of these urban-adjusted birds, which are capable of ripping up a lawn in a matter of hours. Teams of chicken-hunters respond to complaints, chasing down and catching chickens in nets. Miami is also infested by the African land snail. Eight inches long when fully grown, these snails eat stucco off houses, lay hundreds of eggs per month (and can self-fertilize!), carry a meningitis-causing nematode, and eat five hundred different crop plants. Donovan describes them as “giant potentially deadly hermaphrodite house-eating terrorist snails that breed fast.” These snails are a threat to homes, public health, and Florida’s economy, which is largely supported by agriculture. Accordingly, the African land snail has jumpstarted the largest pest-control response in Florida’s history, which appears to have slowed the spread of this monster. Donovan’s portrayal of varying human reactions to urban wildlife makes Feral Cities truly representative of issues surrounding urbanization’s effects on wildlife.
Aside from the attitudes of the general public, some of Donovan’s stories give an up-close account of the scientists who study the complicated lives of urban wildlife. Studying animals in urban areas presents a number of challenges. Coyote researchers in Chicago sometimes have to do some light trespassing, using private driveways in order to track animals living in residential areas. Wildlife officials in India are often forced to remove or put down jaguars that become accustomed to urban living.
Urban wildlife scientists are also usually the people responsible for communicating with the public about urban wildlife. Los Angeles, California harbors one of the United States’ most famous urban wildlife examples—the mountain lion, P-22. Making his home in L.A.’s Griffith Park, P-22 has brought the issues associated with urban wildlife to the fore in one of the country’s largest cities. Some residents are proud of P-22, while others readily accuse him and his ilk of attacking household pets, although, in reality, this is rare. It often falls to scientists to communicate facts about urban wildlife aimed at increasing acceptance of sharing our homes with non-human residents.
The book concludes with a message of hope. Designing wildlife-friendly cities will be a major focus in the future of studies of urban wildlife, architecture, and urban design. Donovan uses the Nature Boardwalk at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo as an example of how these efforts have already begun. After reseeding, a concrete pond was transformed into a veritable urban oasis, harboring a multitude of native plants. Nest boxes are supplied for Black-capped Chickadees, while native fish swim in the pond below droves of native dragonflies. Turtles have found their way to the pond, as has the Black-crowned Night Heron, an endangered species in Illinois. Chicago is a leader in wildlife-friendly urban design, but other cities are following suit, such as Berlin, Germany, which has initiated efforts to connect all the city’s green space to serve as wildlife corridors. Donovan also highlights the non-conservation benefits of urban wildlife: improvements to human health and increased exposure to nature, to name a few. Donovan calls for all of us to open our eyes to the wildlife that lives around us in cities, from rare endangered birds to common squirrels to sidewalk ants to the spiders roaming our apartments.
Donovan hopes that his book will excite people about urban wildlife or, at least, prompt them to be more appreciative of it, much as he has been over the years. As a student at Plymouth University in the UK, Donovan worked on surveys of urban lichens, but a volunteer stint at a magazine convinced him to become a journalist. Despite the change in his career path, Donovan remained interested in ecology and always hoped to write about it. The inspiration for Feral Cities finally arrived in the form of London’s red foxes. After reading newspaper columns about the foxes, Donovan came up with the idea for a book about urban wildlife, which became Feral Cities. For Donovan, urban ecology is more than animals alone—“it’s ecology meets evolution meets architecture meets planning meets psychology meets social policy”.
This interdisciplinary understanding of the issue is certainly apparent in the excellent Feral Cities. Although not an analytical, scientific text, the book provides a unique look into the lives of both urban wildlife and its human counterpart. For anyone interested in any of the many aspects of urban wildlife, Feral Cities will be a vastly entertaining read.
(Una versión en español sigue inmediatamente después de la versión en Inglés.)
Urban green areas and public spaces are key elements in urban infrastructure, mitigating environmental challenges, fulfilling social functions, and contributing to the ecosystems of the surrounding region. In Bogota, the concept of the Ecological Network (Van der Hammen and Andrade 2003)—green spaces integrated within and beyond the city—has appeared as a central element of urban planning in recent years. However, these ideas have not been easy to implement and still the debate persists about the relative merits of development and conservation.
Áreas recreativas Bogotá, Foto IDRD.
The vision of conservation isolated from urban dynamics, without an understanding of the social reality of the territory, has hindered the development of a Principal Ecological Structure or a natural system that ensures public space and connectivity. Additionally, the mechanism for their application is largely limited to zoning laws, rather than a wider scale view that it is founded on watersheds as a principal driver of the ecological system.
Urban public areas represent a chance to build resilient, secure, and healthy biodiverse areas that can also result be poetic and beautiful spaces. In the Colombian reality, great examples of public spaces are fewer and fewer, replaced instead by standardized designs that focus on functional aspects rather than local identities or ecosystemic functions. Implementation of sterile standards and formulas results in the hardening of surfaces and loss of trees in the main parks of the towns; hardened embankments are “decorated” with isolated palms that are incompatible with local style and climate conditions. Additionally, urban developments that seek to be efficient in land use often neglect the notion of neighborhood, and community spaces are diminished by generalized public use.
This dislocation has become evident also at the ecological level. In the case of proposals for large areas of new urban development at the edges of southern Bogotá, grids extend beyond local and community scales and dynamics, creating large homogeneous urban areas without identity and with little ecological wealth. These designs forget the meaning of the neighborhood. Family and social life in such homogenous, diffuse, poorly connected “neighborhoods” is diminished. Further, the trend to seek planning to turn cities into “sustainable” areas remains questionable because urban areas cannot be considered isolated, but must necessarily be associated with the surrounding territory and region.
Development in Colombian cities is often planned with imported parameters and designs, without considering the cultural and geographic realities. Fashions and stereotypes that are created under the umbrella of sustainability encourage super specialized groups of professionals seeking quantifiable standards and checklists on how to be “sustainable”. In the maze of “certifications” of urban ideals they forget the history and realities of the lives of the people who live there, who have everyday problems to solve, and, finally, what matters and what is vital in the life of a citizen.
Altos de la Estancia, Bogotá. Foto D Wiesner.
Plans seek ideals that do not consider the multiplicity of social stories that make up the rhythms of urban life. Many planners in Colombia, and specifically in the case of Bogotá, make great projections without knowing the territory and freeze them onto fixed maps with prohibitive rules. Such plans turn out to be difficult to execute or impossible to maintain—they don’t fit the realities of the ecological and social landscape.
I propose that we perform more regenerative planning strategies with living maps at various scales: well-articulated plans achieved through participatory methodologies and implemented through the comprehensive work of various disciplines involved in the agreements and vision. Disciplines derived from conservation science, as well as those of architecture, design, and landscape architecture converge in a renewed concept of green infrastructure, eco-urbanism, and urban sustainability. Such a convergence occurs today within landscape ecology, a discipline that now recognizes the concept of design in the landscape as a research topic and as a practical application of principles, and which Nausauer and Opdam (2008) defined as a directed transformation of a landscape in order to meet human needs in the management of ecosystem services (Andrade, Remolina, Wiesner 2013).
Parque Entrenubes, Bogotá. Foto Daniel Pineda.
Moreover, in the evolution of the concept of urban biodiversity, we no longer speak of “nature” threatened by man but rather recognize the wild and domestic, the natural and the built, cultural and adapted species represented in urban areas with particular identities in the landscape (Clergeau 2007). Architecture and urbanism have evolved beyond merely functional consideration of the city and its form, making way towards the integration of ecological and social functions that transcend isolated and “efficient” urban structure and discover cultural and ecological functions, allowing integration of the concept of green space in the urban landscape and essential form (Andrade et al).
Cerros de Bogotá.
This integration can inspire planners to address some specific challenges. The dynamics of cities progress and change at rates with which formal plans fail to keep pace. New working methods in line with this reality must emerge, creatively and urgently. It is a challenge that must be realized in synchronization among organizations, businesses and citizen initiatives. What must be achieved is the refinement of comprehensive participatory methodologies of work, synchronized among the tempos of city officials, the community, business, planners, designers, scientists and political cycles.
Diversos enfoques, Foto San Victorino.
We must move forward in a search for quality spaces focused on human beings, improving local conditions, environmental quality and equitable provision of services, consistent with the needs of the community without too much eagerness for stereotypical aesthetics or forms. This demands that dialogue about sustainable urban development does not remain distant from the majority and language converges on forms in which the population can participate.
Corredor Ecológico de los Cerros Orientales. Montaje sobre fotografía.
Joint citizen action is needed to record the processes and experience of self-management. Restore human connections that have been weakened with mobilization based on trust and support. Generate living maps that reflect actions and strategies consistent with the land. Living maps that record processes, changes, adjustments and collaborative actions must be recognized and encouraged.
Planning cannot be reduced to the sum of finished studies that are immediately obsolete. They are static and unresponsive. We need living maps and plans, which are renewed according to processes, progress based on achievements, and learn from observation and error.
Altos de la Estancia, foto D.Wiesner.
For this, it is important to involve and revive the social role of schools and universities, where students should concentrate on methods of observation, participation, and change. Promote comprehensive professionals with skills in land management to ensure that the projects become visible and tangible. Train professionals who do not seek the limelight but work as part of a team, where satisfaction is when synchronicity is achieved.
Work holistically, listen without pontificating, learn and multiply knowledge with living planning, and increase the number of caring, happy, resilient, and included citizens.
Translated into English from the original Spanish by David Maddox
References
Andrade GI (2011) Estado y Presión sobre la Estructura Ecológica Principal. In: Ajustes Ambientales al Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial de Bogotá. Secretaria Distrital de Ambiente. Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá. Bogotá
Nassauer JI, Opdam P (2008) Design in science: extending the landscape ecology paradigm. Landsc Ecol 23:633–644
Andrade, G; Remolina F, Wiesner D. Urban Ecosystems. Assembling the pieces: a framework for the integration of multi-functional ecological main structure in the emerging urban region of Bogotá, Colombia
Clergeau P (2007) Une écologie du paysage urbain. Editions Apogée, France
PLANIFICACION VIVA , CIUDADANOS RESILIENTES Y FELICES
Las áreas verdes urbanas y el Espacio público son elementos clave en la estructura urbana, enfrentan retos ambientales y cumplen funciones sociales y ecosistemicas en su región circundante. En Bogotá, el concepto de Estructura Ecológica Principal (Van der Hammen y Andrade 2003), aparece incorporado como elemento central de la planificación urbana en los últimos años en Colombia. Sin embargo, su consolidación no ha sido fácil de implementar y aún persiste el debate de conciliar desarrollo y conservación.
La visión de la conservación aislada de las dinámicas urbanas, sin un entendimiento de la realidad social del territorio ha dificultado el proceso en la generación de la mencionada Estructura Ecológica Principal o bien de un sistema natural de Espacio Público que garantice funciones y conectividad. Adicionalmente los mecanismos de su generación se ven limitados a la aplicación de una reglamentación urbanística más que a una visión macro que se estructure desde sus cuencas hidrográficas y que contemple el agua como estructurante del ordenamiento.
Las áreas publicas urbanas son la oportunidad de generar espacios resilientes, seguros, biodiversos y sanos lo que debe traducirse igualmente en espacios poéticos y bellos. En la realidad colombiana grandes ejemplos de espacio público se siguen reduciendo a aplicaciones de cartillas estandarizadas que se centran en aspectos funcionales por encima de las identidades locales o de las funciones eco sistémicas. La implementación de cartillas y formulas en las diversas realidades geográficas colombianas se traduce en el endurecimiento y tala de árboles de los principales parques principales de los poblados; en malecones endurecidos y “adornados” con palmas aisladas que no se compadecen con las condiciones atmosféricas ni ofrecen condiciones de bienestar climático a quien las recorre. Adicionalmente, los desarrollos urbanos que buscan ser muy eficientes en el uso del suelo olvidan la noción de barrio y la colectividad se desdibuja en espacios de uso público excluyentes. Esta desarticulación se ha hecho evidente también a nivel ecológico. Es el caso de propuestas de extensas zonas de nuevos desarrollos urbanos en los bordes urbanos de la zona sur de Bogotá, en cuadrículas que se extienden ajenas a escalas y dinámicas locales creando grandes áreas urbanas homogéneas, sin identidad y con poca riqueza ecológica olvidando lo que significa la vida de barrio. Por lo anterior, la vida en familia en un barrio con amigos y conocidos que forman su red primaria se deshace en urbanismos ajenos a su productividad, a su movilidad y a una vida urbana rica en experiencias.
La tendencia en la búsqueda de la planificación de convertir a las ciudades en “sostenibles”, sigue siendo cuestionable pues el ámbito de sostenibilidad no se reduce a las áreas urbanas sino que necesariamente debe estar asociado a la noción de territorio y región.
El concepto de desarrollo en las ciudades colombianas se asocia en muchos casos, a una planeación con parámetros importados, sin contemplar las realidades culturales y geográficas. Las modas y estereotipos que se crean bajo el paraguas de la sostenibilidad termina reduciéndose a grupos de profesionales súper especializados que buscan cumplir estándares cuantitavos y listas de chequeo sobre como ser “sostenibles”. Por lo tanto, en el laberinto de las “certificaciones” los ideales urbanos olvidan la historia de vida de personas que lo habitan, que tienen problemas cotidianos que resolver y que finalmente, lo que importa y lo que es vital en la vida de un ciudadano se olvida.
Los planes buscan ideales que no consideran la multiplicidad de historias sociales que van a otros ritmos. Mucha de la planificación en Colombia, y en caso concreto de Bogotá, los urbanistas realizan grandes proyecciones sin recorrer el territorio y se plasman en mapas en realidades congeladas cargadas de normas prohibitivas y en planes difíciles de ejecutar o eventualmente imposibles de mantener.
Se propone entonces realizar estrategias de planeación regenerativa con cartografías vivas de diversas escalas. Lograr planes realmente articulados a través de lograr metodologías de participación en la planificación y la implementación de trabajo integral de diversas disciplinas que convergen en una visión y en acuerdos. Las disciplinas derivadas de las ciencias de la conservación; y aquellas de la arquitectura y el diseño y la arquitectura del paisaje, convergen en un concepto renovado de infraestructura verde, eco urbanismo o sostenibilidad urbana. Una convergencia que se presenta en la actualidad en el seno de la ecología del paisaje, disciplina que hoy reconoce el concepto de diseño en el paisaje, como un tema de investigación y como una forma de aplicación práctica de sus principios, y que Nausauer y Opdam (2008) definen como una transformación dirigida de un paisaje con el fin de satisfacer las necesidades humanas de gestión de los servicios ecosistémicos. (Andrade, Remolina, Wiesner 2013)
De otra parte, la evolución del concepto de biodiversidad urbana, no habla de la “naturaleza” amenazada por el hombre sino del reconocimiento de lo silvestre y lo domestico, lo natural y lo construido, lo cultural y lo adaptado representado en especies y espacios urbanos con identidades particulares en el paisaje (Clergeau 2007). De otra parte, la arquitectura y urbanismo, han evolucionado desde la consideración funcional de la ciudad, de la forma, hacia la integración de las funciones ecológicas y sociales, que sobrepasan las estructura urbana aislada y eficiente y descubre las funciones culturales y ecológicas, permitiendo integrar el concepto de espacios verdes en el ámbito urbano y de paisaje de forma integral (Andrade et al).
Por lo cual se busca inspirar a los planificadores para hacer frente a algunos retos específicos: la dinámica de la ciudad va a un ritmo que los planes no logran seguir y nuevas metodologías de trabajo acordes a esta realidad deben surgir de forma creativa y urgente. Es un reto que debe concretarse en una sincronía entre entidades, empresas e iniciativas ciudadanas. Lo que se debe lograr es afinar las metodologías de trabajo participativo, que sincronice los tiempos del funcionario, con los de la comunidad, con los de los consultores y los tiempos políticos.
Se esta avanzando hacia la búsqueda por cualificar el espacio centrado en el ser humano, mejorando condiciones de proximidad, calidad ambiental y una oferta equitativa consecuente con las necesidades de la comunidad vecina sin tanto afán por estereotipos estéticos o formales.
Se exige entonces, que el desarrollo urbano sostenible no siga siendo un discurso alejado de la mayoría, y que converja en un lenguaje en donde la población se sienta interlocutora.
Se propone también articular las acciones ciudadanas y registrar esos procesos desde la experiencia y la autogestión. Restablecer los tejidos humanos que se han debilitado mediante estrategias de acción articuladas en grupos de movilización basados en la confianza y apoyo. La generación de cartografías vivas que reflejen acciones y estrategias con el territorio. Cartografías vivas que van registrando los procesos, los cambios, los ajustes y articulan acciones de trabajo de colaboración que deben ser reconocidas y fomentadas.
La planificación no puede reducirse a la suma de estudios que cuando terminan ya son obsoletos sino en cartografías y planes vivos, que se van renovando acorde a los procesos avanzando sobre lo realizado y aprendiendo también de la observación y del error.
Para esto, es importante involucrar y reactivar el rol social de colegios y Universidades, donde los estudiantes deben estar centrados en observatorios de participación y cambio. Promover profesionales integrales con habilidades en gestión del territorio, para lograr que los proyectos se hagan visibles y tangibles.
Formar profesionales que no buscan protagonismos sino hacer parte un trabajo en equipo, donde la satisfacción se da cuando se logra la sincronía. Trabajar de forma holística, escuchar sin pontificar, aprender y multiplicar el conocimiento en una planificación viva, aumenta la cantidad de ciudadanos mas solidarios, felices, incluyentes y resilientes.
We’re now deep into summer, which in Anchorage means that conflicts between the city’s human residents and our wild neighbors are at a peak. Most of the problems involve black and grizzly bears, but moose have also made headlines in the local daily newspaper (“Woman stomped by moose at Kincaid Park,” the Anchorage Daily News reported on June 11) as it happened, my new puppy and I were charged by a cow moose that same week while walking Kincaid’s trails, but avoided getting trampled after the surprise encounter).
A brown bear inspects a residential trash container. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Other wild animals, too, occasionally make the local news because of conflicts with the people who live in Alaska’s urban center, from wolves to beavers. But bears are the primary summertime headline grabbers, both because they present a danger to people (especially those who are unwary or foolish), and because many residents continue to behave badly—or at least ignorantly and recklessly—while living in a place that remains bear country notwithstanding its urban character. (Despite the occasional spring or summertime stomping by cows notoriously protective of their calves, moose are a greater problem in winter, when they’re much more likely to be hit by motorists; they’re also more stressed by the season’s harsh conditions, which can lead to increased aggression.)
Ears back, hackles raised, this urban moose is agitated and ready to charge. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Beyond the drama and stories they produce, such conflicts point to one of the chief challenges that needs to be addressed in any discussion of “the nature of cities,” namely the fact that many urban residents—even where they’re surrounded by wildness—know little about the wild nature of their homelands. Or worse, that many don’t care to know and/or actually resent and resist the fact that they have to share their lives with other species, some of them large and potentially dangerous wild animals and others that are more an annoyance than a threat, from the aforementioned beavers to cottonwood trees and mosquitoes.
As I’ve written in Living with Wildness and recounted in my initial TNOC posting (“Rediscovering Wildness—and Finding the ‘Wild Man’—in Alaska’s Urban Center”), I am fortunate to live in a city that is blessed with abundant “natural areas”: parklands, greenbelts, healthy creeks, and a coastal refuge. I also live in a city that is bordered by a half-million-acre “backyard wilderness,” Chugach State Park. Because of all these wildlands and waters, my adopted hometown is inhabited by diverse and abundant wildlife: some 230 species of birds, five types of salmon, and nearly 50 species of mammals.
Anchorage is the largest U.S. city to support nesting populations of loons. It is also the biggest to have grizzly or brown bears (which are members of the same species) occasionally stroll through mid-town or even downtown—though when noticed in such high-density parts of Anchorage, such a bear inevitably stirs a ruckus and more often than not pays with its life because of human safety concerns.
Years ago, state wildlife manager Rick Sinnott (now retired and himself the author of numerous wildlife articles for the online journal, Alaska Dispatch) commented, “No other large city in the world is inhabited by grizzlies or brown bears. Most cities wouldn’t stand for it, but here they’re accepted. We brag about our bears.” As evidence he pointed to a late-1990s survey in which 70% of local respondents answered that Anchorage has either “just the right amount” or “too few” brown bears.
Anchorage is the largest U.S. city to have brown bears walk its trails and streets and fish for salmon in its creeks. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Another who has applauded the community’s tolerance of grizzlies is Canadian bear authority Stephen Herrero. The author of the acclaimed book, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, Herrero once commented, “I see the situation in Anchorage as world class and certainly unique. It’s something to be proud of.”
A more recent survey suggests that the overwhelming majority of Anchorage residents continue to appreciate wildlife generally, but their tolerance of brown bears has declined significantly since that 1990s poll. In part that’s likely because of some high-profile bear maulings that have occurred within the Anchorage Bowl, most notably in 2008.
The 2010 summary of “Anchorage Residents’ Opinions on Bear and Moose Population Levels and Management Strategies” reported, “Despite some concerns about wildlife populations, Anchorage residents hold generally positive attitudes toward wildlife—a majority (92%) of residents say that wildlife is an important part of their community, and a majority (86%) say that wildlife encounters, despite the possible danger, make life in Anchorage more interesting and special.”
Black bears are much more common than browns; here two cubs take refuge in a tree. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and Game
When asked specifically about brown bears, 48% of the 2010 survey participants expressed tolerance. But an equal portion “do not want [brown] bears in the Anchorage area.” The responses for black bears were 61% and 35%, respectively, likely reflecting that species’ reputation as a less-aggressive animal.
Though they present less of a physical threat, most ursine problems in Anchorage involve black bears, not browns. Partly that’s because black bears are much more abundant than their grizzly cousins. State biologists have become hesitant to give population numbers without studies to back them up, but not so long ago wildlife managers estimated that 200 to 300 black bears inhabit the larger Anchorage area, while brown bear numbers are closer to 60, and those general numbers almost certainly still hold true.
Brown bears also tend to be more secretive, or at least less visible, and seem less willing to go where people are abundant. Perhaps that’s because the bolder or nosier members of the species that do walk into the city’s inner, developed areas almost inevitably end up dead. Black bears seem more adaptable to a human presence; they’re more likely to be seen strolling along a street in the middle of the day. And because they are viewed as less dangerous animals, their presence in neighborhoods stirs less fear—and, as the surveys indicate, greater tolerance.
For all those reasons, and perhaps others, black bears are the ones that more frequently get into human garbage, pet food, etc. So while Anchorage residents may like to boast they share the landscape with grizzlies, black bears are the ones we most often encounter on trails and streets and in our yards and trash piles. They’re also the ones most likely to become “problem bears” after learning that humans are a great source of easy-to-get foods. And too many prove the truth of the adage, “A fed bear is a dead bear.”
***
One of the chief attractants for black bears in Anchorage is human trash. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Regardless of what the polls say about our acceptance of bears and our willingness to share the city with them, Anchorage residents frequently invite conflicts with bears—and, to a lesser degree, moose—despite numerous and ongoing reminders and warnings.
Even when bombarded with messages that such behavior will invite trouble, far too many people leave pet food in the yard, put garbage in open trash bins, or keep bird feeders filled with seed throughout the summer, when birds don’t need our handouts.
To complicate matters even more, in recent years growing numbers of residents have kept chickens in their yards (thanks to more relaxed city ordinances), yet another draw for bears. There’s now an increased push to get chicken owners to install electric fences around their chicken coops. But as with trash and birdseed, some folks will listen and some won’t. Many Alaskans tend to be stubborn sorts with a strong libertarian streak; they don’t like being “over regulated” or told how to run their lives, even if what they’re being told is for the greater good.
One way to keep bears away from backyard chickens is to install an electrified fence around coops. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and gameBlack bears have also learned that bird feeders are a good source of food. Credit: Alaska Department of Fish and Game
I’ve written about the challenges of “living with bears” for the past two decades or so, in articles and essays and locally published opinion pieces. I’d like to say things have gotten better, and in some ways they have. In 2002, for instance, an Anchorage Bear Committee was formed. With fifteen or so members representing more than a half-dozen local, state, and federal agencies that manage lands and wildlife within the Anchorage municipality, the ABC’s goal was simply stated, but hardly easy: to minimize the problems and maximize the benefits of living with bears in Anchorage.
The committee launched several programs to increase residents’ awareness of the actions we humans must take if we truly want to have bears as neighbors. In my 2008 book Living with Wildness, I documented many of the ABC’s successes, while also noting that its members “know the education never stops. Though the essence of their message is both familiar and simple, they must repeat it again and again: if residents of Anchorage—or other Alaskan communities—truly wish to share the landscape with ‘urban’ bears, we will do what is necessary to eliminate food temptations. Where problems exist, they almost always begin with humans, not bears.” [Emphasis added for this posting.]
For that reason the ABC continues to conduct “Bear Aware” events throughout the spring and summer, at a wide range of venues that will draw both adults and youngsters.
At the same time I lauded the work done by the ABC, I lamented that “For all the tolerance that locals express in surveys, interviews, and letters to the editor, human-bear conflicts have increased greatly since the mid-1990s.”
Sadly, this continues to be true.
One indicator: increased “bear calls” to the Department of Fish and Game. A second measure: bear DLPs, or bears killed “in defense of life or property.”
Between 1981 and 1995, an average of one grizzly and less than three black bears were annually killed as DLPs within the municipality of Anchorage. Over the next decade (1996-2005), the average had jumped to 2½ brown bears and 10 black bears. Since then things have gotten even worse: from 2006 through 2012, 100 black bears were killed as DLPs, or more than 14 per year. The high was 21 kills in 2008. Not coincidentally, perhaps, that same year three people were mauled in Anchorage by brown bears; with residents on edge, it’s likely that many considered any bear a menace and were less forgiving than usual. Meanwhile the brown bear DLP kill has jumped to three per year, with five in 2008 and a record six in 2012.
Some years, road kills add substantially to the toll. Four black bears were killed on local roads in both 2003 and 2008, two in 2012. At least one brown bear has died when hit by a vehicle every year since 1996, with a record five bears killed in 2000, four in 2007, and three in 2009.
There are many possible reasons for these increased kills. Anchorage’s human population has continued to grow and the city’s margins have slowly but steadily expanded into areas that once were prime bear habitat. Such changes inevitably lead to increased conflicts and what amount to death sentences for bears.
The city has also grown more culturally and ethnically diverse. A higher percentage of residents come from places where bears are not part of the landscape and/or they bring different value systems, different attitudes toward wild animals. Has this led to a greater intolerance of bears? It’s hard to say. But there’s no question it has led to an increased need for public education.
It used to be argued that limited hunting of Anchorage-area bears contributed to their “bad” behavior and resulting DLPs. As Rick Sinnott once put it, “You get more bears being rewarded with garbage while learning humans aren’t much of a threat.” But in recent years the sport hunting kill of both black and brown bears in neighboring Chugach State Park and other areas near Anchorage has increased substantially, diluting that claim. During the 1990s, hunters killed 20 black bears on average in the Anchorage area; since 2000 the annual “harvest” has nearly doubled, to 39. Meanwhile hunters killed only four brown bears total between 1996 and 2007, but from 2008 through 2011 they took thirteen, or more than three per year (complete statistics weren’t available for 2012).
***
More people also seem to be engaging in risky behavior, for instance running or bicycling on trails also traveled by bears. While moving fast, a large number listen to whatever’s playing on the electronic devices they carry, which of course means they pay less attention to their surroundings. And sometimes they do all this in prime bear habitat. The danger of such behavior was shockingly illustrated in 2008. That summer a teenage girl was attacked by a brown bear in the middle of the night, while participating in a 24-hour bicycle race sponsored by a local bicycle club.
A sign at a trailhead warns people about recent brown bear activity. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Then the area wildlife manager, Sinnott pointed out that brown bears frequently use “Rover’s Run,” the woodland trail where the attack took place, while traveling to and from a nearby creek where they fish for salmon. The cyclist likely surprised the bear while it walked along or nearby Rover’s Run. The animal then attacked what it perceived to be a threat.
Sinnott and other bear biologists further noted that conditions were ideal for such an attack. Like other race participants, the girl was moving quickly and quietly along a narrow and winding trail, through an area heavily used by bears. And she was doing so at a time of day (1:30am) when bears tend to be more active. Both the low light and thick forest growth beside the trail further restricted visibility, while the rushing creek and winds blowing through the forest made it less likely the bear would hear the girl’s rapid approach.
As Sinnott later told a reporter, “She might have been going only 10 or 15 mph, but there was a winding trail, and I’m not sure either of them had any warning at all. It was just—boom!
“Any adult brown bear would react in the same way. It’s like you’re walking down a hallway in the dark and someone leaps out of a corner. You’re either going to run or you’re going to slug ‘em. That’s the way brown bears think, and in a second they’re on top of you.”
Remarkably, bicyclists and hikers continued to use Rover’s Run even after it was posted with warning signs and local biologists encouraged the public to stay away. Less than two months later, a brown bear female with two cubs attacked and severely injured a runner along the same trail. To her credit, Clivia Feliz admitted, “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have been on that trail.”
Others were less apologetic and some locals insisted Fish and Game should “thin out” the bear population, despite its long and well-known use of the area.
A brown bear female with three cubs walks along a trail that’s popular with walkers and bicyclists. Photo: Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Then-mayor Mark Begich closed Rover’s Run immediately after that second attack and kept it closed during the summer of 2009. But following his election in 2010, Mayor Dan Sullivan chose to reopen the trail against the advice of Sinnott and others on the ABC, while arguing that Anchorage is “a city first . . . it is first and foremost an urban environment.” Sinnott criticized Sullivan’s decision and I too took the mayor to task in the commentary “Rover’s Run: Mayor Sullivan Acts Irresponsibly in Keeping the Trail Open.” It should be noted that yet another cyclist was mauled on Rover’s Run that same summer.
In 2011, the now-retired Sinnott wrote a follow-up commentary, “Mayor Sullivan is betting Anchorage bears will behave,” and this year he’s suggested that if Rover’s Run isn’t closed, it should at least be rerouted to minimize human-bear encounters. I won’t hold my breath waiting for this to happen, at least while Sullivan remains the mayor.
This, I believe, is another major challenge for those of us who wish to enhance the wild nature of our cities: political leaders who maintain that cities are places for people, not wild nature. As I wrote in 2010, “To insist, against all evidence, that Anchorage is simply an urbanized place meant for people alone is to be disingenuous or in denial. And for the mayor to leave a trail open to the public against the best advice of local wildlife managers—and despite the recent history of bear-human conflicts along Rover’s Run—is irresponsible.”
Three years later, nothing has changed that I can tell.
***
In early June, only a few days before the moose-stomps-woman story that I mentioned at the start of this posting, the Anchorage Daily News< ran another article: “City sees seasonal rise in bears, moose run-ins,” which included some telling comments by the Anchorage area’s current wildlife manager, Jessy Coltrane. She reported that Fish and Game was receiving daily calls about problem bears in the city’s Muldoon area, attracted there by unsecured garbage bins.
Trash at illegal campsites scattered through Anchorage adds to the city’s “garbage bear” problems. Photo: Wayne Hall
“There are numerous black bears and at least one brown bear that’s working Muldoon,” Coltrane told reporter Casey Grove, adding it’s unfortunate that garbage continues to be such a common problem in Anchorage.
Unfortunate, indeed. And discouraging.
When you have many people who won’t properly take care of their trash, and others who insist on recreating in ways and in places that invite conflicts with bears (and moose), and a mayor who obstinately refuses to follow the advice of wildlife experts because he believes urban areas are strictly for people, it’s clear that we Anchorage residents have a long way to go in our effort to more fully embrace—and celebrate—wild nature in our city, no matter what surveys show.
Some may argue that Anchorage’s bear-human conflicts present an extreme example of the human-wild nature challenges that exist in our cities. I would suggest that they help to more clearly define those challenges.
As I’ve written many times before, the problem isn’t bears or moose, if in fact we really want to have them as our neighbors. The problem starts with people and our attitudes and actions toward the other forms of life with whom we share the landscape. Are we willing to make compromises, changes in our lives and behavior, to allow wild nature a place in our urban lives? All too often, many of us city dwellers say “yes,” but our actions suggest “not really,” even in a wild place like Alaska.
The instigator of the National Park City Concept, Daniel Raven-Ellison, emphasised that the concept would lift people’s ambition, challenging existing norms by asking, “What if …” and “Why not…”, to create new and better opportunities for city living.
During the past week the eyes of the world have been on London, to see a new Prime Minister installed at Westminster. But the week has also seen a momentous decision made for a sustainable and liveable future for London. The city was designated as a National Park City, the first of its kind in the world. It took place at a National Park City Summit held at City Hall on Monday 22 July 2019 where the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan signed a Charter proclaiming London’s new status, saying that this is the “boldest action of any city in the world and a real milestone in London’s history”.
The Summit brought people together from many walks of life including international and national agencies dealing with environment and city planning, representatives of local government, academics and teachers, health professionals and a great variety of organisations dedicated to finding positive visions for a greener, healthier, and wilder city. The instigator of the National Park City Concept, Daniel Raven-Ellison, emphasised that the concept would lift people’s ambition, challenging existing norms by asking, “What if …” and “Why not…”, to create new and better opportunities for city living.
A defining quality of a National Park City is to stimulate an atmosphere in which millions of people take everyday actions to improve the quality of their lives and enhance the fabric of the city. Many of these are already happening, but we have the potential to achieve so much more. Everyone in the city can both benefit and contribute.
“It’s one vision to inspire a million projects.” — Sir Terry Farrell, internationally acclaimed British architect and urban designer
London National Park City launch
As a National Park City, London will be:
a city which is even greener in the long-term than it is today and where people have every opportunity to connect with nature in their daily lives
a city which protects the core network of parks, green spaces, lakes and rivers
a city that is rich in wildlife
a city where every child benefits from exploring, playing and learning outdoors
a city where all can enjoy high-quality green spaces, clean air, clean waterways and where more people choose to walk and cycle.
A city where culture and nature coalesce.
Tony Juniper, Chair of the UK Government agency Natural England, recognised the vital significance of this new concept, which will stimulate the magical connection between people and nature, saying that urban dwellers need to be at the heart of the arguments for nature conservation. Similarly Jonny Hughes, Chair of the IUCN Urban Alliance, argued that the Charter was a profound milestone providing a compelling vision for the future of cities. He saw eco-urbanism as a key feature in the National Park City concept. Kobie Brand, Director of the ICLEI Cities Biodiversity Centre in Cape Town called it a joyful day promoting cities with nature. She made a commitment to encourage all ICLEI Members throughout the world to join this new movement. Kalee Kreider from the National Geographic Society in Washington DC welcomed this extraordinary moment which will transform our approach to cities. Kevin Halpenny, a Board Member of World Urban Parks, called it a paradigm shift, a clarion call for the natural world.
Part of the London National Park City map.
These luminaries from around the world were joined by people from London who are already immersed in a huge variety of projects aimed to transform public attitudes. They included young ambassadors for the natural world who are well aware of the global unravelling of nature and are determined to ignite the passion of Londoners to protect and enhance the natural world in this great city. Action for Conservation is one of these new organisations, which believes that children and young people deserve to be connected with nature. It runs camps to train ambassadors and is aiming to have 100 volunteer rangers working to make this happen.
Alison Barnes, CEO of the New Forest National Park in the UK, gave her strong support for the concept of National Park Cities with many wise words about the values that will emerge from new opportunities for public participation and involvement. It seems that traditional National Parks may have things to learn from this new concept.
David Goode signing the charter.
Monday was a very special day that will be remembered by everyone who was there for many years to come. There will be many others who will wish they had been there.
On the day before, a few of us gathered to launch a Universal Charter for National Park Cities with a new International Foundation. It’s early days yet, but already there are cities around the world preparing themselves for the journey. We heard from David Speirs, Minister for Environment & Water in the Government of South Australia, who provided an excellent account of all the initiatives being pursued by the City of Adelaide. As he says, it has the momentum to become the next National Park City, but I suspect there will be many others in the race. World Urban Parks would like to see 25 National Park Cities by 2025. I would be surprised if there are not many more.
Readers might like to refer back to my 2015 TNOC blog on moves to make London a National Park City.
Something very significant is happening in London. It’s a plan to make London the world’s first National Park City. Now that’s an idea that could catch on in a very big way.
Over the past 18 months, a movement has been growing, drawing together Londoners who want to apply National Park principles to the whole of Greater London. The aim is to turn traditional attitudes to the city inside out, ensuring that nature has a place in every aspect of London’s fabric and making it accessible to every Londoner. The idea has gained huge support from many different sectors of society. It’s a people’s movement that is gaining momentum by the day and, last month, a draft charter was launched for public consultation (see NationalParkCity.London).
St James’s Park in Westminster, where people and nature co-exist a stone’s throw from parliament. Copyright David Goode.
The steering group has come up with a working definition of a National Park City:
“A large urban area that is managed and semi-protected through both formal and informal means to enhance the natural capital of its living landscape. A defining feature is the widespread and significant commitment of residents, visitors and decision-makers to allow natural processes to provide a foundation for a better quality of life for wildlife and people”.
They have gone further by identifying nine specific aims:
Ensure that 100 percent of Londoners have free and easy access to high quality green space.
Connect 100 percent of London’s children to nature.
Make the majority of London physically green.
Improve London’s air and water quality year on year.
Improve the richness, connectivity and biodiversity of London’s habitats.
Inspire the building of affordable green homes.
Inspire new business activities.
Promote London as a Green World City.
Nurture a shared National Park City identity for Londoners.
Richmond Park, a Royal deer park since 1637, was designated as a National Nature Reserve in 2000. Copyright David Goode.
This movement is not something that has suddenly emerged out of the blue. London has a long and impressive history of protecting its green environment, from the Royal Parks created in the late medieval and Tudor periods, to the Metropolitan gardens movement of the 19th century and Garden City suburbs of the early 20th century, to the designation of London’s Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land in the 1950s and the massive proliferation of urban nature reserves since the 1980s, large numbers of which are now protected through planning legislation. The idea of a National Park City is building on firm foundations.
The statistics are extraordinary. Greater London covers nearly 1600 km2, of which 47 percent is physically green. Nearly 20 percent is made up of private gardens and there are 3,000 parks. The total length of streams, rivers and canals is more than 850km, many of which are accessible by footpaths. Signed footpaths and well established greenways exceed 1000km in length. London’s natural habitats are exceptional, with considerable areas of ancient woodland, meadows, heath and common, as well as ancient deer parks—such as Richmond Park—and recently created wetlands that have proved to be extremely popular. These natural habitats include some that are internationally important, but it is particularly striking that the total amount of natural habitat now protected by nature conservation designations amounts to nearly 20 percent of Greater London.
These habitats, which are spread throughout the capital, include about 50 specially protected areas of national significance, 142 Local Nature Reserves and over 1400 Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation. Londoners have access to hundreds of natural areas within this great conurbation and there are numerous groups providing everyone with facilities for contact with nature. It is an extraordinary paradox that the capital city of the UK, with 8.6 million people, is so rich in accessible wildlife compared with rural farmland, which is fast becoming bereft of nature.
Walking through Brook Farm Open Space along the Dollis Valley Green Walk, which takes you across north London to Hampstead Heath. Copyright David Goode.
So, the idea of a National Park City is not so strange as it may seem. Indeed, if we were not so conditioned by deep seated assumptions that a national park must be a pristine wilderness, or that a city must be an entirely man-made entity from which nature should be banished, the idea might have emerged much earlier. It is entirely logical. London is paving the way for a new approach that will be very exciting.
What makes me excited is that the idea has sprung from a diverse group of ordinary Londoners who have a vision for the future. It is not a top-down initiative from government, or the Mayor, or from IUCN or UNESCO. This is a people’s movement. The prospectus says, “All kinds of people are involved: cyclists, scientists, tree climbers, teachers, students, pensioners, unemployed, under-employed, doctors, swimmers, gardeners, artists, walkers, kayakers, activists, wildlife watchers, politicians, children, parents, and grandparents.”
They have put it in plain words:
“Let’s make London the world’s first National Park City. A city where people and nature are better connected. A city that is rich with wildlife and every child benefits from exploring, playing and learning outdoors. A city where we all enjoy high-quality green spaces, the air is clean to breathe, it’s a pleasure to swim in its rivers and green homes are affordable. Together we can make London a greener, healthier and fairer place to live. Together we can make London a National Park City. Why not?”
Having worked on a detailed strategy to protect London’s wildlife habitats since the 1980s (see link below), I am delighted that this new initiative is based on a much broader constituency. It gives ordinary people a voice, an opportunity to influence London’s environment in ways that have not been possible before and an opportunity for everyone to benefit from London’s natural assets.
Mudchute City Farm, next to the financial district of Canary Wharf, in 2007. Copyright David Goode.
The idea has been remarkably well received. Celebrities such as Stephen Fry have been wholehearted in their support. He said, “Imagine London as the first National Park City. Wow, heck of a thought. Help make it happen.” But most of the comments come from lesser-known people who recognise the enormous opportunities offered by this idea to their own particular area of work. Whether it be child poverty, sustainable schools, transport planning, mental health, green building projects, or provision of long distance footpaths, these are just a few of the vast array of activities that are likely to be affected. Sir Terry Farrell, the prominent architect and urban planner, described it as “One vision to inspire a million projects.”
It has also gained the support of the London Assembly and several London boroughs, though the instigators are not looking for the kind of top-down designation by Government that is the hallmark of traditional national parks. This will be a people’s project which will act as a catalyst to promote new solutions for our capital city. But the idea of a National Park City could take the concept of nature in the city into a whole new realm. If it catches on, it could go a long way to meet the kinds of objectives now being espoused by IUCN for protection of urban natural areas; I am sure it will influence the future debate on development of urban Biosphere Nature Reserves.
Momentum is growing in London for this radical new venture and there are positive signs, even in these early stages, that it could shake up some long established attitudes to nature. I believe there is a parallel here with public perceptions of climate change. In her book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues that it will require a shift of public attitudes on a scale equivalent to the movement for abolition of slavery if we are to reverse current trends. So it is, too, with our perception of nature in our predominantly urban lives. But the idea of a National Park City led by citizens turns everything on its head. I’m all for it.
With acknowledgements to the National Park City steering group prospectus.
One adage I want to share after finishing the US Forest Service Inaugural International Urban Forestry Seminar is: look more closely, think more deeply. This was something that one of the presenters said to us on our first day in Chicago and it stuck with me throughout our journey.
Collaboration is key and we need to listen to one another actively and globally to achieve common goals.
Over the course of two weeks (4-17 June 2017), our delegation of 19 participants representing 16 countries had the unique opportunity to learn about programs in Chicago and New York City, as well as from one another. Participants included natural resource professionals, municipal government officials, community leaders, activists, Foreign Service nationals and NGO managers who are engaged in urban forestry and community outreach. The countries represented included: Armenia, Bhutan, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Georgia, Jamaica, Jordan, Malawi, Mexico, Morocco, Palestine, Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda, and I had the privilege of representing Canada.
Our group at SWALE, Photo credit: Pam Foster, US Forest Service
Given my eclectic academic and professional background, my view of urban forest management, research and planning has largely focused on Canadian needs and perspectives. The experience of this two-week seminar broadened my understanding of international viewpoints and directions with every site we visited by sharing outlooks on the challenges facing communities and greenspaces in urban environments. Although many of the sites overlapped themes, this only served to emphasize the complex integration of urban issues. The themes we dealt with at specific sites over the two weeks included:
Environmental education (Seward Elementary);
Resiliency and restoration (Gary, IN);
Alternative education and community development (El Valor)
Environmental justice (Faith in Place and Sacred Keepers)
Building social, ecological and disaster resiliency (NYC Parks)
Governance and community connectivity (STEW-MAP)
Social and ecological restoration (Rockaways)
Access, environmental education (Biobus)
Activism and partnerships (Community Gardens)
Community engagement, art and innovation (SWALE)
Food justice and food security (Brooklyn Grange)
Environmental stewardship and youth development (Rocking the Boat)
Our itinerary included a wide array of field trips, site visits and case studies to examine approaches, techniques, tools, and partnerships that showcase the overall theme of the seminar: Community Engagement—the underlying significance being that without community support, the natural (physical) environment we strive to conserve cannot be sustained. Through engaging discussions, presentations and experiential learning, we shared understandings about urban forest management, urban planning, and community engagement.
Side of Lincoln Hotel, Chicago, IL. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
The seminar exceeded my expectations and afforded me an opportunity to experience a multitude of community activities and programs related to social and environmental justice. One of the main things that stuck out for me was the importance placed on the multi-level partnerships and the scale with which these relationships are imbedded. I am thankful to have met new and inspiring people from around the world. The primary lesson I take from this group is that collaboration is key and we need to listen to one another actively and globally to achieve common goals.
Prior to arriving, we were asked to identify questions and challenges to natural resource management and urban communities facing our countries. During the first few days, each participant offered an introductory presentation on urban forestry and community outreach issues in our home country, allowing us the opportunity to get to know one another more closely, to recognize the common challenges facing practitioners worldwide, and to find common (or dissimilar) entry points into critical dialogue.
Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
From a Canadian perspective, the main questions I proposed were: (1) Given that some countries have competing (or other) priorities (e.g. poverty, political unrest), what are the motivations for engaging governments and communities in urban forest stewardship and education? (2) What are the considerations for being inclusive with respect to diverse cultures, ethnicities, religions, and economic backgrounds? Questions that my seminar colleagues offered included: What are the regulations for planting specific species in urban areas? How do you engage people that have limited access to education? How can we move away from science being an elitist activity or concept and make it accessible and fun? What are the similarities and differences among departments at different levels of government and how can we learn from one another to bridge gaps?
Overall, our collective challenges to urban natural resource management included: lack of awareness and urban forestry education programs; disconnect between research initiatives and applied practice; lack of policies incorporating urban greening in infrastructure; increased residential and commercial development; absence of strategic approaches at federal and regional levels; and lack of knowledge exchange between communities and across professions.
One of the main goals of the seminar was to enable and empower participants to ask questions about how we can develop, replicate and maintain similar programs around the world. Daily, the seminar left me considering the notion of responsibility and what we can do in our respective positions and countries to enhance community resilience and engagement in urban environmental sustainability. In my case, for Canada, one of my roles with Tree Canada, a national NGO dedicated to urban forestry, is to provide direction for the Canadian Urban Forest Network (CUFN) and Strategy (CUFS). Our national steering committee is currently in the process of updating the Strategy for the 2018-2023 term. We have an opportunity to move in a more socially inclusive direction by revising the five working groups of the Canadian Urban Forest Strategy to include critical operational elements that will benefit urban forest infrastructure. Specific activities organization-wide can include:
To advocate for alternative modes of education and creative communications
To better integrate citizen science and crowd-sourcing into our knowledge sharing and knowledge production work
To incorporate more inclusive community engagement strategies for long-term volunteer commitment
To actively broaden the multi-disciplinary Canadian Urban Forest Network and reach the audiences that are currently under-represented
To determine and explore areas of collaboration with the US Forest Service to bring iTree and STEW-MAP into Canada
To engage with the Canadian Forest Service as their primary external partner to help develop urban forest policies/mandates
In Tree Canada’s work with municipalities across Canada, communities have expressed that the primary challenge is a lack of federal support. The Canadian Forest Service is currently developing their internal mandates related to urban forestry; this new development in Canada’s federal government offers an opportunity for closer collaboration.
Lastly, even though diversity was not an overtly identified theme, it permeated every discussion and presentation we experienced. The contribution of women in urban forestry and arboriculture is the overarching narrative that I am currently examining in my postdoctoral research through the University of British Columbia. As such, it was particularly interesting to me that the majority of our host speakers were women. It was inspiring to see the influences of so many women at different ages and stages in their careers, not to mention the diversity in race, ethnicity and perspectives.
In order to better understand some of the questions being raised and the challenges with which we were contending, I want to share some of the places we visited during our seminar that best exemplified the major themes listed above.
The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum: environmental education
Tour of specimen collections at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum with Michelle Rabkin. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Also known as the Chicago Institute of Science and Technology, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum serves to bridge the gap between science and practice working with communities both on and off site. With both their live and dead specimen collections, the Nature Museum offers unique learning opportunities for students and the public with their summer camps, overnight and after school programming, and series of exhibits and events. This site was our home base for much of the Chicago portion of our journey. Our discussions here began with introductions to the seminar and the space as integrative gateway for access to nature and science knowledge. Set within Lincoln Park, the Museum serves as a model for environmental education facilities.
Seward Elementary School and Jardincito: environmental education and community engagement
Jo Santiago, US Forest Service, at Seward Elementary. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
At the Seward Elementary Communication Arts Academy we experienced how environmental education programs are brought directly to the classroom. Jo Santiago of the US Forest Service presented live raptor specimens and discussed habitat, behaviour, individual stories, and the lessons birds of prey can teach us about ourselves.
Jardincito. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
We also learned about engaging communities where they live at Jardincito in south Chicago with Carina Ruiz of the National Audubon Society. We discussed urban environmental stewardship and resiliency against challenges of poverty and gang violence. The takeaways here for me included bringing passion to our jobs and using non-traditional ways of learning and understanding how profoundly surrounding environments can impact student learning and development.
Gary, Indiana: resiliency and restoration; brownfields and reindustrialization
The visit to the Mayor’s office in Gary, Indiana, fostered discussion on how industry can often have such a deep impact on the social succession of a community—who was there, who came after and the impact on landscape use. With the continuing decline in population since the 1960s, 10,000 houses are currently abandoned. Brenda Scott-Henry, Director of Environmental Green Urbanism Affairs, and Deirdre Campbell, Director of Commerce explained that the City of Gary is working hard to stabilize neighbourhoods through community green infrastructure plans and programs like Universal Access at Marquette Park among others like nature tours and historical preservation tours.
Graffiti in Gary, IN. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
During our tour of the surrounding neighbourhoods in Gary, I was struck by the long-term commitment of some of the volunteers who have settled in empty communities maintaining anywhere from three to six houses at a time. The City also encourages volunteers to paint decorative board-ups and fake windows during “blight” removal (blight: term used to describe building decay and illegal dumping). In addition, local and international artists come together each year for the Graffiti Art Festival as part of community building and beautification.
As we drove through the east side of Indiana, which is overwhelmed by the impact of its steel mills, the question we grappled with is what do you do with these spaces when the mills close down? This reminded me of the Ruhrgebiet, or Ruhr region, in Germany (cultural capital 2010), and the reindustrialization of Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord, for the purpose of tourism. While not at the same scale in Gary, however, the City’s efforts to restore the declining population and devastated landscape is ongoing. The takeaways here for me included understanding how to engage the local communities based on their immediate needs and create community ownership.
El Valor: alternative education and community development
El Valor. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
El Valor, a non-profit social service agency with programs focused on engaging adults and children with cognitive and physical disabilities, serves communities mainly comprised of immigrant families, a majority of them from Mexico. Monarch butterfly symbolism is used as a cultural metaphor for migration and journeys. Integration of environmental art using cultural connections like “dia de los muertos” (a cultural celebration of our life cycle in remembrance of relatives) is a cornerstone of their program.
As a non-traditional partner, the El Valor children’s centre and programming supports 500 families to train families together. Parents are valued as their child’s first teacher; as such, much importance is place on family engagement in the knowledge sharing and learning process. It may be common to walk by a piece of artwork created by a child and not realize the complexity or the impact behind it. The takeaways here for me included a better understanding of using symbols as cultural connections for environmental education, that everyone is a stakeholder and can be involved in the process of conservation through creative pathways.
Faith in Place and Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab: environmental justice
On our last afternoon in Chicago we had a panel discussion with Reverend Debbie Williams, Veronica Kyle, and Toni Anderson about environmental justice. I was moved by each speaker’s passion and intimate integration into the community. The question that this conversation raised is how do you have the uncomfortable, complicated dialogue about race and environment?
First, Veronica Kyle, Chicago Outreach Director for Faith in Place, spoke about engaging faith-based communities in developing green teams to deliver programs of environmental stewardship and conservation. Their mission is to reach diverse people of all faiths, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations to share the commitment to care for the earth. She made a compelling argument to make room in operational budgets for diversity. She also spoke about overcoming the resistance to the message of environmental impact by meeting a community’s immediate needs (e.g. jobs). For example, if you have mold in your home, you are not going to care about geothermal solutions.
Environmental justice panel: From right to left: Reverentd Debbie Williams, Veronica Kyle, and Toni Anderston. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Second, Reverend Debbie Williams from Faith in Place spoke about story circles and the importance and power of narrative and storytelling in connecting people to people and people to nature. Encouraging leaders to be inclusive and listen to the priorities of communities and explore multiple avenues of entry into the environmental conservation conversation. “Fostering the family and people connections is key in environmental programs because people will do things for the love of one another.”
Finally, Toni Anderson of Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab spoke about indigenous cultural connections to nature, youth engagement and the need to understand the importance of histories and legacies of ancestral land and settlement. This raised questions about equity, power and race and how these issues underlie land use and ownership and ultimately governance. The takeaway here for me included a better understanding of how to engage with groups who are often overlooked in the environmental science discourse.
NYC urban natural areas: building community resiliency (social, ecological and disaster resiliency)
Highline in New York City. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Our first day in New York was spent discussing how we build, develop and maintain resiliency after disaster; the importance of public-private partnerships— how we develop them and leverage resources; and the balance of green and gray infrastructure. Land use management is a 3-way partnership in New York between the US Forest Service (who does not own any land in NYC), The Natural Areas Conservancy, and the NYC Parks Department. Bram Gunther, of the NYC Parks Department and Natural Areas Conservancy provided an overview of NYC’s natural areas and greenspaces, restoration, and green infrastructure.
Our group walking along the Highline in NYC. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Dr. Lindsay Campbell of the US Forest Service spoke about the important role of the Urban Field Station as a research base for studying the city as a social ecological system (integration of social and biophysical). This is done through adaptive management, applied science, and public-facing programs. The Urban Field Stations serve to create a space of meaning where people can be innovative and where new topics and ideas can emerge. In NYC, the importance is focused on forming interdisciplinary teams and operating as a network across the country. The takeaways for me here were the importance of people underlying land use management and their individual responsibilities for tree care.
STEW-MAP and i-Tree Tools: governance and community connectivity
How do we understand the social, spatial and temporal interactions within a city of 9 million people? This is the research question that underlies the Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP), a civic capacity map and a data-driven set of tools that has resulted in a regional list of 12,000 groups who steward the urban spaces across NYC. Drs. Michelle Johnson, Lindsay Campbell and Erika Svendsen explained that the tool itself is for natural resource managers, funders, policy makers, educators, stewardship groups and the public.
The tool collects information on organizational characteristics, physical geography and organization social networks (relationships). Maps and databases can be generated to better understand civic capacity and support community development.
Slide presentation on Stew-Map. Photo1: Adrina C. Bardekjian
On the application side, the benefit is building a community of data contributors who share the same goals for sustainability. With respect to governance, people can be positive agents of change; without stewardship groups, there is a high possibility that the landscape will not be sustained. The mapping provides a legitimacy of these groups. Stewardship and indicators of social resilience include: place attachment, collective identity, social cohesion, social networks and knowledge exchange.
Our group using i-Tree in Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
In addition, Scott Maco of the Davey Institute spoke about i-Tree Tools as method for urban forest management and research. Analyzing the structure of the forest to garner present data that is relatable to a general audience and useful for proactive planning given its applications (e.g. i-Tree also measures health and vulnerability data). These tools are available for free.
Native grasses planted to stabilize the dunes at Rockaway Beach. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Rockaways: resilience and ecological restoration
The Rockaway Institute for Sustainable Environment (RISE) is a community hub for artists, residents and scientists to congregate and collaborate on issues facing the Rockaway peninsula. At RISE we discussed disaster response, the impacts of Hurricane Sandy on the surrounding community and the efforts to plant native grasses to stabilize the dunes at Rockaway Beach.
Our team at Biobase examining lab specimines. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Biobus/Biobase: access, environmental education
At the Lower East Side Girls Club in Alphabet City we were introduced to the Biobase and the Biobus, a mobile science lab that serves 150-200 elementary, middle and high school students on any given day, across 111 schools in 154 days per year. As students discover science through the Biobus, they have opportunities to explore their interests in more depth and then pursue after school programs. Dr. Ben Dubin-Thaler, founder of the Biobus, spoke to us about how the bus provides access to science knowledge and equipment and offers an alternative approach to environmental education.
Community gardens in NYC: activism and partnerships
La Plaza Cultural Community Garden. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
We examined community gardens through the lens of activism, community partnerships, resiliency and public health with Aziz Dekhan, New York City Community Garden Coalition, and Charles Krezell from LUNGS (Loisada United Neighbourhood Gardens). We were introduced to the rich history of NYC community gardens and how they offer a refuge for communal gathering and contribution.
Some of the sites we visited were long-established gardens that the organizations had to fight the City (via litigation) to keep, due to threat of increased development. More broadly, many communities struggle with this challenge and can either grow closer in the process of standing together, or some projects can come undone in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Our group at SWALE. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
SWALE: Community engagement, art and innovation, food security
Our visit to SWALE, New York City’s floating food forest, integrating permaculture, social design and art for education was innovative and inspiring. Founded by artist Mary Mattingly, this garden is built on a barge and travels to the various piers in NYC, serving as a mobile outdoor classroom to educate visitors about food security and stewardship of land and public waterways. This initiative addresses the challenge that many citizens live in food deserts (areas with limited access to fresh food). The correlation between public health and greenspaces is becoming more widely acknowledged and projects like SWALE are important models for public education. For me, this site captured many of the themes of that we dealt with during the overall trip: integration of nature and cities, community coming together, art and creativity, mobility and transformation.
Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Brooklyn Grange: food justice and food security
At Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, we received a tour by founder Anastasia Cole Plakis, who spoke about the important role that urban agriculture plays in connecting communities to nature and getting people to think about where their food comes from on a broader scale. She spoke about the necessity of educating inner city youth about nutrition and how many of them do not think of the space as a farm so much as a park until they see the four chickens in their coop. The chickens are kept to connect the space with farming and food in the minds of schoolchildren who visit the rooftop. The cycle of this for-profit business involved growing food, selling it to local restaurants, and then using part of the profits to host education programs.
Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Rocking the Boat: environmental stewardship and youth development
Rocking the Boat. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Rocking the Boat, an organization that focuses on youth development and environmental stewardship through boat building, environmental science and sailing offered us a unique experience to row down the South Bronx river with youth educators as our guides. Their three core programs engage over 200 youth per year who move from being students to paid apprentices to alumni then to being eligible for part-time work with the organization as Program Assistants. Participants in the program also receive services from social workers and counselors who help them plan their long-term goals. Groups like this help youth to build strong foundations in environmental stewardship. Click here to hear from the team at Rocking the Boat.
Our team at Rocking the Boat. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the US Forest Service International Programs, for including Canada in this seminar, and I’m thankful to Tree Canada for recognizing the importance of this seminar and affording me the opportunity to attend; our work will certainly benefit from the insights garnered during this two-week journey.
The organization of this inaugural seminar was seamless due to the dedication of the coordinating team; a huge thank you to Kristin Corcoran, Mike Rizo, Liza Paqueo, Rachel Sheridan, and Pam Foster, for making our experience as comfortable and fun as it was informative and memorable. I look forward to future collaborations.
I’m also grateful to all the hosts of this seminar over the two-week period in both Chicago and New York. The shared insights are beneficial to my practical work and academic research; but I’m particularly grateful for the personal experiences this journey afforded, including:
Getting out of my comfort zone on more than one occasion (e.g. speaking to 5th graders);
Re-learning the meaning of acceptance by feeling humbled by the social interactions and level of compassion and commitment of volunteers;
Being exposed to the challenges of urban forestry and social engagement from different countries around the world;
Re-kindling my own passion for collaboration and knowledge that people can achieve anything if they’re kind, open and community-focused.
Finally, I’m grateful to my co-participants for their honesty and openness during our sessions while sharing stories and experiences. It was an honour to be part of this incredible group and I’m thankful for the opportunity to learn from, and contribute to our engaging discussions. After all, the best experiences are the ones that are shared with the people we meet along the way. Adrina C. Bardekjian
Montreal
US Forest Service International Programs. 2017. Concept Note: 2017 International Seminar on Urban Forestry. Introductory document given to participants about the seminar.
Bringing together specialists across disciplinary boundaries, sediment sampling has occurred across 14 sites and 3 seasons. Photo: Josh Johnson (www.joshethanjohnson.com)
Story notes: The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn is well known throughout New York City as a nearly two-mile-long trench filled with sewage and chemicals left behind by years of neglectful pollution.
Though the canal is slated for a multi-million dollar cleanup courtesy of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency Superfund Program, a team of local scientists, landscape architects, and community activists have discovered a very different kind of remediation effort underway in the sludge beneath the bottom of the Gowanus.
This podcast episode, produced by Philip Silva, catches up with members of the BK BioReactor project and their efforts to find out whether anything can live in the sort of toxic habitat provided by a place like the Gowanus Canal.
This phylogenetic tree illustrates the diversity of life found in the Gowanus Canal, a result of its parent microbiological makeup, the introduction of foreign materials through increased trade and shipping, and subsequent adaptations to the urban, industrial environment. Credit: BK BioReactor team (www.bkbioreactor.com).
Left to right: Matthew Seibert, Ian Quate, and Elizabeth Henaff of BK BioReactor. Photo: Josh Johnson (www.joshethanjohnson.com)
Despite all the pollution, it turns out that the canal is teeming with microscopic life, and some kinds of bacteria are actually able to live on the waste that humans have left behind. Not just the sewage, either. Some bacteria seem to be able to feed off the industrial solvents and petrochemical products that line the bottom of the canal. As these microbes nosh their way through the potluck of pollutants on the E.P.A.’s list of hazardous substances, they break them down into safer compounds and elements, leaving the canal just a tiny bit less toxic over time—a long, long time.
We are celebrating our 3-year friendship. Artist-climate activist and ecologist-designer. We met in Portland (a tip of two floral hats, and a gracious thank you to David and The Nature of Cities), a long way from Toronto and longer still from Cape Town. Our conversations have become a multi-media notebook of sketches, photographs, internet memes, poems, voice notes… and lots of botanical discoveries. We walk a creative tension, exploring the blurred boundaries between endangered and emerging ecosystems; we mourn what is lost, rejoice in what is saved, and wonder what is yet to be found.
Where will my broken-heart for nature go? I see pale promise of the novel and the newly-emerging, in places distorted by species dislocated. I take deep pleasure in the weedy and the stray, the forgotten humble plants and the mongrel landscapes of their in-between.
Katrine Claassens (KC:) It is insane, going to “normal work” right now, in the middle of the Sixth Extinction. What for? Why are we doing this? Have we all been so seduced by the idea of normal?
Nina-Marie Lister (NML): Normal work is what caused this. So, what are we working for, if not to save our home, our beautiful planet? We are living out-of-bounds. We are entering a new world of our making. And likely less hospitable for us, no longer the masters.
Advisory: there are pictures below of animals killed on the road.
KC: The camera trap images resonate for me … this feeling has a grip on me, growing since I started living the climate work.
NML: The images are riveting. We use them in research. Combing through them by hundreds, thousands to track movement patterns, hot spots. But I am the one captivated. I realise the animals have character, personality. Do they wonder at us and our voyeurism?
KC: I’m fascinated by the flattened quality of the flash images. At night especially, you lose the resolution, you lose some of the very quality you seek to highlight. It’s a strange and compelling irony.
NML: Then there are the real traps…our house-sitter trapped a weasel in the kitchen compost. It was so angry, spirited, it almost chewed through the wire cage. Was it our home or its home from which we ousted it?
KC: I found this from T.S. Elliot. It has helped shed light … hard poetry for hard times:
What are the roots that clutch / what branches that grow / out of this stony rubbish…
NML: We hit a squirrel in the road today. Had to turn around and run it over again, because it was writhing. Mercy. But why now, when the world seems falling apart? But then I came home to find a swallow in the garden, calling for a mate. It had come home too. Small miracles of migration… signs of life carrying on around us, without us.
KC: A time of monsters perhaps: the old world is dying and the new cannot be born.
NM: What do you suppose we will keep, lose or leave? What we will keep and what will we let go? I hope it is with a breath of kindness, as the chaff is blown from the grain…
Photos: Katrine Claassens (L) and Vanessa Rieger (R)
~ ~ ~
One in the hand
I heard the sickening thump while tap-tapping at my keyboard. Looked up and saw him? her? lying prone, wings spread wrong, legs kicking, head lolling. I reach out, gingerly, my breath coming shallower and faster, hoping. My heart thud-thudding. My fingers trace the silky feathers, warmth radiating through the impossible rosy hue that stains the breast. A tiny heart tick-ticking. I exhale and bring the bird to rest, inside a crude and makeshift nest, a box, a towel an hour. Dark and quiet. Deeper breaths. I cannot bear another one lost to my vitrine vanity. Deadly windows, too close to the shores that beckon the birds home to recover, feed and breed. I wait, I peek and am relieved. So is the Rose-Breasted Grosbreak—who rose, shat, fluffed, and in a blink, flicked and flit away. One more survives to sing the song of spring.
Photos: Nina-Marie Lister
~ ~ ~
Dislocated
I am running, sweating, panting, and late. It’s unseasonably hot for June. Summer dress sticking to my legs, impractical heels catching in the cobblestones, clack clack. My overstuffed briefcase weighed down by books and the umbrella, contorted and clumsy, smack smack. I stop and check my Metro map. Am I lost? Surely they won’t start without me. I duck around the corner in hopes of a shortcut. I hear a distinctly tropical squaw-squaw, an avian laugh, just out of sight. Squaw-squaw, tongue-clicking, tsk tsk. Mocking me. Where am I? I stop, turn and listen again, moving away from the meeting I’m missing. Squaw-squaw ha-ha tsk tsk. I am at once pulled and propelled by that seductive taunt. The heat is oppressive, the air humid and swollen with the threat of rain. I look up nervously, scanning the darkening sky. Wet grey wooly wads against the hazy, fading blue. Then, an improbable flash of emerald—an iridescent green between the grays. I squint and then stare. There they are, a mocking flock of parakeets come into focus, alighting in the London plane trees. African ring-necked parakeets. They look at me curiously, a clumsy sweaty human, staring open-mouthed in wonder as the skies open. I am a stranger in Paris. And they are, quite unnaturally, at home.
Photos: Nina-Marie Lister. Right: Paris street art by Ruben Carrasco
~ ~ ~
Emergence
Night time, rain-slicked road, headlights fuzzy in the fog. The droplets plop-plopping on my windscreen become waves. I can’t see. Slowing down to wish-wash through the river that was the road. Everywhere there are frogs. Hop-hopping between the yellow lines, black tracks my tires make. I can’t bear to look at the carnage the car is wreaking. Which is the water? Where is the road. The tempest has washed them into one. Water is everywhere before it is somewhere1as rains gather to form rivulets, rivers that now ravage roads. I am in the impossible terrain of rain2, watching as the frogs move like fish, overtaking the road in the storm. The headlights now blurry eyes, peering into the pouring. Rain. And in a flash, there is white, strobe-light bright and rising. Swiftly, silently, up, up into the forest overhead. Her wing tips stroke the windscreen, their span dwarfing the tin-can car. An owl on her prowl is undeterred by weather, water or the whimper of the human barely breathing in her shadow.
Photos: Nina-Marie Lister
~ ~ ~ ~
Trapped
Measurements are made. The camera carefully placed. Hidden in the brush. Track pads raked clean of prints made by paw, hoof and claw. The infra-red eye staring. Waiting. But silent stalkers and quiet walkers will make movements however slight. Rustle, bustle, chase and burst forth into its view. Click-click. (Com)motion triggers shutter. Click-click, the creature’s ears prick-prick. Ears hear, head turns and the gaze is caught by the eye. Who has been here? More than we see, the night creatures, hidden in plain sight. Where do they walk, rest and roost? Silently slinking, quietly creeping, boldly bounding they are caught and held, their grainy, ghosted images trapped. Voyeurism as research. They leave us this trace, a tiny tease. Prints on paths that intertwine invisibly with ours.
Photos: ARC Solutions
~ ~ ~ ~
Promise
There is so much beauty in the biodiversity of this blue marble. Breath-taking, heart-stopping, mind-numbing. We cannot ever count it all. The library of life is bleeding away, lost to us before it is ever found. Can it be loved when it is not counted, classified, or named? I hope so. We lament the loss, but we do nothing. I mourn the crushed egg, fallen from the nest, life leaking into my hand3. I feel the sharp pull of my insides when I pass the slumped shape by the roadside, fur matted, a rusty pool staining the pavement. I walk among still-warm feathers at the toe of the towers, counting the mounting carnage each spring and fall. I await the return of winged migrants, breath held each spring, through weird and wacky weather. Their numbers, like their bodies, plummet. Vital, vernal and eternal, the insects hatch, the buds burst, but where are those who feed, forage and feast on this bounty? In the midst of this crash, I look for signs of life among the ruins.
Photos: Nina-Marie Lister
Some species surprise us, emerging as if from fairy-tale slumber, blinking into city light. Others appear here, then are gone, vanished overnight. The racoons and rats are thriving, but the whip-poor-wills gone silent. Parrots in Paris, boars in Rome, coyotes and foxes in Toronto, New York and Montreal too. In cities, the swifts spiral around collapsed and abandoned chimneys. But what is the barn swallow without the barn?4 Our cities grow bigger, consuming countryside, slipping into wildlands beyond. The wolves have been returned to Yellowstone but remain far from their ranges, pushed out and corralled in a park. It is easy with a full-heart to be lulled into to love with the wild and sacred large landscapes of our protected places. But if you fall in love with the marginal landscapes of sacrifice and suffering, then (as Jedidiah Purdy laments), “your love prepares your heart for breaking”5.
Where will my broken-heart for nature go? I see pale promise of the novel and the newly-emerging, in places distorted by species dislocated. I take deep pleasure in the weedy and the stray, the forgotten humble plants and the mongrel landscapes6 of their in-between. I hope fervently and fiercely for connections made among the fragments, for remaking the ruins, and re-weaving and re-wilding. For the moment though, I am stuck between lamenting what is lost and learning patience for what is yet to be found.
Photos: Katrine Claassens (left and centre), Nina-Marie Lister (right)
After / Spring
NML: I find myself wandering around derelict lots and storm drains in this sad city… they are bizarre beacons of hope, life emerging among the ruins. Weeds and waste, where escaped pets have become feral. A new urban nature.
KC: I realise what a soft spot I have for these “damaged” landscapes. There is something I relate to, something that mirrors what is inside. When I see weeds peeping through, it brings me such joy, and it just sucks me in.
NML: Light along with life emerges from the cracks. The weeds destroy the pavement we laid down.
KC: I wonder what happens when we lose patience and hope but keep the compassion?
NML: Compassion and humility. They are all we have got to make meaning life in a ravaged beautiful and emerging new world.
NML: Today I saw a lone trumpeter swan fly overhead and land in the bay. It was breath-taking to see this magnificent and rare creature, all white, with a black face and black legs. It swam with some geese, honking for a mate that may never come. The geese flew away, and it remained alone. Honking plaintively, or hopefully?
KC: My brother found that last recorded call of that extinct bird, and I was listening to it while I worked. It awakened this awful private (or maybe lonely?) sense of loss. I just listened and listened … and then a bird landed on my balcony. A little sparrow.
NML: This evening I heard a whip-poor-will sing in our hedgerow at dusk. I held my breath and waited to be sure I’d really heard, and not just imagined it. My eyes brimmed and leaked, and my heart stirred and opened. I had not heard that song in a decade at least.
Legends say that the whip-poor-will can sense a soul departing and can capture it as it flees. I wonder, does the whip-poor-will sing for the soul of our departing world? Or does it capture ours, before we are lost?
Let us hold onto the birds of the earth with as much hope as we have for the songs they sing.
~ ~ ~
Nina-Marie Lister Toronto
Endnotes
Dilip da Cunha, 2018. The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. University of Pennsylvania Press. 352p.
Ibid.
With thanks to Kat Claassens for her poem (Egg, broken by cat’s teeth), pers. comm. 2020.
With thanks to Jeremy Guth for asking the question, pers. comm. 2020
Jedidiah Purdy, 2015. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press (page 206).
Richard Weller’s term in “World Park”, in LA+ Wild. Vol 1 (10-19).
Should planners maintain inefficiency so that they have the capacity to be efficient when they need to? When the “low-hanging fruit” conversation comes up: Does picking it actually move us in the right direction?
Anyone who has participated in processes of planning, community development, advocacy and societal change more generally has probably engaged in an inevitable conversation about “low-hanging fruit”. (Perhaps there are similar idioms in languages other than English.) In my experience, it goes like this: there is a broader, inspiring conversation about the ultimate vision and goals that the group wishes to achieve. This is followed by the identification of a series of steps to be taken to achieve that goal, some small, some large, most unattainable in the short term with existing resources. Then, to avoid facing what seems like the futility of it all, the conversation turns to identifying pieces of the plan that are achievable in the near term, with the resources available or easily obtainable. A frequent focus of this conversation is some form of assessment of barriers and opportunities to forward progress. The low-hanging fruit are the actions that can be taken toward the goal that are not blocked by barriers.
Problems with this approach include the assumption that the process of change is a linear one, that one step leads to the next until the final goal is achieved and that therefore low-hanging fruit are the same kind of fruit, and of equivalent quality, as the fruit growing higher up on the metaphorical tree. It also assumes that regardless of whether you ever manage to pick the rest of the fruit, the low-hanging fruit is worth picking, and is better than picking no fruit at all. If fruit picking is the goal, then it makes sense to start with the ones you can reach while someone goes and gets a ladder so you can get the rest a bit later. If, however, the lower fruit is not equivalent to the higher fruit, you might take up all the room you have in your baskets with the lower hanging fruit and never get to the higher fruit at all. Or maybe you conclude that if all you can get is the lower fruit, maybe you should choose another tree altogether, where you stand a better chance of success. (As a side commentary on this particular metaphor, and as someone who lives with fruit trees, I can also say that the fruit on the top of the tree ripens first, as it usually gets more sun, therefore picking the lower fruit first is not a good idea at all.) Over the years, I have spoken with many in the field of planning who feel frustration with the low-hanging fruit approach.
The author, ironically, picking low-hanging cherries from her well-watered back yard cherry tree.
Settling for the low-hanging fruit can actually lead you astray
Recently, I spent several days in a workshop as part of a team working on energy resilience in low-income neighborhoods in the city where I live. The team, when I joined it, appeared to me to be working on a typical low-hanging fruit problem: how to increase participation of low-income households in several programs designed to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy use. Efficiency and conservation are the classic low-hanging fruit of sustainability efforts: energy, water, fuel, recycling, these all fall into the general category of working within the existing system to make it less wasteful of precious resources. It’s hard to disagree with these arguments; I think we all intuitively approve of “efficiency” and disapprove of “waste”. But let’s take a look at what efficiency and waste might really mean within the context of the fruit-picking metaphor.
Ecologists are familiar with the concept of resource limitation in ecosystems. An ecological community of plants, microbes and animals will increase its primary production (the production of biomass) until it runs out of a resource it needs. The main limits on primary production globally tend to be sunlight, temperature, or water, however at local scales many ecosystems are limited by a particular nutrient such as nitrogen. Ecologists can detect resource limitation by experimentally adding more of the limiting resource to the system and seeing if production increases. Complex adaptive systems—such as ecosystems, economies, and cities—self-organize around constraints and limits, although they often respond to them in ways we don’t expect. For example, in the complex system that is a city, fundamental resources such as space and water may act as constraints on growth. Transportation planners can tell you what happens when you remove the constraint of road capacity by building more capacity: rather than just relieving congestion, expanding road capacity results in induced demand—more development that quickly brings the system back to a congested state. A few years ago, a graduate student of mine developed a system dynamics for Las Vegas’ water supply that indicated induced demand occurring with water as well. The city’s population growth plateaued until new water projects (the pipeline from Lake Mead, for example) came online, and explosive growth followed.
Here in Salt Lake City, we receive an average of 400mm of precipitation per year; we have some of the highest per capita levels of water use in the world and one of the fastest population growth rates in the US. The vast majority of our water use in the state goes to agriculture, but outdoor irrigation to maintain green grass and shade trees in yards, parks and gardens is the largest share of urban use. We run our sprinklers freely and pay very low rates for what we use. Many civic-minded residents perceive and abhor this “waste” and are converting their lawns to xeriscape. That is, they are imposing a voluntary constraint on themselves that the broader system does not impose. What does this picking of low-hanging fruit achieve within the broader system, then; in years of normal precipitation, what happens to the water that is not used by these residents? The residents, I presume, think that the water is either staying in the reservoirs (which is probably directly true in the short term), or contributing to maintaining ecological streamflows (which may also be true but only if the reservoirs are full). In the longer term, it may also be helping to postpone the construction of a planned water project on the Bear River to the north, thereby saving us all a lot of money and preventing the habitat destruction associated with a new dam. However, it is also probably fueling more development locally by relieving some of the water supply constraints on our local population growth.
I’ve spoken with regional water policy leaders and managers who recognize—off the record—that the “waste” of water in our agricultural and urban systems is actually serving as our emergency reserve. If a deep, multi-year drought hits, there are a lot of taps we can turn off and still have water for basic uses. This is a manifestation of the “flexibility” described by Gregory Bateson in his 1970 essay1. Bateson describes flexibility as “the uncommitted potentiality for change” (the current buzzword “resilience” is also getting at this). From Bateson’s perspective, the goal of all good planning must be to increase flexibility, despite the fact that the system has a “natural propensity to eat up all available flexibility”. How does the planner create flexibility while restraining the system from hungrily gobbling it up? In other words, how do you maintain inefficiency so that you have the capacity to be efficient when you need to? In the case of our wasteful water use, if we increase efficiency now, in good years, we will grow into our good year water supply levels, and have much less room to tighten our belts later.
So, should ecologically-minded citizens continue to water their thirsty lawns rather than try to cut back? What is the higher fruit we’re really interested in here? I think the vulnerability in the system is that nothing protects ecological “uses” for water such as maintaining natural hydrologic flows, aquatic and riparian habitats, etc. Another piece is that the legal framework for water allocation and management here in Utah is set up to be litigious and confrontational rather than collaborative. So the higher fruit is really a reorganization of our water management structure at state, regional and local levels and until we can manage that, in a way that prevents the hungry system from consuming all the slack, I think there’s a reason to stay on the fence with regard to household yard-watering.
Does this narrative apply to the energy efficiency project? Does helping a low-income household to reduce their energy use through, say, upgrading their appliances or insulating their home somehow promote increased energy use somewhere else in the system? Does it remove a constraint on unsustainable growth in the broader system? Certainly, some parallels between the energy and water cases are clear, primarily the desire to reduce “waste” and to save resources and money. However, energy turns out to be a different situation and the low-hanging fruit is more clearly worth picking, for at least three reasons. First, for households who are struggling, then it is a clear win. Constraints on upward mobility of disadvantaged groups are NOT constraints that we want to maintain. Second, energy supply is not a limiting factor in Salt Lake City currently, or in most cities, unless a legal requirement for renewable sources has been imposed. Because energy isn’t limiting here, the picking of the low-hanging efficiency fruit really isn’t going to hasten or impede our progress toward a more sustainable, renewable energy future. Third, our city electricity supply is generatedto meet demand. Energy that isn’t used is energy that isn’t generated, and that means that less fossil fuels are burned, our climate impact is reduced and the air we breathe is cleaner. Using energy more efficiently in this case probably just results in lower resource use and, using less means that we can postpone or avoid expensive investments in electricity generation capacity. The low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency is one of several fruits that will need to be gathered on the path to achieving a resilient, renewable and equitable energy system, and it is therefore worth picking.
One of the fundamental challenges of working in the field of planning, it has always seemed to me, is that planners are good at looking ahead, at perceiving future rough seas, but—to switch metaphors here—they have relatively few levers to pull. How do we plan for game-changers that are coming up fast, like driverless vehicles? Or for changes or catastrophes that we know are likely to hit, but we’re not sure when or how, and that require significant cost to prepare for? As Bateson says, ultimately we need to create a system that has the resilience/flexibility to deal with changes and challenges while still keeping an eye on the further horizon.
This goal is the high fruit, the sun-ripened, juicy-sweet premium fruit. What is the best strategy for choosing actions in the short term, to make sure we don’t run off course, to avoid wasting our efforts? I think we should ask ourselves these questions every time the low-hanging fruit conversation comes up: In picking this fruit, are we altering a constraint on the larger system? Is it a constraint we want to alter? Does picking it actually move us in the right direction, whether or not we ever reach the higher fruit? The answer will vary in different cases, but I propose that thinking about the factors that are limiting the system may help to more effectively target our fruit-picking efforts.
We are not in the Age of Aquarius that had brought—to some of us—radical hope about societal change and a turn toward ecology, steady state growth, and different GDP metrics, including happiness. The age was about love, unity, integrity, sympathy, harmony, understanding and trust. The Age of Aquarius was about doing things differently, building the ‘share economy’, where cooperation and frugality were goals that would reduce our heavy human footprint on the planet. Community gardens, composting toilets, making clothes, raising chickens and making preserves, riding bikes and walking, job sharing and creating worker owned cooperatives that shared profit equitably was the stuff of change.
Today we are in the Age of Green. Green cities, green businesses, urban greening, green buildings, green energy, green cars, making green money from green. The Age of Green is deeply different than the Age of Aquarius as there is an assumption that a transition toward a sustainable “green” society is possible with continued economic growth by using better technologies, enlisting nature’s services, and employing market incentives—that is, without changes in consumption patterns. Stormwater runoff a problem? Simply build infiltration trenches. Air pollution a problem? Plant more trees, add a green roof. Carbon emissions a problem? Just buy green products. Create a market for the emissions and use the profits to invest in forests and wind energy. With the proper quantification of nature’s intrinsic processes and recognition of them, we can unproblematically mitigate human impacts on those very processes. No longer do we need to address the difficult questions about the concentration of wealth and concomitant resource use, or fundamental institutional changes to create more level playing fields among nations and their peoples.
This magical thinking is an interesting turn of events. As Norgaard points out (2010), it blinds us to the complexity of ecosystems, the ecological knowledge available to work with that complexity, and the economic difficulties of implementing ecosystem services strategies, even if they could be sufficiently deployed to mitigate the ravages of environmental exploitation and rampant CO2 emissions, for greater economic growth.
There is a facile way that the implementation of ecosystem services is being advocated despite the lack of scientific certainty about the ability to manage ecosystems to achieve desired outcomes (Healey et al 2008). This is seen on the international level with initiatives such as the UN program for using market incentives to reduce deforestation to mitigate against climate change and retain CO2 forest sinks. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. “REDD+” goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation, and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.
But knowledge about ecosystems themselves is contextual; the quality of the background data on climate, soil conditions, and human impacts requires a great deal of on-the-ground research and debate about what to maximize and why. So the REDD path is more about preserving forests such that the institutional, economic and consumption changes to significantly reduce human impact on ecosystems, especially by the rich, can be put off or avoided. Instead of changing free trade agreements that further enable deforestation-derived products to be consumed by the west, we use market mechanisms to incentivize developing countries to preserve their forests, assuming all things are equal.
But they are not. Indigenous forest populations or peasants are truly not the same in terms of values and economic context as those who purchase the wood products in big box retail stores.
Astroturf. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
Turning to cities, these questions become even more complex due to the specificities of each city and its morphology, its climate zone, human preferences, institutional rules and regulations, and costs of changing obdurate hard infrastructure.
The California cap and trade program’s urban forestry protocol provides funding for urban tree planting, assuming that the benefits can be homogenized by a simplistic formula: biomass calculated using equations derived from native or natural forest trees is adjusted by a factor of 0.80 when applied to open-grown, urban trees (based on 28 selected species) because of differences in biomass allocation between the tree populations (ARB 2010). These values are derived from the USFS i-Tree program that also estimates the additional GHG emissions of on-going maintenance.
Already here there are a number of significant uncertainties that make such calculations problematic. Trees that grow in cities do so under very different conditions than in natural conditions. Soils are compacted, trees suffer from the impacts of air pollution, the watering regime is different, as is soil fertility. They are pruned and trimmed. The program does takes into consideration tree mortality but not the other more tree-specific and complex urban impacts on trees. The protocol also raises a provocative concept: does the planting of trees in the urban fabric constitute making an urban forest? Forests are historic ecological assemblages that are specific to bioregions and differ widely in density and composition that are indigenous to place, the soils, rainfall and other biodiversity. Urban forests are assemblages of disparate trees people like. Trees are jumbled together that come from different bioregions, from an ecological perspective, how does one describe this assemblage? Which parts of forest ecosystem science do you import from native or natural forests to describe these “novel ecosystems”? Does this approach even apply to an anthropogenic environment?
More problematically is that there seems to be the need to justify planting trees from an economic value perspective. Does this imply that if a street tree does not provide monetary value, it should not be planted? Then what about our parks? What about the sewage treatment plant? Livable and beautiful cities are not necessarily constituted by infrastructure that has to justify its economic value. Sewage treatment plants provide public health protection, they are a common good, they are not justified by an economic calculus. We do not build parks based on an economic benefit formula. They are recognized as providing a public good. And thus, well maintained street trees, also provide benefits: beauty (for some), shade (for others), harmony and dignity overall. Creating an economic value for them is an artifact of the Age of Green.
As I have written about before, successful tree planting requires commitment and funding by cities (Pincetl et al 2010); using cap and trade is grasping at straws, trying to get a program going in an era of austerity due to a tax structure that rewards the 1%. If people want trees in cities, they should pay for them through taxes and ensure they are professionally maintained as a common good, whether or not they sequester carbon, stormwater, diminish particulates or provide shade. Each one of those attributes may be incrementally provided by trees (or not), but the “services” will depend on their location, distance from a road, whether there is infiltration available for the stormwater, the size of the tree, and many, many other very situational factors that vary widely across cities, and trees. The fundamental issue is that budgets for cities in the U.S. have declined. It is not that trees provide economically quantifiable benefits that are not recognized.
The question then is why green now? Why does the color green captivate us so? What is the substance of the shorthand implied? Perhaps like “sustainability” it is the term of the period and we can no longer even think of any other that conveys sensitivity to the environment. Once launched it is free for the using and manipulation, the twisting of the meaning. In my neighborhood, green now means astroturf instead of lawn, requiring the balding of the earth beneath it and nearly sealing it, impairing the absorption of water. The plastic lawn is then rolled out over it. No life can survive this treatment, no worms or insects, and certainly no food for birds. I was assured it was permeable though, in case we get rain in Los Angeles. To me astroturf is the ultimate green value. Petrochemical companies continue to make profit, nothing really changes in terms of the aesthetic of the landscape. Green as the predominant idea of nature prevails.
Obviously the push for green is problematic for a host of reasons. Without rigorous urban ecology (and urban hydrology) that treats cities as distinct and as varied as ecosystems and watersheds, it will be difficult to evaluate what techniques are likely to make a difference in making cities more porous to natural rhythms—if that is the goal. Some mitigation of urban impacts is possible, but it needs to be calibrated to the place. Ecology and hydrology have about 100 years of field experience and data collection. Cities need the same kind of attention if the green route for services is desired, and a financial justification seems requisite. So far the benefits have been small and are likely to remain so, until other values begin to change so that the playing field is more level.
Alternatively we can embrace beauty and livability, think about the place in which the city is located, what seems appropriate given its climate and surrounding ecosystems, and develop strategies to make cities respond to those. Cities might end up looking very different from one another, and from place to place. However, such change will most likely not occur unless there are far wider and deeper societal changes about living on the planet. While the Age of Green can be seen to indicate some social sentiment that we need to change, it is still a path of business as usual. Instead it may be time to take Naomi Klein seriously; we cannot continue on the same path of economic growth and consumption—that includes quantifying and then monetizing nature’s services—and expect to truly change our relationships to the environment. More green businesses, creating more green products, off-setting emissions does nothing to reduce consumption of goods—green or not. There are natural limits to our spaceship Earth.
Perhaps addressing how and why we have unleashed consumption as our pathway for redemption should get more scrutiny. This is beginning to happen through analyses such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Noami Klein’s This Changes Everything, Richard Norgaard’s cautionary analysis of the quantification of ecosystem services and others. The Age of Aquarius challenged the relationship between economic growth and happiness in the 70s. It was met with the Reagan/Thatcher revolution that attacked the regulatory supervision of capitalism, and a liberalization of economic activity. We have reaped the consequences this deregulation and growth of free trade in the rampant growth of greenhouse gas emissions, the reduction of city and governmental budgets and their regulatory authority. Free trade shifted production to places like China and India, exporting the environmental burden of production with it. One response has been REDD, and other UN programs to incentivize clean energy production in those places. Reducing consumption in the west is not on the table.
More careful unpacking of the rise of the Age of Green is certainly called for. This will help us to contextualize it and hopefully begin to make changes because they need to be made rather than trying to fuse money making with the alternatives that need to be implemented.
The Age of Aquarius proposed changes in how we as humans interact with one another, and what makes a good life. Sharing, working together, making things, more equity in income and access to the essentials for happiness may be a more sure way to bring nature back in.
With the global urban population expected to double to around 6.5 billion by 2050, the future outlook for biodiversity can be positive, particularly if biodiversity is seen as a part of the solution to some of our most urgent development challenges. Biodiversity underpins the functioning of the ecosystems on which we depend for our food and fresh water; aids in regulating climate, floods and diseases; provides medicines (traditional and modern components); offers recreational opportunities, mental health benefits and spiritual enrichment; and supports services such as soil formation, photosynthesis and nutrient cycling. Biodiversity also contributes to local livelihoods and economic development. All human health depends, ultimately, on ecosystem services that are made possible by biodiversity, ecosystems, and the products derived from them.
Given that the current trends for biodiversity loss are bringing us closer to a number of potential tipping points that would catastrophically reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide the essential services upon which we all depend for our health and well-being (see Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, 2010), the predicted tripling of the global urban area between 2000 and 2030 has potentially grave impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems and human health. In addition, many of the possible consequences are likely to be most acute for the poor and marginalized, as they are more likely to rely directly on biodiversity and associated ecosystem services for their very survival. Although the impact on vulnerable populations may be more visible, all human populations are ultimately dependent on ecosystem services, and global urbanization will have knock-on effects for human health and development.
A standard of living adequate for the highest attainable level of health is often considered as a basic human right and therefore one of the most important indicators of development. As defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), health does not just mean freedom from illness, but a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing. Some suggest that a healthy environment should also be a basic human right and according to a recent Docs Talk blog by Dr. David R. Boyd, protection for the environment is already recognized as a right by ninety-five countries.
Many of the great development challenges, such as global environmental change, climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as food and water security, can be approached by considering the inter-linkages between human health, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Cities are critical laboratories for this kind of thinking. Because of the speed at which the world’s urban areas are expanding, and given that much of this is occurring in biodiversity hot spots (particularly Figure 1 in this link), there is a great opportunity to conduct further research on biodiversity-health connections and improve human health in cities through biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration.
Links between biodiversity and health
The linkages between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human health are complex and our understanding of the cause and effect relationships is continuing to develop. The reports of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) highlighted that human health is affected by the state of the global environment and the health of ecosystems. Then in 2008, the highly acclaimed ”Sustaining life: How our health depends on biodiversity” by Dr. Eric Chivian and Dr. Aaron Bernstein at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard School of Public Health, was published with contributions from 100 leading scientists. In terms of the existing scientific literature on the specific relationships between human health, ecosystems and biodiversity, there are a number of potential mechanisms proposed and evidence is usually drawn from specific case studies.
A direct example of the linkages are the outbreaks of many diseases, including SARS, Ebola, hanta viruses, malaria, and the HIV pandemic, which have underlying causes related to human impacts on wildlife and ecosystems, such as land-use change, human encroachment into wilderness areas, and unsustainable bushmeat and livestock trade (Keesing et al. 2010). As a result of the relationship between biodiversity loss, ecosystem change and the emergence and spread of diseases, management can be viewed as an opportunity to conserve biodiversity and reduce health impacts by tackling the underlying causes (see Campbell et al. 2012).
Given these inextricable links between biodiversity, human populations and health, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is undertaking a range of activities, with the vital support of partners, that further highlight these linkages and that support collaborative implementation.
For example:
1. A joint WHO Discussion Paper entitled Our Planet Our Health, Our Future, was launched at Rio+20 in June 2012 which examines the increasing opportunities for linking human health in the context of the three Rio Conventions (the United Nations Conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change and Desertification) and highlights the opportunity to achieve further implementation of the Conventions and to contribute to improved human health outcomes;
2. The commencement of a series of regional capacity-building workshops, with the first for the Americas held in September 2012 and further workshops being planned for 2013 and 2014; and
Of particular interest to many readers of this blog will be the recent launch of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook: Action and Policy (CBO) at the Cities for Life Summit, which ran in parallel to the 11th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD (COP 11) on 15 October in Hyderabad, India.
CBO book cover.
CBO was produced by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Secretariat of the CBD and ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), with contributions by more than 120 experts worldwide. The key messages and some of the highlights were the subject of a previous blog on The Nature of Cities by Thomas Elmqvist, from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, on 3 October 2012.
As outlined in CBO, urbanization does not have to be accompanied by increased traffic congestion, greater air pollution and more sedentary and isolated lifestyles without nature. There are opportunities for urban ecosystems to improve human health and for cities to conserve and restore ecosystems by considering the way our cities are designed, the way we live in cities and the policy decisions of cities and local authorities. As stated in CBO as key message 4, “maintaining functioning urban ecosystems can significantly improve human health and well-being”.
Urban expansion can better utilize nature-based solutions to reduce impacts on biodiversity and improve human health. Photo: Kathryn Campbell
Although some health and ecosystem service links may be more obvious, such as disease regulation and emergence, there are other connections that are less obvious, including the alarming rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and benefits for biodiversity that can be achieved in parallel. More than 36 million people die every year from NCDs and almost 80% of NCD deaths now occur in low- and middle-income countries. With the projected number of deaths per year expected to reach 44 million deaths per year by 2020, this is a global health epidemic. The current evidence suggests that NCDs can largely be prevented through lifestyle decisions, such as increasing our dietary diversity, which can promote awareness of the value of biological diversity for food and nutrition and can lead to the improved protection of species, their genetic diversity and ecosystems; and getting more regular physical exercise, which can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, encourage greater appreciation of the environment, and benefit mental, physical, and emotional health as more time is spent in natural settings.
Case studies that illustrate the connection between design, ecosystems and human health
Case Study 1: The Healthy Parks, Healthy People Approach
Parks Victoria, a park management agency of the State Government of Victoria, Australia, launched the “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” (HPHP) approach in 2000. The goal was to emphasize the value of visiting parks and natural open spaces for the benefits they provide as healthy places for body, mind, and soul. Similar approaches have now developed around the world, including in Canada, the UK, and the USA. The Melbourne initiative that emerged from the first International HPHP Congress declared that parks are “integral to healthy people and a healthy environment” and that “human health depends on healthy ecosystems”. The Congress was also the springboard to a partnership with a national health insurance provider, which is now funding public preventative health activities and establishing a network of health professionals to encourage people to increase their physical activity by engaging in activities in parks.
The Healthy Parks, Healthy People concept is also being adapted to developing countries, beginning with HPHP Nepal, a partnership involving the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Parks Victoria, and the Nepalese government. A 2010 workshop in Kathmandu highlighted that HPHP and resulting lessons learned could indeed be applied in countries with different socioeconomic contexts. As Dr. Chhatra Amatya,
chairman of Chhahari Nepal for Mental Health, explained, “HPHP is all the more needed in a country like Nepal. Our children do not have space to play a game in a city”.
Visitors getting active in Melbourne’s urban parks network (Australia). Photos by Parks Victoria
(Reproduced from Cities and Biodiversity Outlook: Action and Policy, 2012)
Case Study 2: The Many Benefits of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture
Raising local crops and livestock can increase knowledge of and interest in the biophysical and food-growing processes, empower citizens to influence sources of food production, strengthen links to local food systems, and encourage healthier lifestyle choices. Greater food self-reliance, cheaper food prices, greater accessibility to fresh and nutritious products, and poverty alleviation are all key benefits that can arise from urban agriculture with sound decision-making and planning of the cities’ ecosystems. The advantages of urban and peri-urban agriculture have been noted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and by the World Health Organization’s
There can be many benefits for health and biodiversity from well-planned and managed urban and peri-urban agriculture initiatives. Photo: Kathryn Campbell
Healthy Cities Programme, which appeals to local governments around the world to include urban and peri-urban agriculture in their urban plans.
(Reproduced from Cities and Biodiversity Outlook: Action and Policy, 2012)
Case Study 3: More Trees, Less Childhood Asthma: New York City
Rates of childhood asthma in the USA increased by 50 percent between 1980 and 2000, with the highest rates reported in poor urban communities. In New York City, where asthma is the leading cause of hospitalization among children under age 15, researchers at Columbia University studied the correlation between numbers of trees on residential streets and incidences of childhood asthma. They found that as the number of trees rose, the prevalence of childhood asthma tended to fall, even after data were adjusted for sociodemographics, population density, and proximity to pollution sources. How might trees reduce the risk for asthma? One explanation is that they help remove pollutants from the air. Another is that trees may be more abundant in neighborhoods that are well maintained in other ways, leading to lower exposure to allergens that trigger asthma. Yet another is that leafy neighborhoods encourage children to play outdoors, where they are exposed to microorganisms that help their immune systems develop properly. Further studies will provide a clearer picture of whether street trees really do make for healthier children. New York City is currently in the midst of planting a million new trees by 2017.
City and Subnational Biodiversity Summit, 15 and 16 October 2012
In addition to the launch of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook (CBO) at the City and Subnational Biodiversity Summit at COP 11, the event was a demonstration of the strong commitment and the contribution that can be made by these levels to achievement of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011 – 2020 and its 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets.
The Cities for Life Summit attracted more than 400 participants from 45 countries, including 60 mayors and governors. There were more than 50 presentations that highlighted a wide variety of themes including, among others, vertical cooperation between levels of government; progress on the Plan of Action on Local and Subnational Action for Biodiversity; support for the principle of greater integration and mainstreaming of biodiversity into other sectors including health, economic development, tourism and culture; and existing and potential activities at city and subnational levels. At its conclusion, the participants adopted the Hyderabad Declaration on Subnational Governments, Cities and other Local Authorities for Biodiversity which further supports their work towards achievement of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity and seeks greater coordination between different levels of government.
Ways Forward
Our fundamental reliance on ecosystem services offers significant opportunities to more consistently recognize biodiversity and ecosystem services for human health and to contribute to biodiversity conservation in cities. Although the linkages between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human health are complex, an increasing focus on inter-disciplinary research is aiming to develop a more thorough understanding of the linkages between ecosystem services and the conditions under which health and environment co-benefits can be achieved, as well as the development of robust predictions of the health impacts of different approaches to ecosystem management (for example, the DIVERSITAS EcoHealth activities; and the Health & Ecosystems: Analysis of Linkages (HEAL) initiative. Further examination of these linkages in the context of cities would be another significant step forward.
There is increasing awareness of and interest in the inter-linkages between human health and ecosystem functioning and growing support for collaboration (for example Cooperation on Health and Biodiversity Initiative, COHAB. The impact on cities of using current knowledge in policy, and supporting emerging research, that leads to implementation can be substantial and far-reaching, particularly considering that approximately 60% of the projected total urban area in 2030 is yet to be constructed. We need to collectively seize this opportunity for the health of current and future generations and of the planet.
What if urban resource management and conservation reflected not just the politics and science of the day, but were rooted in creation stories, place-name stories, and personal stories about the relationships people have with place? This kind of thinking is at the heart of traditional ways of stewarding the environment in many remote and rural place-based communities around the globe, but could it also be done in urban settings? If so, how?
What would a biocultural approach to sustainable resource management look like in a major city?
Hawaii’s lessons for navigating Island Earth
In September 2016, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress took place in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, the first time it has ever been held in the U.S. Through ceremony, hula (dance), and mele (chants), the opening ceremonies reflected the kinship that people from Hawaiʻi have with land, sea, and sky—and they set the stage for two weeks of events attended by world leaders in the policy and science of conservation.
In a 6 am oceanfront opening ceremony for IUCN, traditional sailing vessels from attending Pacific Island nations were to be greeted by the traditional families of the sacred Kalia lands in Waikiki. Passing tropical storms shifted the timing of the canoes’ arrival, but the ritual of requesting permission to land proceeded. As part of the ceremony, each island nation offered a stone from home. In this photo, a traditional caretaker of Kalia welcomes visitors. (September 1, 2016)
Welcoming ceremony for the traditional Hawaiian sailing vessel, Hōkūleʻa, in Manhattan, where she landed on June 5, 2016, as one stop on a three-year worldwide voyage to promote stewardship of island earth. The messages of sustainability and traditional wisdom about stewardship relationships carried strongly throughout the crowd, which included Lenape and other indigenous caretakers of the region.
My time living and working in areas rich with biocultural diversity—such as Hawaiʻi, Tanzania, and Fiji—has taught me the value of promoting and applying local knowledge for addressing health care, conservation, and adaptation to global environmental change. More recently, my thinking about the value of applying particular, place-based ways of knowing has expanded—beyond the places in which these knowledge systems originate and into areas that, on the surface, look quite different, such as cities. The reflections I share here grew out of my participation in Hālau ʻŌhiʻa, the only formal professional and personal development training program in Hawaiʻi stewardship practices for stewards of Hawaii’s Islands’ well-being.
Braiding together personal, professional, and spiritual development
Engaging in this experience elevated the concept of braiding together the personal, professional, and spiritual aspects of life as a real practice, and it also shed light on an ala (pathway) to get there. Although this integrated approach is a foundational concept for many place-based and traditional approaches to environmental stewardship, the scientific approach most of us were trained in deliberately avoids such integration in the name of objectivity. The cover of our training manual reads, “Deepening our connections for the wellbeing of ourselves and honua [planet].” It begs the questions: how can we as individuals be well if our surroundings (people and environment) are not? And how can our surroundings be well if we are not? Starting from the idea that people and place, biology and culture are intertwined and synergistic means operating from a “biocultural axiom of aloha.” I believe this core principal of our course has the potential to inform natural-cultural resource stewardship beyond Hawaiʻi, including and especially in densely-populated, urban, culturally diverse places.
With support from the U.S. Forest Service at the Institute for Pacific Islands Forestry (Hilo, Hawaiʻi), the course was created and taught by Kekuhi Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, an esteemed kumu hula (teacher of hula), Director of the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation, co-creator and Assistant Professor of the I Ola Hāloa Center for Hawaiʻi Life Styles at Hawaiʻi Community College and more. With the recognition that “natural resource professionals in Hawaiʻi recognize that effectiveness of and personal satisfaction from resource management can be enhanced by integrating multiple knowledge systems into all aspects of the management process,” Kekuhi formed Hālau ʻŌhiʻa. Her invitation letter described the program’s goals—to “both foster a working knowledge of Native Hawaiian perspectives on resources and resource management, as well as to enhance relationships among members of the resources community, such as managers and staff, community members, researchers, and the resources themselves.”
Hālau ʻŌhiʻa Hōʻike (exhibition and sharing with the community) July 17, 2016, Hilo, Hawaiʻi. Heather McMillen, Eli Wolfe (Heather’s son), Kekuhi Kealiikanakaoleohaililani (course developer and teacher), and Christian Giardina (Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry, Pacific Southwest Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service)
The course was held in the spring and summer of 2016 for one full Friday per month for four months, a weekend immersion experience, and a half-day exhibition to share what was learned with colleagues and family in the fifth month. The majority of participants came from non-profit organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions concerned with resource management.
Some course participants had Hawaiian cultural backgrounds, either by genealogy or by being born and raised in the islands. I have neither, although having lived and worked in Hawaiʻi for almost twenty years, I have developed an understanding of aspects of Hawaiian culture and language. I entered the course with a deep appreciation for this reservoir of information, and realize even now that I have only scratched the surface. I would say, regardless of cultural background or experience, as people who live, work, and care about Hawaiʻi, all of the participants in Hālau ʻŌhiʻa are invested in learning more about Hawaiian perspectives, culture, and traditional ecological knowledge. I left with a greater sense of purpose, more informed and equipped to see and engage in relationships with the social and ecological characteristics of communities in Hawaiʻi, and beyond.
Over the past two years working as a U.S. Forest Service Social Science Researcher with the New York City Urban Field Station, my team and I have been cultivating an understanding of how place-based and traditional ways of knowing can inform natural-cultural resource managers, researchers, and educators more broadly, including in cities. We have been asking: what would a biocultural approach to sustainable resource management look like in New York or another major city? How would it be translated? Would urban resource managers and researchers be receptive?
U.S. Forest Service associated participants in Hālau ʻŌhiʻa (we were about 15 percent of the total participants).
Connecting across micro, macro, and meta levels
In addition to thinking about connections across personal, professional, and spiritual levels, Hālau ʻŌhiʻa has inspired me to think about connections across micro, macro, and meta-levels. In the Hawaiian language, these are: kiʻi ʻiaka, kiʻi honua, and kiʻi ākea (at the personal level, the landscape level, and the level of planetary consciousness).
Conceptual model of connections
We began by applying this framework to understanding various koʻihonua (cosmology) and kaʻao (myth, conscious awakening) from around the world. Kaʻao are windows into other people’s worldviews. Common themes they share across space and time are: creation, recreation, and rebirth, among others. A theme that particularly struck me is that “the sacrifice becomes the creation,” evident in a number of kaʻao. We read and discussed accounts from the Arctic that relay the fate of Sedna, whose fingers were chopped off by her father Anguta as he threw her over the side of his kayak into the sea. Her fingers became seals, walruses, and whales, foods on which Arctic peoples rely. We listened to the Norwegian account of how Ymir was killed by his brothers, who then used his corpse to create the world—blood became oceans, skin and muscles became soil, hair became vegetation, and so on. Many of us are familiar with biblical stories of creation and sacrifice, which were also discussed as kaʻao. It was more than fitting to have this conversation in a landscape where Pele, the Hawaiian Deity associated with volcanoes, continues to take away and create land through the ongoing activity of Kīlauea.
“Kilauea lava flowing into the ocean” by slworking2 and made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license through Flickr
I thought of my own experience giving birth and the sacrifices all parents make for their children, but this discussion also conjured images of a seed and its development. Who could imagine that by splitting open its own skin, and seemingly self-destroying, that a life force thousands of times larger and stronger than the seed itself develops? As a class, we discussed how these stories also teach us about what we have in common, how we see the world and our place in it. Kaʻao are important for all of us, including resource managers, because they influence how we see our relationships (responsibilities and rights) to places, and therefore how we care for them (or not). In other words, they influence stewardship behaviors.
If we see places and their features as family, and recognize that a great grandparent, parent, and child are family members as much as a mountain, stream, and ocean, then the relationships are quite profound, as are the responsibilities we feel to them. In the words of Kekuhi, the relationship between people and land needs to be based on “kinship” rather than “commodity” if we are to live sustainably. As a class, each of us researched, memorized, and recited our genealogies, which situate us within our ancestral and landscape kin relationships. I described my generational connections to my Solvenian great grandparents, my Polish grandparents (via Chicago), and the mountain, stream, and watershed where I live now on Oʻahu.
Haley Kailiehu, secretary of the non-profit Hui Mālama I Ke Ala ʻŪlili (HuiMAU), describes her deep familial connections to the people and place of Koholālele, Hāmākua Hikina, Hawaiʻi Island.
After we practiced chanting “O Wākea” a mele (song) we learned about Wākea (Sky father) and Papa (Earth mother) giving birth to the Hawaiian archipelago, Kekuhi described its relevance and connections
Taking this a step further, what if we recognize that we are not just related to but a part of and even the same as the landscape and water features, plants, and other animals that surround us? This concept of kincentric ecology is also echoed in many longstanding traditions around the world. Kekuhi wrote, “Because we possess the same subatomic structures that stars, earth, ocean, air, plants, and all manner of animate and inanimate forms, is it not natural for kanaka to constantly change as well?” If you see yourself as equal to another being, you are more open to learn from it rather than about it in an objective way.
If the kaʻao of a particular place and its original people is not readily accessible, one could expand and go more regionally, or think about the kaʻao in a more contemporary context. As a framework for outreach, researchers and managers could ask: What are the kaʻao of the people connected to that place today? How did they get there? Where did they come from? Who are their families? Their watersheds? Their mountains, trees, and waters? Are these elements the same or different from “home”? What are their accounts of sacrifice and (re)creation? In what ways are people sustained by their natural environments and by urban green space? What elements or characteristics are as valuable as their own family members? Open community meetings to share these stories in the early stages of engaging communities with conservation, restoration, or resource management have the potential to inform resource managers about the meanings and attachments to place that community members have. Such participatory meetings would also strengthen rapport and set a tone that demonstrates the desire for co-learning and reciprocal learning.
Learning from a place, not just about a place
Learning about something is to objectify it, which implicitly means to be above it. But learning from it means seeing ways it connects to your own life or a something greater. I love this idea. This approach requires humility, respect, and a mind that is receptive. In Hālau ʻŌhiʻa, we operationalized this approach by learning and practicing a ritual protocol to ask permission to enter a place, whether it is a building, home, or forest. When I recite the Mele Komo, a chant, it acknowledges that I am anticipating learning when I step through a door or across a path. Kekuhi told us, “If you don’t ask permission, you have nothing to learn.”
Before and during our class field trips to meet with people who embody relationship to place on the leeward side of Hawaiʻi Island, we discussed this theme of learning from places and the social-ecological memories they carry. The mission statement of Hui Mālama I Ke Ala ʻŪlili (HuiMAU), a non-profit culturally-based stewardship group in the Hāmākua district, says: “We are committed to re-establishing an ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) presence in Hāmākua Hikina, and envision the ʻāina [usually translated as land, but can also mean sea—literally, “that which feeds”] of Hāmākua Hikina restored as places of abundance, where kamaʻāina [children of the land, native born people] are healed by the spiritual forces, sustained by the natural and cultural resources, and elevated to higher levels of consciousness by the ancestral knowledge of these (HuiMAU).
We can also learn from our “plant people” and our “animal people” (Kekuhi’s affectionate terms for plants and animals). For example, dryland forest plants dropping their leaves during drought to conserve energy and water are seen as a lesson for people to adapt to a drying climate, something I heard from a cultural-ecology restoration specialist in North Kona years ago. In Kawaihae (North Kona District of Hawaiʻi Island), Hālau ʻŌhiʻa visited Nā Kālai Waʻa and listened to Uncle Sonny Bertelmann (Pwo navigator and captain of the traditional Polynesian sailing vessel, Makaliʻi) convey the story of his teacher, Papa Mau Piailug, who told him about how people learned navigation from migratory animals—whales and birds. Kekuhi explained to us that when the koholā (humpback whale) expel mucus and water through their blowholes as they move across a seascape, they are helping us remember and tell stories that connect us to Oceania more broadly. Her teenage daughters performed a hula composed by her husband at the cliff’s edge that drove home this message at a deeper consciousness level, beyond language.
Kekuhi’s daughters offer a hula to honor the whales.
Relationships to place are strengthened when you know the names and the stories of the landscape and the beings that inhabit them. As Hālau ʻŌhiʻa, we approached this through kaʻao (described above), learning place names and the stories behind them, as well as spending time engaging the land through stewardship in each place we visited. Although it was gratifying to see how our sweat equity transformed places, Kekuhi reminded us that it’s not how many weeds we remove, or how many plants we plant, that is appreciated; what is most important is what we learn and how we understand our time and purpose in the place at that time. Stated simply: it’s all about relationships.
Reflecting on potential applications in urban areas, the idea of learning from a place underscores the importance of place-based research, embedded knowledge, fieldwork, and the importance of researchers and mangers really “being in” and “connecting to” place. A ritualized “entry” into the field or learning environment (natural area, meeting, workshop, etc.) to set the tone for learning from a place could be done in any setting, including NYC. The protocol itself could be created by or adapted for each project or team, based on their values and experiences. It could even be a silent expression of intention or reflection by the group.
Through my work in NYC, I have heard an appreciation for these ways of learning. Richie Cabo, Director of the Citywide Nursery of the Division of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources in New York City, shared with me, “We are so much like trees that we don’t realize…we have a lot to learn from these guys.” Perhaps the way forward is to encourage and publicly describe the value of these ways of learning in a professional context. I expect they would resonate with the broader public as well. In all cases, being able to learn from a place is enhanced when one is an informed observer who is attuned to place, reminding us of the importance of building relationships.
Learning the songs, stories, plants, and animals of a place from the local perspective can be a way for resource managers to connect with people and place. In some cases, these can be humbling experiences, demonstrating that local people (including non-scientists) are experts with lessons to teach to managers and researchers. These other ways of knowing are important for resource managers because they inform praxis. But, what about cases when the history or the songs of a place are not known? Or the people who hold that information are unknown to the managers? Can these be created together by people today who are not ancestrally tied to that place? Can a group’s history or mission statement be seen as this type of story? Can the process of knowing a place’s kaʻao foster place attachment (aloha ʻāina, love of the land) for resource managers themselves? Given the cultural heterogeneity of New York City, kaʻao associated with a place or a place-based community present or past can be numerous and layered. Deciding which ones to focus on should be a collaborative process—or, in some cases, there could be room for all of them, in the spirit of work that is place-based, but not place-bound, to borrow a phrase from my colleague Lindsay Campbell.
A busy streetscape with dense and diverse populations of people in lower Manhattan as seen from a Federal Building that was built on an African Burial Ground rediscovered in 1991 during construction, now considered sacred ground and managed by the National Parks Service. Manhattan’s name comes from “Manahatta” a word that means “land of many hills” to the Lenape, the island’s inhabitants pre-European settlement. Today, the island is layered with generations of commercial, residential, occupational, and ecological stories of creation and sacrifice of many different people and cultures.
The process always needs to be localized, project-based, and place-based. To help guide the process, each project needs to think about its goals. In Hawaiʻi, they may be to foster and maintain cultural practices and traditional ecological knowledge associated with those practices in order to support natural-cultural resource management. In other places, such as NYC, it may be to support ecosystem functions while also allowing multiple cultures and user-groups equal access to and sense of ownership over green (and blue) space.
Function over form. Focus on the living practice, not particular objects
Discussions of native verses non-native species can be polarizing, but the idea that natives = good and non-natives = bad is an oversimplification. Instead, the concept of functional ecology allows the integration or acceptance of species that are not native to the area, yet are valuable because of the roles they play in maintaining ecosystem functions. I see this idea akin to what follows.
Because of the inextricable links among people and place, the stewardship of natural resources must also steward the practices, stories, and meanings people have for those places. The future of a particular landscape may depend on the stories, practices, and meanings we share with each other. Yet, we need not get hung up on which ones are the “authentic” or “right” ones. Cultures, like ecosystems, are dynamic. Just because their components change over time does not necessarily mean they are less valuable or inauthentic. The importance of maintaining the living practice so it can continue to adapt and evolve rather than “preserving” any particular cultural artifact or aspect of traditional knowledge is a theme I heard during my time in Hālau ʻŌhiʻa, one that echoed what I had learned previously through my place-based research in North Kona, Hawaiʻi. In the words of systems thinking, flexibility promotes resilience. During our cultural immersion weekend, one of the sites we visited was the ancient residence of Lonoikamakahiki, a prominent ruling chief of Hawaiʻi. Some of this stacked stone structure remains, but it has partially been built over by a tennis court and pool, and it is surrounded by vacation condos.
In Queens, NYC, adjacent to Forest Park, a bridge layered with messages from those who left their mark shadows glowing candles and white roses, typical of offerings from religious and spiritual practices throughout the African diaspora.
Mahealani Pai, Kamehameha Schools Cultural Resource Specialist in Keauhou (black shirt and sunglasses in upper left), briefs us on our stewardship activities at the ancient residence of Lonoikamakahiki (mound of lava rocks on the right).
With reverence, we quietly weeded around the site and removed tennis balls that littered the sacred space. Later in our discussion, one of the participants talked about how unsettling it was to see the site disrespected by the developers and even by those staying at the condos, some of whom just stared at us from their balconies as we mālama-ed (cared for, steward-ed) the ancient residence of Lonoikamakahiki and then chanted together to the kai (ocean). Kekuhi commented that the condition of the residence and adjacent heiau (temple) (which are not reconstructed) is not the most important thing. The important thing is that the practices, relationships, and memories associated with the place live on. More than once, I heard her say that knowledge isn’t lost. People haven’t forgotten, they just need to be reminded, an expression that echoed what I have heard in my place-based research in North Kona, where one woman explained, “We have our characteristics and our system to show what this land has. We’re not lost. It’s not forgotten. The ground still has it. The castor oil plants come back, the ground hasn’t forgotten. We’ll see the younger generations coming back to produce this system with the knowledge they’ve had.” At Ko‘a Holomoana, the navigational heiau (temple, sacred structure) cared for by Nā Kālai Wa‘a (a non-profit organization founded on promoting traditional Polynesian voyaging), it continues to be a source of knowledge and inspiration, even though there is uncertainty about the original meanings of the pōhaku (stones) and their placement.
Holomoana, traditional site of navigational training, in Māhukona in the district of Kohala.
The deep memories are still there. The place still serves its function. People still engage in a reciprocal relationship with the place, even as the land is up for sale now. Hearing that the land under this incredibly important cultural site is for sale made me think about the vulnerability of places in Hawai‘i (and other places, including urban ones), and how the greatest threat is the ignorance (not knowing, or maybe not remembering) associated with real estate development. This threat is also linked to seeing the land as a commodity rather than kin. It raises the question, how can inevitable change (including real estate development) at the landscape level honor people-place relationships and our ongoing need to connect to nature and to each other in generations past, present, and future?
During our time together as Hālau ʻŌhiʻa, I took note of and came to a deeper understanding of multiple ways of remembering: through listening to and perpetuating the mo‘olelo (histories) of wahi pana (storied places); through stories and teachings from kūpuna (elders) of one’s own ‘ohana (family) or from another ‘ohana or even from another island nation (as was the case with Papa Mau Piailug of Satawal, Micronesia, teaching the first pwo navigators of Hawai‘i); from observing the behavior of plants and animals; and from observing and listening to our children, who can remind us of the magic in the world and inspire us to live pono (righteous) and with reverence for the wonder that surrounds us. All of these ways of remembering help connect us to place and to each other.
In the context of NYC, these themes of continuing practices (without getting fixated on the details of the authenticity of the cultural objects or species, which are certain to transform over time and across the space of migration, land use change, and ecological succession), and of the threats related to “forgetting” and to real estate development, are certainly relevant. Erika Svendsen suggested to me that perhaps some New Yorkers just need to be reminded and inspired to connect or reconnect to places in their own way. She and Lindsay Campbell have written about how people make urban spaces sacred. If feeling connected comes from admiring the arch of a bridge or a river of yellow taxis as much as admiring an upland forest or coastal salt marsh, we can appreciate all the relationships we have with our landscape on a deeper level. Through our own research at the New York City Urban Field Station, we have documented how New Yorkers engage with nature through ritualized practices that connect them to place and support social-emotional-spiritual well-being.
Flags with Hindu deities mark sacred engagement in a profane space at Little Neck Bay in Bayside, Queens, NYC.
Assemblage created from natural materials found at Conference Park, Staten Island, NYC.
We’ve been working on bringing the social, cultural, and spiritual values associated with urban nature to the forefront (Svendsen et al., in press) so they can be considered on equal ground with other ecosystem services such as provisioning, regulating, and supporting services. Although I have a heightened awareness for why lessons from Hawai‘i could be applied in urban areas like NYC, there are many conversations to have and details to work out. Here I propose questions to consider in initiating conversations as we take the next steps in this journey:
How can we, as researchers, managers, and policymakers, recognize and embrace the sacred nature of stewardship in our urban work?
How can resource managers understand human engagement with the environment, including acts of stewardship and the values people hold for a place, as part of the critical functions of a place?
How can urban resource managers consider the cultural and psycho-social-spiritual aspects of a social-ecological system on par with native species conservation, native habitat protection, erosion control, clean air, and clean water?
Can these be incorporated into goals for urban green spaces and natural areas?
How might they be assessed and monitored over time?
Inviting and allowing time for discussing those questions could also be part of conversations about how personal, professional, and spiritual development have intersected or might be integrated in the future. There are prominent conservationists, other scientists, and philosophers who have written about this topic—including a recent TNOC post, Ecology of One—and these writings could be shared as a neutral (non-personal) way to introduce the topic. Through my experiences with Hālau ʻŌhiʻa, I have seen how these kinds of discussions can strengthen our appreciation for and commitment to stewarding place. Ways to introduce this might start with one person sharing their own experiences and perspectives at the beginning of a regular team meeting or devoting a half-day workshop to the topic.
Hālau ʻŌhiʻa participants sharing their personal reflections and experiences related to various cosmologies and landscapes
Far beyond my own personal reflections, others are recognizing the potential of amplifying stewardship lessons from Hawaiʻi. The Hawaiʻi Commitments from the IUCN describes “Aloha ʻĀina” as an “inherent part of the traditions and customs of Native Hawaiians” that “embodies the mutual respect for one another and a commitment of service to the natural world.” The document also highlights three critical issues: the nexus between biological and cultural diversity and the role of traditional knowledge, the significance of the ocean for conservation and sustainability, and threats to biodiversity. The document concludes that “Embodying Aloha ʻĀina globally will help address the tremendous environmental challenges we face.”
The themes of environmental kinship and interconnectedness resonate throughout our experiences as human beings, from urban to rural landscapes, from temperate to tropical climates. Refocusing our attention in those areas has great promise to help us navigate our life on island earth.
Thank you to the U.S. Forest service for supporting both this training opportunity and my time participating in it. I owe a depth of gratitude to Kekuhi Kealiikanakaoleohaililani for shining the light and teaching the course. Thank you to my NYC colleagues, Erika Svendsen and Lindsay Campbell, who supported my participation in the course, encouraged me to write this, and provided valuable comments. Thank you to Christian Giardina, Kainana Francisco, Claire Gearen, Laura Booth, and David Maddox for providing valuable comments and suggestions. Thank you to my fellow participants in Hālau ʻŌhiʻa who enlightened me and also provided some of the photographs in the blog. Thank you to my friends and family who helped care for my son, Eli, while I traveled to participate in the training and thank you to Eli for the ongoing creation and inspiration.
Reference cited
Svendsen, E., Campbell, L, and H. McMillen. Stories, Shrines, and Symbols: Locating well-being and spiritual meaning in urban parks and natural areas. Journal of Ethnobiology, special issue on urban ethnobiology. (Scheduled for October 2016)
By viewing Muir Woods and other urban forests as “museums for trees,” we create the possibility of reconciliatory healing through sharing multiple narratives of place.
At Muir Woods National Monument, an old-growth redwood forest a half hour’s drive north of San Francisco, more than a million people a year from around the world flock to visit ancient, giant trees.
These visitors largely believe they are coming to a beautiful, living example of a thriving and timeless forest, protected forever by benevolent figures from the United States’ early conservation history.
View from Mt. Tamalpais. Muir Woods sits in a valley in the foreground; the San Francisco skyline is visible in the distance. Photo: Laura Booth
After a year working as an informal educator for the National Park Service at Muir Woods, I prefer to liken it to a “museum for trees”: a stunning forest functioning and, in some vital ways, flourishing within its urban context—but not without modern human impacts that alter its character from the coast redwood forests of yore.
Like most cultural institutions, Muir Woods as a park has a complex, difficult history that—if we remember it and share it—increases the forest’s usefulness as a model for exploring contemporary questions that apply to fragmented natural areas in urban contexts worldwide. Who is nature for? How should we expect nature to look? What is beauty, and who deserves access to it? Why does a forest matter, no matter where you live?
What makes Muir Woods a museum for trees?
The first photo I took in awe of Muir Woods. Photo: Laura Booth
The first time I walked into Muir Woods as a weekend hiker, I recall snapping a photo on my phone and sending it to my father and my brother with an accompanying text: “There are real places on Earth that actually look like this.”
It’s not a dissimilar sensory experience to the one I felt on first entering the halls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a high school class, or my first solo journey to The American Museum of Natural History. In many (though not all) cultures, these institutions inspire a sense of reverence, and many social signals affirm the importance and fragility of the contents they enshrine: here, guarded around the clock and displayed beneath thoughtfully-calibrated lighting, is Art. Here, behind glass and accompanied by an explanatory placard, is Science.
Here, staffed by people in familiar uniforms and Smokey-the-Bear hats, peopled with other visitors (mostly) adhering to the trail and wearing brand-name hiking attire, is the Forest. It is rare, it is visually arresting, and although we destroyed the vast majority of it, some very smart men from the past have protected the important bits of it, so that you can see it and use it as your Instagram background, and perhaps learn about the ecosystem services you experience by virtue of its persistence today (I’ll counter this particular narrative later on).
This wayside offers a narrative about the “saving of Muir Woods.” But from whom did it need to be saved, and why? In this guided tour, I asked visitors to think about events that were missing from the timeline at the bottom of the panel. Photo: Laura Booth
As in other kinds of museums, at Muir Woods and in the surrounding public lands, visitor participation is typically restricted to certain forms—hiking on trails, viewing wildlife from safe distances, camping in designated locations. Generally speaking, visitors to Muir Woods are discouraged from touching plants in the forest out of concern for the possibility that they will unwittingly reach their hands into a patch of poison oak or stinging nettles. Visitors may look at the Art, or the Science, or the Forest, but not experience it in a tactile way unless the exhibit explicitly calls on them to do so.
In a museum for trees such as Muir Woods, we install distance between ourselves and the Forest. In the United States’ public land paradigm, we have devised rules and signs to protect the land from trampling, littering, and destruction of habitat, among other offenses (though these are notoriously disregarded, sometimes to the mortal danger of visitors). We may argue that regulating participation in this way is the necessary legacy of humans’ disconnection from how land works, which, in turn, is inexorably followed by an inability to respect that land.
I believe that “museums for trees” such as Muir Woods innately contain the possibility of beneficial outcomes for forests and people. They also have limiting outcomes that, if we aren’t thoughtful, can preclude us from seeing novel ways of being in relationship with the land.
Yet, certain outcomes emerge when we treat so-called natural spaces in this way—as places where visitors are often vaguely menacing, destructive consumers as opposed to potential co-creators.
Below, I’ll consider some of these outcomes, and how we can use the conceptual example of Muir Woods as a museum for trees to realize more beneficial outcomes, more often, and for more people in our urban public lands.
What we build and what we lose from a museum for trees
When we create “museums for trees” by designating urban forests or other sorts of natural features as parks with amenities, programs, services, and rules, we can increase accessibility to nature for diverse audiences that may have no connection or negative associations with such places—but we don’t always do so successfully.
For example, Muir Woods offers a length of trail accessible to wheelchair users and assistive listening devices for those who are hearing impaired. Folks who arrive directly from San Francisco can safely walk through the redwoods in flip-flops on the raised boardwalk if that is what makes them feel comfortable in the forest.
Providing such infrastructure is integral to making public land equally accessible to variously-abled people with a diversity of backgrounds and experiences. It is one way we can follow through on our capability to increase accessibility to nature. However, it is also low-hanging fruit in the world of increasing access to civic spaces.
While lack of a safely graded trail can be an initial deterrent, there are many other, subtler ways that natural spaces, similar to exhibits in art and natural history museums, have been made hostile to different communities. That hostility is often unspoken, or manifests through omissions in the way we tell the story of a site.
To illustrate, return to the photograph above, the one with the wayside titled “Saving Muir Woods.” Over a timeline that charts the history of the forest beginning in the early 1800s, the text of this exhibit tells readers that when William Kent and his wife, Elizabeth Thacher Kent, owners of Muir Woods in the early 1900s, were threatened with eminent domain (a local water utility wanted to log the old-growth grove, dam the creek running along the valley floor, and turn the forest into a reservoir for public water), William Kent was outraged. He used his stature as a well-to-do Progressive to gain an audience with President Teddy Roosevelt via Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service.
Kent was able to convince Roosevelt of the value of the forest for leisure and recreation, and shortly thereafter, Roosevelt used the power of executive order—as granted to the president by Congress in the Antiquities Act of 1906—to designate the redwood grove as a National Monument. Kent insisted that instead of naming the forest in honor of his donation of the land, Roosevelt should name it after John Muir, the beloved naturalist and writer who founded the Sierra Club.
This sounds like a happy, if simplified, story of Good, Genteel Nature Lovers triumphing over Bad, Greedy Loggers, right?
Just as I viscerally learned when I invited a friend to The American Museum of Natural History in New York and he responded, “The natural history museum makes me uncomfortable—the way it puts black and brown people behind glass like rhinos,” a little context substantially shifts the connotation of the “Saving Muir Woods” story in key ways.
Kent, the educated son of a merchant, moved to the Muir Woods area as a child; unlike the vast majority of people moving west during the Gold Rush Era (but similarly to most of the men responsible for crafting the tenets of the early American conservation movement), he associated nature with enjoyment and as an expression of moral values rather than as a source of livelihood.
When he went on to campaign for public office later in his life, Kent repeatedly ran on a fervent platform of Asian immigrant exclusion. In a 1920 speech in San Francisco, he said, “We who happen to be of English descent are proud and happy in the fact that the country from which we came was not overrun by successions of peoples yellow and black and indiscriminate in their breeding.”
In working to protect the redwood forest from logging, Kent was adhering to values that other “Progressive” white supremacists had cultivated, relating the ancient stature of the Coast Redwood species with preserving the purity of the white race. From Charles Goethe, who linked conservation of tracts of redwoods with his advocacy of eugenics, to Madison Grant, a zoologist and redwood protector whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, was lauded both by Adolf Hitler and Teddy Roosevelt, these men feared the loss or muddling of lineages, including that of the redwoods, that they considered superior.
What does this history lesson have to do with the opportunities presented by the forest as museum?
When we tell a more complete story of Muir Woods, it is suddenly ensnarled with the very foundations of identity-based controversies that are embroiling our national politics in 2018. The site becomes highly relevant to intersectional justice for all kinds of communities, urban and otherwise, that have historically been exploited or excluded in relation to nature and public land.
Perhaps even more so than in traditional monuments to art, history, or culture, our public lands offer in situ opportunities for reconciliatory healing when we interpret them fully, via a multitude of perspectives.
That we struggle to share these stories in the containers—the forests, city streets, prairies, oceans, urban rivers, statues, and parks—where they are most vivid is what Nina Simon, executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, might call a problem of relevance.
In her book, The Art of Relevance, Simon draws an elegant, elongated metaphor that equates a museum to a room. The vibrant content and community a museum can offer (if they are doing strong, effective programming) lives inside the room; those as yet unfamiliar with the value of that content are situated outside the room. The key to the door that separates the Inside and the Outside is Relevance.
People who feel comfortable inside the room are already acquainted with the value of its contents—in the case of Muir Woods, insiders might include avid hikers, local families, park volunteers, or park staff. Insiders are sometimes resistant to change—and when the content of the room is altered to be more inclusive, some of those insiders may object. But by sharing specific, challenging histories such as the one I’ve related above, we can invoke the deep relevance of the forest—or any other natural urban space—to those audiences on the outside, and increase the number of people who see their stake in nature without much altering the parameters we’ve put in place to guide them.
Examples of participatory programs in Muir Woods. Photos: Laura Booth
By viewing Muir Woods and other urban forests as “museums for trees,” we can apply Simon’s metaphor to these natural spaces. In doing so, a primary benefit of the analogy emerges: the possibility of creating reconciliatory healing through sharing multiple narratives of place.
I’m proud to note that Muir Woods has embarked on this work, as has the entire Interpretation and Education division within the National Park Service. Today, many parks are trying to take an “audience-centered” approach in their programming and, based on recognition of an exclusive past, seek to share untold histories with their audiences. As an entry-level interpretive ranger, I was encouraged to devise programs in this framework and to discuss difficult knowledge—from institutional racism to indigenous issues to climate change—wherever they applied to Muir Woods. Of course, there is plenty more of this healing work to do.
I’ve just made an argument in favor of thinking about a forest park as a museum for trees—but perhaps the earliest pop cultural reference to the idea, Joni Mitchell’s 1969 song Big Yellow Taxi, is more critical. The lyric is a familiar one:
“They took all the trees
Put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see ’em”
There’s something distasteful to thinking of Muir Woods as a museum rather than as a forest—when I discussed the idea with visitors, they rejected it out of hand, expressing reluctance to think of the forest’s survival as being inextricably interwoven with humans’ activities.
Unfortunately, this reluctance is seated in the same premise that the men of the early conservation movement held about nature: a mythic idea that forests and other natural spaces without humans are perfect, rising and plateauing in a static, pinnacle state. So thought French Romanticist François-René de Chateaubriand, who wrote, “Forests precede civilizations; deserts follow them.” Likewise, Kent located value in Muir Woods because of his perception of it as “untouched.” In a 1907 letter to Gifford Pinchot, he wrote of the forest:
“It is an object of great scientific value in its wealth of primal tree life and the rare and delicate flowers and ferns found only in an untouched redwood forest.”
Historically, the Coast Miwok people used landscape-scale prescribed fire to manage redwood forests and surrounding ecosystems for edible plants. Ancient fire scars are still evident in the hollows at the redwoods’ bases. Today, the Coast Miwok live northeast of Muir Woods. Photo: Laura Booth.
The Muir Woods of Kent’s time was hardly untouched; prior to their being forced from their homeland and enslaved in the Spanish Mission system, the Coast Miwok people had influenced the forest through landscape-scale burning for thousands of years, shaping the appearance of the forest that Kent and other descendants of Western Civilization chose to see as “primeval.”
The reality of the forest as we find it today is also one of profound human influence, though that influence is largely damaging: the health of the Coast Redwoods’ understory community, the climate processes that determine its biological characteristics, and the persistence of its natural history strategy are threatened by the massive changes people have made within its range over the last 250 years, from rapid deforestation to industrial urbanization, to climate change.
By isolating an old-growth forest such as Muir Woods, we may cut off the stand from the community context that has typified the forest since the last Ice Age—for 10,000 years, more than 2 million acres of connected old-growth Coast Redwood forest blanketed the coast of California; post-logging, the area covered by old-growth stands is approximately 120,000 acres, a full 97 percent reduction from just a few human generations ago.
This loss sets the stage for a wrenching sense of grief that we might also associate with the redwood forest as museum—a place where we put on display trees that, through human actions, have been prevented from performing their evolved function in perpetuity.
Joan Naviyuk Kane, an indigenous poet who writes about her Iñupiaq heritage, illustrates the tragedy of this idea best. In an interview, she spoke about seeing a drum her grandfather had made in a museum’s collections:
“It got me really thinking. Is it still a drum if it is never to be used again and remains only in a museum’s collection? Are they objects or are they poems now?”
Reckoning with the past to create a novel future: lessons from redwoods
If we choose to pay attention, the relationship of indigenous Californians to the landscape offers a lesson for visioning urban forests, such as Muir Woods, both as forests and as the kinds of museums we want: participatory community centers that connect us to each other while instilling us with deep knowledge of the landscape, rather than as elite institutions that serve certain narratives over others.
For thousands of years, California Indians (like indigenous people across the Western Hemisphere prior to European contact) actively managed landscapes at a scale that was virtually impossible for Europeans to conceive at the time. Vast evidence for this management contradicts the premise discussed above—that in order to preserve its truest character, tracts of “wilderness” must be left utterly alone, as free as possible from human influence.
Muir Woods, both contemporary forest and museum. Photo: Laura Booth
In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson writes, “Interestingly, contemporary Indians often use the word wilderness as a negative label for land that has not been taken care of by humans for a long time…When intimate interaction ceases, the continuity of knowledge, passed down through generations, is broken, and the land becomes ‘wilderness.'”
By thinking of Muir Woods as a museum for trees, we create an opportunity to hold a duality: that we need more people, not fewer, to interact and care actively for the landscape where it appears in their daily lives—whether in their local urban national park, community garden, wetland, or tidal marsh—and that, by providing extensive guidance (that sometimes takes the form of rules and limitations) in what activities are appropriate, we offer them a portal into the Inside of the urban nature room—where their stake in protecting the resilience of urban nature becomes self-evident, and they become the new ambassadors inviting Outsiders, in.
Amid the coronavirus outbreak, edible gardens have seemed to become an even more critical practice for cities experiencing lockdown, as food supply chains are upended and an edible garden plot close-by residents could enhance food security and mental health.
Edible urban gardens have gained increasing popularity in the Global North within the narrative of nature-based solutions for cities and as parts of urban green infrastructure, which reintroduce greenspaces and associated functions into built environments, with the aspiration of leading to a socially and ecologically more sustainable city. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, edible gardens have seemed to become an even more critical practice for cities experiencing lockdown, as food supply chains are upended and an edible garden plot close-by residents could enhance food security and mental health. Whilst Taiwan has so far successfully contained the pandemic, the Garden City programme (臺北田園城市計畫), which allocates small edible greenspaces to nearby citizens, might be viewed as a far-sighted policy in this kind.
This article is based on work conducted as part of the “IFWEN: Understanding Innovative Initiatives for Governing Food, Water and Energy Nexus in Cities” project, granted under the Belmont Forum & Urban Europe Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative/Food-Water-Energy Nexus Programme (SUGI/FWE Nexus) and funded by a Ministry of Science and Technology Taiwan (MOST 107-2621-M-130 -001 -MY3) award to Wan-Yu Shih.
Whilst the programme is named after Howard’s “Garden City”, it is definitely not one of the followers of his spatial planning masterpieces. Rather, the ‘Garden City’ Programme in Taipei is a new type of urban farming that puts hundreds of small edible greenspaces into densely built-up areas to provide horticultural therapy, recreational opportunities, environmental education, and a breadth of social-environmental benefits through engaging citizens in food cultivation. The Taipei Garden City programme was officially launched in 2015 after a long incubation period of practices in local societies, which eventually formed a ‘Farming Urbanism Network (都市農耕網)’ and proposed a White Paper that was accepted by the current mayor – Ko Wen-je. Since then, the programme has rapidly integrated gardens from previous policy legacy, such as allotment systems, low-carbon community gardens, Taipei Beautiful sites, and Open Green sites, with newly established gardens both on the ground and on the top of the buildings. This forms 733 gardens across Taipei City within five years, covering 19.75 hectares and involving 54,013 citizens (as of Feb 2020).
Four main types of gardens have been included in the programme:
Happy gardens (30%): the use of disused public lands for engaging local communities to plant vegetables and to maintain the site
Green roofs (11%): the use of rooftop on public buildings for engaging surrounding communities to plant vegetables and to maintain the site
School gardens (45%): the use of grounds and rooftops of schools (from primary to senior high schools) to engage teachers and students in environmental education
Allotment gardens (14%): larger privately-owned lands that are designated as agriculture zones and were created long before the Garden City programme and are mostly located in the urban outskirts
Apart from allotments established at the city outskirt and school gardens using schoolyards and buildings, the first two types of gardens are often created in the most populated districts of Taipei, which provides great accessibility to the citizens. As most central districts of the city have a population density excess of 20,000 persons per km2, finding available lands within such compactly developed areas for farming is challenging, particularly for those on the ground. Several mechanisms have been adopted or developed alongside the programme to secure lands amongst buildings.
A critical strategy was to lift the ban on the use of vacant lands and buildings owned by the public sectors (both national and city governments). A throughout inventory of available lands across the city was conducted and published to enable site seekers to find a suitable land. This has resulted in several rooftop gardens on public buildings, such as district offices, social houses, and hospitals, as well as relatively large gardens at ground-level, such as Zhong-nan Happy Farm next to Nangang metro station and Fujian Happiness Farm. Whilst garden sites established via this scheme are free of charge, their food production is subject to not-for-profit restriction and only allows for self-consumption or donation.
Zhong-nan Happy Farm is right next to the Nangang metro station Photo: Wan-Yu Shih
Another scheme used to increase ground-level gardens is converting parts of the area inside a park, which has been officially zoned as parks and greenspaces in the city’s urban land use plan. This includes gardens, such as Huoxinren Farm at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Hakka Farm at Hakka Cultural Park, and Dexing Colourful Farm at Dexing Park. Amongst them, the land of Dexing Park next to the SOGO department store was donated by Shihlin Electric as part of its corporate social responsibility activities while its factory location was re-zoned from industrial to commercial use. The process of re-zoning was, however, completed before the Taipei Garden City programme was enacted.
Huoxinren Farm utilises parts of the area in the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park for cultivation Photo: Wan-Yu Shih
Colourful Farm is located inside Dexing Park in the commercial areas of Shilin District. Photo: Wan-Yu Shih
Attributing to these land acquirement mechanisms, which avoid the need of altering zoning and building codes in the urban plan and save time and budgets from land acquisition, the programme was efficiently implemented. However, the strategy inherent in the spirit of temporary use models of vacant lands from the previous policy – Taipei Beautiful programme, which incentivized temporary greenery on private vacant lands, is not without problems. One of the challenges is that many ground-level gardens sitting on government-owned lands, which are not zoned for greenspaces, are only temporarily available and subject to change for construction. The recent dispute on reclaiming the land of Fujian Happiness Farm for building social housing is one case in point.
“Happiness Farm” in the Fujian neighbourhood of Songsan District was created 7 years ago on a vacant lot owned by the Ministry of National Defence and was assigned as a garden city site under the Taipei Garden City Programme. The garden is located in the city centre, where the land is worth 20 billion $NTD, or 701,340,000 $USD (information based on the interview with warden). It has earned great popularity among local residents as a rare green space within the neighbourhoods to grow vegetables, to meet neighbours, and to ease symptoms of depression, and improve mental health. Over time the gardening activities also fostered good community coherence, as can be seen through the fast organisation of a self-help group when the community was informed to clear the place for social housing to be built by the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Centre. Although local residents keen on keeping this green space nearby, the land of the garden, which is officially zoned for residential use in the urban plan, provides little legal basis for their wishes. Unfortunately, this dispute won’t be the sole case. Sooner or later, many ground-level gardens will face the same problem.
The land of Happiness Farm at Fujian neighbourhood belongs to the Ministry of National Defence of Taiwan Photo: Wan-Yu Shih
The self-help group of Happiness Farm at Fujian neighbourhood to convey their opinions with the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Centre in a public meeting. Photo: Wan-Yu Shih
Fostering social coherence and resilience amongst urban communities is one of the strengths of the Taipei Garden City programme. The temporary use of available lands to engage residents for farming activities has benefited the social-environmental ecosystem of urban communities. This function is however not sustainable, as current land use mechanisms cannot sustain long-term farming and so social coherence might fade out over time when the garden disappears. Like many cities opt to create urban farms on the rooftop in face of difficulty to acquire lands, Taipei City too pays attention to the top of the building to carry on the programme in the future. However, community gardens on the ground are generally more popular in the case of Taipei since it is visibly and physically more accessible by local communities. Conversely, the use of rooftop gardens is often constrained by safety concerns and building management. It should not assume that the social function of a ground-level garden can be equally replaceable by a rooftop counterpart.
Allocating doorstep green spaces from densely built urban areas is critical but challenging. It requires enormous efforts to negotiate and coordinate between public and private sectors. The success of Taipei Garden City programme so far in terms of implementation and popularity amongst citizens is attributable to the existence of a champion in the government to facilitate cross-sectoral collaboration as well as active local communities to cocreate and to realise the policy. Many popular gardens however might vanish due to its temporary nature of land use and the on-going densification of the city. The pandemic crisis is catalysing urban transformation to be a greener living environment that provides equal and accessible green spaces for public health and well-being. It is also an important time for urban planning to rethink the human-nature relationship while designing the legal mechanisms for not only land use zoning, but also a possibility for nearby residents to suggest a rezoning.
Che-wei works for Classic Landscape Design and Environmental Planning (http://www.classic1990.com/). He is one of the key initiators of the ‘Farming Urbanism Network’ (https://www.facebook.com/FarmingUrbanismNetwork/), which prepared a policy appeal for the ‘Taipei Garden City’ programme.
STEW-MAP is a tool that helps us understand and visualize how groups steward their local environment, and how their work is part of a larger network of civic engagement.
Worldwide, cities are grappling with aging infrastructure, shifting populations, and changing weather patterns, necessitating the use and expansion of green space in equitable and creative ways. Many are embracing a transition from the sanitary city—comprised of siloed functions and grey infrastructure—to the sustainable city—comprised of regenerative and distributed systems that require ongoing coordination. At the same time, municipal budget constraints create an urgent need for leveraging civic capacity. Even under the best-case scenario, cities invest in their natural resources and green infrastructure primarily through the commitment of capital funds, leading to insufficient support for long-term maintenance of these installations. City agencies do not have the funding or humanpower to maintain these sites and systems alone, and rely on a growing network of civic organizations and volunteers.
If you are a gardener, a park champion, a food justice activist, a kayak club member, an educator, a researcher, or a community organizer—we need your help in putting your group on the map! The 2017 NYC Region STEW-MAP survey is now open! Check your inbox and respond to the survey to make sure your hard work is recognized. If you have not received a survey but are a part of a stewardship group you would like to see on the map, email [email protected]. For more information on STEW-MAP, visit nrs.fs.fed.us/stewmap or email [email protected].
The urban landscape is a co-creation of many, and if we want to improve the quality, accessibility, and viability of our natural resources then it is important to understand not only the resource as a social ecological system, but those who care for it as part of that system. STEW-MAP (the Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project) began in New York City in 2007 as a way of visualizing the civic groups that provide capacity and take care of the local environment. It is a way to understand the social extent of caring for a place. In urban environments where there are many layers of change as well as overlapping bureaucratic boundaries and property jurisdictions, civic stewardship groups can appear more transboundary as their work and purpose often cross over space, time, and scale.
Visualizing and mapping these groups helps point out gaps and overlaps in civic capacity across a city’s neighborhoods. Prior STEW-MAP research found that stewardship groups focused on different issues may be working in the same neighborhood, yet unaware of each other. Also, groups may be working on similar issues, but in different places and without coordination. STEW-MAP aims to connect groups and sites across the entire city’s social-ecological system.
At the NYC Urban Field Station, we define stewardship groups as two or more people working to conserve, manage, monitor, transform, educate on and/or advocate for the local environment—from a group of friends or block association planting flowers in tree pits, to large environmental education NGOs, to grassroots environmental justice campaign. STEW-MAP collects data through a survey, which asks questions about:
Data on civic groups responding in 2007.
1. Basic Characteristics: The STEW-MAP survey measures a group’s capacity, longevity, structure, and theory of change. Questions address the motivation and the mission of groups, as well as the metrics used to track progress. This information is essential to knowing not only the type of stewardship group but how it is functioning as an organization.
Where the 2007 STEW-MAP Survey respondents work.
2. Stewardship Turfs: The STEW-MAP survey also maps the physical spaces that stewards care for such as the waterfront, a block or a park and the spaces where systems like waste or air quality touch down in place. Unlike the jurisdictions that govern private property, political districts, and formalized public space, civic stewards are not held to such boundaries. Instead, they create, determine and shape their own turf based upon where they do their work. Stewards can self-define their turf in the STEW-MAP survey, whether they work on a specific lot or an entire borough or waterway. Stewardship is not ownership, it is defined by caring for a place.
3. Networks and Nodes: Finally, the STEW-MAP survey captures the connections with other civic groups, businesses, and governmental agencies. These include public agencies and NGOs that stewardship groups go to for collaboration and support. Many of these social networks channel resources like materials, labor, and funding. These networks transmit knowledge, ideas, and data, helping to to shape new forms of cooperation and even governance. STEW-MAP allows us to visualize the key nodes or brokers in this network.
A visual representation of the key nodes or brokers in the network of civic groups, businesses and governmental agencies.
The data collected from the 2007 STEW-MAP survey in New York City were analyzed and made into a public database and interactive map designed to help stewards better understand how they fit into their city. Data from the 2007 survey can be found here. STEW-MAP findings from 2007 showed that there are groups of all sizes, shapes, budgets, and structures across the city. However, they all share the way they care about their local environment—which is evident through the strong place attachment, social cohesion, community identity and co-creation of knowledge across a diversity of different site types. Research also found that stewardship groups focused on different issues may be working in the same neighborhood, yet unaware of each other. Also, groups may be working on similar issues, but in different places and without coordination.
Through many years of research, we have learned that people care for that which has meaning in their lives; as Steven Jay Gould famously said, “…we will not fight to save what we do not love.” STEW-MAP helps to understand and visualize how groups are making meaning of their local, everyday environment. In doing so, we find that people can be positive agents of change in our community, and that these acts are more than localized actions but part of a much larger network of stewardship and action. STEW-MAP data adds to our understanding of civic stewardship and can be used at varying scales to improve and grow the network of stewards. It helps visualize universal human behaviors of how we move from individual action to a group action in an effort to care for ourselves, each other, and our environment. It can also help to see these actions within the scale of an entire city or region, noting the places where people have come to invest time, money, labor, and ideas to strengthen and leverage the work through partnership and sustained collaboration with others. Our long-term vision is that stewards of all sectors –civic, public, private—and in all places will see themselves and their efforts as part of a co-creative effort to strengthen our natural resources and our communities.
Since 2007, STEW-MAP has expanded to cities internationally. STEW-MAP projects are currently underway in Baltimore; Philadelphia; Seattle; Chicago; Portland, Maine region; Los Angeles; North Kona and South Kohala regions in Hawaii; Paris, France; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and Valledupar, Colombia. A 2016 Forest Service General Technical Report describes the steps for undertaking STEW-MAP in new cities.
Since 2007, STEW_MAP has expanded to cities internationally.
In 2017, we are working to update and expand STEW-MAP in New York through a regional survey of stewardship groups. STEW-MAP 2017 builds upon past research, providing the first update in 10 years on previously participating groups. In addition to capturing change over time, the 2017 survey data will reveal the ways in which the larger stewardship landscape has evolved in the New York Region, including how the changing climate, political administration shifts, social movements, and environmental disasters have influenced the goals and methods of stewardship groups.
Laura Landau, Lindsay Campbell, Erika Svendsen
New York
Lindsay K. Campbell is a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service. Her current research explores the dynamics of urban politics, stewardship, and sustainability policymaking.
Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to hybrid governance, collective resilience and human well-being.
Community gardeners and urban farmers across North America are using an innovative research toolkit developed in New York City to measure and track the impacts of their work. A small group of dedicated gardeners created the toolkit in mid-2013 as part of the Five Borough Farm initiative of the Design Trust for Public Space, a local non-profit incubator for groundbreaking urban planning and design projects. The toolkit is made up of sixteen different methods for collecting data about things like the number of pounds of food harvested in a community garden or the number of children who develop a taste for fresh vegetables after hanging out at a neighborhood farm.
Gardens as far west as Nevada and as far north as Toronto have started using the toolkit and its accompanying online data-tracking site, “The Barn,” since both were released online in mid-2014. The toolkit is freely available for anyone to download, use, and repurpose under Creative Commons licensing. The Barn data-tracking site is also free and open to any community garden or urban farm throughout the world.
The toolkit has already caught on with other gardeners in New York State. 75 community gardens in Buffalo, New York signed up to use The Barn and organizers for the network plan to help gardeners collect data during the 2015 growing season.
“Previously, we existed to set up and support community gardens in our City,” Derek Nichols wrote in a recent email. Derek is the Program Director at Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo, a convener and organizer for the city’s many gardens. “Now, we can focus on capturing the impact of our gardens on things like food access, the environment, and citizen engagement. The toolkit provides an easy guide to attain that data through innovative collection exercises.”
The toolkit is adaptable to different contexts and its creators hope other sites throughout the world will pick it up and reshape it to meet their local needs.
Community gardens and urban farms using the toolkit and The Barn website are popping up across North America. Credit: Farming Concrete
Farmers and gardeners in New York City developed the toolkit to take this kind of research into their own hands, allowing them to ask—and, hopefully, answer—questions directly relevant to the day-to-day activities at their own farms and gardens. The toolkit invites users to set goals for various gardening and farming practices and then track their successes and failures over time. Users can reflect on their data at the end of a growing season and strategize ways to improve their practices for the year ahead.
Kimberly at the Davidson Avenue Community Garden in the Bronx used the toolkit to measure volunteer time donated to the garden. She discovered that local kids were playing an important role in keeping the garden going. Photo: Liz Barry
The data can also be useful for supporting and expanding community gardens and urban farms in cities where vacant lots are rapidly disappearing under waves of gentrifying redevelopment. Gardeners and farmers can use the data to demonstrate the social, economic, and environmental value of setting aside patches of the urban landscape for something other than concrete, glass, and steel.
The toolkit is broken up into five sections: 1) food production data; 2) environmental data; 3) social data; 4) health data; and 5) economic data. Each section contains step-by-step instructions for collecting data using methods that are cheaply and easily replicated at any farm or garden. For example, gardeners that want to track the pounds of local household garbage they divert from landfills simply need a five-gallon pail, a no-frills kitchen scale, and a clipboard to methodically weigh and record all of the banana peels, apple cores, and woodchips that get tossed into their compost bins.
Some of the social data collection methods in the toolkit build on age-old community organizing techniques, while others were specifically designed with the needs of volunteer-run gardens and farms in mind. One method in this category invites gardeners to take stock of all the latent skills and knowledge waiting to be tapped within a gardening community, using a standard asset-mapping approach with sticky notes and flip charts posted around a conference room. Another method provides garden leaders with illustrated “Task Cards” that allow volunteers to create a paper trail for all of the labor hours they donate over the course of a season.
Attractive “Task Cards” invite volunteer gardeners to track the time they donate for different activities—making it easy for a coordinator to tally up all of the volunteer time that goes into a garden each year. Photo: Philip Silva
One of the health data tracking methods looks at whether children who spend time at a garden or farm develop an affinity for eating fresh vegetables. The method asks children to log whether they think the taste of a particular vegetable grown at the garden is “yum” or “yuck”—both before and after tasting the vegetable for the first time. Here’s an illustration of how the method works, taken directly from the toolkit:
Jeanine is a Children’s Workshop Leader at the little community garden in Memorial Park. Every summer, she works with fifth graders from a local summer day camp to plant rows of corn, green beans, and tomatoes. The children harvest the crops as they ripen throughout the season, tasting each harvest and bringing some of the produce home with them in little paper bags. The children always have a lot to say about what they’ve tasted, but Jeanine struggles to keep track of how their attitudes change as a result of growing and tasting the vegetables for themselves.
Last year, as the green beans and tomatoes started to ripen and harvest time approached, Jeanine got ready to track what the children thought about the taste of these two vegetables. She took two large tin cans out of her recycling bin, cleaned them, and taped a colorful drawing onto the front of each can: one of a big red tomato, the other of a bushel of green beans. She bought a bag of dry red beans and a bag of white beans at her local grocery, and poured each bag into separate bowls.
The next morning, Jeanine arranged the bowls and the jars on a picnic bench in the garden. After the children arrived and got settled, Jeanine briefly taught them how to harvest the tomatoes and green beans. She then invited each one to step up to the picnic bench and pick a “Yum” bean or a “Yuck” bean to describe what they thought about tomatoes—a red bean for “Yum” and a white bean for “Yuck”. Their choice made, they dropped their bean into the tin can labeled with the drawing of a tomato and then did the same thing again for the green beans.
While the children worked in the garden with Jeanine, another adult gardener poured the contents of each jar into separate plastic bags and set them aside for Jeanine to count out later. After the harvest was over, everyone tasted a tomato and a green bean—some for the first time. Jeanine then invited the children to step up to the picnic bench once more and register how they felt about tomatoes and green beans after harvesting and tasting them. When the children left for the day, Jeanine counted out the red beans and white beans in each of the plastic bags and compared them to the beans left in the jars. She found that there was an increase in “yum” opinions about tomatoes by the end of the day, and a small in- crease in “yuck” opinions about green beans. She logged the results and shared them with other gardeners and began thinking about other ways to make the next harvest more appealing to children in the garden.
The toolkit builds on earlier work done by the Farming Concrete initiative to help community gardeners and urban farmers weigh and keep track of all the pounds of food they grow each season. Farming Concrete’s protocols for measuring both the number of crops cultivated and the number of pounds of food grown are the first two methods found in the pages of the toolkit. The Farming Concrete team became partners in the Five Borough Farm initiative, and now the toolkit and its accompanying data logging technology are hosted on the Farming Concrete website.
The toolkit contains handy data worksheets that are easy to photocopy and reuse from month to month and season to season. Gardeners and farmers can also gather and analyze their data at “The Barn” after they set up a user account and create a site record for their urban farm or community garden. The system generates stylish summary reports with charts and graphs that are easy to print, email, and share with other gardeners, with policymakers, and with potential funders.
Community gardeners and urban farmers work together in 2013 to create the first draft of the toolkit. Credit: Design Trust for Public Spacecompost
A group of thirty gardeners and farmers came together in the late spring of 2013 to craft the toolkit with help from two Outreach Fellows sponsored by the Design Trust. The Outreach Fellows facilitated a daylong brainstorming workshop where gardeners and farmers laid down the first core set of ideas that would evolve into the first version of the toolkit. The session followed the precepts of “Open Space Technology”, empowering participants to form their own small working groups based on their own interests, passions, and concerns.
A report published by the Design Trust for Public Space had this to say about the approach:
Groups formed, split, grew, and shrank during the workshop, while creatively tackling the same basic question—“How do we know something good is actually happening in our garden?” At the end of the workshop the full group reassembled to share sketches of a dozen new methods that were both meaningful to them and achievable, based on the capacities of their fellow gardeners.
The Outreach Fellows worked with gardeners and farmers across the city to pilot and test the toolkit throughout the summer of 2013. The feedback they received during the subsequent fall and winter led to the development of an updated version of the toolkit released in 2014. A new team of Outreach Fellows is currently working to adapt the toolkit based on additional feedback from farmers and gardeners provided during the 2014 growing season. The updated toolkit will be available for free download in the spring of 2015.
The author served as a Five Borough Farm Outreach Fellow along with his collaborator Liz Barry from September 2012 to December 2014. The current Five Borough Farm Outreach Fellows are Sheryll Durant and D Rooney. The author continues to serve as a special advisor on the project.
Street vendors. Market peddlers. Musicians walking through subway cars. Parking spot guards and car watchers. Van drivers with handmade signs competing for passengers. Hawkers who sell stuff out of the trunks of their cars, out of baby carriages, and from bicycle carts. Hagglers looking to pocket some cash along the road, at a red light, or in busy intersections.
Should cities view people who claim public spaces through informal market activities as insecure persons—or as entrepreneurs?
Informal economic market activity comes in many varieties, and this type of unlicensed trade occurs in most cities worldwide. Maybe it’s hidden out of view in seedy back alleys or behind the markets where bootleggers with sketchy reputations secretly offer their wares. In other places, it’s out in the open, an accepted and normal part of the daily sell-and-buy routine for many products such as fruits, vegetables, household items, and clothing. In other corners of the world, informal markets come off as a sport, with petty traders doing a song and dance to gain attention and prospective buyers circling tables elbowing and jockeying for the best price.
However they are viewed, informal markets bring with them inherent challenges that many cities struggle to deal with.
A few months back, when I was in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, I had a long conversation about what cities can do about these activities with Lela Rekhviashvili, a post-doctoral researcher at Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography. Her area of study is in the informal economic practices of marginalized groups in urban settings; she has researched these informal practices in Georgia and was in Bishkek examining the marshrutka system, a complex public transportation web of mini-van operators that locals throughout post-Soviet countries depend on.
Marshrutkas, or mini vans, are the main form of public transportation in former Soviet countries. The operate under formal and informal economic arrangements that vary by city. Photo: Lela Rekhviashvili
The urban dilemma
To understand the backdrop, cities have to look at who is involved.
Typically, shadow markets and illegal vending opportunities are the only source of income to a city’s poorest group of people. These are the people living on the fringe of society, scraping by and living in survival mode. They represent the part of society that falls between the cracks or those whom cities don’t know how to adequately help. In today’s political climate, many of these people have the faces of “undesirable” migrants who have washed up somewhere; they are the ones selling brand-knock-off sunglasses, purses, or watches on dingy sheets that can be quickly rolled up when the police come, or small pocket items such as cigarette lighters or packs of tissues out of plastic bags that can be easily stowed away.
“When we talk about these small-scale informal practices, we have to think of it as the practices of ‘have-nots’ who do not have access to owning things, and they do not have the capital to invest in something.”
Although they may be among a city’s most vulnerable citizens, local officials and police who enforce city rules have a hard time managing these people’s needs. This is indicative of a double-sided dilemma cities face: How do you manage these activities—which are needed as income sources—without marginalizing people by defining which activities can appropriately take place in public spaces?
“The strategies these [marginalized] populations deploy rely on non-commodified resources, such as public space,” Rekhviashvili said. “So somebody comes and starts using public spaces and commercializes it, to a degree, but their access to this space is not commercialized. They don’t pay market value to anyone for standing there. The only thing that saves their access to this spot is that essentially another informal activity is taking place another 100 meters down. Access is ensured, in some ways, by the level of social approval… Access to the most important resources they have—the land and location—is not market-based, but based on social approval and also based on their claim to public resources being common resources that they can draw on.”
The questions of how public spaces should be used, and whether informal economic activities should take place in them, have many city officials’ heads spinning worldwide.
On an overarching level, the answers lie in how urban officials delineate public and private spaces and how they balance marketization of these places or commodify urban spaces. This process of marketization—which is a necessary part of capitalism, and by extension economic growth—plays a significant role in how informal practices take seed and expand or remain dormant activities.
But the actual management approaches are as varied as the economic practices they are meant to control.
A man and woman sell goods out of carriages along a busy street. Using public space for these types of informal economic activities raises many city-level questions about marginalization and just systems that benefit all residents. Photo: Lela Rekhviashvili
Some city governments feel that these non-taxable activities hurt licensed commercial vendors who pay sales and property taxes and deserve more city support, prime selling space, and customer loyalty. In an effort to reduce what they call unfair competition, many cities (including European cities I have lived in and visited) take a harder stand on this; they not only make it illegal to sell goods informally on the street, but also impose hefty fines and/or prison sentences to those caught engaging in these practices.
Other places have developed more creative ways to integrate this marginalized population into mainstream society and have changed the way its constituents are viewed by the general citizenry.
And, at the extremes, cities without adequate resources have let informal economies run rampant without any control mechanisms in place, while others have gone as far as criminalizing homelessness, for example—which creates a vicious cycle of repeat offenders who can never rise above their lot in life, according to Rekhviashvili.
Creating balance
It’s hard to pin down one approach as a good one in all circumstances. In many situations, it boils down to a few key introspective questions.
“How do we see people who claim public spaces? Do we see them as entrepreneurs, or do we see them as insecure persons who have no other income or ways of generating income to secure their livelihoods?” Rekhviashvili asked. “These are two different kinds of judgments. An entrepreneur is seen as someone who turns profit into investment, expansion, and growth. But many of the people who engage in these activities are turning profit into survival.”
In a place like Tbilisi, Georgia, for instance, a street vendor or parking spot watcher can expand 50 meters more, but they cannot have a kilometer more, she noted. “They can’t go beyond that, again, because their access to the space is not private. They don’t own it. They only have it because somebody else approves of it….the immediate social context approves of it.”
If this is the case, and it’s likely that these practices won’t ever really vanish, how should cities monitor, control, or capitalize on them? Are there examples of cities handling such activities well?
“One way is the Bishkek way,” Rekhviashvili responded. “It’s fascinating to me. It really reminds me of the Georgia of the 1990s, where this ‘do it yourself strategy’ was allowed by the government. It’s the same here now. Everybody does a bit of informal things. Public spaces are not restricted. You can see a lot of vendors at the place of their convenience. Some trade with more things, some only sell a few things and you can see clearly that they don’t have anything else. They only sell strawberries, for example.”
Informal economic activities take many forms. People could be selling onions in the market, strawberries on the street or watermelons out of trucks. Photo: Bangkok to Barcelona On Foot
The marshrutka mini-bus system is another example. The only thing the state regulates about them is the price of transit, she added. “Almost everything else about this is unregulated. The state does not intervene.”
Part of this may stem from state or city’s lack of resources to do more, resulting in their turning a blind eye to the web of informal practices tied to the marshrutka mini-buses, including drivers, dispatchers, and work standards.
For cities that may see such a hands-off strategy as giving away too much control, Rekhviashvili recommended regulations…but not regulations that criminalize the behavior, which often prove counterproductive in the longer term.
“Rules that criminalize these small-scale activities punishes people who are poor,” she said. “This, again, comes down to how do we want to see these people. The question of whether they are entrepreneurs, marginalized or criminals becomes an important discussion point.”
How does your city manage informal economic practices? How has public policy been shaped to integrate this activity into more formalized trading? What rules have or haven’t worked in delineating public spaces for this kind of use? How are informal vendors viewed in your city?
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Taylor Britt, Houston Money can be very tangible to people, but that doesn’t necessarily entail a full accounting of the externalities associated with protecting and restoring ecosystems.
Nette Compton, New York In a climate of tighter budgets and more scrutiny of government spending, we need to do a better job of convincing the public and our political leaders that investing in natural systems is worth it.
Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm Urban ecosystem services are not market priced, and thus usually under-provided by market forces.
Haripriya Gundimeda, Mumbai When it comes to personal assets, we make rational and conscious decisions after carefully valuing all the alternatives Why cannot we do the same for urban planning and make cities better living spaces?
Mike Houck, Portland A fundamental challenge is convincing policy makers, natural resource managers, the philanthropic community, and sadly, some prominent conservation NGOs that urban natural resources, whether natural or built, have ecological value.
Patrick Lydon, Edinburgh The very fact that government and business leaders are attempting to work ‘nature’ into a balance sheet is good sign that there’s trouble afoot.
Rob McInnes, Faringdon, UK The disconnection between urban humans and the natural systems upon which they all depend has permeated the minds of politicians and decision-makers.
Timon McPhearson, New York Experiences in many cities show that expressing benefits in monetary value motivates policy and green infrastructure investment.
Franco Montalto, Philadelphia I believe that we could generate a lot more public support and associated investment in ecosystem services if they were better calibrated to the values, needs, and goals of diverse urban residents.
Steve Whitney, Seattle The real strength of ecosystem service thinking in an urban environment is its ability to reveal the multiple benefits of green infrastructure investments, encourage interdisciplinary planning, foster collaborative governance, and illuminate systemic costs and benefits.
Taylor Britt is a recent Rice University graduate who works as Research and Special Projects Manager at Houston Wilderness, a local environmental nonprofit.
The promise of ecosystem services is that it can unite our understanding of ecology and earth science with the world of business and politics by allowing us to assess the true economic value of the natural world. But no matter how sophisticated the methods for calculating the monetary value of ecosystem services are, what really matters is the ability to reach the institutions and humans that will make the decisions to adopt ecosystem services.
Of course, money can be very visceral to people, but that doesn’t necessarily entail a full accounting of the externalities associated with protecting and restoring ecosystems. For instance, here in Houston, what the Texas Department of Transportation found especially compelling about urban freeway forestation wasn’t the air quality or aesthetic benefits (or what dollar value you put on that), but the fact that they would no longer need to mow the grass along the freeways. Many widely heralded green infrastructure successes (for instance, New York City’s protection of the Catskill-Delaware watershed) saved enormous amounts of money without even accounting for the value of the full societal benefit of ecosystem services.
What Houston still needs is more biophysical information the services provided by our region’s ecosystems. Local studies are especially important here because our politicians are often skeptical of information coming from other regions. Houston’s Harris County Flood Control District is currently looking at several possible solutions to flooding caused by Cypress Creek, which could have devastating impacts on the city if it overruns existing infrastructure. An expanded conservation area is on the table as part of the solution, but will depend on a study that is currently underway to demonstrate the effectiveness of native prairie grasses in absorbing water.
Local political realities inform the way solutions must be crafted in other ways as well. High private property ownership and suspicion of government regulation present challenges that require locally-tailored solutions. One especially exciting prospect here is the Lone Star Coastal Exchange, which is an ecosystem services marketplace under development that is targeted at philanthropic organizations and corporations seeking offsets for their environmental footprint. This could offer new revenue streams for landowners around Galveston Bay while serving to maintain the storm surge absorption capacity of coastal wetlands that is vital for protecting the Houston metropolitan area from hurricanes and tropical storms. Buyers and sellers will have to decide what providing and protecting these ecosystem services is worth to them monetarily.
The answer, as is so often the case, is that it depends on whom you ask. For some of us, the facts have already convinced us to invest in ecosystem services. We have seen the loss of some ecosystems and degradation of those which remain, particularly in urban areas. We need to preserve and restore these areas because they provide habitat for other species, many of which are threatened by human development. We can be more selfish, and look at the value provided to humans by protecting non-human habitat. There is a strong case to be made that preserving biodiversity serves humans, though that can be a hard sell to the average urban dweller, who may struggle to see the importance of bobolinks returning to New York City in the face of paying rent and commuting to work.
The debate then shifts towards what ecosystems can do for the collective us. These arguments can drive home the point that nature helps in a number of ways to make cities livable. People innately understand the pleasure of being surrounded by beauty and natural spaces, and that feeling helps underlay an effort to preserve such space for public use in the future. People know that New York City’s Central Park has value, but making the case that salt marshes also have value takes more education. But more is being done to quantify the many services natural systems provide such as cooling our cities, filtering our air, absorbing rain fall, as well as helping buffer the impacts of larger and more frequent storms.
Who isn’t convinced? Many people, some of them local residents, and others who hold decision-making positions. In a climate of tighter budgets and more scrutiny of government spending, we need to do a better job of convincing the public and our political leaders that investing in natural systems is worth it, tipping the balance towards overwhelming public and political support.
And one path to success is to convince people, regardless of political affiliation or interests, that green infrastructure is a better and less costly way of providing many services city dwellers need. To better accomplish this with a bigger audience, we need to assign dollar values to these services in a scientifically justifiable way. These types of efforts so far have been quite successful; ecosystem service valuation research performed by the Trust for Public Land in several states has shown that state investment in land conservation returns anywhere from $4 to $11 in natural goods and services per $1 invested. This work has persuaded legislatures and voters to fund state-wide conservation work. The more we can make this case, and specifically target urban areas where need and cost is greatest, the more we can strengthen the understanding and political support for green infrastructure. And that is much more impactful than convincing the small group of us that is already convinced.
Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.
The difficult but important task of valuing urban nature: Valuation of ecosystems and their services has developed rapidly as a way to avoid them being invisible in planning and development and prevent losses of assets important for the wellbeing of people. However, recently it has been clear that in the urban landscapes there are also numerous un-captured economic opportunities related to investments in urban green spaces, e.g. less costly and more sustainable solutions to address climate change challenges (compared to conventional engineering). Such opportunities also need robust tools of valuation. In various cities around the world (such as Amsterdam), initiatives have been taken where cash flows resulting directly from urban green space are being generated and captured in order to sustainably manage them. The underlying principle of these approaches (e.g., landscape auctions, crowd funding, private ownership of public parks) is to link the real economic benefits to the maintenance costs of urban green spaces in order to achieve sustainable management.
How do we value urban nature? The total value of multiple services generated by ecosystems can be divided in different parts as illustrated in the figure below, depending on whether there is a market and whether the value can be expressed in monetary or only in non-monetary terms. Many tools for monetary valuation of ecosystem services are already available: direct market price, replacement cost, damage cost avoided, production function (value added), hedonic price (extra amount paid for higher environmental quality), travel cost (cost of visiting a site), and willingness-to-pay surveys.
The value of ecosystem services can be expressed as (1) recognized value, the bulk of which includes cultural and aesthetical values that are often possible to express only in non-monetary terms; (2) demonstrated value, where it is possible to calculate a potential substitution cost in monetary terms (e.g. the replacement cost of wild pollinators); and (3) captured value, where there is a market that determines a value, often priced in monetary terms (water, food, fiber, etc). (Modified after TEEB 2010)
However, if we only describe the captured and demonstrated value, we would leave the recognized value invisible in decision-making processes and perhaps the bulk of values be lossed. Then, what are the non-monetary values and how could we go about to be better in making them visible?
In general, non-economic values of urban ecosystems could be summarized into the contribution by ecosystems to the formation of 1) place values, social cohesion, identity values, 2) educational and cognitive development, and 3) insurance value from increased social-ecological resilience.
1) Place values emerge from attachment to physical places as these come to be rendered meaningful by those who live or lived there. Several recent studies have shown that sense of place tend to be a major driver for environmental stewardship. Identity and sense of community, i.e., the feelings towards a group and strength of attachment to communities is often shaped by social processes that are attached to physical places and culturally valued species.
2) Urban ecosystems also provide multiple opportunities for cognitive development and educational benefits. Cognitive development associated to urban green areas would include the development and transmission of local ecological knowledge.
3) Finally, a critical type of non-economic benefit stems from the ‘insurance value’ that can be attributed to the contribution of urban ecosystems and biodiversity to maintain social-ecological resilience and security in cities and capacity to respond and adapt in the face of disturbance and change.
To summarize, urban ecosystem services are not market priced, and thus usually under-provided by market forces. To make the full range of values visible we need not only develop methods for non-monetary valuation but also a frame-work for how we produce an enriched picture of values, including monetary and non-monetary, through some form of multi-criteria analysis. Such a framework is urgently needed.
Dr. Gundimeda is a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay; and the President of URBIO. Her main interests are green accounting, mitigation aspects of climate change, energy demand and pricing, valuation of environmental resources, and issues relating to the development in India.
Yes, I believe that better information on the monetary value of ecosystem services is critical for getting cities adopt greener infrastructure solutions. The reason — most often, we take these things for granted and do not recognize the importance of ecosystems in providing the cost effective solutions. We cannot manage what we cannot measure and hence, not measuring the true contribution of ecosystem services leads to its mismanagement. The international project on “The economics of ecosystems and biodiversity” (TEEB) has provided several examples on how recognising the importance of ecosystem services helped in providing cost-effective solutions, analysing the trade-offs better and helped improve the decision making, thereby leading to conservation of the ecosystems.
For example, we recognize the fact that urban heat island — a phenomenon that occurs due to higher density of population, pollution and infrastructure — leads to increased consumption of energy and that green spaces can provide cost-effective solutions would lead to better green infrastructure solutions. Here, the expenditure saved due to increased energy tariffs from air-conditioning can be compared to the cost incurred in maintaining the green spaces in urban ecosystems. The role of green spaces in providing cost-effective solutions can thus be better understood with monetary valuation. The recognition that nature often provides cost effective solutions leads one to explore innovative alternatives like green rooftops and green spaces thereby reducing the temperatures in urban set up.
Similarly the role of mangroves in protecting the urban areas against storm surges can better be understood from what it costs to plant or maintain the mangroves intact as against constructing and maintaining an artificial dike. Mangroves can provide the same solution with almost one-fifth of the cost of an alternate man-made infrastructure (dykes). The value recognition can definitely help in including green spaces like mangroves in city planning.
What happens if wetlands are transferred to alternate land use like agriculture? The functions provided by the wetlands have to be performed by artificial structures. This can cost the governments higher than maintaining wetlands intact. Demonstration of these values led to conservation of wetlands in New York and Kampala.
When it comes to personal assets, we make rational and conscious decisions after carefully valuing all the alternatives Why cannot we do the same for urban planning and make cities better living spaces?
Mike Houck is a founding member of The Nature of Cities and is currently a TNOC board member. He is The Urban Naturalist for the Urban Greenspaces Institute (www.urbangreenspaces.org), on the board of The Intertwine Alliance and is a member of the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission.
I’d frame the question: How do we convince elected officials and policy makers to invest in both built and natural green infrastructure which then will retain or deliver ecosystem services, both monetary and non-monetary. Yes, of course we need to demonstrate the monetary value, both avoided and reduced costs, of using green infrastructure and better integrating grey and green infrastructure systems in our cities.
That said, a more fundamental challenge is convincing policy makers, natural resource managers, the philanthropic community, and sadly, some prominent conservation NGOs that urban natural resources, whether natural or built, have ecological value. Well-intentioned, progressive urban planners often argue there is “no room for nature in cities” because they eat up to much “buildable” land. For example, for those cities or regions with Urban Growth Boundaries (UGB), some argue that UGBs are to protect “nature out there” and that everything inside the UGB is to be urbanized. “Too much” green inside the UGB, they say, is antithetical to good urban design and growth management.
While that canard is on the wane, even some conservation groups contribute to an anti-urban by asserting that investing in urban natural resource protection, restoration, and management is contrary to the broader conservation agenda. This stance has been used at times as a rationale to propose raiding urban coffers to fund “real” conservation projects in “pristine” environments.
LEFT: Urban natural areas such as 160-acre Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge in downtown Portland provide multiple ecosystem services including maintaining biodiversity (more than 100 species of birds have been recorded at Oaks Bottom) in the heart of the city, multiple passive recreational opportunities, waster quality benefits, floodplain storage, and environmental education. RIGHT: At the other range of the size spectrum built green infrastructure like this curb extension not only protect the city’s $1.44 billion investment in its Combine Sewer Overflow program by keeping stormwater out of the city’s grey, piped system but also create a more aesthetic green street and contributes to traffic calming, improving quality of life in the neighborhood.
Grey Infrastructure such as Portland’s Combined Sewer Overflow “big pipe” (LEFT) is essential to the city’s efforts to clean up the Willamette River by virtually eliminating sewer overflows, but it is a single, purpose “out of sight,out of mind” solution with none of the additional benefits provided by green infrastructure such as Portland’s Park Blocks (RIGHT), which attenuate stormwater, reduce urban heat island effect, provide migratory bird habitat and beautify downtown Portland.
This figure demonstrates the cost savings a city can realize by combining grey and green infrastructure. Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services calculated what it would cost if it only replaced the aging (100-year old) pipes in on sub-basing of the Willamette River vs combining green streets, bioswales, tree planting and other green approaches. The cost savings amounted to $63 million. Courtesy City of Portland
Green infrastructure practitioners and ecosystem services researchers and policy makers I work with say the following are the most significant knowledge gaps, although many feel we already have all the information we need to promote and implement green infrastructure projects. The biggest gap we face is more effectively educating policy makers and the public about the multiple benefits (monetary and non-monetary) of built and natural green infrastructure.
Gaps:
1) Knowledge of all benefits of complex green infrastructure projects (e.g., wetlands, floodplain, managing hydrograph). Need more information on multiple benefits of urban floodplains.
2) Proper geographic context in which we value ecosystem services. Generally, context is too small.
3) Inconsistency in how ecosystem services are measured and lack of common terminology.
4) Inability to capitalize green infrastructure so utilities can bond and use rates to fund projects. Need changes to national capital improvements and accounting standards.
6) Measuring cultural ecosystem services. How do people value green infrastructure, both built and natural and the ecosystem services they provide?
7) Social and quality of life and human health costs and benefits are typically not accounted for.
8) In an era where regulators are emphasizing incentives and non-regulatory, voluntary approaches, a lack of understanding of, or political will to enforce a strong regulatory hammer, without which green infrastructure programs won’t materialize.
Social benefits such as birdwatching, community interaction, and environmental literacy are seldom, if ever, calculated in ecosystem services analyses
Patrick Lydon
The very fact that government and business leaders are attempting to work ‘nature’ into a balance sheet is good sign that there’s trouble afoot.
If we’re serious about presenting ecosystem services as integral to the city, I would argue that we should seek to establish nature’s place, not as a good infrastructure option and not as a positive economic impact factor, but as a service which is absolutely essential to the life of the city itself. Absent this ideology, nature becomes too easily shoehorned into the more convenient languages of economics and statistics, where it suffers the fate of being forever pushed around, outbid, and marginalized.
This past summer, when interviewing a particularly insightful natural farmer in Japan, I asked something to the effect of “why can’t we all just understand that the earth should be revered and appreciated?” His simple answer surprised me.
The farmer corrected my statement, saying “We understand already. Every time we stand in nature, every time we look up at the sky, or the tree, or the wheat plant, we feel joy in the simple moment, we smile for no apparent reason other than the fact that we are here on this earth…we understand, we just need a bit of help to cultivate this understanding.”
If our need is to cultivate a proper understanding of why nature and ecosystem services are important, any discussions of monetary value run contrary to this need. Yet how do we make our case, when speaking qualitatively about nature is something of a foreign language to most public and private sector decision makers?
I am reminded of a recent public art installation seen in Silicon Valley called A Floating World. The artworkspoke of urban ecosystem services in a more visceral way, and it gave the city a different language with which to see, hear, and understand the value of ecosystem services. Value, repackaged.
Robin Lasser’s public artwork brings urban awareness to ecological ideas. Photo courtesy of the artist
We can’t all be farmers, nor should we throw eco art everywhere, but what we can do quite easily is to help politicians and denizens alike regularly come into contact with nature in various ways as part of their job and life. Put people in a position where they can begin to understand the value of ecosystem services qualitatively instead of quantitatively.
Monthly experiences in nature? Council meetings at a city farm? There are myriad ways to discuss the importance of nature outside of economic terms and to begin building a true case for nature as an essential part of the city.
The spectre of industrialisation and technology continues to cast its shadow over human society, narrowing our natural horizons whilst expanding a virtual world. As human society has become increasingly urbanised and technology-obsessed the intrinsic bond between people and nature has slowly evaporated. Too often nature in cities is confined to postage stamp gardens, regimented parks or peri-urban nature conservation areas. Urban humans have become disconnected from nature. Nature is something that is “out there”, beyond the city, on the pages of the Sunday supplements, portrayed on jaw-dropping television documentaries, captured on amusing clips on YouTube, mumbled in the rambling memories of elderly relatives and trapped in the camera-phone snapshots of exotic holidays.
The disconnection between urban humans and the natural systems upon which they all depend has permeated the minds of politicians and decision-makers. Policy decisions too often fail to recognise the full value of urban nature. But this is not simply a failure of the economists. Wider society lacks the knowledge to understand the benefits that can flow from urban ecosystems. Sectoral governance structures perpetuate siloed thinking and compromise integrated decision-making. Even the nature conservation sector too often valiantly champions the threatened and the rare at the expense of extolling the wider benefits that nature provides human society. Consequently, biodiversity frequently becomes synonymous with the conservation of the iconic resulting in an undervaluing of the common and widespread species and habitats which underpin human well-being in the urban environment. It is no longer enough to consider urban biodiversity purely through the failing paradigm of protected species and habitats. Whilst not rejecting traditional nature conservation approaches, a parallel process must be developed where urban ecosystem services are more fully integrated into decision-making.
To achieve this will necessitate a hierarchical approach which does not simply fixate on the monetisation of these benefits. Simple methodologies need to be developed so that the full suite of benefits can be recognized as a precursor to integration within decision-making. These must be fit for purpose, designed for the appropriate audiences within city management structures and not another well-meaning, expensive but ultimately redundant output from an academic research platform. Once recognized, these benefits need to be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed and city managers need the relevant tools to achieve this. The objective should be to develop capacity within the people responsible for local decision-making to facilitate understanding of the full range of benefits and the scope of beneficiaries. Only once this process has been completed tools which facilitate monetisation of benefits should be applied.
The academic understanding to achieve this exists. The finances can be found. The tools and protocols can be developed. The solution is less to do with knowledge gaps or economics and more to do with capacity building and dissemination. Why wait for perfect knowledge if making well-informed decisions based on our current understanding would be an improvement? The key challenge is to provide information in the appropriate language to convince all stakeholders, from city mayors to individual citizens, of the importance and relevance of urban biodiversity and developing the relevant tools for the appropriate audience and with the necessary utility to recognise, capture and integrate into decision-making the benefits which nature provides human society in cities.
Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Cities around the world are beginning to realize that urban biodiversity and ecosystems are incredibly valuable for an expanding list of reasons. For example, cities like New York that need to find ways to deal with urban heat islands, troublesome stormwater, or extreme events are turning more and more to green infrastructure because it is both cost effective and can provide additional benefits. Though we know that ecosystems provide many types of services, we are only able to put monetary values on a few of them. This doesn’t mean that these services are the only valuable ones. We simply lack the necessary data to reveal the exact economic value of the larger set of ecosystem services that are being generated in urban ecosystems.
Experiences in many cities show that expressing benefits in monetary value motivates policy and green infrastructure investment. What we need, in addition to data, are robust mathematical models that take into account ecological, economic, social, and spatial data, which can be combined to calculate the value of multiple ecosystem services simultaneously, including provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services. To build such models will require developing indicators for aesthetic, sense of place, environmental education, and cognitive development benefits of urban green areas, in addition to improving our ability to capture real estate, tourism, mental and physical health, and insurance values connected to ecosystems. Urban planning and governance could benefit from the ability to examine development and planning scenarios in terms of trade-offs in delivery of ecosystem services. With potential decision-support tools like the mathematical modeling approach, we could demonstrate how alternative residential or urban park development plans affect the generation of future ecosystem services.
New economic valuation models also need to be spatially explicit so that planning and management can decide on how to create multi-functional ecosystems in places where they are needed most. Equity issues are paramount and we simply have to do a better job of creating green infrastructure solutions in low income, and minority communities. Understanding the spatial mismatches between where ecosystem services are most needed, whether for recreation, heat reduction, or noise pollution mitigation, and where they are currently provided is a critical first step for deciding future planning and development.
It also important to recognize that ecosystems services are influenced by human perceptions, values, and cultural traditions. There are probably few one-size fits-all solutions; rather, we need to work with neighborhoods and local stakeholders to find out the needs and priorities at the community level. In the meantime, we will need indicators for social need that can begin the process of identifying high need communities that should be prioritized for green infrastructure development. And since some aspects of ecosystems can also yield disservices, we need to get the science right to be sure we are in fact creating services, and not disservices. Ecological input to urban planning and management is important to achieve this.
Finally, not every important benefit of urban biodiversity and ecosystems can be captured in monetary terms. We need to advance non-monetary valuation at the same time, and work with our city leaders to understand how non-monetary valuation can be used in priority setting.
Dr. Montalto, PE is a licensed civil/environmental engineer and hydrologist with 20 years of experience working in urban and urbanizing ecosystems as both a designer and researcher. His experience includes planning, design, implementation, and analysis of various natural area restoration and green infrastructure projects.
Decision makers (and individuals) always try to get the most out of their money. However, I believe that we could generate a lot more public support and associated investment in ecosystem services if they were better calibrated to the values, needs, and goals of diverse urban residents.
By modifying the configuration of urban spaces, we can change what happens there, i.e. we add and subtract functions to that particular urban space. A small but rapidly growing body of researchers from different disciplines (including yours truly) are working in lock step with practitioners to study these projects. I am confident that this work, though in its early stages, will ultimately produce robust empirical, statistical, or physical representations of these dynamic conditions, enabling us eventually to predict the various functions obtained from discreet modifications to urban space.
A related, and much more fundamental question, however, is why and how we modify urban spaces in the first place. Stated differently, given that there are an infinite number of ways that we can design/redesign/modify a space, be it a living room, a rooftop, or a wall, how do we settle on any one concept? Research here is less prevalent.
I believe that many green infrastructure advocates often mistakenly assume that a common set of values underlies such decisions, and expect that consensus regarding ecosystem service goals should follow. In my opinion, there is absolutely no reason to believe that such assumptions would be true. Anyone who grew up in a city remembers how differently you perceived the kids from your block compared to the kids on the next one. Even if you grew up in the suburbs, you remember how different the neighborhood on your side of the tracks was from the one on the other side. Our cities are dynamic networks of enclaves (voluntary clustering for example by ethnicity, lifestyle, or sexual orientation) and ghettos (default and/or imposed involuntary segregation of minority groups). In the US, zoning and other land use policies have also segmented our cities into commercial, residential and industrial areas, and physically separated high income from low income households on parcels of different sizes. We’ve got neighborhoods that are “where it is at”, neighborhoods that are “up and coming”, and neighborhoods that may- or may never- be; we’ve got contested, dangerous, sacred, and safe spaces; and both public and private land. The folks who live, work, and circulate through urban neighborhoods see different opportunities, face different challenges, have different goals, and, therefore, desire radically different things from the spaces around them. As any community planning meeting will demonstrate, most proposed changes to communities generate debate. If the transition to more enhanced urban ecosystem services is to be meaningful in scale and impact, it too will generate significant debate and discussion, and different strategies will emerge in different places.
I suppose that on a very basic level, it is safe to assume that we all want cleaner, healthier, more efficient cities, and broad typologies of ecosystem services (e.g. clean air, clean water, etc.) can be mapped to these goals. But in this usage, the ecosystem service concept is, to me, too general to be actionable and will therefore only generate lackluster support from the public. On the other hand, if the growing body of ecosystem service practitioners is willing to get down and dirty, more nuanced (and therefore more relevant = politically powerful) ecosystem service goals that address the real needs, goals, and aspirations of community residents can be developed. If you were a city council person, would you expect more phone calls from your constituents if you touted the need for cleaner water, or if instead you articulated your support to efforts that would create opportunities for gardening for local seniors; cut off the ability of thieves to access the backs of our houses; and eliminate persistent puddling in the streets after rainstorms?
The challenge is that as diverse as our communities are, is as diverse as these customized ecosystem service goals will be. It takes time and effort to inventory community needs, and the responsibility for doing so does not fall squarely on a water department, a public works department, or even on local politicians. Yet, by definition, ecosystem service goals need to be elicited directly from the public. They will be varied and responsive to the needs of different urban constituencies. They will vary from community to community, and from city to city. They will need to be adapted and changed over time, as communities change.
I am suggesting that instead of viewing ecosystem services as some new, noble, post-Brundtland, 21st century, game changing theoretical concept, let’s just think of this term as a name for our ever-improving multi-faceted abilities to map local to global, built to natural, and people to nature. If we can demonstrate the relevance of the concept in this way, very little convincing of the need for investment in ecosystem services will be required. It will be obvious.
The Environmental Protection Agency values a human life at $9.1 million U.S. dollars. To derive this number it applies some sort of sophisticated statistical analysis. In my cartoon fantasy, however, I see a room full of anatomic bean counters individually valuing the human body’s component parts. Once totaled, this approach could certainly produce an aggregate monetary value, but it would fail to account for the inherent value of the body as a system — a system about which we are still learning and upon which we are entirely dependent.
Attempts to monetize the value of ecosystem services often fall into this very same trap. The real strength of ecosystem service thinking in an urban environment is its ability to reveal the multiple benefits of green infrastructure investments, encourage interdisciplinary planning, foster collaborative governance, and illuminate systemic costs and benefits. In contrast, most efforts to monetize ecosystem services employ an opposite, fragmented approach where ecosystem components and associated benefit flows are disaggregated and considered separately. Unfortunately, even if all of the individual categories of benefit could be accurately valued, and they cannot, the sum total would not reflect the true composite value of the living systems upon which we are also entirely dependent.
There are other limitations as well. Original research to determine ecosystem values can be expensive and time intensive, transferring benefit values from elsewhere can be imprecise, and valuation techniques derived from the field of ecological economics can be difficult to describe and defend in a policy development context.
So, despite these significant limitations, why might information on the monetary value of ecosystem services be critical for cities seeking to accelerate the use of natural green infrastructure?
First, monetary values are required whenever a reciprocal agreement is negotiated whereby one party agrees to pay another party for the generation of a particular ecosystem service. Such transactions, typically among municipal utilities and nearby landowners, are becoming increasingly common as an alternative pathway for cities to meet regulatory obligations, or to incentivize private developers to meet additional green infrastructure targets.
Monetary values also are needed when a unit of government seeks to comprehensively account for its capital assets. In the United States, established accounting rules allow consideration of built capital only, while natural capital assets are kept completely off the books. This makes it difficult for a municipality to secure needed public financing for green infrastructure investments. Some municipalities are beginning to push back, with efforts now underway to convince the Governmental Accounting Standards Board to allow accounting for natural capital assets.
I believe natural green infrastructure is the very foundation on which urban sustainability is based. If a dollar sign can help reveal the true costs and benefits of urban planning and development decisions, then we should monetize. But as we do, we must always remember that no matter what monetary values the environmental bean counters might conjure up, we can be absolutely certain they will be low.
Local transition initiatives are giving rise to place-based sustainable solutions as a counter movement to globalizing uniformity. The accumulation of small actions can add up to systemic change.
How can cities accelerate transitions to sustainability? That was the central question in the collaborative EU-funded research project called ARTS, in which researchers, policy makers, citizens, artists, and entrepreneurs co-reflected on pathways to fast-forward urban sustainability. Upon the request of many urban changemakers, we translated the academic findings into an accessible book for urban change-makers, called Change the World, City by City. The book illustrates 5 mechanisms for acceleration, 25 pioneering urban transition initiatives and concludes with 10 things to know and do to fast forward sustainable change in cities. Below we would like to share a few key messages from the book.
Photo: (c) cargonomia
#1. The next big thing will be a lot of small things
If you think small-scale, local transformative initiatives are just fiddling about, think again. A quick mapping exercise in the five city regions under study (Budapest, Brighton, Dresden, Genk and Stockholm) revealed about five hundred transition initiatives that aim to advance urban sustainability by changing the way we think, act and organise. We defined a transition initiative as an local initiative initiated by public, civic or business actors that in one way or another focused on achieving environmental sustainability. Examples include cargonomia, a cargo bike center in Budapest that offers a climate friendly transportation mode, the waste house in Brighton which has been constructed from waste materials, the transition town initiative Dresden im Wandel to promote low carbon living, the municipal organic food initiative Södertälje in Stockholm that serves only locally grown and organic food in public institutions and the eco communal gardens in Genk that regenerated discarded plots of land. At first glance, their transformative capacity might be tiny in a world dominated by large corporations and powerful vested interests. They are however not alone: the collective impact they bring about is not negligible. We see that transformation is spreading organically, in multiplicity, everywhere, and that small transformative initiatives replicate amazingly fast around the globe.
IBikeBudapest Critical Mass Bike ride. Photo: (c) Bertalan Soos
In just a decade transition town initiatives spread virally to 48 countries, involving hundreds of thousands of households in creating low carbon, resilient and environmentally friendly communities. The same holds true for permaculture and eco-village initiatives that quickly developed into a movement engaging millions of citizens worldwide that are changing the ways we produce and consume. In just a couple of years, the first repair café initiative, organised in the Netherlands in 2009, grew to approximately 750 initiatives that spread to Japan, US, Canada, Australia and many more countries. Urban gardening initiatives are back in popular demand and energy co-ops, re-use centres and renaturing city initiatives are replicating at a high pace across the globe. The inherent power of transition initiatives lies in their numbers. Instead of the dominant “too big to fail” growth paradigm of the corporate world, their progression is about “being too many to ignore”.
Our research shows that well-organised initiatives, despite their relatively small size, can influence the wider system beyond city boundaries through positive spillover effects, outward replication or by reshaping ideas of local governance into more open for business-beyond-the-usual. What is more, urban changemakers are not only multiplying change, they are diversifying change by tailoring alternative ways of thinking, doing and organising to fit their place. Viewed from a transition’s perspective, local transition initiatives are giving rise to place-based sustainable solutions as a counter movement to globalizing uniformity. Many tiny transformations will aggregate into big change. The next big thing will be a lot of small things.
Photo (c): cargonomia
#2. The city of the future is designed for life (not cars)
Many of the initiatives in the five cities under study aim to bring nature back into the city or reclaim space and acknowledgement for the living world. From the Green Wedge collaboration in Stockholm, urban beekeeping in Genk, urban gardening in Budapest, community-supported agriculture in Dresden to the Biosphere Partnership in Brighton, these initiatives all aim to either renature urban environments or safeguard natural environments from human development. The fact that people want to bring nature back into the city is not surprising. We have largely designed our urban habitats as concrete deserts. Most space in cities is dead space – space for driving and parking cars and storing goods. Such space is not life-friendly – neither for humans nor for other forms of life. It leaves citizens craving for healthy air, better liveability, quiet refuges and spiritual, recreational and aesthetic landscape values. Many change makers thus devote their time to bringing nature back into the city.
Redesigning cities for life requires a shift from technical to living systems design. This can only be achieved if humans acknowledge their interconnection and interdependency with all other living things and anchor “life-friendly” and “life-enhancing” principles as central qualities in urban planning processes. This means that renaturing cities is much more encompassing than the development of engineering solutions for green infrastructure such as green walls or roofs. Designing cities for life requires a whole new set of (re-)design principles and a complete shift from reductive thinking to relational, pattern and systems thinking as well as shifting from degenerative to regenerative value logics. Only when we accomplish to make this shift, we can start to develop cities that support life over the long haul.
Photo (c): Joke Quintens
#3. Human – nature – human nature reconnecting is key
In line with the previous insight, many of the identified initiatives are also explicitly working towards reconnecting citizens to nature, to each other and to human nature. By doing this they fill a void left by the incumbent institutions that mainly promote discourses of eco-efficiency and technological fixes. While technology is important, it is only part of the solution. As Albert Einstein pointedly stated: “You cannot solve the problems of today by using the same thinking that created them.” This is exactly where technological solutions run short. Neither eco-efficiency nor technological fixes get to the root of the problem: the illusion that there is a separation between humans and nature. Nature is not just what is out there – we are nature too. We will not be able to resolve problems of unsustainability as long as our mental models promote anthropocentrism – humans on top of the pyramid, instead of biocentrism – humans as part of the web of life.
The fact that so many urban initiatives focus on the reconnection of humans with nature, implies that change makers are (consciously or unconsciously) aware of how this disconnect reinforces unsustainable ways of thinking, doing and organising. In a response, local change makers have developed a wide variety of initiatives to mobilize, affect and re-establish the connection between citizens and nature. They use diverse ways of bringing nature closer to citizens, often establishing experiential learning initiatives wherein schools and communities can explore and learn about various plant species through schoolyard and communal gardening plots; they involve citizens in immersion and conservation activities, they experiment with growing food harmoniously and sustainably, they organise compost schools and train nature guides and so much more.
We are not only disconnected from nature, we have also lost connection to our own nature. While the current dominant value logic drives consumerism, individualism and competition, we are a social species and therefore need each other to succeed. Our research showed that many urban initiatives are driven by a desire to promote social inclusion and cohesion. Initiatives such as the Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, the Eco Communal Gardens in Genk or the transition town initiatives from Stockholm, Dresden and Budapest explicitly adopt, develop and improve community building approaches to reconnect citizens in new ways. Renaturing human nature is about building capacity for evolution, growing ourselves as human beings so that we can again become in sync with the rest of life on our unique planet. Or, in the words of Evolutionary Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris: “The best life insurance for any species in an ecosystem is to contribute usefully to sustaining the lives of other species, a lesson we are only beginning to learn as humans”.
Children Psychiatic Center in Genk. Photo: (c) KPG
There is only one way forward and that is to reinvent ourselves as human beingsOur findings show that change to fast forward urban sustainability is happening organically, everywhere, all the time. The innovators are you and me – by evolving our ways of thinking, our ways of being and our ways of relating to the world we are transforming our responses on a personal and a collective level. Our insights demonstrate that creating the city of the future is most of all a developmental process. It is about re-thinking, re-connecting, re-purposing, re-naturing, re-skilling, re-distributing and re-organising. Accelerating urban sustainability is therefore also about slowing down. Slowing down to reconnect with our inner and outer nature. Slowing down to recognize our interdependence with the wider community of life. Taking time-out of everyday busy-ness to ask deeper questions: How can we change the role of humans so that we become good for the planet? Sustainability is much more than devising solutions to problems. At its core, sustainability is about making beneficial contributions to the future of life on the planet. It is about making meaningful contributions to our community and our environment. It is about evolving our capacity for co-evolution.
And while many of the world’s largest private and public institutions fail to move beyond “management of unsustainability”, devising eco-efficiency discourses focusing on doing less bad (using less energy or producing less waste), treating the symptom rather than the causes, urban transition initiatives do the exact opposite. They get to the root of the problems and work to transform the mindsets that kept the unsustainable system in place in the first place. Many of them are redesigning the way they work and live to generate a positive impact, to regenerate communities and ecosystems. Urban transition initiatives are reinventing the way cities inhabit this planet by fuelling processes to rethink what we value, what is of value and how citizens can shift from value extracting to value adding roles. Our research also shows that upscaling value adding roles depends on new ways of collaboration. This inevitably entails reinventing ourselves as human beings: what kind of human do we need to be so that we can co-create the conditions for beneficial change? How can we become more mindful and build capacity for evolution into our design, organisation and decision-making processes? Building the city of the future is about a whole lot of little things that are locally attuned, meaningful and regenerative. Most of all, it is about renaturing human nature. Because our nature shapes the nature of cities.
The book is the result of a collaborative effort of VITO, Studio Transitio and the core research team. It can be ordered hereand all revenue raised will be donated to Kom Op Tegen Kanker, a Belgian non-governmental organisation that supports cancer patients and strives for a healthy environment.
The question then is why green now? Why does the color green captivate us so? What is the substance of the shorthand implied? Perhaps like “sustainability” it is the term of the period and we can no longer even think of any other that conveys sensitivity to the environment. Once launched it is free for the using and manipulation, the twisting of the meaning. In my neighborhood, green now means astroturf instead of lawn, requiring the balding of the earth beneath it and nearly sealing it, impairing the absorption of water. The plastic lawn is then rolled out over it. No life can survive this treatment, no worms or insects, and certainly no food for birds. I was assured it was permeable though, in case we get rain in Los Angeles. To me astroturf is the ultimate green value. Petrochemical companies continue to make profit, nothing really changes in terms of the aesthetic of the landscape. Green as the predominant idea of nature prevails.
Who isn’t convinced? Many people, some of them local residents, and others who hold decision-making positions. In a climate of tighter budgets and more scrutiny of government spending, we need to do a better job of convincing the public and our political leaders that investing in natural systems is worth it, tipping the balance towards overwhelming public and political support.
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