Twelve poems and three meditations on the idea of shade. It is our aim with SPROUT to use poetry, and the space that poetry holds, to advance discussions about our cities’ futures. SPROUT is intended to be a space of convergence—a space where disciplines meet and where transdisciplinary conversations about the eco-urban through poetry take place.
For SPROUT’s third issue, the editors were inspired by The Nature of Cities’ (TNOC) recent art exhibition, Shade, and invited contributors to draw on the exhibition’s virtual installation as a conceptual springboard to contemplate the theme of shade through a poetic lens. We asked poets to reflect on the role shade plays in the built environment, particularly focusing on shade equity—i.e., how shade can make more inclusive spaces in the city, or, conversely, how the lack thereof can create inhospitable, hostile spaces. We were interested in soliciting work that considered shade from ecological, architectural, and environmental justice points of view.
In our first completely open call, we encouraged contributors to visit the virtual exhibit of TNOC’s Shade and wander through the installation of featured artists’ umbrellas (manifesting different interpretations of shade). Curated by community-based arts organisation, Arroyo Arts, the exhibition welcomed emerging and established artists to use repurposed umbrellas as their canvas to explore the themes of shade, heat, nature, and climate change. One of the prompts provided to guide visual artists for the Shade exhibit—which we, too, found helpful—read as follows:
In a warming world, shade equity is an issue that disproportionately affects low-income and working-class communities, people of color, and communities in developing nations who are more likely to work outdoors, rely on public transportation, and live in denser neighborhoods with a lack of trees and shade. As the climate changes and heat waves become longer, more intense, and more frequent, what was once thought primarily as an aesthetic amenity is increasingly recognized as a way of protecting the public health and well-being of marginalized communities. Urban heat causes more deaths than all other weather-related causes combined in an average year, and yet providing shade can be simple and effective and can be done in many creative ways including tree planting, bus stop sheds, and awnings, to name a few.
Our issue’s treatment of shade reveals poems that chart the course of light and dark (in other words, the movement of shade), through the course of the day. They play with the idea of how shade shifts and maps itself over urban (and some less urban) spaces. The issue begins with Jean Janicke’s poem inviting us to take action, asking us to put down what we’re doing and “Hurry” in order to not miss the sun lining up through the tree canopy in a transient moment where light communicates through the morse code of shade. Movement and the turning of the earth as light and dark alternate is then carried through to Adrienne Stevenson’s poem, “Degrees of Light”, which sustains the ambivalence of both time standing still, with the sun at its noon-day height, and then its corresponding advancement into the shaded violet of night.
The heat of the day with its absence of shade appeared to interest a number of contributors and this is picked up further in Sue Woodward’s “standard bearer (dawn at eselfontein)”. The poem follows man and dog, walking from one farm to the next in the morning sun, as the shade spins around the axis of the man’s vertical form. He is a flagpole, casting a giant shadow over his dog, which (ignoring for a moment the immediate relief it must provide to his dog) haunts the page with anthropocentric significance: what shadow do we, as humans, cast over the natural world through our activities? Like the blistering sun the farmer faces, Heather Wishik’s diptych faces the topic of shade equity head on. In “Two Neighborhoods – 1960s Pittsburgh”, Wishik presents two urban portraits: one with shaded affluence juxtaposed against that of the workers’ treeless sidewalks that “burned children’s bare feet”.
Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum’s “Burn” seems to present a timely message on this front (with its description of “seeded flame rooted rage”)—especially when forest fires and their attendant smoke and haze currently enshroud the northeastern seaboard of North America. Assuming a more transhistorical point of view, Gregory Haber’s “The South Bronx Sea” contemplates the impact of settler colonial urban planning with the Bronx’s lack of shade as a result of deforestation and industry: both “habitat and haven”, which had previously been “gifted” by “soft pine and hard hornbeam”, are now “sun-beat hardscapes” of “extirpated shade”. Not all is lost though, as “rebellious rebirth” of the forests start to “plumb concrete cracks”, seeing shade finally start to return to the city. Is this a way in which to begin remediating both nature and city of the harm engendered by mercantilist imperialism? What does this mean for its people?
This question seems to be taken up by the next two poems: Sihle Ntule’s “The Sunset Clause” and Erica Bartholomae’s “Heading Home”—both South African poets contemplating shade from a geopolitical perspective. These poems function dialogically, initiating conversation around the shade cast by the old dispensation of apartheid; both wondering whether the dawning of a new age is possible when the legacy of inequity runs so deep. Ntule’s poem throws shade, figuratively, by raising the spectre of South Africa’s fraught negotiated settlement in its transition to multiparty democracy (the “sunset clause” presenting a temporary power-sharing arrangement to end the political deadlock), whilst Bartholomae’s poem reflects how—through the conceit of shade inequity—very little has substantively changed in the country. The editors mulled over the choice of wording in the final lines of the poem: “Wondering how far she had to walk and if this country will ever / change” [our emphasis]. We found the use of the demonstrative pronoun (“this”) over the possible possessive determiner (“our”) interesting, and wondered what this could mean for the collective responsibility needed to overcome environmental racism. We invite our readers to allow themselves to be drawn into the world of this poem, and to sit with this discomfort.
In Anna Rowntree’s, “In the Shade of Some Newly Planted Thing”, a considered reflection on newness runs through the poem—“I didn’t think to bring a blanket; /I am new to this too”; “little walk to the park, the sort of thing new mothers do”—and with it, a sharp focus emerges on its opposite; the opposite here points to what is missing, what is absent, and it extends beyond the line, “But there are no trees here, / No ancestral oak with an inheritance of shade”. In the place of time, age, and growth (all of them absent in the missing inheritance of shade), the new offers up an “invented kind of place / Contrived for the likes of you and me”. By contrast, Deborah Leipziger’s “Tell me, what are you most afraid of?”, growth (growing older: “Let me count my rings”) and age (the active process of aging we are all involved in: “At last count, I am two hundred years old”) are central to the offering of shade as both “protection” and “cover”.
In “Three Acts in November Rain Play”, by Tricia Knoll, we experience the ordinary-ness of a day, through the eyes of someone who has “nowhere safe to go, no one expecting me”. Safety and shade seem somehow linked here, and yet, ambiguity remains—nothing is ever made clear, leaving the reader slightly unsettled. By contrast, the issue ends with a short poem, by Mary Salome, that offers us insight into the “quiet offering of shade”. It was a purposeful choice to close with this poem, reflecting how through optimism, collective action, and a renewed sense of responsibility and love (for community, habitat, ourselves and each other) we hope to work towards greener and more inclusive urban spaces despite the adversities we face in a world increasingly ravaged by the effects of environmental racism and climate change.
It is our aim with SPROUT to use poetry, and the space that poetry holds, to advance discussions about our cities’ futures. Being a creative project of The Nature of Cities, from its inception, SPROUT is intended to be a space of convergence—a space where disciplines meet and where transdisciplinary conversations about the eco-urban through poetry take place. We view the medium of poetry, its form(s) and function(s), as providing a unique vantage point from which to initiate and allow these kinds of conversations to materialize and unfold. In the Meditations segment of each issue of the journal, we invite city practitioners (i.e., architects, academics, ecologists, civil servants, scientists, other artists) to consider and reflect on the works in the current issue, translating the volume into the register of their own meaning-making of the city.
In this issue, we offer you the opportunity to engage with meditations on shade, framed by the work contained within the issue. Edith and Jolly de Guzman (curators of TNOC’s Shade exhibition), reflect on how amenities like shade are “defining a new era of climate injustice”, while Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, considers how poetry and the “poetic act opens interstices, margins, twilight zones”, as a means to come to terms with the current state of the world. Finally, Paul Currie reflects on the “balancing act” of his work, describing it as being “on a tightrope between joy and despair”. We are delighted that his meditation echoes the hopeful note we aimed to strike and end on; and, with that in mind, we leave the final words of this editorial to him: “joy is a more powerful motivator for myself and so, every day in these vignettes of life I am seeking, yes, the gaps, but also the nuggets of possibility”.
Kirby Manià and Dimitra Xidous, Executive Editors
Vancouver and Dublin
Dimitra Xidous is a Research Fellow in TrinityHaus, a research centre
in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Engineering that focuses on co-creation and the intersection between the built environment, health, wellbeing inclusion, climate action and sustainability. She is an Executive Editor of SPROUT, an eco-urban poetry journal, run in partnership with The Nature of Cities.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Pippin Anderson, Cape TownWe need to have an excellent plot, believable or at least striking characters, conflict (ok, no shortage of that in science), and (perhaps most relevant) resolution that gives hope, direction, and instruction.
Skylar R. Bayer, AnchorageDespite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Nic Bennett, AustinThere is already a lot of amazing fanfiction about science. People are literally writing themselves into science stories. Recognition by powerful institutions of these science story remixes would increase belonging in these spaces. Fanfiction about science, by people who don’t usually see themselves in science, has the potential to disrupt usual knowledge and power relations.
David Bunn, VancouverA truly social-ecological form of science will be able to combine the insights of data and of stories. As climate change forces species and populations to seek out new habitats, urbanizing populations on the edge of conservation zones, whether in Kenya, Brazil, or Nepal will increasingly seek out occult explanations for ecological phenomena.
Lindsay Campbell, New YorkI am humbled by what I have learned from curators and artists about how to convey ideas, emotion, and complexity in a way that grabs and holds the audience.
Marcus Collier, DublinThe ideal situation would be to bring the potency and alluring qualities of traditional storytelling together with the conveying of our scientific findings.
Sarah Ema Friedland, New YorkReality is much more interesting than oversimplified, packaged, and commodified stories. The stories we tell about reality, including and especially scientific reality, cannot be contained by formulaic storytelling. Instead, nuance and difference should inform the way we tell stories.
Bram Gunther, New YorkLike any narrative that is built around the unfamiliar, communicating our story of rewilding suburban yards, campuses, commercial, and institutional spaces, is challenging.
Madhu Katti, RaleighScience continues to hold the power to help humanity shape a brighter future. But scientists need to relearn the key elements of stories and tell good stories. Stories that don’t erase personalities and cultures, stories that evoke emotion in the listeners and draw them deeper.
Tim Lüschen, BerlinNew collaborators are essential. We should form partnerships that have not existed before, creating a novel effect for the audience. Why not collaborate with more-than-human beings? Let them take center stage in ways and media that have yet to be explored.
Paul Mahony, ManchesterSmall stories have real potential for carrying messages. Because they’re normal. Just like us.
Bethann Garramon Merkle, Laramie Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Claudia Misteli, BarcelonaNo matter what discipline or field of knowledge you belong to, have you never seen yourselves trying to explain complex ideas, and in the end, you realize that everything you have said sounds incomprehensible or unclear to others? We want people to understand us and to feel that we have the ability to transfer knowledge.
Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieWhat keeps coming to mind are powerful moments of noticing. Perhaps that is because I believe science to be, at its heart, a particularly deep and careful way of noticing the world―sometimes even what is hidden behind the surface of the world.
Alice Reil, MunichIf many of us would share our personal stories and emotional connections to our natural surroundings with our neighbours, would we all be more motivated to protect them even more? I’m now visualising little printed stories scattered across communities, which enable neighbours or passers-by to read how a particular tree or green space is meaningful to fellow citizens.
Daniela Rizzi, FreiburgDespite its potential, storytelling is not widely utilized in scientific communication. However, science should not just be about cold facts and figures; it has the power to change lives, protect our environment, and shape our future. That sounds like a good story.
Kirsten Schwarz, Los AngelesFor me, the most compelling science stories are the ones that share the humanity of the work, the humanity of those doing the work, the humanity of those impacted by the work (for good or bad), the aspects that connect us, the emotions.
Priya Shukla, Davis Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Ania Upstill, New YorkScientific writing often seems to assume that for something to be taken seriously, it must be dry and fact-based. The more seriously written something is, the more true it is. But what if that wasn’t the only way to go about it?
Evelyn Valdez-Ward, Kingston Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, ParisMark Fisher famously wrote that it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what comes after it. I wish that more scientific literature embraced speculation and affabulation as methods to talk about the worlds that we want; help us imagine a diversity of (past, present, and future) non-extractive worlds.
Ibrahim Wallee, AccraThe people’s voice matters in validating development outcomes, be it positive or negative. Telling their story is essential and even more crucial in building trust.
Tommy Cheemou Yang, New YorkStorytelling asks us to see that change does not come from the expert but from the mundane acts that cascade into large movements creating change.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
What if we explored a rich storytelling approach to knowledge from science and practice? Human-scale stories. Stories with emotional resonance. Dare I say it? Even entertaining stories. Stories that connect to people who perhaps are not “experts” in whatever field, but nevertheless have a real stake in the decisions and outcomes.
There are five key elements to just about every story: plot, setting, characters, point of view, and conflict (that is, a tension that presents itself). We typically use all of these when we recount a story or event to our family and friends, at least subconsciously. (“Hey mom, I went to the corner store for milk and ran into a weird scientist planting a red maple tree. Turns out he is my Uncle Bob. I didn’t know I had an uncle. What’s up with that?”) Beyond these five elements, there are many different ways to tell a story, in various formats or styles. Mystery. Surprise. Comedy. Tragedy. Graphic. Theatre. Fiction. Direct address. Song. Folk tale. There are, as we all know, many kinds of “story”.
But we don’t use such techniques in science. Why not? Work in science and practice contains much important and interesting information for a general and policy-making public that is larger and wider than traditional scientific modes of delivery reach (e.g., journals, scholarly books, reports, case studies). Much of it lies fallow, only available to small groups of “experts”. Journalism has been one route to wider audiences, but it is limited. Science has lost its knack for communicating with the public just when we need it most.
What if we explored a rich storytelling approach to knowledge from science and practice? Human-scale stories. Stories with emotional resonance. Dare I say it? Even entertaining stories. Stories that connect to people who perhaps are not “experts” in whatever field, but nevertheless have a real stake in the decisions and outcomes, and so deserve to have access to the knowledge that supports (or does not) decision making.
Examples of storytelling approaches to science exist, but they are rare compared to the total volume of output in science. Could we take something from this approach to communicate science and practice to a wider audience?
At TNOC we have been very interested in fiction-based or art-centered storytelling about issues based in science and practice. Our recent NBS Comics project (“nature to save the world!”) is an example, and in a previous roundtable we explored visual storytelling as an evocative approach to environmental and social justice conversations. Entertaining and human-scale stories can be satisfying sources of basic knowledge and inspiration. For readers interested in more, they can also be doors through which people can pass into realms of more technical knowledge. This is the approach we take in our art exhibits as well, so that they become art[+science+practice] exhibits.
Examples of storytelling approaches to science exist, but they are rare compared to the total volume of output in science. Could we take something from this approach to communicate science and practice to a wider audience?
So, we asked a group of scientists, practitioners, and artists this: If you were to approach some aspect of a work of science or practice — perhaps your own work — as a story, what would you do? What form would you use? Would you seek out new collaborators? How would you tell the story of your work?
What could we achieve with such a novel, more “popular” approach to science communication?
It is as if we have come to believe that for a science story to be true it must sober and direct, humorless and impersonal; complicated and technical. Such an approach underestimates the general public. What if, as Ania Upstill asks in this roundtable, we stretched our imaginations beyond what we think a story of science should be, to what such a story could be?
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
Pippin Anderson
We need to have an excellent plot, believable or at least striking characters, conflict (ok, no shortage of that in science), and (perhaps most relevant) resolution that gives hope, direction, and instruction.
I agree stories bring in magic that is missing in science reporting
I was a young graduate student and attending my first conference (it was the annual meeting of the South African Association of Botanists, I think). The last presentation in the session had been by a professor who was well known to me from my own undergraduate days, and it was just one of those presentations that “pops”. This professor had been an excellent lecturer, and a firm favourite with every class, which I had always put down to his colossal intellect. I was in the bathrooms just after the presentation and overheard some women talking outside my stall: “Eish, that Prof Bond, he always tells a lekker* story. I could listen to him all day.”
I was dumbstruck. That was his trick — he was a storyteller! It had never occurred to me but the magic he was weaving was stories. He was managing to take fire ecology, evolutionary theory, or reproductive ecology, and weave in a protagonist, a challenge, disappointment, and resolution, all in a manner that was so cunning and skilled that we never even noticed. This was the first time it occurred to me that good science is even better when packaged in a format that draws the reader effortlessly along.
I think we do tell stories
Later, while still a graduate student (it seemed to go on for years), I got a job with University of Cape Town’s Writing Centre. After serving time at the front of house, I moved to focus on postgraduate writing. I was introduced to the “Once upon a time …” exercise, used to guide postgraduate writers in preparing their papers or thesis chapters. Here it was Professors Arlene Archer and Lucia Thesen (perhaps the fairy godmothers of my own story) who reminded me that science is best presented as a story. They made me aware of the relationship we have with our readers and the responsibility of fulfilling promises and expectations in the often-opaque writer-reader contract. They introduced me to this exercise to use with postgraduate students and it is one I have pulled out every single year since then (see the image).
But are we really fulfilling the story element? Are we enthralling our readers, making them come back for more, and getting our final point to a wider audience?
The ‘Once upon a time …’ exercise.
But we tell them badly
The “Once upon a time …” exercise is a good one and a useful reminder of the expectation of scientific writing. But we are falling short in our story-telling abilities (responsibilities?). While we are told that a good story has plot, characters, conflict, and resolution, evidently there must be more than this to really draw in one’s audience. We need to have an excellent plot, believable or at least striking characters, conflict (ok, no shortage of that in science), and (perhaps most relevant) resolution that gives hope, direction, and instruction.
Indeed, in science writing, we are often told not to provide resolution, but to keep an open-end to allow for a natural point of departure for the next paper. We foster a soap-opera culture, where sometimes it feels the story will never end.
Good stories are well written. Heaven knows we are all familiar with a poorly told story. Of course, the apprenticeship lies in reading good stories. Humbling ourselves in acknowledging that just the science is not enough. And perhaps, finding a sidekick, a true storyteller, to assist us in our quest in turning our science into a good story. Or perhaps (better still) to actively assume the role of a subordinate character in our own stories and guide the hero, the storyteller, in the quest of turning our science into gripping and compelling stories.
Just as we assign roles to our characters, so too must we assign storyteller and story-listener roles
And of course, relevant to any good story, is who gets to tell it. Who has license to tell this story? We all know that every telling of a story will differ. Sometimes ever so slightly and sometimes by vast leaps of faith. It is important to ensure that there are lots of stories and lots of voices and that we watch out for whose story is loudest and be sure to hold our heads at just the right angle to hear the quiet stories. The stories whispered to us from the corner of the room. From across the crowd. Every good story is matched by true listening. If you can’t get the story, there is as much glory in being a true listener.
Skylar Bayer is a marine ecologist and science communicator. Currently a marine habitat resource specialist in the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office, she received her PhD from the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences for research on the sex lives of scallops and is a producer for the Story Collider.
Skylar R. Bayer, Evelyn Valdez-Ward, Priya Shukla, and Bethann Garramon Merkle
Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Sharing Science Through Shared Values, Goals, and Stories
Effective science communication relies on understanding the values of the people we aim to engage with. By identifying shared values, we can communicate effectively using storytelling to achieve our science communication goals. Acknowledging our own goals, informed by our values, helps us recognize the importance of understanding others’ values as well.
A conceptual flow chart of how to start the process of reflecting on values that inform your goals and how both interact with stories to share science. (Figure from Merkle, Bethann Garramon; Valdez-Ward, Evelyn; Shukla, Priya; and Bayer, Skylar R. (2021) “Sharing Science Through Shared Values, Goals, and Stories: An Evidence-Based Approach to Making Science Matter,” Human-Wildlife Interactions: Vol. 15: Iss. 3, Article 27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26077/9wss-av78.)
Respecting each other’s values is crucial because a mismatch of values can lead to information being disregarded, misinterpreted, or poorly received. This is particularly significant in ethical science communication, where our goals include co-produced science and ensuring that study results are understood and applied by those who can benefit from them.
To communicate effectively, it is essential to build relationships and recognize the value of diverse perspectives and knowledge. Science has a long history of extracting information and tangible resources from people, especially historically marginalized communities. To communicate effectively, it is critical to take a step back and build relationships that recognize everyone has valuable perspectives and knowledge. Thus, as communicators, we cannot simply enter communities and expect our information to be readily received or their knowledge to be readily shared with us. Engaging in activities such as round table discussions, consensus processes, and community events facilitates knowledge-sharing from multiple viewpoints. These interactions should prioritize listening, respecting, and valuing others’ perspectives to establish mutual trust.
As relationships develop and we understand the values of the people we engage with, we can reflect on our own values and seek out areas of overlap. This process requires revisiting our communication goals, which may evolve as we connect with different topics and address people’s concerns and priorities. This approach, known as “backwards design,” starts with shared goals and values and guides the development and implementation of effective communication strategies.
Storytelling is a very powerful tool to achieve many different communication goals. Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved. Importantly, stories also embody shared values, making them an effective means of conveying key messages and reinforcing connections.
Crafting a resonant story begins by considering the goals derived from shared values. Sharing a personal story that holds significance to the communicator can foster a connection with those listening or engaging to the story. Identifying the main characters and describing the conflict and climax of the story further engage them. Exploring the consequences of the conflict reinforces the stakes of the story.
Once the story framework is outlined, drafting and practicing the story with others is necessary. Candidly describing emotions, internal thoughts, and the setting allows listeners to fully immerse themselves in the narrative. Testing the story with others, seeking their feedback, and noting their reactions helps refine the story for maximum impact. Iterative drafting and practicing stages are necessary for this process.
Ultimately, science communication can be significantly enhanced by leveraging the power of storytelling and understanding shared values. By employing a thoughtful approach and aligning goals with the intended audience, science communicators can foster engagement and create meaningful connections that drive positive change.
For a more comprehensive understanding of the tools, worksheets, and detailed steps involved in this framework, we invite readers to explore our published, peer-reviewed, open-access paper titled “Sharing science through shared values, goals, and stories: an evidence-based approach to making science matter”. The paper provides additional resources, examples, and step-by-step guidance to aid in applying this approach effectively.
Dra. Evelyn Valdez-Ward (ella/she) is a Mexican Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Switzer Foundation Fellow. Her research focuses on marginalized scientists' use of science communication and policy for social justice. She co-founded the ReclaimingSTEM Institute, addressing the need for inclusive science communication spaces.
Priya is a PhD candidate in Ecology at UC Davis and Science Engagement Specialist with the California Ocean Science Trust. Her research explores the effects of climate change on shellfish aquaculture in California and she is an active science communicator who is deeply invested in improving the accessibility of marine science.
Bethann Garramon Merkle, MFA, is a Professor of Practice at the University of Wyoming, where she is the founding director of the UW Science Communication Initiative. She also co-founded the Ecological Society of America's Communication & Engagement Section.
Nic Bennett (they/them) researches power, ideology, and belonging in science communication at The University of Texas as a doctoral candidate of the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations. They engage arts- and science-based research and practice to critique, disrupt, and reimagine science communication spaces. Alongside scientists, artists, activists, and community members, they hope to expand the circle of human concern in science communication and STEM.
Nic Bennett
There is already a lot of amazing fanfiction about science. People are literally writing themselves into science stories. Recognition by powerful institutions of these science story remixes would increase belonging in these spaces. Fanfiction about science, by people who don’t usually see themselves in science, has the potential to disrupt usual knowledge and power relations.
A Fanfiction of Belonging, for Science
Can thinking like a fanfiction writer help science be a place of belonging?
Fanfiction is stories based on previously existing works. It’s anything that you make to celebrate a piece of culture you love. And it’s not just making your favorite Star Trek characters kiss (although that is awesome), it is a powerful form of participatory culture.
The popular imagination usually pins fanfiction as “lowbrow”, but “classics” like the Aeneid, Romeo and Juliet, and Lord of the Flies are all examples of fanfiction. We must also think critically about what we call “lowbrow”. This elitism is usually lobbed at marginalized groups to portray their culturally relevant creative expressions as “less than”.
Is science a fandom? And, if so, does it have fanfiction?
In this short post, I want to argue that thinking about science’s fanfictions is a useful way to think about how to transform science’s culture into one of belonging.
Using this lens, we might notice that most mainstream science communication kind of looks the same: journalistic, cheerlead-y, and very white. Narratives of scientific certainty have been historically (and currently) used as a tool for othering (e.g., IQ tests, scientificracism, race-based medicine). A fanfiction of science reimagines that.
Fanfiction, as an act of science storytelling, might disrupt this. When queer audiences don’t see themselves in a franchise they love, they write themselves in. Fanfiction about science, by people who don’t usually see themselves in science, has the potential to disrupt usual knowledge and power relations.
Thereisalreadyalotofamazingfanfictionaboutscience. People are literally writing themselves into science stories. Recognition by powerful institutions of these science story remixes would increase belonging in these spaces. If fandom is an expression of the collective self, how can our narratives of science serve as imaginal and transformational tools?
Opening up and considering science as culture, as more like a fandom than an elite institution, could widen the circle of human concern. We must push hard on the boundaries of what we include as science storytelling. Fandom allows for both individual expression and communal belonging, and a radically re-imagined science fandom has immense generative power. Let’s write ourselves in.
David Bunn is an interdisciplinary South African scientist and public intellectual. He joined UBC very recently from a position as a senior research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Lab at Colorado State University. Before that, he was a senior professor and head of school at South Africa’s largest university, and served in the second generation of South Africa’s post-apartheid government, helping to frame new national policies for arts and tourism funding and the archiving of indigenous knowledge.
David Bunn
A truly social-ecological form of science will be able to combine the insights of data and of stories. As climate change forces species and populations to seek out new habitats, urbanizing populations on the edge of conservation zones, whether in Kenya, Brazil, or Nepal will increasingly seek out occult explanations for ecological phenomena..
These Data, This Life: Ecological Science and Evidence of Stories
Science would like to use stories to better communicate with broader audiences. Unfortunately, with some singular exceptions, scientists are seldom very good at storytelling. Typically, when stories are deployed, they are frequently only illustrative and seldom advanced as a form of evidence. The world of stories, to put it another way, rarely impinges on the domain of data.
The problem is exemplified in my most recent research. I am currently directing a NASA-funded project looking at changes in land cover and animal habitat over 30 years in and around South Africa’s iconic Kruger National Park. We make extensive use of remotely sensed vegetation data, from the workhorse Landsat satellite to NASA’s new GEDI LiDar instrument. Significantly, we also have to take into account the rapidly urbanizing borders of Kruger National Park: over 2 million people live within 30 kilometers of Kruger’s western fence, with 40% unemployment. We are attempting to understand both social and ecological edge effects in this system; increasingly, this has led us to the evidence of stories.
So, bear with me. I’ll tell you a brief story.
Charlie Nkuna
In an early precursor to our current project, I was leading a study on human-animal conflict on the Kruger National Park boundaries. Our data were derived from camera trap analyses of lion occupancy, but we also did a series of oral history interviews. One main informant was Charlie Nkuna, an African field ranger who had lived and worked in Kruger Park for 50 years. He told me this story:
One day in 1973, the family discovered that their eldest daughter Senana had disappeared. (This was not in itself unusual: many kids her age would become bored with life in the conservation zone and run away to relatives in the neighboring urban areas to the west.) The next evening, there was a lion attack on a cattle enclosure, but the herders managed to defend themselves and the lion was wounded. Villagers asked Charlie, as the senior field ranger, to track the lion down. Following a blood spoor through the dewy grass the next morning, he came upon a sight no parent should ever have to confront: the head of his missing daughter, who had been silently dragged away and eaten some days before. Charlie and his family had lived in the Kruger Park for decades. They had walked everywhere unarmed and never had any problems with lions before. I asked him why he thought this sudden horror had occurred. His answer changed the way I understand the role of evidence in social-ecological systems thinking.
“The lion . . .,” he began, and then paused. “The lion,” he continued, looking closely at me, “was sent.”
In my scientific work, it is not so much stories that are important; rather, it is what is technically termed narration. In the act of telling, and in the pause, Charlie was judging his audience and switching to another form of explanation: the language of the occult. He knew of my interest in shifting carnivore habitat and range. However, he also clearly felt the need, in that moment, to turn the focus to the complex social dimensions of these changes. For that, he needed a different kind of language that referenced the uncanny, and that required a different kind of trust from his audience, one that he assessed briefly in the pause in his narration.
In the 1970s, Charlie recalled, a war in Mozambique produced a flood of refugees and increasing poaching from the growing urban population to the west. He himself had been very effective in arresting poachers. So, in one sense, the lions were changing their behaviour in response to increasing human encroachment. Yet perhaps, he suggested, these were not really lions at all but sorcerers from neighboring villages who had changed themselves into lions to enact revenge on him for his past policing successes. Newly urban attitudes to wealth accumulation and the waning of customary authority in the bordering towns produced a form of social rupture from which this malevolent carnivore emerged.
Stories about uncanny animals out of place should be considered as data. Narratives about lions moving out of Kruger, or leopards in the northern suburbs of Mumbai, are evidence of the way many urbanizing populations explain ecological phenomena like edge effects or fragmentation. In the manner of their telling, however, they also speak eloquently about shifting consumptive patterns in emerging secondary cities. A truly social-ecological form of science will be able to combine the insights of data and of stories. As climate change forces species and populations to seek out new habitats, urbanizing populations on the edge of conservation zones, whether in Kenya, Brazil, or Nepal will increasingly seek out occult explanations for ecological phenomena.
As scientists, we have time-honoured ways of collecting data about species and climate change: we can catalogue edge effects in fragmented forests that bring benefits to certain guilds and disaster to others, for instance, or the phenological shifts for which migrating caribou herds are now unprepared. Ideally, though, when considering these phenomena from the perspective of social and ecological explanation combined, the object of analysis itself will become something different. When communities speak about the declining salmon population and increasingly negative encounters with grizzly bears, they are speaking about a ten-thousand-year history of human-mediated systems in which other beings are ancestors and kin. Stories about these beings also reveal changes in commodity culture, gender dynamics, property relations, and the migration of local youth to regional cities.
These stories have great potential, and they hold the key to more convivial forms of local conservation management. In the manner of their telling, they are all scientifically insightful tales.
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.
Lindsay Campbell
I am humbled by what I have learned from curators and artists about how to convey ideas, emotion, and complexity in a way that grabs and holds the audience.
To tell a better story about care, I work with artists and curators.
I experienced this firsthand when we were trying to communicate the importance of our Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) to civic groups across New York City. As researchers, we were showing up at workshops and public events with our typical 1-sheet and trying to recruit people to participate in our social science survey. But we weren’t capturing the heart and soul of why stewardship matters. And people were passing our table by.
So, we worked with the artist Carmen Bouyer, who developed a stewardship storytelling exercise. With a series of open-ended prompts, a print map, and a deck of cards of stewardship actions, we suddenly had a meaningful and easy way to interact with stewards. We asked them to share a place and way in which they helped take care of the local environment and to mark it on a map. While conceptually Carmen was asking the same questions we were, she did it in a way that was tactile, playful, and accessible. It didn’t take a 20-minute survey to get on her stewardship map, just a few moments of writing or speaking. If you were stumped for ideas or embarrassed that you didn’t think you made a contribution, you could flip through the card deck for ideas or inspiration.
We took our stewardship storytelling “on the road” with everyone from seasoned urban forestry professionals to local youth. We elicited heartfelt stories of environmental caretaking―large and small. Community clean-ups, tree planting, starting new educational NGOs, water quality testing, composting… as people added their stories to the map in real-time, they could watch the accumulation of these practices and feel a part of the community that we observe so vibrantly in our research, but that can be hard to see as a collective force.
Working with Can Sucuoglu, we incorporated stewardship storytelling as a digital map in our exhibit Who Takes Care of New York? at the Queens Museum and later as an online exhibit at The Nature of Cities. Our goal with each of these stewardship storytelling efforts is to make care and connection to place more visible and valued.
In addition to being inspired by the stewards themselves, I take my inspiration from visionaries like artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles whose Manifesto for Maintenance Art makes clear the importance of caretaking to the functioning of our world. Overall, I am humbled by what I have learned from curators and artists about how to convey ideas, emotion, and complexity in a way that grabs and holds the audience. These are often afterthoughts in science; we are not taught to be effective communicators.
Marcus is a sustainability scientist and his research covers a wide range of human-environment interconnectivity, environmental risk and resilience, transdisciplinary methodologies and novel ecosystems.
Marcus Collier
The ideal situation would be to bring the potency and alluring qualities of traditional storytelling together with the conveying of our scientific findings. We have seen some examples, but it is still a huge area yet to be discovered, and it offers good storytellers a lifeline as well as an opportunity to expand their range and to become more central in the era of social media.
Myths and Legends | Facts and Figures
In Ireland, storytelling has had a very long tradition and also a strong social currency. For centuries, it has been the main mechanism for imparting information, though it often included an augmentation of facts for entertainment purposes. I have recently been reading stories of Irish Myths and Legends to my 8-year-old grandson. They, like such stories from many other cultures, often contain dramatic amorous convolutions, monsters and magic, and a smattering of war and decapitation―something for everybody! It is not so different from many Hollywood sci-fi fanaticise blockbusters. Interestingly, my grandson prefers to have the stories read to him over watching screen adaptations of them. He claims that he likes to “see” the action in his mind, and we often discuss some of the issues that arise from the story in question―ethical, social, and so on. However, he often stops me to fact-check something about the landscape or location, and to ask if this animal or that bird is still common. In other words, in his mind, these stories are a mixture of social and ecological facts as well as fantasy (for more on this have a look at Liam Heneghans’ excellent Beasts at Bedtime). So, it is clear to me how valuable a story is, however real or imaginary, for imparting factual knowledge. In fact, I was also amazed how I still remember the stories, having heard them read to me at the same age, I venture to suggest that everyone reading this also remembers such stories. Storytelling still has this potency as well as a currency.
Though I am an academic who originally worked in the NGO sector and before that in the Arts sector, I feel that communication of scientific or project findings is still as perplexing and as frustrating as ever. One of the main issues is the precise level at which findings should be pitched. We want to pitch just once and not spend our precious time creating several narratives for diverse communities of interest―planners, policymakers, managers, the public, diverse ages, ethnicities, abilities, and so on. Luckily, science has changed radically in recent decades. It is no longer purely science for curiosity, rather we are in the era of engaged science in a time of crises. This means that we highly value citizen participation and co-creation in identifying pathways for dealing with multi-faceted issues such as biodiversity loss, climate crisis, resilience, and becoming more nature positive. Citizen science has the potential to change scientific investigation in the same way that citizen journalism has changed the media (for good as well as ill), and citizen science may be able to deliver the co-benefits of science better. These benefits include communicating to wider society by making scientific findings relevant as well as acceptable. The citizen-centric approach in science is also tailor-made for a new era of dramatic storytelling to enable more engagement and participation in science. We still have that childhood curiosity to fact-check fairy tales and legends.
The ideal situation would be to bring the potency and alluring qualities of traditional storytelling together with the conveying of our scientific findings. In recent years, we have seen some examples, but it is still a huge area yet to be discovered, and it offers good storytellers a lifeline as well as an opportunity to expand their range and to become more central in the era of social media and distraction.
Why stop at storytelling? All the arts have equal opportunities here―music, dance, design, and so on. If you create the right story, you can engage with a much wider audience and if my own experience is to count, people will remember the facts for a lot longer. This is how we will enable the kinds of behaviour change that will help us be more sustainable and more resilient, but as we say in Gaelic: sin scéaleile (that’s another story)!
Sarah Ema Friedland is an NYC based film and media artist and educator. She is currently working on a feature documentary titled Lyd, which she is co-directing with Rami Younis, and which was selected to pitch at the DocCorner Market at the Cannes Film Festival and Days of Cinema in Ramallah. Friedland is a member of the Meerkat Media Collective and the Director of the MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College where she is also a Teaching Professor in the MDOCS Program.
Sarah Ema Friedland
Reality is much more interesting than oversimplified, packaged, and commodified stories. The stories we tell about reality, including and especially scientific reality, cannot be contained by formulaic storytelling. Instead, nuance and difference should inform the way we tell stories.
As someone who makes and teaches non-fiction filmmaking and runs a residency for non-fiction storytellers, storytelling makes up the joys and frustrations of my daily grind. I love a good story, I love being taken on a journey and hearing/seeing/reading powerful descriptions of places and people. However, I am also annoyingly aware of the ways constructed stories can trap and oversimplify reality.
As a film student, I learned that good storytelling follows a three-act structure –– beginning middle, and end –– with rising action, stakes, conflict, and resolution. Joseph Cambell’s “Hero’s Journey” was dragged out so often as evidence that this is the way that stories have always been told and therefore the bestand only way to tell stories, that even the scholar of mythology himself would have rolled over in his grave at the ways his life’s work has been oversimplified to package and commodify storytelling. Reality is much more interesting than the Hero’s Journey and the stories we tell about reality, including and especially scientific reality, cannot be contained by formulaic storytelling. Instead, nuance and difference should inform the way we tell stories.
The science fiction/ fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin offers another way of shaping stories in her influential essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” She bases her preferred shape for a story, the carrier bag, on what anthropologists have cited as the first tool: not a weapon, but a bag, used to gather, keep and hold dear items of both necessity and joy. Narratively, this bag is a bottomless vessel for the valuing of experiences, ways of being, and conceptions of time.
Scientific Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing applies Le Guin’s theories to science, “Science in the broadest sense of the term refers to knowledge that we can collect, collate and put in our carrier bag. And this broad sense of knowledge creation involves all the kinds of observation and noticing that we could do. For our times, facing the climate crisis, the extinction crisis, all of those other environmental catastrophes that surround us, we’re going to need a lot of kinds of science.”
And we are also going to need lots of different kinds of storytelling that reflect science and scientists with rigor and complication. Science and non-fiction storytelling center observation and allow us to see differences, but the most dominant forms of storytelling tend to act as a strainer of those observations, sifting out the hard-to-swallow, but juicy lumps of life and leaving behind a homogenized liquid that can be easily digested.
What is the danger in this? If we allow singular conceptions of what storytelling should be to sausage-factory-afy science and make uncomplicated heroes out of scientists, then we may jeopardize the work itself. If conflict is accentuated for a story’s sake, the importance of careful and slow investigation may be minimized for fear of it being perceived as boring storytelling. Human heroes may be prioritized, leaving behind teams of people who collaborate, and further sidelining the non-human lifeforms that should be at the center of scientific inquiry. And the importance of failure might be shoved aside in order to reach a nicely tied-up resolution.
Fascism is resurgent, the climate is in crisis and economic exploitation is reaching new heights. To organize for a more equitable and livable planet, we need to envision it in all its complexity and in all its forms. If we do not make space in science and other all disciplines for storytelling that centers the collective in addition to the individual, collaboration and compromise in addition to conflict, and journeys that do not only march forward in time toward a neatly tied-up resolution, facing these stakes will be a lonely, rigid, divisive and devastating journey indeed.
Bram Gunther, former Chief of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources for NYC Parks, is Co-founder of the Natural Areas Conservancy and sits on their board. A Fellow at The Nature of Cities, and a business partner at Plan it Wild, he just finished a novel about life in the age of climate change in NYC 2050.
Bram Gunther
Like any narrative that is built around the unfamiliar, communicating our story of rewilding suburban yards, campuses, commercial, and institutional spaces, is challenging.
At Plan it Wild, a sustainable landscaping company based in Westchester County, NY and Fairfield County, CT, we are disrupting the landscaping industry, elevating its value from merely the indiscriminate “mow and blow” to be “synonymous with ecological restoration”— a phrase coined by leading ecologist Doug Tallamy, who also is a Plan it Wild science board member.
Like any narrative that is built around the unfamiliar, communicating our story of rewilding suburban yards, campuses, commercial, and institutional spaces, is challenging. People are confused by the somewhat foreign concepts of adding biodiversity, native plants, new habitats and natural growth to their backyards, fields, and patches. Consequently, our dilemma is to compellingly retell the story of landscaping in these ways:
Style. Yards look different after a patch of lawn is turned into native habitat. They look wilder and less overtly ornamental. Rather than paint this atypical picture, a better approach could be to talk about the transformation from lawn to forest and meadow as the new normal in that mirror’s a region’s ecosystems and habitats.
The lawn is obsolete. Not all of it. Open flat space is necessary for recreation, but a high percentage of can go native. We need to tell this story without preaching or condescension ― as if there is no choice but to do this ― but rather by its benefits; for instance, public health and helping to reduce the effects of climate changes are parts of the answer.
The yard as bigger than just what we see. How can one yard, one campus be meaningful in a huge global movement? The appropriate depiction is to talk about the yard as an essential piece of the whole. Our partners at the Aspetuck Land Trust have called their overarching land conservation campaign the “Green Corridor” and have framed it so that every yard counts towards creating the corridor. It’s a good way to talk about rewilding the suburbs ― as a form of interconnectivity.
Science. Although broad data on environmental benefits can be helpful in getting people to shift their lawn perspectives, it’s too abstract. A better story would include descriptive and easy to understand examples and metaphors. Plan it Wild is creating a biodiversity tool to measure the impact of rewilding in urban and suburban spaces so we can talk about the science through specific imagery and data points for an individual yard or patch of land.
Cost. Although there are many obvious benefits of restoring nature in your backyard ― it is a moral and community-minded thing to do; it can result in more family activities, like gardening and rewilding together; it improves the beauty of your home ― rewilding is a complicated project. And when we tell potential clients how much rewilding will cost, they often suffer sticker shock, because regular lawn maintenance is so cheap. To overcome this reluctance, we need to craft a better story that portrays the real value at any price of natural habitats and the cleaner air and water that comes with restoration. And we must tell them that our goal is to create year-round green jobs for land stewards instead of one-off day labor for undocumented and unprotected workers.
Plan it Wild launched a campaign called “Less Lawn, More Life” to get people into their yards to observe their nature through the iNaturalist app. Through this program, we hope attitudes will change, and rewilding will become more commonplace and familiar. This citizen-science effort will also feed data into our biodiversity measurement tool, which in turn will yield us simple language and numbers to show the benefits, values, costs and necessity of bringing back nature.
To make our story better, we’d find a short clear emotional but logical way to tell the story that includes all the pieces above. What do you think?
Madhusudan is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to study cities grown up as a reconciliation ecologist.
Madhu Katti
Science continues to hold the power to help humanity shape a brighter future. But scientists need to relearn the key elements of stories and tell good stories. Stories that don’t erase personalities and cultures, stories that evoke emotion in the listeners and draw them deeper.
Saving the Story of Science
Once upon a time there was no division between science and fiction. Human beings loved to tell stories about things they had seen, experienced, discovered, imagined, or invented while going about the world. Stories helped form and nurture bonds of friendship, family, and community, share the joys and perchance ease the pain of loss that is inevitable for anyone living in an indifferent universe. These stories carried information about how people thought things worked in the world, and shaped how they were expected to carry themselves in society. Some of this information was factual, backed by evidence should a listener challenge the storyteller and seek to verify the information, while some was imaginary, intended to fill gaps in understanding and to help the listener make sense of the world. Or to escape the troubles of the world altogether for a brief moment. And sometimes the stories were false, intended to mislead listeners in order to strengthen the storyteller’s power and influence. In either case, these stories also had the power to change reality by influencing the mind and actions of the listener.
As our understanding of the natural world deepened and our social systems grew more complicated, the nature of our stories also changed and became more complex. Over time some people who paid close attention to stories and storytelling realized that there are repeated patterns and rhythms to how we tell stories, and eventually some of them (let’s call them humanities professors) discovered, as our good host David reminds us, that every good story has five key elements: plot, setting, characters, point of view, and conflict. Regardless of the storytellers intention to convey factual or imaginary information, to tell truths or lies, to help build community or to break it, all good stories tend to be built around these five elements. The best of such stories exerted great emotional power on the human mind and were able to change the way people saw and interacted with the world and with each other.
Meanwhile, some other people who called themselves natural philosophers (ancestors of scholars we now call scientists) became obsessed with the facts conveyed through stories, and focused their minds on finding ways to gathering evidence to verify the facts and thence to assemble the facts into new stories about how the universe really worked. In their obsession with facts and evidence, and the desire to see the world as it truly is outside of human consciousness, natural philosophers sought ways to remove the biases resulting from the limitations of human senses as well as emotional states and cultural preferences. The resulting new kind of storytelling they came to call science, which focused on conveying factual information, sought to limit human bias, and eschewed emotion which can cloud our perception and judgment of reality. Of the five essential elements of good stories, scientists came to be trained to suppress two in particular: character and point of view.
The scientific tradition of storytelling refined this emotionless impersonal form and developed it into a tool of great power in not just conveying evidence-based factual information but also in discovering the laws of nature and in developing tools to manipulate nature for the benefit of humans. Science had thus refined the power of stories to shape our very reality, taking humanity all the way to splitting the atom and changing the global climate, to devastating effect. Scientists, harnessing the power of the scientific method of story-making and storytelling, helped etch humanity’s signature into the very rocks layering the earth, marking a distinct human-dominated geological epoch, now labeled the Anthropocene.
The story of science became abstracted from the stories of the varied individual human beings who did the work of discovering facts and gathering evidence and verifying the stories. The distinct characters of individual scientists were erased to create, in the public imagination, the mythical “scientist” with unruly hair wearing a lab coat and carrying test tubes bubbling with steaming liquids. This scientist came to be imagined mostly as a man, and mostly a white one at that. Similarly the scientific story also flattened diverse points of view into an objective “view from nowhere”, with even the writing style forced to remove the central protagonists, persons doing the science.
As powerful as science was, its new tradition of storytelling ended up confusing people who were not scientists, and therefore could not find any emotional connection with the “nobody” telling the story from no particular point of view. It didn’t help that these stories also contained a lot of big words made up by scientists to convey information more precisely. To no one’s surprise but the scientists, the general public began to lose track of all the new factual information, preferring instead the better told fictional stories with characters and points of view they could see in themselves. The growing division between the factual stories of science and the stories that shaped the popular imagination also left scientists at the mercy of rulers and traders, politicians and businessmen who were able to co-opt the science for their own power and profit.
Frustrated by how the natural world was being degraded by those pursuing immediate profits and amassing power in society, some scientists attempted to convey their knowledge directly to the public and to warn them of the dangers of reckless use of science. But they had forgotten how to tell good stories, and instead of engaging the imagination of their readers and listeners, they came across as shrill Cassandras, purveyors of a doom and gloom only they could see coming when the world still looked sunny to uninformed eyes. People already confused by the language and grammar and peculiar rhythms of the scientific story became even more suspicious of the scientists telling them, in turn falling prey to the power-hungry politicians and businessmen manipulating them with imaginary tales of glory.
And this is how the world came to be in its present predicament, poised on what scientists believe to be the edge of a sharp precipice, staring into an unknown abyss and a murky future. Science continues to hold the power to help humanity peer into the murk and shape the future to be a brighter one. But for that to happen, scientists need to relearn the key elements of stories and learn how to tell good stories. Stories that don’t erase the personalities and cultures and identities of the protagonists (and antagonists), stories that don’t hide specific and distinct points of view but instead uses those to evoke emotion in the listeners and to draw them in deeper so they are also able to learn the facts and learn to apply the lessons from these stories to shape better futures.
Relearning the art of storytelling requires scientists to first unlearn the constraints of the formal science story drilled into them through years of schooling. It requires paying attention to the details not just of the phenomena they study, but also the identities and cultural backgrounds and histories of fellow scientists. This should also help open the eyes of the dominant white scientists to the work of people whose contributions have hitherto gone unrecognized, and to the injustices their science may be perpetuating in the wider world. Learning to tell good stories also means listening deeply to other stories of facts and imagination outside the realm of science. Of course, most scientists may not be able to become good storytellers, but their stories can still be shared by others as long as the scientists are willing to share.
As this very gathering of minds at this virtual round table shows, there are many who love to tell stories and are committed to shaping humanity’s collective imagination towards creating a more hopeful brighter future. After all, hope, when it spurs positive actions, is the best antidote to the doom and gloom stories that continue to flow from science. As the saying goes: it will all be alright in the end, and if it isn’t alright, it isn’t the end.
Tim Lüschen is working at the intersection of deep participation and sustainability transformations. His interests lie in different ways of knowing, human-nature connection, facilitation, systemic constellations and new combinations of art and sustainability.
Tim Lüschen
New collaborators are essential. We should form partnerships that have not existed before, creating a novel effect for the audience. Why not collaborate with more-than-human beings? Let them take center stage in ways and media that have yet to be explored.
One essential aspect of my work is the story of the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. It involves highlighting our unawareness of our connection and being-as-nature, as we tend to focus so much on our separation and division, creating an illusion that we can completely dominate and control “nature”.
How can we bring more awareness and foster discussion on this topic? How can we perceive ourselves and the rest of the world as nature-culture? What kinds of stories can we tell? Hopeful stories? Warning stories? And what medium should we use? Paper, a stage, the internet, a forest, film, a podium, tape, or a crossroads? How can we effectively convey a compelling story based on scientific and philosophical ideas?
In my view, new collaborators are essential. We should form partnerships that have not existed before, creating a novel effect for the audience. Why not collaborate with more-than-human beings? Let them take center stage in ways and media that have yet to be explored. For instance, in the French documentary film “Le Chêne”, an oak tree and its inhabitants serve as the main characters over the course of a year, without any narration. It is a good example of how to incorporate the latest scientific knowledge about different living organisms, while at the same time allowing them to reveal themselves by simply BEING themselves.
Another novel approach to communication would be to focus on conflict. By illustrating the conflict of perceiving the more-than-human world as alive and autonomous entities, as their own subjects, we can address a long-standing suppression. Numerous conflicts, both conscious and unconscious, arise within ourselves when we broach this topic. Therefore, it is crucial not to depict this conflict as stagnant, but as fluid and open, with possibilities leading in various directions and opening up new vistas.
Consider the Greta and the Fridays for Future movement as an example. After seemingly being stuck for a prolonged period in the discussions about the climate crisis, with no progress being made, the silenced future generations suddenly demanded a voice in this process―naming the concrete conflict present, and the injustices included in it. With this, a shift occurred, and a new normal emerged.
However, this conflict involves many other voices that have been silenced. What if other suppressed voices begin to demand attention and lay their fingers on the other wounds that we were ignoring before? The voices of plants, animals, and the broader earth? Let them express their points of view—their sufferings, joys, and experiences.
Such storytelling has the power to stir people, connecting new brain functions and reactivating old ones. The animalistic spirit, inherent in all of us, could howl once again, and with that comes conflict. Conflict arises with those who benefit from suppressing this perpetually-present perception of the world. Conflict arises from past traumas and difficulties associated with this perception. Conflict arises regarding new decisions and how to make them.
Once again, it would be helpful to view the more-than-human beings as collaborators rather than enemies. Portray them as real, well-defined personalities, just as detailed as any main actor in a compelling story and encompassing a vast array of different characters―a world of difference within sameness, just as in our human world. Such storytelling has the potential to be more alive and resonant, connecting with the entirety of the human being, rather than solely engaging the left part of our brain. It has the capacity to evoke something within people that has not been stirred before. Let’s open up the box.
Paul is General Manager of Oppla, the EU Repository of Nature-based Solutions (based in the Netherlands), and Creative Director of Countryscape: part design agency, part environmental consultancy, based in the UK and Estonia. He has over 20 years’ experience in communications and knowledge exchange within the public and private sectors.
Paul Mahony
Small stories have real potential for carrying messages. Because they’re normal. Just like us.
Stories are how we understand the places in which we live, work, and play. I mean, really understand and connect to them. As people.
And as people, it’s not always the biggest and most exciting stories that grab and hold our attention. Sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it’s the smaller, more personal, and private stories that resonate with us the most. Because we can relate to them in the context of our own lives; and because we all enjoy glimpses of other people’s lives, even the things that others might consider mundane. Everyday life is, after all, something that we all share and experience every day.
The power of ‘small stories’ is an approach that myself and colleagues have used successfully in the tourism industry. We developed what’s become knowns as the Sense of Place Toolkit method whereby we encouraged small, often rural businesses to tell their own stories through their marketing. To make a USP of their authenticity and relatability. To express their love of the landscape in how they communicate with customers. We piloted the idea with a small community in Lancashire, UK, and it proved highly successful (we came second in an international award to the Grand Canyon! A story in itself…). And it made me realise that small stories have real potential for carrying messages. Because they’re normal. Just like us.
What am I getting at here? Well, sometimes those of us working to “save the world from imminent environmental catastrophe” have a habit of hyperbole. Of telling the biggest stories we possibly can. Of going into battle ― and it is sometimes a battle ― with the baddest, burliest headlines that we can muster. It’s what we see in the news, right? It’s what turns people’s heads and gets their attention. It’s why Hollywood movies fill theatres. But are those big stories really what makes people stop and think? Perhaps they are too big. Too fantastic. Too remote and unrelatable to our everyday lives. Who among us are the Hollywood action heroes capable of responding? (ok, maybe you…).
So, I think we need to be telling more small stories in the environmental space too. In fact, only yesterday while the news media was ablaze with imagery of Rhodes on fire during a heatwave, I had a conversation with my dad about why his vegetable garden is looking out of season, and I think, just maybe, he nudged a little closer to accepting that the world might be changing after all. Not because Rhodes is on fire, but because his beans aren’t what they should be this year.
TL/DR: Sweat the small stuff. Put it to work. Because sometimes when your message isn’t getting through, you need to dial it down and not up.
Social communicator, journalist and social designer, interested in how design, communication and social innovation can shape and reshape a more resilient and sustainable future. A strong believer that empathy, creativity, cooperation and the force of landscape opens up infinite opportunities to build better societies, more connected to nature and people.
Claudia Misteli
No matter what discipline or field of knowledge you belong to, have you never seen yourselves trying to explain complex ideas, and in the end, you realize that everything you have said sounds incomprehensible or unclear to others? We want people to understand us and to feel that we have the ability to transfer knowledge.
Let’s get metaphorical when it comes to science or practice
Our brain and how we process our experiences are deeply linked to storytelling and how we understand the world.
For example, if we read an article about what metamorphosis is applied in the life cycle of a butterfly, yes, we are informed, and we have an idea of what it is; we retain it but without much more significance than keeping the information.
Maria Sibylla Merian – Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung (The caterpillar and its marvelous transformation)
However, if someone later tells us the “story” of how a caterpillar made a silk egg in the garden, and how a child visited it every morning to witness its transformation and even describes the scents of the roses in the garden and the singing of the birds. Doesn’t that change everything? What happened to you when you read or heard this story?
Without having been in that garden, you have smelled the scent of the flowers, imagined the chirping of the birds, and witnessed in your imagination how that multicolored butterfly took its first flight. You may even have projected a familiar landscape or even the place where you grew up.
What has just happened in our brains? More brain areas have been activated, and more powerful connections have been made. The areas of language comprehension and processing have been involved, as well as the sense of smell, sight, taste, and even motor areas if you have even seen yourself walking through that garden.
Yes, storytelling is a powerful tool to tell better stories and make issues (even complex ones) understandable to various audiences. It is indeed a resource that democratizes knowledge.
Storytelling + metaphor + science = a great story!
No matter what discipline or field of knowledge you belong to, have you never seen yourselves trying to explain complex ideas, and in the end, you realize that everything you have said sounds incomprehensible or unclear to others? Indeed you have explained it technically, based on data and scientific arguments. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with it. But we want something else. We want people to understand us and to feel that we have the ability to transfer knowledge.
Let’s go back to the example of the butterfly. In this story, we are trying to explain the biological evolution process in the life of this winged insect. We have previously used storytelling, but what if we add to this the metaphor resource?
Let’s imagine we are in a science class with a group of children. We create a model where a garden is represented. Each of the participating children will represent one of the stages of the butterfly (egg, larva, pupa, and adult). Another child will represent the predators, for instance, a lizard, another the flowers, and another the river, or even a stone, so the whole class will recreate the ecosystem that makes the life of this winged insect possible.
The metaphors of the butterfly ecosystem act like a shortcut, embedding insight as a deep understanding rather than a rational cognition. Children will feel they understand, even if they can’t describe it directly. This is an example in a classroom with children, but it works just as well with people of any age.
Why is this relevant in science communication?
We want people to understand what we are trying to say. Realizing that the way something is told directly impacts the result of someone else’s understanding, we should make the best use of this knowledge if we want to achieve the insight of others.
As scientists, practitioners, and people interested in fostering better cities for nature and people, it is our capability and, thus, a duty of mission to ensure that our ideas are effortlessly understood.
When we use the term nature base solutions, for example, to people not related to the term, we could instead use a metaphor framed in storytelling, not necessarily through speech but through theater, video games, co-creation sessions, poetry, and even comics (a beautiful example are the comics (Nature To Save the World). At some other TNOC round table, I was invited to talk about landscape initiatives, and I participated in sharing how the Latin American Landscape Initiative (LALI) operates. I created a metaphor of how LALI acts precisely like a living cell: “A landscape initiative is like living cells. Cells have all the equipment necessary to carry out the functions of life. A cell can move, grow, transform, adapt to environmental changes, and even replicate itself. A cell has life in itself, but cells have much more power when they group themselves to form something else, something bigger and more complex.” Nowadays, LALI is often introduced to the world with this metaphor; for people utterly unrelated to landscape. Why? Because we want the concept of landscape initiative to expand and reach new audiences. In this way, we transfer knowledge, but at the same time, we open the door to receiving other insights different from the usual ones.
The means are infinite; the tools are the same: storytelling and metaphors.
What next idea or concept do you want to share, and how can you transform it into a metaphor?
Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.
Steward Pickett
What keeps coming to mind are powerful moments of noticing. Perhaps that is because I believe science to be, at its heart, a particularly deep and careful way of noticing the world―sometimes even what is hidden behind the surface of the world.
Future Poets: Please Pay Attention
I am convinced that scientists need to tell better stories. But I have struggled to settle my mind on an example for this roundtable on something from my own work that invites a story. Instead, what keeps coming to mind are powerful moments of noticing. Perhaps that is because I believe science to be, at its heart, a particularly deep and careful way of noticing the world―sometimes even what is hidden behind the surface of the world.
Recently, I read an interview of the poet Abram Van Engen by Tish Harrison Warren in the New York Times (16 July, 2023). Here’s a line from Van Engen that connects my feeling of science as deep noticing with attention in poetry:
“I think of poetry as the art of attention. It’s the ability to pay attention to the world and produce for the world the name of something that must be known.”
The triad sounds loudly: attention; urgent knowledge; producing. This chord could be a part of some great symphony of science as well as a harmonious representation of poetry.
I am perhaps cheating in thinking about poetry here, rather than a true narrative story. Of course, some poetry―epics come to mind―are as much stories as anything else. But how many (and indeed how) do poems engage all the five elements of story that the prompt lists? Depending on the poem in question, one or more of the elements may exist. But without trying to analyze what narrative elements might exist in it, here’s the piece of my writing, undated but more than a decade old, that kept coming to mind as something outside the usual formulation of science that still somehow emerged from understanding within science:
Spring: To a Poet of the Future
Spring came this year
with a violence
worthy of Stravinsky’s rites.
Liner notes once said
winter was replaced so suddenly
in the Russian taiga
that the music was hardly surprising.
Here, the green rose hard
from the insistently moistened ground.
Rain cold and constant
fed a fierce flowering:
Spent petals piled in deep drifts;
Pollen dusting any surface
dark enough to show it
and tinting windshields
yellow.
Is this the deconstructed spring?
Rain, temperature, and length of day
reassembled in some new way
ordered by a change in climate?
A new rhythm
overlapping beats
unexpected fierceness.
Future poets,
please pay attention.
Let us know.
Are centuries of metaphors
of soft temperate springs
just so many discarded petals
piled up like debris
no longer decipherable as flowers?
Well, there you have it. Something to say about science, in a way that is not science. Maybe the start of a story rather than a story.
Another quote from the Van Engen interview: “Poetry is much more about undergoing something rather than understanding something.”
How do we turn things from science―understanding―into things like stories and poems that help people undergo something in their relationship to the worlds of nature in cities or elsewhere?
Alice Reil (she/her) is an urban geographer who strives to bring more biodiverse, urban nature into public spaces. She led the biodiversity and nature-based solutions team at ICLEI Europe, a global city network, and now works at the City of Munich’s green space planning department.
Alice Reil
If many of us would share our personal stories and emotional connections to our natural surroundings with our neighbours, would we all be more motivated to protect them even more? I’m now visualising little printed stories scattered across communities, which enable neighbours or passers-by to read how a particular tree or green space is meaningful to fellow citizens.
I just started a new job in which I am tasked with coordinating the local implementation of urban nature interventions through a European Union-funded project. This project aims to generate more scientific evidence as well as practical experience around inclusive and just access to ecological spaces for all in cities. At the same time, these interventions should help reduce pollution and promote biodiversity. On the one hand, this new role puts me at the receiving end of someone else’s―the project authors’―vision and narrative. On the other hand, it is my responsibility to create and adapt the reasoning for and activities of the project for local audiences. In other words, it is about the story I want to tell.
Over the past weeks, I have been asking myself: How can I translate 200+ pages of project description into a tangible narrative for myself, but also for those that we as the city department want to reach? How can we detach ourselves from keywords and turn our vision and activities into a story, which mobilises citizens to renature their neighbourhoods together with us?
I do not have the answer, I just have ideas. And I also recognise my limitations, as my education and work experience has always been tied to the written word. I would certainly seek collaborators from visual, art, or play-based backgrounds as well as “living experts” from those that we are trying to reach through the project, i.e., kids and youth as well as elderly citizens. I also recognise, that not all of these are homogenous groups, yet we would try to reach and tailor our interventions to their needs as much as possible.
For neighbours and (aspiring) history buffs it might be interesting to connect nature interventions with local history, both that of the neighbourhood as well as personal connections to the community. I take some inspiration from the Melbourne Urban Forest project, which mapped all city trees, and gave them an email address―and the trees promptly not only received maintenance requests but also love letters and personal anecdotes. The City of Glasgow, together with regional partners, was recently inspired by this Australian approach. The team created “Every Tree Tells A Story” and provides educational material and social media channels for Glaswegians to share their love of trees. If many of us would share our personal stories and emotional connections to our natural surroundings with our neighbours, would we all be more motivated to protect them even more? I’m now visualising little printed stories scattered across communities, which enable neighbours or passers-by to read how a particular tree or green space is meaningful to fellow citizens.
Urban nature helps create and design public spaces. Often enough, though, art and untamed, wild nature are neglected, yet very organic elements in creating aesthetic, welcoming spaces. There is a growing number of cities that have street art walks. (If you’re ever in Ghent, Belgium, make sure to take a stroll of the open-air gallery of its many murals!) How could we combine nature and urban art in our public spaces and for sure thrill youth, kids, and art-loving residents? I have experienced art walks and always found them especially memorable such as the Rehberger Way in the southwest of Germany. I also know of artists who use natural materials to make sculptures of varying sizes. Yet this “ecological art” is often set in or against the backdrop of landscapes and I haven’t yet seen good examples that really weave art and nature together in an (often confined) urban setting and that tell stories linked to the importance of biodiversity for instance. Whilst I continue my search, there is a growing body of comics showcasing the state of nature as well as current challenges and how we are or could be solving them. You might have already come across the nature-based solutions comics curated by The Nature of Cities itself together with the EU-funded project NetworkNature.
Whilst these are just ideas, we certainly need different approaches to enthuse all about nature―or at least about the need to protect and promote nature. Just recently I came across the term “plant blindness”, which describes the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment. In turn, this makes it very difficult for humankind to realise the importance plants and the natural environment in general play for us and our planet. On a recent trip to the local art exhibition “Flower Power” on the role of flowers in art and culture, I saw Tracey Bush’s work called “Nine Wild Plants”: she uses collages of famous brands to depict local plant species. She wants to raise awareness that the average Western citizen knows many more brand names than they know local plants.
Perhaps we should take a break from our (project) work occasionally and go on a good, old (or GPS-supported geocaching) treasure hunt of plants and other living things and use the funny and surprising anecdotes of those plants and our experience along the way to reconsider how we approach our work. Next onto the groundwork in neighbourhoods and cities, we should strive to design projects which create scientific evidence, but also inspire everyday action―or at least awareness and create space for playful, artistic interventions. For this, we need to engage with fellow artists and work with funding bodies to allow for better, more convincing, and fun stories of and with nature.
Architect/urban planner (Faculty of Architecture & Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo). Holds a doctoral degree in landscape architecture and planning (Technical University of Munich). Senior expert on Nature-based Solutions and Biodiversity at ICLEI Europe (ICLEI Europe).
Daniela Rizzi
Despite its potential, storytelling is not widely utilized in scientific communication. However, science should not just be about cold facts and figures; it has the power to change lives, protect our environment, and shape our future. That sounds like a good story.
Imagine reading a scientific paper filled with jargon, complex terminology, and dense data charts. It can feel like deciphering a secret code! Scientific communication, as we know it, tends to be quite formal and even a bit rigid, focusing on presenting information objectively and relying on data-driven analysis. While this approach is essential within scientific circles, it often fails to captivate a wider audience or pique their interest in highly relevant societal topics. To truly engage a broader audience, we need to go beyond the dry and detached approach. We must find ways to connect with people on a personal level, appealing to their interests, emotions, and experiences. It’s about telling stories that make relevant data relatable and accessible.
Storytelling offers a powerful avenue to connect with people on an emotional and narrative level. It is a timeless art that has been used for centuries to captivate audiences and convey meaningful messages. When we hear a compelling story, we become invested in the characters, their experiences, and the journey they undertake. It evokes emotions, sparks our imagination, and leaves a lasting impact. Despite its potential, storytelling is not widely utilized in scientific communication. However, science should not just be about cold facts and figures; it has the power to change lives, protect our environment, and shape our future. So, it is extremely important to consider a storytelling approach in science communication to bridge the gap between experts and the general public. Stories also allow complex ideas and information to be conveyed in a relatable and accessible manner. By incorporating elements such as plot, setting, characters, point of view, and conflict, scientific information can be presented in a more engaging and memorable way. Scientific works can become captivating stories that grab the listener’s attention and take them on a thrilling journey.
Even if you think you can’t do storytelling, it’s just about starting. Anyone can become a storyteller. I wasn’t one, but I became one. Today, when I talk about nature-based solutions to a wider public, I instinctively try to identify the key elements that can make it a relatable and compelling topic. A personal connection to the subject matter also adds a layer of depth, as people can recognize passion immediately, and it resonates with them. Maybe this is the reason why I have gained a substantial number of followers on a professional social media platform. My posts breathe my genuine enthusiasm for nature-based solutions, capturing the hearts and minds of my audience. I share my journey, narrate the challenges I encountered, the obstacles I overcame, and the lessons I learned along the way. It’s like painting a vivid picture of the discoveries I made, unveiling the hidden secrets and unravelling the mysteries that lie beneath the surface. By infusing my story with this personal touch, I create a narrative that not only showcases expertise and achievements but also breathes personal interest and commitment. It humanises my work, making it relatable and inspiring to others who share my passion.
By adopting a storytelling approach to science communication, we can potentially achieve greater accessibility, engagement, and understanding among a wider audience. By making science feel relevant and impactful, we can capture the attention of even the most sceptical listener. This approach has the potential to unlock the valuable knowledge and insights from scientific work that often remain confined to specialised publications and limited audiences.
To approach my own investigative work as a story, I would need to identify the key elements that make it compelling. Picture this: instead of drowning readers in technical jargon, I would use language that everyone can understand. I would weave together narratives, visual aids, and real-life examples that ignite curiosity and spark imagination. It might also involve seeking out new collaborators from different disciplines or backgrounds to bring diverse perspectives and expertise.
So, let’s break free from the constraints of traditional scientific communication. Let’s embrace storytelling, engage our audience’s emotions, and make science an exciting and accessible adventure. Together, we can unravel the wonders of the natural world and inspire a lifelong curiosity about the mysteries that science seeks to uncover.
Kirsten Schwarz is an urban ecologist working at the interface of environment, equity, and health. Her research focuses on environmental hazards and amenities in cities and how their distribution impacts minoritized communities. Her work on lead contaminated soils documents how biogeophysical and social variables relate to the spatial patterning of soil lead.
Kirsten Schwarz
For me, the most compelling science stories are the ones that share the humanity of the work, the humanity of those doing the work, the humanity of those impacted by the work (for good or bad), the aspects that connect us, the emotions.
A More Compassionate Science Can Bring Us Better Storytelling
The person that taught me the most about science and the importance of storytelling wasn’t a scientist, but a human that dedicated his life to compassion, David Henry Breaux. He stood on a street corner in Davis, CA asking people that passed by to reflect on the concept of compassion and share their personal definition. At the time of his murder, he had been doing that work for almost 14 years. Many came to David to extract information, to find answers. But David didn’t provide answers, he listened, deeply and empathetically. And he demonstrated with that deep listening you likely already held the answers if you were still enough to hear them. And, through that deep listening, he also showed us that we have a lot in common with one another if we’re willing to slow down, reflect, be vulnerable, and share our stories.
At the time I met David, I was a postdoc at UC Davis. As I reflected on my thoughts on compassion, I realized that in my experience of science, compassion was not valued in a meaningful way. It wasn’t centered in the process of doing science, it wasn’t considered in the process of sharing science, and it wasn’t a requirement for advancing one’s career. David helped me see that if I was going to continue with a career in academia, I was going to have to center compassion not only in my life, but also in my science.
Stories help us do just that. We need stories to share our science because stories connect us. Science may help us better understand our world, but stories help us empathize, they connect us to our world. We need stories to make our science more compassionate, inclusive, and impactful. We need stories so we can more easily connect our science, and the people doing science, to the human experience.
For me, the most compelling science stories are the ones that share the humanity of the work, the humanity of those doing the work, the humanity of those impacted by the work (for good or bad), the aspects that connect us, the emotions. Science is sometimes described as a systematic approach to answering a question. That’s often not a very exciting story. But in practice, science is a messy wandering adventure that often leads to more questions than answers, the entire process guided by perfectly flawed humans. It’s the parts we don’t often share that make great stories.
Stories are also our legacy. Thousands of people have a story of David. His story didn’t end when his life ended. His work continues, more important and needed than ever. I’ve thought a lot about my definition of compassion since David was taken from us. I think it’s creating the conditions in your life to see more clearly, to slow down, to reconnect to the stillness and compassion in your heart. It’s an active practice, it won’t always be perfect, but it will always be there. And it’s part of everything, including science. Centering compassion in our science makes sharing our stories a natural extension of the work that we do, central to our mission as scientists. And as humans.
Ania Upstill (they/them) is a queer and non-binary performer, director, theatre maker, teaching artist and clown. A graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre (Professional Training Program), Ania’s recent work celebrates LGBTQIA+ artists with a focus on gender diversity.
Ania Upstill
Scientific writing often seems to assume that for something to be taken seriously, it must be dry and fact-based. The more seriously written something is, the more true it is. But what if that wasn’t the only way to go about it?
As an Applied Theater maker, in addition to the five key elements of stories pointed to above, I’m also interested in what form a story takes. Is it told live to an audience? Is it told via printed media? Is it told as an audio story or a podcast? Is it a play, or a song? Is it, perhaps, told by puppets?
I am intensely interested in this question. Despite the “Theater” in the name, in Applied Theater we don’t assume that a traditional theatrical performance is the best way to tell a story. Instead, we utilise a variety of frameworks to engage participants, from Theater of the Oppressed―where audiences step into roles to attempt to change outcomes―to Theater-in-Education pieces that use artifacts to engage young audiences, and many more. In my work as a theater maker, I have also utilised a variety of forms, from circus to music, in order to best fit the content of the story that I’m telling. For something highly emotional, music is a powerful tool. For something that requires a sense of magic or awe, circus is incredible. For something that needs to invoke a sense of curiosity, there’s nothing quite like clowning.
With stories, I believe that humans want to be moved and entertained. This might be especially true for theater, but I think that it’s true for all stories. Scientific writing often seems to assume that for something to be taken seriously, it must be dry and fact-based. The more seriously written something is, the more true it is. But what if that wasn’t the only way to go about it? As children, we learn lots of incredibly valuable information from picture books or from puppet shows about, say, the importance of brushing our teeth. I’m curious about how different forms of storytelling can be used to reach new, different audiences. What if scientific knowledge came through a poem? Or a song (like in the They Might Be Giants album Here Comes Science)? Reading Rainbow was popular for decades, and is still enjoyed by audiences. Part of the show’s success, I believe, is that instead of simply recording a child’s storybook, it used a compelling host who provided a contextual frame for each story. It’s also telling that they stopped producing new episodes in response to the many new types of media that were becoming available. If one of the most successful children’s shows was responding to the times, shouldn’t we?
I would love to see more writers exploring using different forms to tell their stories, especially around science. Facts deserve to be delivered in a compelling and interesting way so that they can really be heard. I’m interested in what could happen if we stretched our imaginations beyond what we think a story should be, to what a story can be. One of our powerful tools is form, and I challenge us all to consider which of our many exciting storytelling mediums best suit the stories we’re trying to tell.
Stéphane Verlet Bottéro (b. 1987) is an artist working at the intersection of social practice, installation, education, writing, gardening, and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body, and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice seeks to open spaces to unlearn and unsettle ways of inhabiting the world.
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro
Mark Fisher famously wrote that it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what comes after it. I wish that more scientific literature embraced speculation and affabulation as methods to talk about the worlds that we want; help us imagine a diversity of (past, present, and future) non-extractive worlds.
Having had an education in both (ecological) science and (visual) arts, I am interested in how in spite of generating knowledge by different means, they both operate as storytelling practices. An author that has changed my understanding of science as a practice of creating world-making stories, is Donna Haraway. For me, anyone interested in what tales can science tell should read her book Staying with the Trouble, in which she develops the ideas of SF as a method.
The acronym SF is polysemic: string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism. SF extends beyond the traditional genre of science fiction literature and delves into the realms of science as fact but also as fantasy and fable. Speculative thinking and writing are playful tools to challenge dominant paradigms, envision alternative paths for coexistence and flourishing, and imagine different futures.
The feminist ethics of SF are particularly useful to think about whether science-fact/fiction can be told using terms that recognize individuals, communities, and their environment’s relations of interdependence and mutual care, rather than using terms that reinforce dominant individualistic and exploitative models that often characterize technology and society. It reinvigorates what Deleuze said about the virtual―that it has the ability to change the real.
Key to this ethical and methodological framework is Haraway’s notion of response-ability. It acknowledges that we are not isolated individuals but part of complex webs of relationships and ecosystems, which implies that our choices and actions require a mode of attention that values such interconnectedness. This has important consequences in terms of how the way science is narrated may influence engendering other futures.
Equally, the books of Octavia Butler have had a huge influence on me, in particular through her ability to draw from science and technology in order to invent worlds in which oppressive divides between constructed categories (natural/cultural, masculine/feminine, …) are no longer relevant. I wish that more scientific literature embraced speculation and affabulation as methods to talk about the worlds that we want. Mark Fisher famously wrote that it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what comes after it. I believe that more storytelling would help us imagine a diversity of (past, present, and future) non-extractive worlds.
Ibrahim Wallee; is a development communicator, peacebuilding specialist, and environmental activist. He is the Executive Director of Center for Sustainable Livelihood and Development (CENSLiD), based in Accra, Ghana. He is a Co-Curator for Africa and Middle East Regions for The Nature of Cities Festivals.
Ibrahim Wallee
The people’s voice matters in validating development outcomes, be it positive or negative. Telling their story is essential and even more crucial in building trust.
In today’s contemporary world, the emergence of participatory communication, a bottom-up dialogic communication model in the development field, introduced in the 1950s by the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire has evolved into the preferred communication model. This communication medium is deployed in pursuing development as social change, giving voice to the people, and empowering communities sociocultural and economically. As an influential proponent of the participatory communication theory and practice, Freire’s focus on dialogical communication, emphasizing participatory, and collective processes in research, problem identification, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation of change, is instructive (Mefalopulos & Tufte, 2009). His critique of extension works (1973) and a book on liberating pedagogy (1979) emphasize a close dialectic between collective action and reflections and work towards human empowerment (ibid: 3).
The participatory communication model engenders resonance with the plight of the vulnerable, acceptability, and a broader reach of new audiences within the development ecosystem. The model appeals to social context and cultural sensitivities and enriches development outcomes by promoting ownership and communal participation. For development practitioners to demonstrate value to beneficiary communities, this model remains an inclusive and effective tool that unpacks the complexities of development discourse to bridge the knowledge gap and elicit an understanding of the value proposition in its social and practical context.
It is worth recognizing that sociocultural context matters to development practice because human identity, socialization and cultural sensitivities, relative to language and value propositions, play an important role in gauging the effectiveness of development outcomes. Irrespective of the contentions and the problematization of the concept of development and its imperial leanings espoused by Arturo Escobar and Henry Veltmeyer, to mention a few. It is where participatory communication empowers people in its two-way dialogic medium of interactions. It allows society to establish substance and affirm a sense of ownership and value in the interaction of practitioners with beneficiary communities, leading to an appreciation of contributions to the growth of the knowledge economy and its relevance to social change and economic empowerment. The people’s voice matters in validating development outcomes, be it positive or negative. Telling their story is essential and even more crucial in building trust. Hence the need to recognize that people are voiceless not because they have nothing to say but because nobody cares to listen to them (Malikhao & Servaes, 2005: 91). This is why participation promotes listening, builds trust, and facilitates equitable exchange of ideas, knowledge, and experiences (ibid). Paulo Freire refers to this as “the right of all people to individually and collectively speak their word” (Freire, 1983: 76). He emphasizes that it is not the privilege of a few but the right of every man to do so. “No one can say a true word alone, nor say it for another prescriptively, robbing others of their word (voice)” (ibid). Freire’s postulation depicts not only the empowering but liberating nature of participatory communication and its receptive outlook towards diversity and multiplicity of views, including conflicts, to inspire efforts at addressing contemporary challenges of society.
The inclination to choose participatory communication in telling a story of development practice that reaches new audiences, far and wide, stems from the above enumerations of this dialogic communication model’s value and substance. Even more imperative is that the inherent conflicts associated with the concept of development as a practice are subjective. The diversity of thoughts and views on development discourse adds to the vortex of the complexity and challenges that require a multidisciplinary approach to proffering solutions to achieving and validating desired outcomes. It is where using collaborative channels of communication that bridge the gaps between the technical, innovative, and inspiring discourses reaches an extended audience within the public sphere. Every voice matters and deserves listening, reinforcing Freire’s insistence that dialogue is not false participation but an indispensable component of learning and knowing.
References:
Escobar, A. (1999). The Invention of Development. Current History, 98(631), 382-386.
Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Malikhao, P., & Servaes, J. (2005). Participatory communication: the new paradigm? Media and Global Change: Rethinking Communication for Development, 91-103.
Mefalopulos, P., & T. T. (2009, June). Participatory Communication; A Practical Guide. World Bank Working Paper No. 170, pp. 1-50.
Veltmeyer, H., & Parpart, J. (2018). The Development Project in Theory and Practice: a review of its shifting dynamics. ResearchGate, 1-52.
Tommy Cheemou Yang is an indigenous Hmong designer, researcher, and educator focused on insurgent urban and architectural transformations, utilizing inter-disciplinary methods such as fieldwork, oral/public history, and radical mapping. His current work challenges architectural and urban design epistemologies, cultivating conversations on identity, social action, resiliency, and insurgent placemaking.
Tommy Cheemou Yang
Storytelling asks us to see that change does not come from the expert but from the mundane acts that cascade into large movements creating change.
Reviewing and connecting my work around this notion of “storytelling,” I am reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The danger of a single story. The longstanding rituals of stories carry wisdom and worlds that are non-linear and changing. It cascades as it weaves through communities and urges us to refute the linear and flat histories created by contemporary design and data-driven thinking. If we want to make deep and lasting changes around equity and environmental justice, we can no longer accept that the content of knowledge remains within the hands of the “expert.” Storytelling asks us to see that change does not come from the expert but from the mundane acts that cascade into large movements creating change.
Yet, it is remarkable how little attention is given to storytelling as a method of inquiry within the realms of design and the sciences. I argue for the establishment of storytelling central to our field of investigation, dissemination, and pedagogy. Inspired by Gunderson and Holling’s theory of Panarchy―the introduction of an ethnographic method to succession, scales, and belonging can frame how the life and stories from communities cascade into large urban transformations [Fig. 1].
Figure 1: Introduction of Storytelling
Among my work, I listen to HMoob remaking home in Wisconsin, spend days walking using film and photography to capture small practices of stewardship in New York Chinatowns, and visit how urban villagers of Chiang Mai are maneuvering the top-down planning of the city. This slice of my research utilizes multi-sited ethnography to thread stories across territories revealing how ordinary citizens use tactics of homemaking to deal with current large systemic issues.[1]
Within this process it soon became clear that I must make my work accessible to others beyond experts in order to initiate a multi-dimensional analysis, thus inspiring a path for research into the potential of oral storytelling, comics, and animations. For example, my work with HMoob stewards in Wisconsin was woven into an array of Hmong Radio Documentaries exploring the meaning of home, identity, and ethnic belonging beyond the domain of the house [Fig. 2].[2]
Figure 2: Hmong Radio DocumentariesFigure 3: Students Doing Field Work Chiang Mai
Accessibility in research led me to teach designers ethnographic methods that would expand the domain of communication nurturing non-conventional techniques to counter map, legitimize, protest, and make apparent frictions of the city. The following figure illustrates students’ field explorations in Chiang Mai, Thailand held with Brian McGrath in 2020 capturing the lived realities of village compounds [Fig. 3]. Using the multi-sited case studies, the same pedagogy cascaded into an array of designers learning to see and hear their environments in Pittsburgh where I am currently teaching at Carnegie Mellon University [Fig. 4].
Figure 4: Student Fieldwork and Mapping of Pittsburgh
From my perspective, research must be deciphered not just through jargon, graphs, and numbers, urging an innovative potential of the literal reading of our environments as narratives.[3] As Shannon Mattern reminded us, our contemporary world is planned and designed drawing upon layered histories, meanings, and symbolisms.[4] By recognizing these patterns, it builds empathetic approaches―a vital restoration to increasingly prevalent number-driven models in research.
To speak about that location from which work emerges I choose familiar politicised language, old codes, words like “struggle, marginality, resistance”. I choose these words knowing that they are no longer popular or “cool”―hold onto them and the political legacies they evoke and affirm, even as I work to change what they say, to give them renewed and different. – Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness, Bell Hooks 1989
Paying attention to the field not only as an object of analysis but a classroom where scholars and communities produce empirical comprehension advocate for embodied practices―linking effect, labor, histories, and resistances as forms of knowledge.[5] It puts differences at the heart of inquiry, a radical openness to accommodate and evolve with the things we see or hear in the field.[6]
[1] Marcus, George E. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155931.
[2] The Field School was founded by Dr. Arijit Sen, using participatory action-research to explore how cities have changed over time and their local histories. http://thefieldschool.weebly.com/
[3] Barthes, Roland, and Lionel Duisit. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History 6, no. 2 (1975): 237–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/468419.
[4] Mattern, Shannon. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
[6] Hooks, Bell. “CHOOSING THE MARGIN AS A SPACE OF RADICAL OPENNESS.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989): 15–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44111660.
The benefits of trees are irrefutable, but they are not widely understood and don’t seem to change behavior much. This suggests we need other approaches to convince people trees really matter. There are several promising directions.
Several weeks ago, I was startled when taking a typical morning walk to find that a large and majestic white oak tree had been cut down and lay in the front of a neighbor’s yard. It was a shocking and sad sight, a tree I had admired almost daily, reduced to a pile of sawed-up and lifeless segments on the ground. Several days later I happened upon the neighbor who was standing in front of his home. While I did not know him personally, I mustered up the courage to ask why he had cut down the tree. He hemmed and vacillated a bit in his answer and mumbled something about how the tree was leaning and felt it better to deal with the tree now than at some later point. He did not seem troubled at all about the decision, though slightly irritated at the question I posed. (Why is this any of your concern?) The tree looked to me to be quite healthy, and it was at least 15 feet away from the house. I remain perplexed by this decision, and the street and the neighborhood are poorer for it.
The last few months especially have been one similar sad discovery after another. It feels at times like I am living in a battleground (see the image below), with arboreal casualties piling up all around me. Many large trees are being cut down all around my city and the cumulative result is showing: a recent study found that the City of Charlottesville has witnessed a sharp reduction in tree canopy in a short period of time: from around 50 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent today.[1] We are still a leafy city, but the deforestation happening around us is clearly accelerating.
What is striking to me is the casualness of these acts. The loss of a several-hundred-year-old tree ought to be a gut-wrenching decision, made only as an absolute last resort. I am surprised that others don’t seem to care as much as I do or feel as emotionally and viscerally harmed by these decisions. Trees just don’t seem to matter much; I am perplexed about why that is so and what steps we might take individually and collectively to change this.
Figure 1: One of the many older trees lost recently in Charlottesville, VA Image: Tim Beatley
I find myself often holding the thought that, unfortunately, while I find these older trees absolutely wondrous, many others in this otherwise environmentally aware and progressive community, do not feel the same way. And our city has an anemic tree code that does little to protect trees like this (though there are now proposals that would strengthen this code). The experience of discovering or in some cases watching a large older tree being cut down is not, unfortunately, uncommon.
My conclusion, unfortunately, is that trees don’t seem to matter much. They are viewed for the most part as largely inanimate objects. Even quite modest reasons seem sufficient to justify cutting down trees, despite the reality that the loss, especially of large-diameter older trees, represents a wound and harm that extends well beyond the crown or boughs or the root zone of the individual tree. The decision to cut down such a tree should matter dearly, and I am increasingly distressed by why this is not the case. And I desperately want to figure out how this could change and how we might grow or cultivate a society that appreciates the value of these trees, that believes deeply that they matter and that they should be, wherever possible, preserved, and cherished.
There are many explanations of course for why trees don’t seem to matter. Part of it could be attributed to what has been called “plant blindness”. That is, a tendency to care about animals and critters of all kinds that move and speak and grab our attention. There is especially a bias in favor of larger (and charismatic) mammals, of course, but even an ant or a mayfly receives more of our attention than the host plants that help sustain them. Paying full attention to plants and trees has always been a challenge.
No doubt that mattering challenges are made much more difficult by the prevailing ways we tend to see and treat the natural world. A big part of the problem is that trees are first and foremost understood as private property, to be used as a property owner sees fit, with little consideration of public impacts or implications. Many trees in cities are found in parks and public spaces, but often the majority of trees are found on private land. Boston’s recently released urban forest plan, for instance, notes that over 60 percent of its trees are found on privately owned land.[2]
What are we to do to create a world (and cities) where trees really do matter? One approach is to continue to talk about the many benefits trees provide, individually and collectively. To speak (as I often do) of the important shading benefits, of their value in capturing and retaining stormwater, and in sequestering carbon. I am often emphasizing the incredible beauty and delight that trees bring to me, daily and hourly. Trees and urban forests are having a day when it comes to appreciating their benefits in helping cities adapt to extreme heat. But perhaps we have forgotten all the other daily delights that trees provide and/or we tend to forget or minimize their value as an essential foundation in most of our daily nature diets. I think of the magnolia flowers that are starting to bloom here in Virginia, and the tulip trees flowering all around me. And, of course, each large tree is a remarkable and complex ecosystem itself providing spaces for birds, squirrels, and all manner of other life that animate our backyards and the spaces around cities. Without trees, there would be few birds, we know, yet we often fail to make the connection between tree conservation and the sights and sounds of the other nonhuman souls that we delight in seeing and experiencing. We would be lonely without trees and the remarkable habitats they provide. Perhaps there are more convincing arguments to make or perhaps they could be delivered in more effective or convincing ways?
And scholarly evidence mounts weekly, so perhaps an emphasis on these new insights would move the needle. This includes a recent study from Belgium that shows a sharp relationship between sales of mood disorder drugs and heart disease medication with the presence and size of trees―the larger the crown the lower the need for such medications.[3] Or the recent study showing the inverse relationship between trees and mortality.[4] The health benefits of trees, mental health benefits especially, are remarkable and to my way of thinking irrefutable.
These are all important arguments, and we should continue to make them. But they are not widely understood and unfortunately don’t seem to change behavior much. That is too bad, but it suggests we need other techniques and strategies and approaches if we are ever to reach a point where trees really do matter. What might be the antidote, or partial antidote to this problem? What might we do to shift our mindset and attitude so that trees do indeed matter? There are several promising directions.
Part of what we must do is better understand the psychology of trees and tree protection and factors that might influence a decision or more broadly the importance we give to urban trees and forests. Trees are cut down for various reasons, of course: a dislike for the leaves they deposit every fall, concerns about trees falling on roofs, a desire to let in more light, and often it seems a desire to change up the look or feel of a house. I do not wish to minimize these reasons, but they mostly seem insufficient to justify the loss of a grand and magnificent living being that does so much for us collectively. And I think we fail for the most part in our reasoning to think carefully and adequately account for the public costs on the other side of the ledger sheet. In working on behalf of trees (making trees matter) should our approach be to counter each of these arguments? For example, it is ok, indeed ecologically preferable, to let the leaves fall where they will.
Trees for most of us largely recede into the background of our lives. We may not be alarmed by their loss, when it happens, in part because we tend not even to notice or pay much attention to them. As the late poet Mary Oliver has pointedly observed, “attention is the beginning of devotion”. How do we work to make the trees around us more visible and important? What can we do to help to make them matter?
Making trees personal
Dating trees might help persuade some of us about their right to exist. When I speak of the estimated age of the grand white oak that sits adjacent to the UVA School of Architecture―likely close to 300 years old—it never fails to generate an audible “wow”. If we had to attempt to raise an oak tree from an acorn (something I have been trying to do) we would further appreciate just how unlikely and difficult it is that trees of this age and size exist around us.
We must truly see and experience the trees and forests around us, in personal and visceral ways, for them to matter. These can happen in many creative ways. In many places, there are organized tree walks and community tree celebrations. In some cities, there are annual “Tree of the Year” competitions. There are online maps that help us collect and disseminate the personal stories and histories of the trees around us. QR codes, Virtual Reality, and many other digital technologies are increasingly used to foster greater awareness and connection. I am reminded of the primary school in Western Australia I had the chance to visit years ago where all students learned to identify native species of trees and where a native “bushland” behind the school became an important space for learning about and connecting with nature. Or more recently the schools in Berkeley, California, that are engaging students in the planting of schoolyard mini-forests, using the Miyawaki planting method.
There are also so many ways that we can practice modern life (and lives) in ways that pay attention to the trees around us; that actively acknowledge them as co-occupants and co-citizens. Standing up and actively giving voice to trees is one way, and we have many good examples of where that has been and is happening. Mourning and grieving the loss of special trees (several years ago a colleague of mine wrote and distributed an obituary of one special tree). Recognizing the many ways that the histories and lives of trees and humans are bound together (and collecting those stories, for instance through an online initiative started at Portland State called Canopy Story[5]). Various tree rituals are helpful as well, some even daily. For example, I hold “tree hours” for students in my classes, convening under an old white oak.
Starting tree rituals of various kinds is another possibility.
Here at UVA, I now require students in my Cities + Nature class to keep a nature journal and one of the directed entry assignments is to find and write about their favorite tree on campus. Part of that involves learning as much as they can about that tree and drawing it. Many students are not very confident about their drawing skills but often produce remarkably detailed pictures of their favorite trees, evidencing considerable time noticing the details and observing firsthand the life of this tree. Spending time noticing the trees around, learning their common species names, the colors, and shapes of leaves, and sitting under or near them to listen to the sounds that emanate—what writer David George Haskell has called the “song of trees”[6]. Calculating the age of a tree is another way to particularize it―and also to gain a sense of perspective about what it took to live and grow and survive over a long period of time. The more we learn and absorb about a particular tree the more we are likely to care about it and come to its defense.
The more we know about specific trees, the less likely we are to see the decision to cut down a tree as a trivial thing. The more it is understood to impact a family member, the more that tree will matter, and the more protective we are likely to be.
A tree as a who, not an it
Naming trees will also help. While subject to the perennial criticism of over-anthropomorphizing, where we can we need to name trees. Specific names that send the signal that a specific individual tree, standing before us. It is a fungible entity―that can be traded off in some way, but a living individual deserving of attention and care. There are recent examples of how effective such an approach can (sometimes) be. In Seattle, for instance, a large western red cedar known as “May” was in jeopardy of being cut down when neighbors joined together to lobby for its protection.[7] Almost everyone in the Seward Park neighborhood seemed to know May, and eventually, the residents were able to convince the owners, who were building a replacement home to one that had burned down, to save the tree. As in so many cases, it is not clear why the owners would have needed to cut the tree down in the first place.
Native American author Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her powerful book Braiding Sweetgrass, rightly concurs about the importance of names and naming in the Seattle example.[8] Naming means they become people. Native Americans speak of trees and forests, she tells us, as the “standing people”, and view nonhuman lives through a lens of kinship. How we speak about the trees around us conveys much of what we believe about them.
A “grammar of animacy”, she advises, strengthens this sense of trees as people. Conversely “when we tell them the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation”.[9] I make a point, where I can catch myself, of never calling a tree an “it”, or a bird or an ant, choosing a gendered pronoun. It is not perfect, but such practices will help to see the trees around us in a different way.
Kimmerer eloquently describes the central role of gratitude and reciprocity in indigenous cultures. Gratitude begets reciprocity; expressing gratitude for the gifts given to us by trees around us (in cities especially) is a good start: the gifts of shade, water, food, birds, and beautiful colors, among others. “One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world”, Kimmerer says.[10] What would reciprocity look like for urban trees? Taking meaningful steps to care for and water trees in times of drought, to steward over and protect them from the incessant chainsaw.
A new tree ethic
As much as anything, then, we need to develop and disseminate a new ethic of trees; one that sets out a new narrative about them, and new assumptions about their relationship to humans. It would necessarily build on these Native American notions of trees as kin and the importance of reciprocity. Another element of this ethic involves the inherently public nature of the decisions made about them, especially older, ancient trees. As trees get larger and older the magnitude of their impacts all grow: the extent of the shade they provide, the caterpillars they offer up to nesting birds, and the carbon they sequester. In this way, their “publicness” grows substantially over time. The loss of such trees will have a large public impact. Protecting and caring for these trees can be framed as a civic act and as a modern element of what it means to be a good citizen.
Margaret Renkl, writing in the New York Times, calls for a “profound paradigm shift”. She says so eloquently “We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future”.[11] She rightly points out the temporary tenure we hold over these old trees and our duty to ensure that they exist in the future.
What Renkl is describing really is the need for a new kind of tree ethic; a collective sense of what we owe trees and forests, and what our ethical obligations are to them and relative to them. We are duty-bound, I believe, to recognize the immense public benefits they provide and to treat them with care and respect. Older, larger trees especially ought to be understood as living elements of our communities worthy of celebration, veneration, and protection.
This brings us closer to the idea of the rights of nature, a perspective growing in importance globally. The view that that tree or that urban grove has intrinsic moral value and an inherent right to exist, irrespective of whatever utility or value the tree has for humans. It was a profound, and still quite a new idea, when I first read Christopher Stone’s groundbreaking essay “Should Trees Have Standing”.[12] He proposed then, in 1972, the “unthinkable”: “that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment―indeed to the natural environment as a whole”.[13] It is a natural extension of naming those trees if they are understood to be living individuals. And the work of tree luminaries and pioneers like Suzanne Simard, and Diana Beresford-Kroeger, have helped us to see how complex and wondrous trees and forests are; and to begin to see them as living creatures with agency and sentience.
Most of the official signals we send about the older trees around reinforce the sense that these trees are of nominal value and akin to landscaping choices made by a homeowner. That could change. The adoption of a strong tree protection ordinance or code would help greatly, though lax enforcement often reinforces the sense that decisions about trees are best left to the property owner.
Acknowledging the great trees among us
Paying homage to the grand trees around us would also be a good step in the right direction. On a recent trip to Atlanta, Georgia I sought out (to visit and see) the oldest tree in that city. I found it, thanks to an online list of Champion Trees kept by the nonprofit Trees Atlanta. It was a Cherrybark oak, a remarkable 274 inches in circumference. Her crown was immense, shading much of the opposite side of the street. I doubt many residents of Atlanta know her, nevertheless, make time to find and visit her. But they should. And we should, in the cities and neighborhoods where we cohabit space.
Figure 2: Atlanta’s Cherrybark Oak Image: Tim Beatley
I also feel that many decisions about the status of larger trees would benefit from conversation and discussion among neighbors. This again flies in the face of the “a tree is private property” belief, but I think it is undeniable that outcomes would be different if the owner of an older tree fully appreciated the extent to which that tree or drive was valued and enjoyed by others in the community.
And here the power of peer pressure might help to strengthen a collective tree ethic. Aldo Leopold in his famous book A Sand County Almanac contemplated what it would take to implement a land ethic. He rightly notes that the most effective ethic is one that is enforced through public sentiment and community attitudes: “The mechanism of operation [of the land ethic] is the same for any ethic: social approbation for right actions; social disapproval for wrong actions”.[14]
Here I am reminded of the late poet Mary Oliver’s remarkable poem “The Black Walnut Tree”.[15] In it, she and mother (I am assuming she is relating a personal story) grapple with the economic decision of cutting down a beloved Black Walnut tree, concluding in the end not to cut it down. In the poem, Oliver and her mother talk it through, “two women trying in a difficult time to be wise”. Careful and thoughtful deliberation is needed but so often lacking when it comes to decisions about trees. In the end, “Something brighter than money moves in our blood,” says Oliver, and the decision is made to save the tree.
Is this “something brighter” a love for the tree, or perhaps a sense of stewardship, a recognition of personal responsibility to care for the tree and the many animals and other living things that rely upon it as their home? Is it a sense of civic duty to refrain from destroying something that is such an important collective good? It is not clear in the poem, but there are hints of these considerations.
Selling the tree might pay off the mortgage, writes Oliver, but if they did this, “what my mother and I both know is that we’d crawl with shame in the emptiness we’d made in our own and our fathers’ backyard”. The poem reflects the sense of collective or familial disapproval and hints at the importance of this in understanding the psychology of these kinds of decisions. In contrast to this poetic story, there is rarely the feeling of shame. It is more akin to changing a sweater or choosing a different color paint for the exterior of one’s house. And at a time when we are even less likely to know our neighborhood perhaps it is unrealistic to expect much of such a strategy or to assume that a homeowner will care at all what others might think of her actions.
Those of us lucky enough to have older trees ought to think about the legacy value of taking steps to protect them and passing them along. Many of us who are moving into our elder years ought to be experiencing what social psychologist Erick Erickson described as “generativity,” the desire to think about one’s legacy, what one will leave behind, a natural desire that tends to emerge in the last stage of human development. As the number of people 65 and over rises sharply perhaps there will be a rapid rise in legacy thinking and actions that tree protection can rightly tap into? One of the largest and oldest trees here in central Virginia is a white oak, now adjacent to our airport, that was preserved in the will of the landowner. Giving new meaning to the idea of a living will, I’d like to challenge older folks to think about how they will protect and pass along the giant trees around them—putting in place legal protections that will ensure the acts of passing along that Renkl speaks of above.
Economic signals
There are other things we can do, of course, including working to change the economic and moral signals we send about the trees around us. I have advocated for many years the need to reform our local property tax systems to better take into account trees and the ecosystem services provided especially older, larger trees. Most local property assessments do not explicitly consider trees, but they could. A homeowner willing to protect a large older tree, or several, is entitled to a rebate or reduction in their tax bill that reflects the ecosystem benefits provided by the tree or trees. If the tree is cut down, the annual financial benefit goes away and so there is a tangible cost borne by the property owner.
There are many precedents for such an approach to point to. In other parts of the world, the idea of offering annual payments for actions that support the protection of the environment. In the Netherlands, farmers have received payments for protecting endangered species. In the US, we have precedents as well. Many cities now have stormwater management districts that assess a stormwater fee calculated according to the extent of impervious surface and the presence of trees and vegetation. Cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas have generous financial rebates for homeowners willing to take out water-thirsty lawns and replace them with xeriscaping and drought-tolerant plants. And I recently wrote about a community in Florida that has been providing a subsidy (small to be sure) for homeowners willing to host nests of burrowing owls.[16] There are lots of examples of the kind of economic incentives that would make a meaningful difference. And in addition to the economic calculus offered, they also have the benefit of sending a clear message to property owners (and the larger public) that trees do indeed matter.
The public trust doctrine
We also need to address some of the false arguments that defend or support the casual and callous cutting of older trees. One I hear often is that a tree is coming to the end of its life anyway so why not cut it down? New research suggests that trees (unlike humans) don’t die of old age but rather from some specific threat or ailment―they are hit by lightning or succumb to a disease or a pest. Most of the large trees I see could easily live for many more years, and don’t exhibit signs of disease or distress.
Still, there is the retort that trees are private property, and their disposition is rightly the domain of private decisions by those who own them. But private property rights are always subject to the constraints of the larger public good. There are many legitimate limitations placed on the exercise of private decisions and private freedoms to support a larger public interest.
Could the public trust doctrine apply in such cases?
The public trust doctrine is a common law principle drawn from our British legal heritage and earlier still from Roman law. It is the doctrine that establishes our right (the public’s right) to access and move along navigable rivers. And in every coastal state, it ensures that the public has access to and is able to walk along the wet beach (and in several states, this right applies to the dry beach as well, at least up to the first line of vegetation). It has been used as the basis for protecting coastal wetlands and even more recently, it has been argued, for the protection of our collective atmosphere on which all human and nonhuman life depend.
Given that larger older trees in a city provide such undeniable public benefits, individually and cumulatively, the public trust doctrine would seem a highly relevant tool to defend and underpin limits on the right of a property owner to cut down such trees. As with beaches, wetlands, and rivers, trees and forests would seem similarly imbued with intrinsic qualities of publicness. I do not know whether state or federal courts would sustain an application of the public trust doctrine to the protection of local trees, but this seems a logical and defensible application, at least to me.
There are always constraints on the exercise of individual rights, and it does not seem unreasonable to place restrictions on the ability to cut down such a tree given the public implications. But there may be times, of course, when, in our effort to protect trees, may leave a property owner with few other economic options. Some cities are now using TDR (transfer of development rights), to allow a landowner or developer to transfer unused density in cases where, to protect a tree or tree grove, he/she is not able to achieve the maximum permissible development. And it is not unreasonable to ask that building and development plans and designs be adjusted (e.g., so that homes are more vertical, building footprints are shifted to avoid existing trees). Some city tree codes require that developers go through a process of avoidance where protected trees exist on site.
And sometimes a city may need to be ready, albeit in rare cases, to purchase a site with a tree or grove of trees when the regulatory impacts on a landowner are too great. There is a recent example in Toronto of a 250-year-old red oak under threat, perhaps the oldest tree remaining in the city. The city ended up buying the tree (and the house and lot it occupied) for $780,000 (Canadian dollars, or around $570,000 USD, about half the funds were raised from private donations, it should be noted). This may seem a large sum to expand for a single tree, but it does suggest the need to explore options for publicly purchasing trees in some situations (where preserving the tree leaves a property owner no or highly curtailed development options). Perhaps we should explore the possibility of adapting more traditional (conventional?) land conservation tools to urban settings: purchasing tree conservation easements, for example, or seeking donations of tree conservation easements, that would essentially create a protective provision (running with the property deed) for a specific tree or grove.[17]
Tree conservation tools
Part of the answer is to apply new tree conservation tools that help solve this program or adapt existing tools. Portland, Oregon (and maybe other cities) has adopted a tree TDR provision that allows a landowner to transfer (or sell) unused development potential―that is, if because of the need to protect an existing tree or grove, it is not possible to reach the full permitted density. This would work in concert with the kinds of financial annual subsidies mentioned earlier. Undoubtedly there are other planning tools that communities could use that I have not heard of or thought of. Lack of tools should be an excuse for the loss of trees and canopy.
Figure 3: Tree protection and the state of our urban forest made their way into our recent city council primaries as this campaign sign shows. Image: Tim Beatley
Standing up for trees
Can this new tree ethic, or paradigm shift to use Renkl’s terms, really transcend politics, and should it? Rather than transcend it, it must underpin and guide local politics. While I have pointed out the importance of individual behavior when it comes to the trees around us, at the end of the day the political system must deliver the strong tree codes we want and need. We should still have heated and earnest conversations about the trees in our neighborhood, and we should engage our neighbors in discussions about the trees they share on their street, certainly, but we should also demand that trees throughout the community be protected, even those lacking the visibility or the support of a nearby engaged neighbor or group of neighbors.
Standing up for the trees around us has the potential to significantly change local politics. I have been encouraged that, in my home city, the loss of trees has found its way into a recent local political campaign (see/note the recent campaign sign above). This is a good start [though the local press needs to do a better job reporting accurately on tree loss: one recent local newspaper headline reported the canopy decline as 15 percent when really the loss is closer to 30 percent]. And the city has begun work on a new tree code, though it remains to be seen how stringent it will be, and how assiduously it will be enforced. Cultivating a deeper community tree ethic will remain an important and necessary step and is the best assurance that politicians and neighbors alike will begin to see how and why these majestic trees “matter” and work hard to protect them.
Trees do matter and those of us (most of us) who believe strongly that they do must stand up and say so. We must name our trees, celebrate them, and speak their praises, and work for stronger codes and ordinances that acknowledge both the immense beauty and health they bring us, but also their inherent value and right to exist.
1 Charlotte Rene Woods, “Charlottesville’s tree cover has dropped about 15% since 2004–but there are ways to bring it back,” Charlottesville Tomorrow, April 5, 2022.
2 City of Boston, Urban Forest Plan, September 21, 2022, p.47, found here: https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/file/2023/03/2022%20Urban%20Forest%20Plan%20-%20two%20pages-3.pdf.
3Dengkai Chi et al, “Residential Exposure to Urban Trees and Medication Sales for Mood Disorders and Cardiovascular Disease in Brussels, Belgium: An Ecological Study,” Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol 130 No 5, May 11, 2022
4Geoffrey H. Donovan, et al, “The association between tree planting and mortality: A natural experiment and cost-benefit analysis,” Environment International, Volume 170, December 2022
5See “Canopy Story” found here: https://www.pdx.edu/sustainability/canopy-story
6David George Haskell, The Song of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors, Viking, 2017.
17This is sometimes referred to as Purchase of Development Rights (PDR), and has been used extensively to protect farmland and ecological lands such as wetlands.
The results of the measurement campaigns show how important urban green spaces are for the provision of the cooling function as a regulating ecosystem service — even under heat and drought conditions.
Assessing the cooling function of urban parks under heat and drought conditions
Thanks to the cooling function of the vegetation, urban parks offer cool, pleasant places in cities during hot summer days. Urban parks are also places for recreation and social interaction. In parks, people go jogging or cycling, meet friends, or relax during their lunch breaks (Nadja Kabisch et al. 2021).
The interdisciplinary research project GreenEquityHealth (www.greenequityhealth.hu-berlin.de) investigated the cooling and recreation function of urban parks under extreme heat and drought conditions in the city of Leipzig. Leipzig, like most Central European cities, was affected by severe heat and dry periods in 2018 and 2019. The annual mean air temperature of the city increased by 2.5°C in both years, and the total annual precipitation was reduced by about 34 percent in 2018 and by 22 percent in 2019 (Stadt Leipzig 2022).
In July 2018 and June 2019, a one-week measurement campaign was carried out in two inner-city parks in the city of Leipzig. The aim was to create empirical evidence on the cooling function of urban parks under severe heat and drought conditions. Two structurally distinct parks close to the city center were selected for the campaign: the Friedenspark and the Lene-Voigt-Park. The Friedenspark, which was used as a cemetery until the 1970s, is an urban park of about 17 ha with extensive lawns and a dense stand of large, old trees. The Lene-Voigt-Park, on the other hand, is a newly created park developed in the early 2000s on a former railway brownfield site. The former railway station and the track structures can still be recognized today in the ruins of some buildings and in the elongated shape of the park with its approx. 9 ha size. Large, open lawns predominate here, with tree plantings and larger rows of trees in the side areas.
Figure 1 shows photos that illustrate the drought-induced vegetation degradation and Photo 3 one of the measurement station in the Friedenspark. The one-week measurement campaigns took place from 19 to 25 July 2018 and from 30 June to 6 July 2019 under high temperatures of up to 34°C. Air temperature and humidity were measured at two heights (2m and near ground level) at 17 measuring sites distributed over both parks. Additional measurements were carried out in the adjacent built-up street area.
Figure 1: Photos of the Lene-Voigt Park (upper left) and the Friedenspark (lower left) illustrating the drought and heat conditions during the summer of 2018 and 2019. An air temperature and air humidity measurement station during our GreenEquityHEALTH project measurement campaign. Photos: Roland Krämer.
Air temperature and air humidity measurements in mid-July 2018 showed increasing daily maximum air temperatures from around 28°C in Friedenspark on 18 July to around 34°C in Lene-Voigt Park on 25 July, reflecting the gradual heating of the entire urban landscape during the 2018 heatwave. In Lene-Voigt Park, the highest air temperatures of 33.5°C were measured at a height of 2m and even 40°C at ground level. In contrast, lower daily maximum temperatures were recorded in the Friedenspark (up to 28°C at 2m height). Especially during the day, the higher air temperatures in Lene-Voigt Park can be explained by the very open structures with little amount of shade. Due to the dryness that has already prevailed since April 2018 (with below-average precipitation) and the frequented use by park visitors, the ground vegetation in Lene-Voigt Park was also severely damaged and the lawn areas have turned into bare soil areas. In the Friedenspark, too, meadows and many trees were impacted by the drought and heat. However, due to a tree cover of over 60 percent, large areas remained shaded even under these extreme conditions providing cooling. The tree cover in Lene-Voigt Park, on the other hand, is only about 15 percent, which partially reversed the temperature situation in the parks at night. The open areas in Lene-Voigt Park favor a vertical heat flow, which led to a partly stronger cooling during the night in the Lene-Voigt-Park (Kabisch et al. 2020; Kabisch et al. 2021; Kabisch/Kraemer 2020).
In the adjacent residential neighborhoods, a stronger heating of the building fabric is expressed with local temperature differences of up to 2 K compared to adjacent green spaces, especially in the afternoon. Figure 2 shows the result of an area-based modelling of the situation on 30 June 2019, when almost 40°C air temperature was reached at 2 m above ground (Kraemer/Kabisch 2022). Cooling takes place mainly in the green structures in Friedenspark and in the isolated vegetation-covered areas of gardens and backyards (Fig. 2). The strong heating of the open areas in Lene-Voigt Park is also evident here.
Figure 2: Air Temperature difference in the Lene-Voigt Park (black frame upper part) and Friedenspark (black frame in the mid of the figures) and adjacent residential neighborhood areas in the city of Leipzig on June 30, 2019, at 3 pm and July 1, 2019, at 6 am (deviation from span wide M in Kelvin): The Friedenspark provides cooling both during the day and at night. The Lene-Voigt Park, on the other hand, heats up considerably during the day, especially under dry conditions, but provides important cooling at night and in the morning due to open, unsealed surfaces. Based on Kramer and Kabisch, 2022.
The significance of urban green spaces
The results of the measurement campaigns impressively showed how important urban green spaces are for the provision of the cooling function as a regulating ecosystem service. In particular, urban parks still provide cooling under drought and heat conditions but also the vegetation in gardens or backyards reduce local air temperatures and contribute to heat mitigation. Especially in growing cities, the preservation and further development of urban parks, but also other elements of green infrastructure, is of great importance, particularly under climate change.
Roland Kraemer and Nadja Kabisch Leipzig and Hannover
Nadja Kabisch holds a PhD in Geography. Her special interest is on human-environment interactions in cities taking co-benefits from nature-based solutions implementation for human health and social justice into account.
Acknowledgement
The project “Environmental-Health Interactions in Cities (GreenEquityHealth, www.greenequityhealth.hu-berlin.de) – Challenges for Human Well-Being under Global Changes” (2017 – 2022) was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF; funding code 01LN1705A).
References
Kabisch, N. et al. (2021): A methodological framework for the assessment of regulating and recreational ecosystem services in urban parks under heat and drought conditions. In: Ecosystems and People 17/1, 464–475.
Kabisch, Nadja et al. (2021): Impact of summer heat on urban park visitation, perceived health and ecosystem service appreciation. In: Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 60, 127058.
Kabisch, N. et al. (2020): “Physical activity patterns in two differently characterised urban parks under conditions of summer heat” [Environ. Sci. Policy 107 May (2020) 56–65]. In: Environmental Science & Policy 114, 216.
Kabisch, N. and Kraemer, R. (2020): Physical activity patterns in two differently characterised urban parks under conditions of summer heat. In: Environmental Science & Policy 107, 56–65.
Kraemer, R. and Kabisch, N. (2022): Parks Under Stress: Air Temperature Regulation of Urban Green Spaces Under Conditions of Drought and Summer Heat. In: Frontiers in Environmental Science 10.
We have developed and applied new methods to evaluate how networks of plans address heat. We are building upon previous research suggesting that there are multiple complementary ways to evaluate plan networks. Here is the first step: the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ for Heat.
Cities everywhere are getting hotter due to climate change and the urban heat island. Places like the Pacific Northwest in the United States, which historically was not concerned about extreme heat as a climate risk, have experienced unprecedented heatwaves in recent years (White et al. 2023). These deadly events, as well as dire warnings for future heat increases from the latest IPCC reports, are a wake-up call for many cities, which are increasingly looking to actively plan for heat.
In 2021, we published the results of the first national survey of US planners focused on how their communities were planning for heat. Our survey confirmed that planners are quite concerned about heat and implementing different strategies to mitigate and manage its effects, but they also face many barriers. We also found that while most cities reported addressing heat in at least one plan, the type of plans where they incorporated heat varied (as shown in the graph below). Sustainability, climate change, or resilience plans, comprehensive plans, and hazard mitigation plans were all common choices, but none of them was mentioned by the majority of cities in the survey. This suggests that to effectively evaluate heat planning in a community, we can’t just focus on one plan, but instead need to understand the full network of plans that the community develops to guide future development and policy.
There is no single plan type that universally addresses heat according to a survey of US cities. This means any effort to comprehensively evaluate heat planning needs to examine multiple plans (Meerow and Keith 2021)
Networks of plans
We have written previously on this site about the importance of coordination across the network of plans for heat, drawing from our Planning for Urban Heat Resilience, published by the American Planning Association. Since then, we have developed and applied new methods to evaluate how networks of plans address heat. With this work, we are building upon previous research suggesting that there are multiple complementary ways to assess plan networks. Here we will outline our first approach, the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ for Heat, which adapts the original Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ methodology, initially developed for flooding, to the particular challenges of heat hazards.
The Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ for Heat
We developed the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS™) for Heat as an extension of the original Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™, which was originally developed by Berke et al. (2015) and then further advanced and translated to planning practice by Malecha et al. (2019), for spatially evaluating networks of plans to reduce vulnerability to hazards. With support from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office’s Extreme Heat Risk Initiative and in partnership with the American Planning Association, our research team piloted PIRS™ for Heat in five geographically diverse U.S. communities: Baltimore, MD, Boston, MA, Fort Lauderdale, FL, Seattle, WA, and Houston, TX.
How does PIRS™ for Heat work? We read through a community’s network of plans, including their comprehensive plans, hazard mitigation plans, climate action plans, and climate change adaptation, resilience, or sustainability plans. We identify the land use policies or actions in those plans that pass the Three-Point Test (Malecha et al., 2019): (1) have the potential to impact urban heat, (2) are place-specific, and (3) contain a recognizable policy tool. We categorize those policies based on their policy tool and heat mitigation strategy and score them based on whether they would likely mitigate heat (“+1”), worsen heat (“-1”), or the impact is unclear from the description in the plan (“Unknown”).
Examples of policies categorized and scored using PIRS™ for Heat from Boston’s comprehensive plan, Imagine Boston
Scored policies are mapped to relevant census tracts across each community to evaluate their spatial distribution and the net effect on urban heat. The resulting PIRS™ for Heat scorecard is then compared with social vulnerability and heat hazard data to assess policy alignment with heat risks and to identify opportunities for improved urban heat resilience planning.
Below is an example of the resulting maps for Boston. More details on Boston’s results and the other four pilot cities can be found in the PIRS™ for Heat Guidebook. The map on the left shows the PIRS™ for Heat scorecard results, with darker tracts being those receiving more heat mitigation policy attention. The middle map shows mean afternoon temperatures based on the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) Urban Heat Island Mapping campaign, with darker tracts being hotter. And the map on the right shows the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, with darker tracts being those deemed more socially vulnerable. Across Boston, we find that hotter and more socially vulnerable areas tend to receive more heat mitigation policy attention, which is what we would hope to see in more cities to address well-documented heat inequities.
An interactive web-based Storymap is also available for all cities we’ve completed.
PIRS™ for Heat results for the City of Boston. The map on the left shows the net policy scorecard for all census tracts in the city. The middle shows the NIHHIS Urban Heat Island Map and the right shows the CDC Social Vulnerability Index Map.
Key lessons for heat planning from the five PIRS™ for Heat pilot cities
Our initial applications of PIRS™ for Heat provide several important lessons for heat resilience planning. First, we identify policies that would likely affect heat in all the plans we examined, further confirming the importance of evaluating networks of plans, rather than individual plans, to understand how a community is planning for heat resilience.
Second, while communities should aim for a diverse portfolio of heat mitigation strategies, some categories (e.g., urban greening and waste heat reduction) are more common than others (e.g., urban design). Similarly, communities rely more on certain policy tools than others (e.g., capital improvements, the land use analysis and permitting process, and development regulations).
We were encouraged to identify many policies across the plans that would likely mitigate heat, but often they were not explicitly linked to heat hazards. These are missed opportunities for communities to promote heat mitigation co-benefits and potentially increase support for those actions.
We also identified many policies with an “unknown” impact on heat mitigation, meaning they would likely affect heat, but they lacked sufficient detail in the policy language for us to determine whether it would increase or decrease urban heat. Communities should consider how new developments and investments are likely to affect urban heat.
With the exception of Boston, policies with the potential to mitigate heat were not consistently targeting the hottest and most socially vulnerable areas of pilot cities we examined. This suggests that more targeted heat planning is needed.
Finally, as we have shared these results with city officials in the pilot communities, it has become clear that the PIRS™ for Heat process can spark valuable conversations about heat planning and quality land use planning more broadly.
Presenting PIRS™ for Heat results for Tempe, Arizona to city officials as part of a participatory workshop supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
What’s next?
We are currently deploying PIRS™ for Heat to more cities across Arizona with diverse populations and climates as part of the new DOE-funded Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory (SW-IFL). We plan to repeat the PIRS™ process in the future to document how planning for urban heat resilience has, hopefully, improved over time in certain communities and to evaluate how initial PIRS™ for Heat information was used in plan updates. This is important because longitudinal assessments of planning are few and far between.
We are also developing a new method of analyzing how networks of plans address heat and piloting it in several communities, the Plan Quality for Heat assessment. It complements PIRS™ for Heat because rather than just focusing on the land use policies with the potential to mitigate heat, it assesses whether plans include the full suite of heat mitigation and management strategies as well as other principles of quality planning, including the goals, fact base, implementation and monitoring, coordination, public participation, and uncertainty. These methods can help communities holistically evaluate their current heat resilience planning across their network of plans and more effectively prepare for a hotter future.
Ladd Keith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at The University of Arizona. An urban planner by training, he has over a decade of experience planning for climate change with diverse stakeholders in cities across the U.S. His current research explores heat planning and governance with funding from the NOAA, CDC, and National Institutes for Transportation and Communities.
References
Berke, Philip, Newman, Galen, Lee, Jaekyung, Combs, Tabitha, Kolosna, Carl, & Salvesen, David. (2015). Evaluation of Networks of Plans and Vulnerability to Hazards and Climate Change: A Resilience Scorecard. Journal of the American Planning Association, 81(4), 287–302. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2015.1093954
IPCC (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. A Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland (in press). https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
Keith, Ladd & Meerow, Sara. (2023). Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS™) for Heat: Spatially evaluating networks of plans to mitigate heat Storymap. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b01d63aee41c48b0804b77569f78cf21
Keith, Ladd; Meerow, Sara, Berke, Philip, DeAngelis, Joseph, Jensen, Lauren, Trego, Shaylynn, Schmidt, Erika, Smith, Stephanie. (2022). Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS™) for Heat: Spatially evaluating networks of plans to mitigate heat (Version 1.0).www.planning.org/knowledgebase/urbanheat/
Malecha, Matthew, Masterson, Jaimie Hicks, Yu, Siyu, & Berke, Philip. (2019). Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard Guidebook: Spatially evaluating networks of plans to reduce hazard vulnerability – Version 2.0. College Station, TX. https://planintegration.com/
Meerow, Sara & Keith, Ladd. (2022). “Planning for extreme heat: A national survey of U.S. planners.” Journal of the American Planning Association. 88(3): 319-344. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2021.1977682
Meerow, Sara & Woodruff, Sierra. (2019). Seven principles for strong climate change planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(1), 39–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2019.1652108
Plumer, Brad & Popovich, Nadja. (2020). How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/24/climate/racism-redlining-cities-global-warming.html
Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory. (2023). https://sw-ifl.asu.edu/
White, Rachel H., Anderson, Sam, Booth, James F., Braich, Ginni, Draeger, Christina, Fei, Cuiyi, … West, Greg. (2023). The unprecedented Pacific Northwest heatwave of June 2021. Nature Communications, 14(1).
Woodruff, Sierra, Meerow, Sara, Gilbertson, Philip, Hannibal, Bryce, Matos, Melina, Roy, Malini, … Berke, Phil. (2021). Is flood resilience planning improving? A longitudinal analysis of networks of plans in Boston and Fort Lauderdale. Climate Risk Management, 34, 100354. . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2021.100354
Helga Jakobson built a synthesizer system that reads the bioelectric impulse of the plants, and would clip alligator clips onto their leaves. Then the system reads the bioelectric impulse of the plant. More than figuring out what the plants sound like, Helga had to figure out who was singing.
In early 2018, the Assiniboine Park Conservancy, which is located in the western part of the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, announced that they would be demolishing their conservatory in April, citing the end of the structure’s lifespan. At that time, artist Helga Jakobson was experimenting with designs for capacitors that could capture plant reactions, and she asked if she could take her inventions into the space to record the sounds of its inhabitants before they were displaced or uprooted permanently. In just three months, she collected over 500 hours of plant song and, for the past five years, she has been composing these sounds into a symphony. Information on the final product, Entropic Symphony, can be found on her website.
Lucie Lederhendler, who is curating an exhibition including new work by Jakobson this September, asked to speak with her about this ambitious project. The following interview has been edited for form and clarity.
The cover for the soon-to-be-released album Entropic Symphony by Helga Jakobson. Image: Helga Jakobson.
Lucie Lederhendler: I’d like to put the project into context first, because there’s something so meta-sociological in the framework, of the moment when you began your work, in the narrative of the conservancy.
Helga Jakobson: Sure. The Assiniboine Park Conservancy manages the park, the grounds around the conservatory, the zoo, all of the landscape within the zoo, all of the soil within the conservatory, and any other structures or features of that allocated zone.
The overseeing bodies that managed not only that conservatory building but also the larger grounds and the zoo were really the stewards of the space. Historically, there was a much larger volunteer base managing the visitor component, and so, as the conservancy was making decisions around not only around the closure of the space, but also around where the plants would go, which plants could move and which plants could not, they were also providing a lot of stewardship, and doing the work to figure out the new Leaf building at the same time.
I have a lot of respect for the conservancy and the way that they navigated the closure of the space. I found them to be thoughtful down to the microorganisms that they were the stewards of. The way that they spoke about soil, the way that they spoke about the interconnectivity of the bacteria, of the fungal bodies, and really thinking about how best to provide care for all of the organisms that live inside of the space. It was really magical to hear the depth to which they considered their roles.
The decision to close the conservatory was a really fraught and upsetting one, on so many levels. What was interesting about the closure was that it brought out these multi-layered aspects of grief that people felt on so many different fronts. For instance, there was the grief of the conservancy, the staff, who had worked there for a very long time, who had felt very personal relationships with the plants that they were stewards of, and then also the volunteers, and community members who were all losing these beings that were deeply, deeply cared for, down to a microbial level. Not to mention the community members, long-standing volunteers, and environmentalist groups, to name a few.
LL: There’s something about the idea of a conservatory that has a built-in obsolescence, but you wouldn’t take them away, right? That’s where I see the meta-sociological framework most clearly.
HJ: Oh, indeed. The conservatory itself, at Assiniboine Park specifically, but all conservatories are these really interesting meta-sociological spaces. They’re at once antiquated and also futuristic. They’re an ideal, this utopia, a kind of space of hopes and dreams and growth, while also being reliquaries–spaces that house something fantastical that could just never exist. The plants within a conservatory would never live so close to each other. They would live in more complicated relations, so there’s a layer of impossible, and also communal, space. For instance, the Assiniboine Park Conservatory was one of the last free conservatories or green spaces of that capacity in Canada. There are only a few left that are free of charge, which also speaks to a larger issue of the lack and loss of communal gathering spaces, of free commons for folks to enjoy.
LL: So, any displacement of plants will have obsolescence, but that’s okay.
HJ: I’m not sure even if it’s obsolescence so much as entropy. Of course, the space itself is man-made, but it’s clear in planting a plant that it will die―even trees, which have a longer life span. Most of the plants within that space just could not live as long as the humans that love them. One of the main reasons that the space itself closed, and this aligns more I think with what you’re getting at―was the boiler. The boiler was one of the biggest issues in the space, but really it was climate change. They built the building around this boiler in 1914 to manage all of the weather inside, and it was a massive beast of a machine that was built in a time before the weather fluctuated like it does now. It just couldn’t keep up. So, the boiler was slowly―and towards the end, rapidly―dying.
The Assiniboine Park Conservatory, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson.
It was fantastic in a way because some of the plants in the space, too, would just not stop growing. In this way, yes, the boiler became obsolete, but some of the plants, which should have stopped growing at a certain point, just didn’t. There was one that I really really loved, a gigantic palm that they kept topping―they would just cut it off and it would just keep growing. The first time that they topped it, it was because it had grown so tall that it had cracked one of the windows on the roof. I called it the roof-crushing palm. It just wouldn’t stop. The space had outgrown itself, roots were cracking the foundation, and the boiler―slowly, all together, they created this amazing chaos that had a kind of decadence of ruin that we’re all drawn to. Maybe not all, but I would say a lot of us, are drawn to the beauty in decline.
It felt like a really bombastic environment to be invited into. I had an exhibition that I was building machinery for at the time that would play plants. At the same time, I was feeling my own feelings about the space closing, and thinking about the inner workings of plants, and I thought I just had to reach out. When they invited me in, and I hadn’t built the machinery yet! I had to work around the clock to figure out this new system, a new recording device, and amplifier, while also trying to understand what it would be like to compose within that environment. I became an expert really fast in the synthesizer system that I built.
There was more and more news coverage about the space closing, so people started coming more and more. When I first started doing this work in residence, I would see three or four people in a day and, by the end, it was hundreds of people. It was completely out of control.
LL: When you say you were working in residence, you’re literally in among the plants and the soil?
HJ: Oh yeah, and in the rooftop―they allowed me access to the top tier that they water from so I could work away from the public, as well as access the leaves and green space up above the terrain level.
LL: When you talk about these people swarming to have a desperate last visit, it makes me think of a colleague of mine, Dr. Alysha Farrell, who talks about “unmetabolized grief” in the context of the climate crisis―this feeling of helplessness is just grief with no direction. When you think about grief and mourning in the context of the loss of these plants, and, in particular, I think there was a Norfolk Pine that they couldn’t save.
HJ: Yeah, that was the one that people had the most feelings about, for sure. It was an interesting one. It had been topped, I think they said, 13 times in its life. Without the context of direct conversations with the staff there, I would have felt that that was barbaric―or quite aggressive. Being able to see it from the top, though, from where the public would never have seen it, it was quite clear that topping is why this was such a majestic tree because it had been shaped by humans.
So, there was a funny feeling that I had about the Norfolk, and how I felt during the entire residency. My entire perspective was shifted back and forth so many times. Beforehand, I had some pretty romantic ideas about the conservatory. I grew to feel that it was a very colonial space, like a cabinet of curiosities.
Then I also had a community perspective. One of the people that I saw almost every day in the space, who really used the space and needed it, was a mother and her daughter. The mother was in her 80s and had dementia and found a lot of peace there. They were quite low-income and didn’t have a lot of physically accessible spaces to go [to] in Winnipeg in the winter, so it was an incredible resource for them, and they really valued it. So, I had this perspective of the space being a gathering place for folks like that.
Then as the news came out that the conservatory was closing, and people started coming more and more, there were so many really interesting stakeholders who were coming in protest. They had a lot of thoughts about right and wrong and weren’t informed about the very, very thoughtful process and practical components of the closure. I think that the idea of metabolizing feelings of eco-anxiety―there are a lot of different terms that you can put towards that kind of feeling―comes down to what do we do, and how do we live on a damaged earth?
The Norfolk Pine in the old Assiniboine Park Conservatory, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson
I think a lot of the reactions that people had to the closure were rooted in exactly that. The Norfolk was a great example. This idea that this tree was so beloved because of the size and the shape and the beauty of it, that the general public had no idea that it had been manicured so extremely for so many years, and that’s what created that majesty. That was an illuminating moment for me, compounded with the idea that that one tree can mean so much―I think it is a bit fantastical. The conservancy knew that people would have so many feelings about the Norfolk being cut down, and so they had worked to create cloned seeds from that tree to give out. I’m not sure if this ever happened but, in theory, you’d be able to grow your own, so to speak. They worked to create other registrations of the tree’s existence, going so far as to reach out to Bartholomäus Traubeck about creating a tree ring recording of it.
The whole experience was really a metaphor because you build yourself a little cabinet of curiosities, knowing that it’s going to eventually fail. It just cannot stay forever. The idea of roots breaking it down and reclaiming it recalled a Margaret Atwood kind of mindset for me, in the MaddAddam series when she talks about the kudzu taking over, and how these plants that weren’t really meant to be there would just take over the world anyways.
Some people that I spoke to found a lot of peace in the idea that nature just wins in the end. Even if that means that they’re allowed to die, like these palms, breaking free through the roof, even though they could not survive in this climate. Maybe they don’t want to live for this extended period of time that they’re being cared for. This Norfolk pine that has been topped so many times, its roots are the ones crushing the foundation. Is it saying, “Enough now, let me die”?
There’s a lot of really interesting takeaways, and when I wonder, did they―the Conservancy―let us grieve right? Did they allow people to do what they needed to do to get that kind of closure and peace? Did that closure remind us that we’re all living on this damaged earth that sometimes feels beyond repair? I think that they really did a good job of it. They allowed protesters to come in as choirs to sing to the trees, and me to come in and record all of these trees. They allowed all of their volunteers to have a private day after the closure and to walk through the space. So, I think when it came to grieving well, they did that. They were faced with a situation that was inevitable.
How do we live in community together with these systems that are going to fail? As our ecosystem is reaching some critical points, I think all that we can learn to do as humans is to grieve well. To be activated and informed and mobilize to create impact where we can individually and to lobby for structural change.
LL: The medium of symphonic arrangement is such a time-tested mode for the expression of grief. Did that idea begin with the concept? Was it, “I want to create an elegiac symphony”?
HJ: No, it wasn’t. I felt compelled, thinking about the deep and varied layers to the story of the closure. Grief, death, dying, ephemerality; these are all core elements of my art practice. Sound at that point was a very new component to my work. I approached it saying, I can do this thing, and then when they said yes, I had to figure out how to do it.
I have no interest in anthropomorphizing. I have no interest in speaking for things. I just had the impulse to allow these plants, or an impression of them, to be recorded. For posterity, but also to see what would happen, just as a pure research-based experiment. Because there were hundreds of plants, I needed to figure out a framework for how I would organize it. So, I decided to lay it out as an orchestra. Then, instead of trying to assign each plant according to, “You look like a tuba, so you’ll be the tuba,” I tried to just facilitate. That made it a lot easier to organize in that sense.
Then I really had to think about tonal qualities, I had to think about what MIDI libraries were readily available because I was working at a pretty fast pace. So, more than figuring out what the sounds would sound like, I had to figure out who was singing, and how to allow that to happen.
LL: There’s a parallel between the idea of handing the mic to the plants and letting them speak to the humanist idea of centring victims’ voices in conversations about trauma, in that both have to be done with structured care. So, how much intervention did you allow yourself? Did you set parameters for how much manipulation you would have in that voice collection?
HJ: Yeah, my clumsy way of working in that space was to act like Vinciane Despret, who speaks to the importance of being a polite visitor. There cannot be a world in which my hand is not involved. All that I can do is set up the most equal and fair parameters that will allow for a less biased expression. So, I worked with the MIDI libraries that were available to me through LogicPro, that way I was not tuning or amplifying one or the other in the recording process. I just simply let them play.
That’s been more of a consideration as I’ve been composing: where do I cut and where do I not? The first iteration of the symphony was just a 15-minute-long recording of all of the files all at once, which sounds very droney, very dull, very very low tones. There’s this great hum that happens. This is something where, had I walked in with a synthesizer built beforehand, I could have had a little more control, but it’s almost better for me and my perspective that I was learning with the plants, and so the recordings just were as they were. It felt like sympoiesis[1] in the sense that it was an adaptive and evolving knowledge base, a collectively-built system that could only grow as fast as I could build it, while also recording at this rapid pace. One led to the other, led to the other, led to the other. So, I do really feel that it was kind of a co-mingled experience.
LL: Can you describe how you’re actually collecting these noises? And what’s the current status of the project?
HJ: I built a synthesizer system that reads the bioelectric impulse of the plants, and I would clip alligator clips onto their leaves, stems, bark, or roots; all of these different plants, as many of them as I could in the timeframe I was allotted. Then the system reads the bioelectric impulse of the plant and outputs it as MIDI libraries. The MIDI libraries that I accessed were those readily available through LogicPro, so they’re pre-programmed as orchestral instruments.
I collected over 500 hours of recordings over those months in 2018, and I’ve been composing them into the symphony since then. The official title is Entropic Symphony, it’s 45 minutes long, and I received funding from Manitoba Art Council to produce a record of it, a physical LP. With supply chain issues, that pressing has not happened yet, but it will very soon.
LL: The idea of bioelectric energy, you’ve said before that it’s more interesting when it fluctuates, and it often fluctuates when it’s near to another bioelectric organism. Which makes the song about relationality, really. Your position to it, and its position to other plants, and other organisms. I remember you said that there’s a parallel in the relationship between the individual plant and the individual human; and the individual human and their touch screen. I love that because it helps me conceive of myself, essentially, as a bioelectric organism in the same way I can essentialize a plant. It really grounds us in the ecosystem and pulls away those distinctions.
HJ: I think one of the most poetic things that I’ve understood, through researching technology, biology, and more scientific frameworks for thinking with plants, has been the equalizers, the great equalizers on the planet. Those are water, electricity, and temporality. We’re all, all of the beings on the Earth, all of the terran beings, going to die, we all have to have water and nourishment, and we all have to have electricity running through us. There are so many moments in the human day that are affected by electricity.
It reminds me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and this idea of bioelectric galvanization–the idea that you could shock dead animals, and they would live again. There was this great moment of reckoning where people in the arms race of scientific research were digging up dead bodies to experiment on, a massive race to be the first to capitalize on electricity in favour of immortality. Mary Shelley wrote a poignant piece about care and what would happen if they succeeded, and what is right and what is wrong in that.
In this ecosystem of thought, of scientific reasoning, of logic, of artistic expression, it’s really important to situate ways of thinking side by side to create a dynamic mode of thinking. Building these pieces of machinery and interfaces helped me to resituate myself on a one-to-one scale with the plants that I’m working with. There’s something just so magic about being able to touch a plant and hear your touch, to walk by a plant and see how that affects it and having another synapse or another sensorium for that experience. That’s part of what I hope to do with my work, to help people reposition themselves and to provide a conduit for compassion in a different way.
LL: When you were in among your musicians, the plants, can you describe your experience of your own aliveness? Of your mass? This question is also interested in the relationship between vitality and aliveness, vitalism, and life.
Jakobson recording a plant in the Assiniboine Park Conservatory as it responds to her touch, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson
HJ: It’s a really complicated idea, the idea of life and aliveness and being, and you know that’s why we have so many schools of thought and so many beautiful words for it. I think for me, my aliveness and my mass and my beingness all felt very present for me in the fact that it was such a whirlwind. I didn’t have a lot of time to pause, to reflect on being present. I was almost forced through the paces, racing against time, racing against the closure, racing against the decline of these plants or the displacement of them, to find a way to not think too much while working. Instead, I tried to get into a meditative state, and just be present. To just figure out with my hands and with my ears what was happening, and how to tune my instrument. It felt like holding a metal detector and walking over the earth, listening for fluctuations. As time went on, I was able to anticipate where there would be more deposits of excitement, of noise, of sound, of clarity in a certain way. I gained a really meaningful piece of wisdom that was passed on to me by my Amma, my grandmother, when I told her that I had the feeling that our family has a lot of people in it who see ghosts, folks with a relationship to the metaphysical or people who have prophetic dreams. I asked if she had a way of understanding that. I asked, “Do you think that there’s some psychic ability in our family or something like that?”
She said, “You know, I don’t know. That’s not up to me to understand, but what I do understand is that when I am very quiet and when I learn to listen better, I’m able to be more intuitive. And I think that intuition is like a muscle, and I think that you exercise it the more that you practice listening.”
That really struck a chord with me, and I felt it firsthand when I was in the space. I think by being very quiet, by trying hard not to impose, but instead to work with, and be in relation, I was very aware, not of my mass, but of my masslessness in a way. It made me feel as though my skin was simply a very thin barrier in-between that electric feeling that I have and the electric feeling that the plants have. To have something tangible representing that felt very empowering. I would walk away from the space feeling light-headed, almost in a trance, because it was so strange to breach that line. That felt really powerful and important.
LL: There was an article published by CTV a little while ago with the headline, “Yes, Plants Can Talk,” that was so infuriating. First of all, because everybody knows this, this is not new at all. It’s research out of Tel Aviv University that uses different sound sensing devices to record ultrasonic sounds, but in order to receive them they have to stress the plants. When I finished the article, I was a little bit disgusted. “You’re torturing them! You’re listening to them scream in pain and patting yourselves on the back!” They were doing things like not watering them, cutting them down to the quick. I understand the nuances that you were talking about with people getting more nostalgic than academic about these things, but surely, we shouldn’t be burying sentiment all together?
HJ: I got a lot of negative feedback myself from people riling against the work, saying that I was trying to say that plants spoke English, or other folks saying that I’m electrocuting them, “and all of this in their last days!” What are the ethics of listening to somebody as they’re dying, and doing nothing? People really have a lot of feelings. With that article―I probably get every article that comes out on major news sources ever, sent to me, from all places in the world, saying “Hey, it’s that thing you do!” All I can say is thanks so much for sending me this horrifying article. Because there are so many sensationally titled, almost clickbait, articles about the research on plants.
LL: The clarification you made there, of no, plants can’t speak English, but they can make sound, they can react, and we can record that reaction with different devices, is making me think about sound really differently. Sounds that are all around us but silent are still communication because there’s a directionality to the wave.
HJ: Well, it’s ephemeral, right? This point that you’re bringing up about the ultra-ultra-ultrasonic―you’re right there have been a thousand researchers doing a thousand bits of really important, and interesting, and also flippant and obscure, and wild experiments with plants for-ever. In the film The Secret Life of Plants, which is a great love of mine to this day, there’s a Japanese couple―a scientific researcher and his wife who’s an avid gardener―who poke a cactus with acupuncture needles. He gets her to start speaking to her plants, and you can clearly hear that the plant is somehow, through relationality, learning to speak the Japanese characters in response to her prompts. I don’t fully understand the mechanisms of how it happens, but it seems very similar to my work in that it taps into bioelectric capacitance, although outputting sine waves instead. It seems as though her hands and physical proximity create a response―the sounds seem to react to her movements.
I think this is a great example of exactly what we’re talking about. It’s truth-ish-ness, it’s scientific exploration, but more, it’s fabulation. Those endeavors are so important as exercises, which can be taken very seriously. That research should be done, and it’s very interesting, but there’s just such a mélange that it’s hard to really understand what is and is not real. Again, I’m not trying to propose that plants have humanesque thoughts, I’m not proposing that plants have the capability to learn language. But I do think that there’s a way that we relate to one another that can be shown through experiments like this, just as much as from a conversation with a granny who sings to her plants.
I’m talking about relationship-building, about how to be better together on this damaged earth. I’m thankful for all the research in that realm although sometimes I want to ask, “Why are you doing that, though? Why is that important to you?” Artists, academics, folks from philosophy backgrounds, from all kinds of different walks of life, have to be quite thoughtful when looking at science. Even in this wild time that we’re living in, with AI generators and all the panic that comes from that, critical voices who are applying thought, who are asking why, can reflect on how often the work is being done for capitalist ends. There can be very insidious backstories to the research.
LL: It seems to me that a lot of the pushback comes from scientific communities, and a lot of the research that’s being done is, like Monica Gagliano, people who tell the story of being exiled, or almost exiled, from the scientific community in order to pursue this work.
HJ: 100%, at least, there are a lot of people that I’m aware of. In The Secret Life Of Plants, there’s a great case study of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, who presented his research showcasing the inner life of plants in front of the Royal Institution in London in 1897, and he was laughed out of the room. Because he was a person of colour, really.
Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about this in Braiding Sweetgrass. She says, “I went into biology because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful side by side, and when I told my Ph.D. advisor, they laughed at me.” There are all kinds of people from all walks of life who are invested and interested in this research, who are not listened to in the scientific community because it is a very colonial, very white supremacist, quite misogynistic field. It’s important to be critical about what research gets funded and what doesn’t.
Another book that came out, that tried to model itself after The Secret Life Of Plants, called Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence in which they talk about how the research of Cleve Backster, who’s one of the most famous case studies: him and his philodendrons and his lie detector. It talks about when that research was dropped, another researcher proposed that you could capitalize on building a neural relationship with plants and use your plants as an alarm! Or a garage door opener! The inference is that when you’re able to find some sort of capitalist function for these phenomena, then that research will be funded.
LL: I’ve been a little bit obsessed about the privileging of written language recently. It hurts to think about writing as a bad thing, as someone who’s so bookish. But a recent exhibition had me researching the Hindu cosmological cycle, the Chatur Yuga, which puts us in the age of destruction and despair. What happened at the beginning of this age? The most significant thing was that systems of writing were being introduced in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. If that starts the age of destruction, maybe it’s because it creates a hierarchy of knowledge.
HJ: Indeed, it’s really true. This is also about the idea of what power is, but there are a lot of different ways of thinking and being in culture that can flatten out that power. Colonization is really in line with the written word or the printing press, in particular. It does make a lot of sense.
LL: These topics are all embedded in oneirophyte, which I’m curating and will include your and four other Winnipeg-based artists’ work. Though it shifts the thinking a little more towards the realm of imagination and dream, rather than the waking emotional realm. The theme of that exhibition emerged from artist research rather than preceding it, from observing what new and digital media artists seemed to be interested in right now, and I’m wondering if you think that there’s something about where you are, something about the city of Winnipeg, that might be directing artistic curiosity in this way?
HJ: That’s a good question. There was a really great exhibition that stirred me into this realm of thinking, years ago, in Winnipeg, put on by Video Pool, called Toxicity, that thought about bioart and the blend of science and art. That was a first. It happened shortly after Janet Cardiff was in town with the Forty Part Motet. So that might have contributed to it. There’s also something about living in such an extreme climate, where you can really feel the pull of climate change because you can see flooding happening, you can see new earth, like in Riding Mountain, where the glacial lake deposited. There’s really interesting geological and vegetative phenomena that happen around here. What’s more, I think being very rooted in farming gives folks a lot of different layers of understanding. It’s been a meeting place for Indigenous peoples since time immemorial, so a lot of minds gather here. It’s Treaty One Territory (1871), so it holds pre-colonial knowledge about relationships to the earth and to people. Maybe those are some elements that inspire artists to reflect on the earth that they’re on.
LL: When we talk about new media and digital media, it’s implied in what you’ve been talking about with this project, that there is a need for new tools of communication.
Jakobson’s workstation in the Conservatory, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson
HJ: Totally, and I think that there is a really big draw, especially right now, every year that carries on, moving more and more closer to midnight on the Global Doomsday Clock, we’re really feeling that pressure to live in a different way. In deepening our understanding of colonization and calls to action towards Truth and Reconciliation, there are a lot of political and practical reasons to reposition yourself to the land that you’re on. So, one perspective is social, and another emerges from living on a damaged earth.
LL: Right, just decentring ourselves in general. What replaced the conservatory is The Leaf, which is quite expensive, isn’t it?
HJ: Yes, it’s very expensive! But there are so many layers to that. Volunteerism is at an all-time low, and building materials are so expensive that to have a space like this, there does need to be a cost associated with it. That’s just living under late-stage capitalism. I’m not saying that I think it’s right, but there are reasons for it.
LL: It’s not malicious, it’s not profit-mongering.
HJ: No, it’s not, but it shouldn’t have to be like this.
It’s funny, with the opening, I’ve had a lot of people asking if I’ve gone yet, and I haven’t. I want this project to be done before I set foot in.
LL: That’s pretty sentimental of you.
HJ: I think so too! But there’s also a practical reason, which is that they’re still figuring out some of the hiccoughs in opening, and seeing ragged, over-touched butterflies is not a big draw for me; I think I would feel pretty sad to go in right now. It’s not a fault of the conservancy, it’s just the reality of human impact on space.
[1] “Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself,” From Donna Haraway, Chapter 3: Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press: 2016. p 57.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Jose Alaniz, LongbranchNo less than Superman in “Superman for Earth” was not up to the task of solving the environmental crisis: a NIMBY protest objecting to the siting of a landfill; a new housing development in Smallville consuming farmland; or Lois expressing morality about having children in an overpopulated world. “There are no easy answers,” he concludes.
Steven Barnes, Los AngelesGraphic fiction is a sub-set of fiction and as such can handle any genre from romance to horror to philosophy. The question of HOW to do it correctly is certainly important and there is only one rule, one similar to that in cinema and television: Show, don’t tell.
Emmalee Barnett, SpringfieldThere are so many different ways to use pictures and written words to paint an enjoyable, informative story. They combine the best parts of a novel and an illustration, if you ask me.
Rebecca Bratspies, New YorkThe Environmental Justice Chronicles succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We proved that comics can convey sophisticated legal/environmental information, while still being fun to read.
Deianira D’Antoni, CataniaIn comics, a confidential relationship is established between the protagonist and the reader, a dialogue that stimulates creativity and prompts the reader to develop critical thinking, to reflect and open up to new and different perspectives.
Cecilia de Santis, CiampinoA challenge is for the scientist to face: deconstructing our ego. It is unlikely that readers will engage if the story makes them feel silly. So, how can we shape our communication with empathy?
Marta Delas, BarcelonaReading a comic sounds more fun than reading an article or a textbook. Fun is a powerful tool. So is beauty. And emotional engagement. We can use all of these tools in a comic, creating stories full of knowledge.
Darren Fisher, MödlingOne of the things I love about comics is how simple they can be, and how low the bar is to entry is. More people telling their stories in this medium can only help to promote visual storytelling as a way to understand and talk about the great challenges we face in meaningful and impactful ways.
Ivan Gajos, ManchesterIn order to engage ordinary people and inspire the next generation we need to go beyond traditional communication methods and embrace more creative storytelling. Comics have a superpower that makes them especially useful when communicating social and environmental challenges.
David Haley, Walney IslandIt’s time for diverse superheroes to story our planet into many futures beyond modernity’s monoculture, be they from Gotham City, Kolkata, or our own home towns.
John Hyatt, LiverpoolI love the medium and the more well-made comics that can inform and emotionally move us rather than preach and that carry a positive, planet-friendly, life-affirming message the better!
Charles Johnson, SeattleAlthough the work of black cartoonists in the 20th century was generally confined to the black press because of segregation, talented creators such as Ollie Harrington and Morrie Turner graphically demonstrated the ugliness of racism and the humanity of black Americans.
Eva Kunzová, BratislavaUsing comics to bridge the communities is an amazing way to inform and inspire new people. But they need to stay honest with themselves.
Lucie Lederhendler, BrandonIt’s appropriate to imagine myself with a superpower here: shooting out of my eyes something like lasers, but instead of heat and energy, simple movement forward in time to keep watch, marshal behaviour, or hold a seat. The spaces between panels in a comic create openings like that, for each mind to participate as itself, in a co-created world.
Patrick M. Lydon, DaejeonStories matter. Our democracy, our money, our relationships with nature, all of these are at their most basic level, stories. A culture that inherently inflicts wounds upon itself and its environment then, is doing so precisely because of its stories. The potential of NBS Comics is in its understanding, that we should do all that we can to tell better stories, together, not only as a human family, but as a part of nature.
Joe Magee, StroudThrough the process of sitting down with him and visualising his methods in the field using drawings and then photo-collages, I captured visually the solutions he was employing.
Lux Meteora, MadridComics are quite a good way to share environmental and socially accurate information, packed in small colorful bites. They are able to depict imagery, illustrate points and give a rounding point of view on issues that are sometimes seen as very complex and unsolvable.
Heeyoung Park, StrasbourgI don’t think environmental comics need to involve concrete solutions to our problems in order for them to be effective. Can NBS Comics embrace works that do not necessarily include nature-based solutions but have underlying environmental themes and are highly compelling?
Mike Rosen, PortlandEnvironmental and social justice aims do not have to be solely represented in nonfiction comics. Plenty of fictional comics, even including those with superheroes, can and have advanced this work. These are fun, informative, and motivational too.
Mark Russell, PortlandComics combine the best of the visual and text-based worlds, allowing people to read at their own rate, to stop and digest impactful moments as they occur, but also being a visual medium that can quickly convey information in a clear and immediate manner.
Clifford Thompson, BrooklynIn thinking about how to make the comics movement more popular (and it is, of course, immensely popular already), we might consider the following areas of content and aesthetics: Simplicity. Bold color. Human vulnerability. Serious and timely issues.
Chris Uttley, StroudA comic can help people to visualise and hear about environmental problems and their solutions, in ways that cut through cultural expectations and norms to inform and entertain.
Charlie la Greca Velasco, MilanIn my own experience of creating Environmental Comics for CUNY and the United Nations, I have been fortunate to witness the profound impact these comics can have on our society. However, it has been a process that has taken time and a focused commitment to the project over the course of a decade.
Shannon Wheeler, PortlandCartoons don’t do much. But comics changed me. It was MAD Magazine’s anti-establishment cartoons that inspired me to write and draw cartoons myself. The hatred for the lies from all directions steered me in better directions. I like to think that reading comics made me a better person.
Midori Yajima, CiampinoWe live in a time when too many people see scientists as distant figures, giving advice from the top of their ivory tower. Engaging with stories can break that wall, and bring the discussion even beyond, by making it accessible, relatable, and maybe even more participatory. Still, it is right within the message that challenges hide.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
500 million**.
This is a (very rough) estimate of the number of comics (of all kinds) read in the world at least monthly. 37% of people in the USA read comics at least monthly. 46% of South Koreans read comics at least weekly. 50% of teenagers in France read Manga. The global market for comics in 2019 was estimated at almost $US17 billion and is expected to grow. You get the idea.
(**Calculated by me from statistics on rates of comics readership by country multiplied by the total populations of North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. This leaves out India, which has a strong comic interest but little data on readership rates.)
In other words, a lot of people read comics. This presents a great opportunity for scientists, practitioners, and activists in the environment and social practice to share, in collaboration with comic artists, important stories to more people. If they can tell good stories.
Around the world, we continue to struggle with pervasive and insidious challenges with racism, inequity, and environmental degradation. We need to talk and communicate more, certainly. And we need to do so in new ways that reach new people and in modes that reach them where they are, in forms that are attractive to them. As scientists and activists, we need to learn how to become better storytellers. Or at least hang out with better storytellers.
This is the inspiration for this roundtable. Can we tell better and more engaging stories about our environmental and social challenges? Can we widen the circle of people who read such stories and take action? Can we use them for education and engagement? Can they create good and entertaining and useful stories?
Yes, we can.
Although the comics landscape is dominated by superheroes doing classic superhero things, there is a growing movement of comics that have environmental and social justice aims. The Nature of Cities has launched a comic series called NBSComics—Nature to Save the World, a collaboration funded by NetworkNature and the European Commission on nature-based solutions for environmental challenges. Rewriting Extinction (with almost 2M readers on webtoon) is a remarkable series of comics with a community of over 300 artists, scientists, and storytellers. Le Monde Sans Fin (World Without End), by artist Christophe Blain and scientist Jean-Marc Jancovici, is a best-selling graphic novel exploring energy and climate change. As José Alaniz discusses in this round table, even Superman, in Superman for Earth, struggled against ecological degradation. There are an increasing number of examples.
The pacing and format of comics allows people to contemplate and think between panels. And they can do so at a human-scale and in entertaining ways, engaging not just the heads of readers, but their hearts.
In social justice, likewise, there is an important history of comics that address racism, sexism, poverty, and environmental justice in ways that are frank, compelling, informative, and even entertaining. Charles Johnson in this roundtable discusses some of the history of this work. Remarkable examples include Candorville by Darrin Bell (the first black cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize) and the EJ (Environmental Justice) Chronicles, by Rebecca Bratspies and Charlie LaGreca (in this roundtable, and the banner image of at the top of this page).
But we need more.
Comics offer a unique and effective platform for addressing social and environmental challenges through storytelling. The combination of visuals and narratives in comics provides a dynamic and engaging medium to convey complex issues in a compelling manner. The visual nature of comics allows for the vivid representation of social and environmental challenges. Artists can depict the consequences of pollution, deforestation, or social inequality, bringing these issues to life and creating a lasting impact on readers. Their pacing allows people to contemplate and think between panels (unlike movies, which drive relentlessly forward).
And they can do so at a human-scale and in entertaining ways, engaging not just the heads of readers, but their hearts. They can capture the emotions and experiences of individuals affected by these challenges, fostering empathy and understanding.
Comics have the power to reach diverse audiences, including those who may not typically engage — or want to engage — with other forms of communication.
Comics are stories, typically including text, with pictures. It has always struck me that description — text + pictures = story — suggests ways for scientists, practitioners, and artists to collaborate. Scientists tend to be text-driven, too. What is a scientific journal article if not a story (text) with pictures (graphs)? Comics artists use tools with which scientists are at least vaguely familiar. That’s a a start for collaboration. Indeed, research suggests that people are less and less connected to scientific knowledge (Spiegel et al 2013). We need an additional path to science communication.
In other words, comics are big and full of potential to engage a lot of people with important stories of our shared challenges in social justice and the environment.
Let’s do more of it. But how? Read on.
References
Amy N. Spiegel, Julia McQuillan, Peter Halpin, Camillia Matuk, and Judy Diamond. 2013. Engaging Teenagers with Science Through Comics. Res Sci Educ. 43(6): 10.1007/s11165-013-9358-x.
José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published three monographs, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU Press, 2022).
Jose Alaniz
No less than Superman in “Superman for Earth” was not up to the task of solving the environmental crisis: a NIMBY protest objecting to the siting of a landfill; a new housing development in Smallville consuming farmland; or Lois expressing morality about having children in an overpopulated world. “There are no easy answers,” he concludes.
An auspicious attempt to redefine the superhero within the context of the Anthropocene’s complex systemic challenges (in the end showing up the genre’s in-built disadvantages for such a task) came in the guise of Roger Stern and Kerry Gammill’s Superman For Earth (1991).
This in-continuity DC one-shot shows the Man of Steel confronting the world’s pollution, deforestation, and mass extinction with super-powers. When they come up woefully short, the liberal bromides and late-capitalist “fixes” ring even more hollow. Still, the graphic novella effectively parlays a reader’s familiarity with the Superman mythos for an informative, fact-filled evocation of late-20th-century environmentalist angst.
The story opens with a discomfited Lois Lane telling fiancé Clark Kent about her research to prepare for an upcoming international ecology symposium which she will cover as a journalist: “… Acid rain, toxic waste, the greenhouse effect, species extinction […] we’ve done some terrible things to this world …” (n.p.). Superman notices some of these effects while flying about; we learn that Metropolis’ skies and Hob’s river have become noticeably dirtier since Perry White’s childhood and Superman’s arrival—instances of solastalgia.
As he often does, Kal-El takes it upon himself to lend a hand. But the hero’s every attempt to address this crisis only reveals how multi-faceted and fathomless it really is. In addition, Superman’s efforts are all reactive: the FBI and EPA ask him to help foil a toxic oil ring, so he does; White complains about the polluted river, so Supes goes to sweep up garbage out of it; while doing that, he notices a leaking sewage pipe and seals it up; he spots illegal logging in the Amazon, so he stops it. “I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time on any one task before,” he sighs.
The problem is too big even for the Man of Tomorrow, who discovers that modern ways of life in the US lie at the root of the country’s environmental woes. For example, a scientific analysis shows that the partially-cleaned river carries innumerable chemical pollutants (it’s not just a matter of sunken old tires and shopping carts), while even a paper recycling facility leaks deadly dioxin. “I can assure you,” its director tells our hero, “our plant meets federal standards.”
Appalled as he is by the ubiquitous presence of that dangerous substance, even in milk cartons and diapers, Superman flies again and again into a wall of neoliberal business-as-usual. Frustrated, he grouses: “Mills in Sweden are already using a safer oxygen-bleaching process in their paper production. But American mills have been slower to change. Instead, they’ve argued that the dioxin levels are too low to be a health hazard.”
A scene in the Amazonian rainforest introduces still more complexity. It opens with a panoramic shot of dark-skinned loggers chainsawing and burning the trees as terrified animals flee. They are criminally clearing the land for a “great ranch”—presumably to pasture cattle for beef. Superman stops their operation cold; the federal authorities arrive to take the perpetrators into custody. Our hero lectures them (in Portuguese) with familiar platitudes about the rainforests as a “priceless resource” for their role in the planet’s climate and so on. But the logger foreman spits at his feet, saying, “Yankee pig! You level your own forests, and then preach to us to leave ours uncut! Do you expect us to starve to protect your world?”
As Lois responds when she hears of the incident: “The United States talks big about bettering the environment, but we set a wretched example, don’t we? We’re the most conspicuous consumers.”
The story continues in this vein, with Superman repeatedly shown as not up to the task of solving this crisis, whether at a NIMBY protest objecting to the siting of a landfill; a new housing development in Smallville which is consuming farmland (“Where are all the people coming from?” Ma Kent worries); or Lois expressing doubts about having children once she and Clark marry, referencing debates about the ethics of childbirth in the Anthropocene (he answers that his alien genes may make that issue moot). “It’s such a complicated problem,” he concludes. “There are no easy answers. I’m afraid that what is needed is a major change in the way we live—maybe even the way we think!”
He’s certainly right about that, but Superman’s failures here of course owe as much to the market’s approach to the genre as to any extratextual global state of affairs. In a deeply-rooted convention, mainstream superheroes do not forcibly impose their will on society as a whole, even for its own good (as they perceive it)—if they do, they’ve become villains like Watchmen’s Adrian Veidt. So the hero must uphold a sort of generic Prime Directive, lest Superman For Earth turn into a very different dystopian story, disrupting regular series continuity, damaging the hero’s “good guy” brand, etc.
So, in this novella, Superman is stuck, in ways that productively challenge and critique the genre along with the US way of life. Stern and Gammill’s choice of the first, most iconic, “gold standard” superhero (as opposed to, say, Batman or Green Lantern) reflects their commitment to that task of deconstruction.
Steven Barnes is the NY Times bestselling, award winning author and screenwriter of over thirty novels, as well as episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, ANDROMEDA, HORROR NOIRE and the Emmy Award winning "A Stitch In Time" episode of THE OUTER LIMITS. He is also a martial artist and creator of the "Lifewriting" approach to fiction, and the "Firedance" system of self improvement (www.firedancetaichi.com). He lives in Southern California with his wife Tananarive and son Jason.
Steven Barnes
Graphic fiction is a sub-set of fiction and as such can handle any genre from romance to horror to philosophy. The question of HOW to do it correctly is certainly important and there is only one rule, one similar to that in cinema and television: Show, don’t tell.
There seem to be two questions here:
Is it valid to address real-world concerns in fiction? And
Is graphic fiction fiction?
The answer to the first is that I know of no broadly held social concern that has not been addressed in fiction. My own area of greatest interest, Science Fiction, has been described as a literature that attempts to address one of three questions:
What if?
If Only….
If this goes on…
All three of these are looking at an idea that does not exist, and then connecting to society and human psychology as we understand it (“what if a time machine existed?”) or takes a current trend or problem and extrapolates it into the future and across the horizon (“what if populations continue to increase?”). While classic era SF rarely dove deep into social concerns, the New Wave of the 60’s experimented with both language and thematics, becoming more inclusive and open-hearted.
The success of this approach even in a genre “of ideas” suggests that yes, fiction can handle anything humans imagine or experience, anything they love or fear.
The second question: “is graphic fiction fiction?” would seem to obviously be answered by “yes.” You cannot even ask the question without assuming “graphic fiction” is a sub-set of “fiction.” It is a medium, and can handle any genre from romance to horror to philosophy. The question of HOW to do it correctly is certainly important. I would say there is only one rule, one similar to that in cinema and television:
Emmalee is a writer and editor with a B.S. in Literature from Missouri State University and currently resides in Spokane, MO. She is currently the editor of TNOC's essays and fiction projects. She is also the Co-director for NBS Comics and the managing editor for SPROUT: An eco-urban poetry journal.
Emmalee Barnett
There are so many different ways to use pictures and written words to paint an enjoyable, informative story. They combine the best parts of a novel and an illustration if you ask me.
I would say yes.
I have been an avid comic reader for several years and have written a few simple comic stories with a couple of different artists as well. There’s something about telling a story alongside pictures that just helps convey the storyteller’s worldview in the most spectacular ways. Other than video, no other narrative style can convey exactly the mental image and emotions the author wishes to plant into the minds of their readers as graphic narratives can.
I personally love how diverse graphic narratives can be in the way of artistry as well as storytelling. There are so many different ways to use pictures and written words to paint an enjoyable, informative story. They combine the best parts of a novel and an illustration if you ask me. Comics are also becoming the new medium of expression amongst the younger generations. Several existing websites, creators, and media are centering themselves around the growing market and uniqueness of graphic narratives such as Webtoons, Tapas, and TNOC’s latest series NBS Comics.
As far as using comics to advance our solutions to social and environmental challenges, I would say comics are the best way to broach those difficult subjects. Comics are a very easy-to-understand approach as far as explaining complicated topics (such as Nature-based Solutions) are concerned. They make the jargon and the graphs and the data more approachable for younger readers as well as older, unknowledgeable readers. The ‘what-if’ genre is always very a compelling way to theorize what would happen to our planet if we don’t do anything, but I believe real-life examples also have a very impactful nudge towards understanding greener solutions. With graphic narratives, we can help those that don’t know exactly how the world will look if we run out of clean water, if the ocean waters rise, if the crops fail, or if the animals go extinct. We can make these broad topics of “climate change” and “extinction” more accessible and break them down into doable solutions for the general public.
Rebecca Bratspies is a Professor at CUNY School of Law, where she is the founding director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. A scholar of environmental justice, and human rights, Rebecca has written scores of scholarly works including 4 books. Her most recent book is Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names. With Charlie LaGreca-Velasco, Bratspies is co-creator of The Environmental Justice Chronicles: an award-winning series of comic books bringing environmental literacy to a new generation of environmental leaders. The ABA honored her with its 2021 Commitment to Diversity and Justice Award.
Rebecca Bratspies
The Environmental Justice Chronicles succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We proved that comics can convey sophisticated legal/environmental information, while still being fun to read.
Comics are powerful advocacy
A decade ago, artist Charlie LaGreca-Velasco and I began the Environmental Justice Chronicles—a series of graphic novels set in Forestville, a fictional town that could be any place struggling with environmental injustice. Our goal: to build a new generation of environmental leaders focused on urban environmental justice.
The Environmental Justice Chronicles succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We proved that comics can convey sophisticated legal/environmental information, while still being fun to read. The books have been read in schools around the country, featured at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum, and made into a short video (in collaboration with Mt. Sinai.)
The series began with a pun. LULU, the story’s villain, is an environmental acronym standing for “Locally-Undesirable Land Use.” LULUs are landfills, chemical factories, powerplants and other facilities that impose environmental and health risks on the surrounding community. LULUs are disproportionately sited in Black and brown communities. Naming our villain LULU intentionally evoked this unequal experience.
In Mayah’s Lot, readers learn alongside Mayah as she organizes her neighborhood to thwart Green Solution’s scheme to site a toxic waste facility in her already overburdened community. With her leadership, the abandoned lot instead becomes a park, providing the community some desperately needed greenspace. The book stands alone as a story, but also provides valuable environmental justice lessons. It introduces readers to street science, basic administrative procedures, and effective community organizing.
Bina’s Plant revisits Forestville, this time telling a fictionalized version of a real environmental justice victory—the shuttering of the Poletti Power plant, one of the dirtiest power plants in the country. This book introduces more technical skills—how to intervene in a permitting decision and explores the relationship between legal advocacy, negotiation, and community mobilization.
Troop’s Run has our heroes entering Forestville’s electoral politics, running on a climate justice platform and facing off against fossil fuel special interests. The park they created in Book 1 becomes a rallying point for their climate advocacy.
Our latest collaboration, The Earth Defenders raises awareness about the plight of environmental defenders around the world. The chapters span the globe, depicting brave environmental activists and the dangers they face as they invoke their human right to a healthy environment and defend their forests, water, land, and air. All these stories are drawn from real life. We work closely with the environmental defenders to make sure our comics are appropriate and respectful. Our mission is to amplify their stories rather than invent our own.
The Keepers tells the story of Kenya’s Sengwer People, forest dwellers being evicted from their traditional territory so their lands can become conservation lands.
Song of the Sunderbans depicts the grassroots resistance to Bangladesh’s decision to build an enormous coal-fired power plant in the Sunderbans—the largest intact mangrove forest in Asia.
The Prey Lang Patrollers, describes how Cambodia’s indigenous Kuy people have organized themselves into forest patrols to combat illegal logging in the Prey Lang forest. (coming soon). The fourth story (under development) is set in Colombia and tell of Afro-Colombian women being displaced in the name of “development.”
Our goal: to raise awareness about the dangers Environmental Defenders face, and to make sure that protecting environmental rights is on the agenda of every international conference discussing human rights or environmental protection.
Deianira is an architect and illustrator specialising in communication and visual arts.
She pursues the idea that the architect is not only a designer of buildings but an “organizer of thoughts and a social innovator”, who should be able to steer the common consciousness, raising awareness and inspiring it through his communication skills. Motivated by this sense of responsibility, she deepened her knowledge with a master's degree in Milan on sustainability issues and an advanced training course in communication and marketing for architecture in Bologna.
Deianira D’Antoni
In comics, a confidential relationship is established between the protagonist and the reader, a dialogue that stimulates creativity and prompts the reader to develop critical thinking, to reflect and open up to new and different perspectives.
When we talk about environmental and social challenges whose impacts are influenced by and affect an entire community, triggering virtuous behaviors at the small scale would allow for small, diffuse contributions with large, global impact. But how can we trigger positive and lasting change in the behavior and actions of a society saturated with media noise and information overcrowding?
The scientific and technical communities can play an important role, providing the proper tools for society (including lay public) to understand issues, read through massive amounts of data, and sift through effective solutions to undertake. A common awareness can be therefore promoted through the transfer of appropriate knowledge that can also initiate a process of raising awareness of social and environmental issues. The medium and language by which we decide to disseminate them must be well-screened to implement effective communication at multiple levels.
It is clear, however, that communicating complex issues to the general public is no small matter. In fact, the risk is to create a disparity in the dissemination of knowledge. But how can we find a linguistic code to subvert this disparity and open a dialogue with society as a whole?
Comics make it possible to systematize technical and specialized language with storytelling to make the topics covered accessible to a wide audience. But comics are not only a communication tool; in fact, in recent years several researchers have tested and analyzed their potential in the educational field. Comics fall into the category of multimodal messages because they combine verbal and visual stimuli. Multimedia messages increase arousal, focus attention, and enhance learning (Rosegard and Wilson, 2013, p. 7).
Since storytelling allows messages to be conveyed in an evocative manner, through metaphors, analogies, and symbolism in a continuous succession of meanings and signifiers, comics require the reader to make an effort to interpretation, invite them to participate, and make the communication process interactive. This is due to the fact that comics have wider margins than a text and thus leave room for interpretations arising from personal experiences and related to themes not directly expressed.
Comics creator Scott McCloud talks about this: between panels, the reader must take a position to “fill in” the progression of gaps between panels. In comics, a confidential relationship is established between the protagonist and the reader, a dialogue that stimulates creativity and prompts the reader to develop critical thinking, to reflect, and open up to new and different perspectives.
For years I have been seeking a synergy between the spheres of art and communication and the spheres of strategic planning and sustainability, with the aim of raising awareness of the issues of climate change, ecological transition, and spatial justice. This synergy would emphasize the need for a shared commitment to contributing to an environmentally and socially sustainable future. Comics is not the only method to achieve this goal, but it presents an interesting opportunity. It makes it possible to combine the “top-down” approach of the cartoonist who, starting from complex information, simplifies it by distributing it along the narration to allow the reader to orient himself; to the “bottom-up” approach of the reader who, starting from his own perception and basic knowledge, gradually immerses himself, through images and narration, in the complexity of the theme.
We could define comics as a democratic communication tool that can speak to the totality of the community, always being understandable even to less experienced readers and different age groups. The emotional drive comics is capable of generating, leveraging in the curiosity, allows to engage, inspire, and translate into the action of many, eventually triggering real change.
Besides… I’ve already tested it… a Talking Fox can explain, better than I could in words, to my little cousin, what we are capable of doing by committing all together to the environment and society!
References
Communicating Research through Comics: Transportation and Land Development | National Institute for Transportation and Communities (no date). Available at: https://nitc.trec.pdx.edu/news/communicating-research-through-comics-transportation-and-land-development.
Wylie, C.D. and Neeley, K.A. (2016) Learning Out Loud (LOL): How Comics Can Develop the Communication and Critical Thinking Abilities of Engineering Students. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18260/p.25542.
Marta Delas is a Spanish architect, illustrator, and videomaker.
Concerned about urban planning and identity, her artwork engages with local projects and initiatives, giving support to neighbourhood networks. She has been involved in many community building art projects in Madrid, Vienna, Sao Paulo and now Barcelona.
Her flashy coloured and fluid shaped language harbours a vindictive spirit, dressed with her experimental rallying cries whenever there is a chance. Together with comics and animations she is now building her own musical universe.
Marta Delas
Reading a comic sounds more fun than reading an article or a textbook. Fun is a powerful tool. So is beauty. And emotional engagement. We can use all of these tools in a comic, creating stories full of knowledge.
If we are going to “save the world”, we have to think of new ways to communicate and engage wider audiences with knowledge. Why are there many researchers passionately working on finding solutions and better practices in order to face the challenges we have ahead as a society, while our policies are not taking this knowledge into account? There is an immense gap between knowledge and the public and there are not enough resources being used to solve this problem. It is key, for our democracies to work, that decision-making is guided by knowledge. So, it is urgent for us to think of effective ways to inform and give access to it.
Reading a comic sounds more fun than reading an article or a textbook. Fun is a powerful tool. So is beauty. And emotional engagement. We can use all of these tools in a comic, creating stories full of knowledge. Text and image combined are able to introduce a great complexity, allowing us to engage an audience with a character’s story at the same time as introducing other layers of information. The target audience can determine how we tackle a subject but it is important never to lose sight of the entertaining side of a comic. For these stories to reach a bigger number of people, they need to be able to be read for leisure. We know there is a wide audience for stories, Netflix series pop up constantly in our daily conversations. But watching a series is something we do for recreation, not necessarily to become informed.
We also need to acknowledge, even if we are analogical paper lovers, that nowadays communication is ruled by screens. Comic books need to continue to exist (please!) but it is fundamental that comics can be brought into a screen, and many already have. This makes them even a more powerful tool, being able to fit into mainstream platforms such as, for example, Instagram. Many comic writers have adapted their format to this platform, creating short comic trips with 10 images, the maximum number the platform allows to be published at the same time. This strategy is important: condensing information to what the public is used to. Communication has become quicker; attention spans have shrunk in the past years, and stories need to catch the reader’s attention rapidly, in order to ensure it doesn’t get “scrolled on”.
The same way comics are a fantastic way to educate and engage, it is crucial that we explore other forms of communication too, that can help us raise awareness on important topics. Videos can be very useful in order to be shared in other popular social media platforms such as TikTok and Youtube. TikTok has over 1 billion monthly users worldwide, for example. It is essential that we recognize the potential of these platforms for educational purposes in order to get knowledge out of research institutions’ walls. There is a lot at stake.
Dr. Darren Fisher makes comic-based explainers and illustrations, turning complex ideas and subjective experiences into visual communication with a twist. Some recent projects include book Illustrations emphasising the importance of workplace health and safety through a series of gritty and graphic depictions of disability, told straight from lived experience; and an animated story-reel informing about an EU-funded scientific project to provide the knowledge base needed to make the political goal of conserving 30% of Europe's nature by 2030 reality. More recently Dr. Fisher created an animated comic shown at 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). He currently resides in Austria and volunteer as a drawing demonstrator and facilitator with SOS Kinderdorf, an independent, non-governmental organization that provides humanitarian assistance to children in need.
Darren Fisher
One of the things I love about comics is how simple they can be, and how low the bar is to entry is. More people telling their stories in this medium can only help to promote visual storytelling as a way to understand and talk about the great challenges we face in meaningful and impactful ways.
I feel like nowadays it’s not enough to just produce comics and put them online. You need to integrate with other media and embrace social media. This means creating reels for Instagram, motion comics for YouTube, discussing on Twitter, and continuing the conversations on podcasts and livestreams. Anything to promote the message further.
Comics can also embrace a transmedia approach, where you also need to access other media to get the full picture. Unless you’re one of the big publishers and producing comics with established mainstream characters, it’s going to be difficult to make an impact, regardless of the quality of your product. So, you need to think about all the different angles of promotion that are possible. We also might think about how the images from these comics and the storylines can be promoted at related events, for example protest rallies, or included as part of relevant NGOs such as Greenpeace in their actions. Joining forces with like-minded initiatives to broaden the reach of comic-based visual storytelling is a win-win scenario. They get to lean into a bank of campaign-ready images, and we get to expand the reach of comic-based visual storytelling.
As for the stories themselves, you want to hear from as many different people as possible and be ready to publish outside your comfort zone or personal preference. Incorporate as many different styles as possible and be willing to take risks. Of course, you might offend someone by publishing unconventional comics outside the mainstream. But that’s okay, it’s all part of making an impact. You want a huge diversity of vectors to approach the issues from, across genre and voice. Stories should be told from deeply personal first-person perspectives and high-level narratives that give the lie of the land regarding the complexities of biodiversity and conservation, and everything in between. I think variety will help to give a lot more opportunities for resonating with a wide base of people, connecting on the frequency that works best be it emotional or cerebral, and invigorating some kind of meaningful response. We know comics can do this uniquely, provided people take the time to engage. So first you need to cut through the noise, pop up often enough on a multitude of different channels, and have enough choice of offerings that you increase the chances of connecting with people.
That only touches on the surface of curation and distribution. The practice of making is itself incredibly valuable as a way to better understand the world and ourselves. Running drawing and comics workshops where people work with artists to learn how to tell their own story of connection to nature, and how to share that story online, would be a powerful companion piece to your efforts. This would say loudly and clearly that comics are a democratised medium. One of the things I love about comics is how simple they can be, and how low the bar is to entry is. You put one picture next to another, add some text, maybe some symbols, and you’ve good some kind of a story starting to form. Everyone can tell their story in this way, basically any type of story they want, on any sort of subject matter. There’s no limit to budgets; anything you want to show is possible, provided you have the time. More people telling their stories in this medium, and more frequency of seeing comics language in a variety of contexts, can only help in the aim of promoting visual storytelling as a way to understand and talk about the great challenges we face in meaningful and impactful ways.
Ivan is a highly respected art director, photographer and film maker who has worked for a number of international design agencies in both the UK and Australia. His expertise encompasses a variety of contemporary and classic styles, though he is perhaps best known for his clean and functional approach to graphic design.
Ivan Gajos
In order to engage ordinary people and inspire the next generation we need to go beyond traditional communication methods and embrace more creative storytelling. Comics have a superpower that makes them especially useful when communicating social and environmental challenges.
In a sector often characterised by overwhelming complexity, a constant barrage of information and public misinformation, effectively communicating social and environmental challenges has never been more important. Enter comics—a remarkable medium that can tackle complex themes, challenge preconceived ideas and engage readers with mature storytelling and thought-provoking narratives.
In order to engage ordinary people and inspire the next generation we need to go beyond traditional communication methods and embrace more creative storytelling. Comics have a superpower that makes them especially useful when communicating social and environmental challenges: comics can convey complex concepts in accessible and engaging ways. When used well, comics can educate, inspire, and trigger journeys of discovery without compromising scientific integrity.
Comic artists have a number of tools at their disposal to convey complex concepts whilst maintaining the delicate balance between accuracy and clarity. Through concise dialogue, vivid imagery and visual metaphors, comics have the power to illuminate the most complex scientific concepts, transforming impenetrable jargon into a compelling and comprehensible story.
Comics can present multiple narratives on a single page—whether they be different timelines or concurrent events unfolding in parallel. While movies can achieve this with jump cuts, comics excel at conveying complex narrative ideas in a simple and more powerful manner. A single page, read panel by panel or viewed as a whole, can convey information, emotions, and ideas simultaneously through the interplay of visuals and text.
In the comic “Watchmen” by Alan Moore the story unfolds through a series of interconnected flashbacks, present-day events, and various character perspectives. This allows for a complex exploration of characters and their backstories encouraging the reader to piece together information to uncover the story. This mastery of visual storytelling sets comics apart from other media forms.
Unlike movies, comics can be read at a reader’s own pace. A reader can effortlessly rewind, pause or fast-forward in order to fully grasp a new concept or revisit a section that requires deeper understanding. By manipulating panel size, layout, and employing visual techniques such as transitions, artists can control the pacing and rhythm of the narrative. This level of control is unparalleled in other media forms, where timing is dictated by factors such as screen time and the experience is often more linear.
Comics also often invite readers to actively engage their imagination by leaving certain details open to interpretation. The limited visual information in each panel encourages readers to fill in the gaps and imagine the spaces between panels or the moments preceding and following depicted scenes.
The comic “Maus” by Art Spiegelman tells the story of the Holocaust, with Jews portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. Spiegelman uses a minimalist art style and utilises visual metaphors, symbolism, and ambiguous imagery throughout the comic. By leaving certain details open to interpretation, “Maus” encourages readers to engage actively with the comic and draw their own conclusions. This interactive engagement fosters a deeper connection between the reader and the comic, immersing them in the story and allowing for a more personal and meaningful experience.
As the world becomes increasingly fast-paced and inundated with bite-sized information and clickbait articles, comics stand apart as an approachable medium for conveying complex ideas, inspiring readers and engaging wildly diverse audiences. By embracing the transformative power of comics, we can make our work more accessible and engaging, and connect with readers on a deeper level, inspiring emotions, and creating art that is cherished.
David makes art with ecology, to inquire and learn. He researches, publishes, and works internationally with ecosystems and their inhabitants, using images, poetic texts, walking and sculptural installations to generate dialogues that question climate change, species extinction, urban development, the nature of water transdisciplinarity and ecopedagogy for ‘capable futures’.
David Haley
It’s time for diverse superheroes to story our planet into many futures beyond modernity’s monoculture, be they from Gotham City, Kolkata, or our own home towns.
Storying Our World
In 1985, in a crowded Kolkata spice market, a man cleared a space by chanting and then sat on the floor. From a large cotton sack, he pulled some scrolls. He continued to chant and the gathered crowd waited in anticipation while he decided which scroll to use. Eventually, he pulled a thread to release a scroll. He rocked up onto his haunches and chanted loudly as he unravelled the scroll, pointing to a hand-painted image. People in the audience (now six or eight deep) interacted as subsequent images were revealed. The sequence of images told the story of a man and his family having problems with people in his village, as the rains persisted to fall. Eventually, the man, his family, and his livestock were on top of a hill, while others drowned. The final frame of the story saw a helicopter fly in to save the man, his family and animals. This was a latter day rendering of Noah, with the ark transformed into a helicopter. Bengal is no stranger to flooding, but in 1985 few people knew about the climate emergency. They did know that deforestation in the foothills of the Himalayas was not a good thing and that floods were becoming more frequent and more devastating. Through his Bengali folk-style comic, this Phart storyteller/artist was effectively prophesying what the Rio Earth Summit made public in 1992.
Phart storyteller. Photo: David Haley 1985
As far as we know, people have storied (made and told stories) their world in words and pictures since Paleolithic times, over 47,000 years ago. The making and telling of stories, as one integral act is an important process to understanding the dynamic processes of neurological development and “fundamental culture” (Machado de Oliveria 2021, Morin 2006). This is how our belief systems are formed.
We may speculate that, orally, “In the beginning there was the Word…” and graphic pictures certainly predated written text, possibly accompanied by some forms of performance to celebrate the natural world, rights of passage and great events (Boal 2008). Then things changed irrevocably about 5,000 years ago with the Fertile Crescent / Cradle of Civilization, when people changed their agricultural and trading practices, became sedentary and invented cities. They also started to develop picture sequences that became text and by 3400 BC were being collected in city-state libraries, like that at Uruk in Sumaria.
We can then fast-track through Alexandria, Ancient Greece, Rome, China, the European Middle Ages and the invention of the mechanical printing press to comics of Europe, America and Japan of the 20th Century.
The important thing throughout this history was the story; a sequence of moments or incidents that in a linear or circular fashion make some sort of sense to tell us something. The combination of pictures and text, evokes two of our senses simultaneously. The form, the making and the telling, provide the means of creating and communicating that emerge as another thing. As the English artist, David Hockney repeated as a mantra in his film, A Day On The Grand Canal With The Emperor Of China, surface is illusion but so is depth: “The way we depict space determines what we do with it” (Hockney 1998). And comics generate their own space, or multiple spaces within each medium they appear. And as we know, “the most moral act of all is the creation of space for life to move onwards” (Pirsig 1993).
Not childish, but childlike, these multi-dimensional, multi-perspectival worldviews allow dreams to pass through what society and formal education teach us to believe is reality. They expand the possibilities of our ontological existence to experience pre-modernity understandings of being in the world. In this sense, they make way for the possibilities of humour, serious comedy, lampooning and the paradoxical insights of Trickster (Hyde 2008).
It’s time for diverse superheroes to story our planet into many futures beyond modernity’s monoculture, be they from Gotham City, Kolkata, or our own home towns.
References
Boal, Augusto. (2008) Theatre of the Oppressed (Get Political). Pluto Press, Sidmouth, England
Hockney, David (1998) dir. Haas, Phillip. Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China. Milestone Films. https://milestonefilms.com/products/day-on-the-grand-canal-with-the-emperor-of-chinga (Accessed 30 January 2023)
Hyde, Lewis (2008), Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture, Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa (2021) Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books, Berkley, California
Morin, Edgar. (2006) Restricted Complexity, General Complexity. http://cogprints.org/5217/1/Morin.pdf (Retrieved 27.02.18) p. 10.
Pirsig, Robert. M. (1993) Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Black Swan, London p.407
John Hyatt is a painter, digital artist, video artist, photographer, designer, musician, printmaker, author and sculptor.
As an artist, Hyatt has exhibited in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Portugal, Japan, the UK and the USA. He has a long and varied career and involvement in cultural practices, pedagogy, industry, urban regeneration, and communities. A transdisciplinary theorist, he is a polymath with an interest in arts and sciences.
John Hyatt
I love the medium and the more well-made comics that can inform and emotionally move us rather than preach and that carry a positive, planet-friendly, life-affirming message the better!
Deception of the Ignorant
It was the comics’ author/artist, Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit”, who was first to exploit the pedagogical potential of comics. Back in the 1950s, he drew comic books for the US Army on how to mend and maintain jeeps. They were easy to use and understand motor-pool graphic training manuals for the average American squaddie to follow and learn from. Of course, it helped that Eisner was a genius (and I never use the term lightly). However, a training manual is not a comic. The art approaches the diagrammatic, the words are instructional. It does not have a depth of interaction between story and art that gives the medium its power. Words created the whole of literature and mark-making underlies all visual art. In comics, there is the mixture of both and that can be potentially greater than the sum of the parts. I maintain that to be truly effective the medium must move you emotionally and that is not easy. Craig Thompson’s “Blankets” comes to mind.
Comic book art is a craft but one that can be mastered without massive investment in kit. A pencil and paper with a dip pen and brush can produce something as wonderful as Chester Brown’s “Yummy Fur”. The craft of comics is one of economy and depth and, like it or not, entertainment. Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing” delivered a powerful message on ecology but within the complexity of a good plot and a subversion of the monster genre. Moore and Dave Gibbons’ epic, “Watchmen”, intended to bring the vigilante meta-story arc (running through comics since Eisner’s vigilante “Spirit”) to a close. Yet, for every progressive and positive message, today, there is an endless stream of the dark and the violent. Frank Miller’s right-wing, libertarian visions of “Dark Knight” Batman and the rancid DC follow-up perversions of the “Watchmen” cast of characters, have led to a sewer of mainstream comics that sit comfortably within the conspiracy-theory led, polarised and paranoid society that the US, to an uncomfortable extent, has become today.
Psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham, published Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, in which he alleged that certain comics were corrupting the children of America and making them delinquent. There were, it must be said, some wonderfully disturbing comics coming from EC at that time and Wertham was not without some justification. His intervention led to the Comics’ Code, a self-regulation by the industry. But those days are well-gone. Self-regulation has been side-stepped by re-categorising comic books with an inflated sense of self-importance as “graphic novels”. As mainstream comics move increasingly in search of the ultra-violent, the vigilante, and the shocking and, at prices beyond the child’s pocket sell to the adult audience that grew up with the medium, a pervasive sad, heavy, and drab gas of ideological warfare pervades the landscape. In my mind, I transpose the innocent, squaddie, comic book consumer of Eisner from a 1950s black & white Sgt. Bilko-type environment into the Proud Boys ultra-right vigilante fraternity of today: still reading comics and still absorbing but in a world that has passed through Watergate, the Iran/Contra scandal, Clinton’s impeachment, and resulted in Trump’s January 6th, 2021, US Capitol attack. Not so much “Seduction of the Innocent” but, more like, “Deception of the Ignorant”.
I am not one for Wertham style censorship, but I love the medium and the more well-made comics that can inform and emotionally move us rather than preach and that carry a positive, planet-friendly, life-affirming message the better!
Dr. Charles Johnson, University of Washington (Seattle) professor emeritus and the author of 27 books, is a novelist, philosopher, essayist, literary scholar, short-story writer, cartoonist and illustrator, an author of children’s literature, and a screen-and-teleplay writer. A MacArthur fellow, Dr. Johnson’s most recent publications include The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling; and All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson.
Charles Johnson
Although the work of black cartoonists in the 20th century was generally confined to the black press because of segregation, talented creators such as Ollie Harrington and Morrie Turner graphically demonstrated the ugliness of racism and the humanity of black Americans.
We think in pictures. For that reason, an image transcends language barriers and, as the old saying goes, is literally worth a thousand words. As humans, we’ve expressed ourselves in writing for perhaps 6,000 years. But visual creative expression in drawings and paintings reaches back 45,000 years to the image of a pig with warts and bristles drawn on a cave wall on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and even farther back 73,000 years to crosshatch lines on a rock found recently in a South African cave.
Everywhere we look, we are surrounded by visual images. So it has been all our lives, and even more so today when literacy is in decline. The creators of those images, whether they are painters, illustrators, editorial cartoonists or comic strip creators, have always been my heroes. Despite the fact that I’m best known as a literary writer, theirs is the first creative tribe I’ve belonged to, professionally, since I was seventeen. Early in my first career I learned that comic artists have to develop a thick skin because the work we do most often is aimed at shaking up the status quo and, like all good art, having an impact on a viewer’s thoughts and perceptions. Here’s an example of what I mean:
In the 1860s and 1870s, “Boss” Tweed in New York City wielded such power through patronage, kickbacks, and spurious public works projects that he and the “Tweed Ring” managed to steal $45 million from NYC. Political cartoonist Thomas Nast is credited with helping to bring down Tweed, who was convicted of corruption in 1873, through savage cartoons—140 in all—he drew for Harper’s Weekly. Nast, also known for creating the elephant and donkey symbols for the Republican and Democratic parties as well as the classic image of Santa Claus, so infuriated “Boss” Tweed that he once swore, “Let’s stop those damned pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can’t read—but damn it, they can see pictures.”
Tweed’s cronies threatened Nast, who left NYC for his own safety. The editorial staff of the satirical French publication Charlie Hedbo was not so lucky. A satirical cartoon of the prophet Muhammad, first published in 2006 in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, then in Charlie Hedbo, led to protests by offended Muslims. In January 2015, two brothers who cited their allegiance to al-Qaeda attacked the Paris newspaper and killed twelve people. Even today the editors require police protection.
These are cautionary tales for comic artists, who in the Western world live by the credo that there are no sacred cows in politics, religion, culture, or anywhere else. But all cartooning need not be—and usually isn’t—a frontal attack on corruption or dogma. Through imaginative images we can show the consequences of climate change and racial injustice in ways that nothing else—not photographs, films, or language—can do as powerfully or memorably.
Although the work of black cartoonists in the 20th century was generally confined to the black press because of segregation, talented creators such as Ollie Harrington (often called the dean of black editorial cartoonists), and Morrie Turner (the first syndicated black cartoonist in the ‘60s), graphically demonstrated the ugliness of racism and the humanity of black Americans. Today that work in comics is being realized every single day in syndicated strips like “Candorville” by Darrin Bell, the first black cartoonist to receive a Pulitzer Prize for his insightful humor about racial mores, and by many others working as illustrators. Bryan Christopher Moss, who illustrated a graphic novel I co-authored last year with sci-fi writer and Afrofuturist Steven Barnes, titled The Eightfold Path, and Cliff Thompson who wrote and illustrated Big Man and the Little Men come immediately to mind. These artists demonstrated that comics are and have always been a uniquely effective medium for education, certainly for propaganda during World War II, and during the era of the Civil Rights Movement.
Bratislava-based illustrator and comic artist Eva Kunzová creates little stories about nature and people. Eva has illustrated books, created art for nature guides, and had her illustrations featured in magazines. In 2022 she took part in CreatureConserve's Mentorship program, where she created a stand-alone experimental comics zine about the Vjosa river, one of the last wild rivers in Europe.
Eva Kunzová
Using comics to bridge the communities is an amazing way to inform and inspire new people. But they need to stay honest with themselves.
There is still a bit of an underground punkish feel to comics addressing environmental or social issues. This is great, it allows authors to experiment and mold the medium into a shape that best tells the story with all its emotions. Whenever I visit zinefest, and have an opportunity not only to see all the amazing work but also to speak with passionate creators, it is quite a strong motivational kick not only for me but for other visitors as well. That is what I believe is at the core of the medium, this combination of passion, creation, and inviting community.
In my experience with social media, stories and informative content especially in the form of comics are quite popular. Perhaps contradictory to the common opinion that technology and the internet make people indifferent and detached from the real world, I find the opposite to be true. While tabling on zinefests or just meeting friends of friends, I often find that many of them are interested in nature and environmental issues, despite their primary interests being in completely different fields. These kinds of meetings or connections are hard to replicate in the internet world. On one hand, it’s easier to reach a bigger like-minded audience from across the world, but very hard to reach people living in different internet-algorithm bubbles. But that does not mean that they are not interested in environmental issues.
Using comics to bridge the communities is an amazing way to inform and inspire new people. But they need to stay honest with themselves. Trying to trick readers into reading environmental comics or trying to hide messages out of a belief that this is the only way to reach people, can be damaging to the story but also to the audience. Many people are interested in these topics even if they are not part of their main interests.
Lucie Lederhendler has been the curator of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, a community-engaged, contemporary public art gallery, since 2021. Her research is concerned with the ecosystems of mythologies and the mythologies of ecology. She is a lecturer in art history at Brandon University.
Lucie Lederhendler
It’s appropriate to imagine myself with a superpower here: shooting out of my eyes something like lasers, but instead of heat and energy, simple movement forward in time to keep watch, marshal behaviour, or hold a seat. The spaces between panels in a comic create openings like that, for each mind to participate as itself, in a co-created world.
It is obvious to me that if a message is important, it should be delivered using as many modes of communication as possible, and that the number of different modes of communication is infinite, as they overlap in gradient measure, grow and subside into the past and into the future, and adapt to endlessly changing circumstances. Communicating the climate crisis is crucial messaging, so let’s throw the whole arsenal at it.
Comics are interesting because they integrate written language, visual signifiers, and time-based modes. Even more interesting is the overwhelming use of the medium to hold stories that are speculative: humour, time travel, space travel, superpowers. Why should this be? I’m reminded of a recent roundtable about Indigenous comics, hosted by the Dunlop Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Specifically, I’m thinking about an insight offered by artist Shaun Beyale, who notes that even though comics provide a lot to the reader—writing, dialogue, images—the reader has to participate by filling in the space between the panels. I think this answers the question, because when we fill in blanks we speculate: what could be here, what would make this this story I’m in more exciting, more tragic, more like my experience of the world?
Storytelling about the future needs those blanks so that folks can occupy them, project their at-risk identities into to the future and hold them there. As Audrey Hudson writes about her community, “if Black people do not think/mark ourselves into the future, then we will get wiped out of thought”. The spaces are spaces of possibility, and they have the capacity to hold a multitude of projections.
Another thing I’m thinking about is an article summarizing the work on imagination by Mary Cheves West Perky in the early 20th-century. In one experiment, she asked participants to look at a blank wall and imagine the image of something from a certain category (“fruit” is the first example). After a while, Perky would project an extremely dim image from the same category onto the wall. Participants not only accepted the real-life photons as their own figments, but even adjusted their mind’s eye to accommodate the new image without having any awareness that they were doing so.
I love this example that allows me to take blank space out of the realm of metaphor and knock my knuckles against a wall. Not being a comic book character myself, I can’t materialize the things I imagine, but there is no doubt that there is a tight relationship between imagination and reality—not the least that something must be thought of before it can be done.
There are many fights to be fought in opposition to climate change, and many tactics to use. Holding future space, I think, is one of the most valuable, not just against despair, but against the nullification of things. It’s appropriate to imagine myself with a superpower here: shooting out of my eyes something like lasers, but instead of heat and energy, simple movement forward in time to keep watch, marshal behaviour, or hold a seat. The spaces between panels in a comic create openings like that, for each mind to participate as itself, in a co-created world.
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He writes The Possible City series, is co-founder of City as Nature (Daejeon). He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
Patrick M. Lydon
Stories matter. Our democracy, our money, our relationships with nature, all of these are at their most basic level, stories. A culture that inherently inflicts wounds upon itself and its environment then, is doing so precisely because of its stories. The potential of NBS Comics is in its understanding, that we should do all that we can to tell better stories, together, not only as a human family, but as a part of nature.
If one wants to shift the way the world works, what they need first, is a good story.
Stories are so powerful, everything about our cultures and the ways that we live, are built upon them. Narratives shape our very reality, and without stories to make sense of this Earth and Universe and our place here, we would suddenly find it immensely difficult to function as individuals, let alone as a society.
Forget that meager Cartesian label of humans as thinking beings then, we might do better to call ourselves storytelling beings.
But how wide does this powerful realm of story actually reach?
Our democracy, for example, is not merely a system of governance. It is a powerful story that articulates ideals of equality, participation, and representation. The belief in this story is what enables democratic processes and institutions to function.
Similarly, money functions as a symbolic system of exchange and value, but its worth is derived from the story that a piece of paper or a digital record is valuable. Without a shared belief in this story, there is no value in money.
Just as well, our individual and cultural relationships with nature are stories too; these stories position ourselves, our cities, and our industries in relation to the rest of this nature. A culture that inherently inflicts wounds upon itself and its environment then, is doing so precisely because of its stories, and more specifically, the position in which these stories place humans — above, below, or within — the context of nature.
But there are other stories that we might not be so familiar with; stories like those of NBS that tell us, yes, we are living beings who have important roles within a living world that includes far more than just humans. The fact that these stories exist, and that they have successfully informed ecologically sound ways of being, means that the stories we tell matter far more than we usually give them credit for.
Two frames from “The Possible City” series, depicting stories set in Osaka, Japan / CC BY-SA, Patrick M. Lydon
A few years ago I began an illustrated series called The Possible City. The series is an ongoing exploration based on these kinds of ideas. Stories matter. Many of our current cultural stories obviously inform habits that are not very beneficial to people and the environment. We need more compelling stories that resonate with the world that we think is possible.
But the matter of how we go about it is important, too.
The power of the NBS Comics project is that it it understands this: if stories are the foundations of our cultures, we should do all that we can to tell better stories, together. We should tell better stories that combine creative insights with both traditional and scientific knowledge, better stories about the world we should live in, not the one we currently inhabit. Like a FRIEC, we should also write, draw, paint, sing, perform and share these better stories, of what our human family might become if we take our proper seat at the table with the rest of nature, and listen. Most of all, we must do it, as the good Dr. David Maddox often says, across disciplines and ways of knowing. We need more projects that explore such radical transdisciplinarity, not only within human species, but all species.
NBS is too beautiful a concept to sit alone in the realm of data and statistics. It deserves a narrative revolution, one that can propel it from being a collection of definitions, to a completely new way of seeing and being.
Joe Magee is an award-winning artist, illustrator, and film maker.
He has been a regular contributor of images to a range of international publications such as Libération, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Time Magazine, New York Times and Newsweek - having upwards of two thousand images published.
Joe Magee
Through the process of sitting down with him and visualising his methods in the field using drawings and then photo-collages, I captured visually the solutions he was employing.
Comics can really help advance solutions for social and environmental challenges. When I began to illustrate my comic, The Sound of a River (which explores nature-based ways to prevent flooding in towns) in collaboration with flood management scientist Chris Uttley, I didn’t fully understand the work that Chris was doing. Through the process of sitting down with him and visualising his methods in the field using drawings and then photo-collages, I captured visually the solutions he was employing. Weaving these images and techniques into an engaging story about a young girl whose house floods meant that the whole concept, including the potential causes of, and solutions to, urban flooding could be delivered to readers in an almost subliminal way. All sorts of small details were incorporated into the images to give a richness around the subject.
My teenage daughter read the comic in about 5 minutes and I felt that she had understood the concept in a way that, maybe, just by reading some text about it might have been too dry, boring, and hard to comprehend. The images will have stayed in her head to help establish her awareness of the subject.
Lux Meteora (Madrid, 1990) is a visual artist and illustrator interested in the natural world and its kinships. She works with traditional and digital media, developing sequential images that grow into visual storytelling. She is deeply interested in the relationships between species, which she explores through images in poetic, science-rooted pieces.
Lux Meteora
Comics are quite a good way to share environmental and socially accurate information, packed in small colorful bites. They are able to depict imagery, illustrate points and give a rounding point of view on issues that are sometimes seen as very complex and unsolvable.
Hi, I am Lux. I’m a comic creator, a painter and illustrator, and I live with fear. I, along with many, sit on my chair everyday and face the looming reality of climate change. I see its effects in erratic weather events, prolonged summers, and an extended fire season. I get to draw, research and write about it, and am quite aware that this is the privileged side of things. I also study botany and illustrate other matters, but environmental issues sit under an “urgent” note on top of the table. Developing a Nature-based Solution comic makes me feel that I am adding something good to the conversation, that I am providing accurate information that perhaps the reader didn’t know before. I felt second-hand impact from wildfires and wanted to know more about why they happen and what we can do to mitigate them. This research and its result being out there is something that makes me feel purposeful, in a different way than producing a work of fiction.
Everything, really, has a social and environmental impact. The commerce where we choose to spend our money, the companies we work for, the selection of produce on our baskets, these are all purposefully defining who we want to be, and our consumption has derived, hidden impacts. Reading a good book, a good comic, matters. The content and the purpose matter. Do I want to be a consumer of fast fashion, fast food, fast superhero comics? Are those popular because they are good, or because they are easy to read? Environmentally conscious comics can also be easy to read, can also be visually intricate, and easy on the eyes. That is the goal, and we have the tools for it.
Fanzine culture makes it possible to create a thing and put it out in the world, sharing it without the need to go through editorial bureaucracy. That has aided with creation, and broadened the horizons of artmaking. Digital comics are even more accessible than printed ones, especially those including translations, availing anyone to read them on any device.
As the written word is more and more intertwined with images, as we are constantly subjected to audiovisual overwhelm, text alone provides a weaker impression than text combined with visual media. This does not have to be a sad realization, but a field of possibility.
Comics are quite a good way to share environmental and socially accurate information, packed in small colorful bites. They are able to depict imagery, illustrate points and give a rounding point of view on issues that are sometimes seen as very complex and unsolvable.
People involved in policy making are not necessarily aware of all the derived aspects of those regulations. Visual storytelling is a tool that provides a different vision, one that can perhaps bring another dimension to the effects of our environmental and social management. Our social and environmental challenges are the biggest thing we face, as a society and as a cluster of generations. I believe in throwing everything we have into that fire, including, of course, our visual stories.
As a visual artist, I am interested in exploring universal and abstract concepts such as rebirth, freedom, dreaming among many others. Drawing inspirations from deep within, I make art with the hope that my work will serve as a door to a deeper reflection and emotional connection to our true selves and the world we live in.
Heeyoung Park
I don’t think environmental comics need to involve concrete solutions to our problems in order for them to be effective. Can NBS Comics embrace works that do not necessarily include nature-based solutions but have underlying environmental themes and are highly compelling?
There are different paths that can lead to solving today’s environmental and social challenges, and comics and graphic narratives are definitely an entry point that can attract many people who enjoy visual storytelling. They can be factual or scientific, serving the purpose of educating and informing people, but today, I would like to highlight the visual narratives that have the power to connect us back to nature through emotions and imagination.
You may already be familiar with the works of Miyazaki or Tolkien, so here’s a lesser-known series by Daisuke Igarashi called “Children of the Sea”. In this story, a girl meets two boys who are said to have been raised by dugongs and have supernatural aquatic abilities. She too has a gift of her own—just like every one of us—but it’s the boys, whose names mean sky and sea, who connect her back to the waters and open her eyes to all of its wonders and hidden messages of the universe. “I think the universe is a lot like people.” “At that time, we were part of the sea itself, the universe itself.” These words remind us of the connection that’s been lost to many of us living in a modern society, but it’s the story and art that give life to these messages.
Now, that doesn’t sound like we would learn much about practical solutions to our problems, but an imaginary world like this can really pull us in, touch our emotions and push us to go beyond logical reasoning. That’s where its powers lie. I believe many would be inspired to take action if we could engage more of our emotions and intuition and actually feel that we are part of a bigger world and what that really means. Just like any close relationship, we need both our mind and heart to connect back to nature and rebuild one that’s healthier.
This is why I don’t think environmental comics need to involve concrete solutions to our problems in order for them to be effective. We need different kinds of narratives to engage all people and bridge the gap between humans and nature. So, my question is: Can NBS Comics embrace works that do not necessarily include nature-based solutions but have underlying environmental themes and are highly compelling? If the definition of NBS needs to stay specific for practical reasons, could the two work side by side, and if so, in what form?
This also leads to a more general question: How can we apply both our mind and heart to our current problems and what does that look like?
Michael Rosen’s passion for comics began when he was 11, waned at 14, and reignited at 29. Michael edited the graphic novel Oil and Water, written by Steve Duin, drawn by Shannon Wheeler (Fantagraphics Books). He co-edited three comics on COVID by Shannon Wheeler and produced by NW Disability Support for the Oregon Health Authority (over 300,000 copies distributed). He has a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering and 30 years of management experience with local and state government programs in natural resources. He is board chair for the NW Museum of Cartoon Arts. He resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife Terri.
Mike Rosen
Environmental and social justice aims do not have to be solely represented in nonfiction comics. Plenty of fictional comics, even including those with superheroes, can and have advanced this work. These are fun, informative, and motivational too.
I do believe comics can help us advance solutions to our social and environmental challenges. I see these types of books more and more in local comics shops, bookstores, and libraries. They include graphic novels on climate change, mental and physical health, government reform, the state of our democracy, racial history, and LGBTQ issues. They are prominently displayed and readily available. As such, I see the market for them are growing.
Comics are an effective tool for education and engagement. During the pandemic, through a grant from the Oregon Health Authority (Oregon’s state health agency), I worked with the cartoonist and writer Shannon Wheeler and the nonprofit Northwest Disability Support to create Covid educational comics. Over 300,000 comics, in English and Spanish, were distributed throughout Oregon. Nonprofits, medical service providers, and schools used these comics to educate children and adults on preventing Covid, the vaccine, and boosters. Three comics were produced and covered emerging issues as they arose. The comics were engaging and informative. The medium helped explain complex issues simply. And readers were drawn in by the humor and vibrant, colorful art. We also emphasized diversity in the way we represented characters. They were different ages, colors, and abilities. The overall approach was an alternative to dense and complex text. The people that read these comics were better informed and took actions to protect their health and the health of others.
Generally, I think visual storytelling has the advantage of engaging all levels of readers and especially helps younger audiences whose comprehension is improved with visual representation of the subject matter.
One way to grow this movement is by investing in these endeavors through grants. Public service messages that are complex can be simplified and the audience for the message expanded by visual storytelling. Whenever the opportunity arises, I encourage government agencies to invest in this approach to messaging. I’ve also encouraged environmental nonprofits to consider telling the story of the important work they do through comics and to approach government agencies, like the Oregon Health Authority, to fund this work.
Finally, environmental and social justice aims do not have to be solely represented in nonfiction comics. Plenty of fictional comics, even including those with superheroes, can and have advanced this work. Growing up, many of the traditional comics I read dealt with complex issues such as, drug use, social change, and environmental protection. These were fun, informative, and motivational.
Mark Russell is an author and a GLAAD, Eisner, and Ringo award-winning writer of comic books. His titles include The Flintstones, Superman: Space Age, Second Coming, and Not All Robots, among many others.
Mark Russell
Comics combine the best of the visual and text-based worlds, allowing people to read at their own rate, to stop and digest impactful moments as they occur, but also being a visual medium that can quickly convey information in a clear and immediate manner.
Yes, not only can comics help in advancing solutions to social and environmental challenges, they are uniquely qualified to do so.
Comics are an ideal medium for educating and inspiring activism for several reasons, which I will go into here, but the first and foremost being that as a medium that is both visual and textual, it works in much the same way the human brain does. In other visual media, like movies and television, the viewer is a passive observer, absorbing the information at the pace the director intended and with little time for digestion of what is being presented. The result being that, while accessible and easy to consume, much of the impact fails to take hold in the mind of the viewer because they are always having to focus on new incoming information. Printed media, like journalism and novels, lends itself well to pause and thoughtful analysis of what is being said, but it’s a good deal more laborious to consume and is not as accessible to a wide audience. Comics, on the other hand, combine the best of both worlds, allowing people to read at their own rate, to stop and digest impactful moments as they occur, but also being a visual medium that can convey information in a clear and immediate manner. This is why the 9/11 Commission printed their findings in graphic novel form. It was much easier to convey the engineering and architectural conclusions with drawings and images. And it was more accessible to a wider audience that didn’t have backgrounds in engineering and science.
And accessibility is perhaps the most important factor in any effort to educate people who are not a captive audience. It is a truism in media that if people can choose to be doing something else, they probably will. So in order to get people to willingly spend their limited time and attention on what you have to say, it helps to present it in a format they can quickly absorb and which has some immediate payoff, the way a good splash page or a panel with a high image-to-word ratio does. While this may be a gross simplification, in many cases, comics are to literature what a ten minute YouTube video is to a two-hour documentary. While the documentary might be amazing, people are generally more willing to take a chance on the ten minute video. Especially when it comes to younger audiences.
And this brings me to the third reason why I think comics are ideally suited to this mission. Their readership skews younger than other printed media. In any sort of social or political advocacy, I think it’s important to reach people while they’re still young, before identities and worldviews harden into stone. While our understanding of the world is molten and we are still sensitive to the pain of the world, this is when we need to learn about the impact we have on it. This is when we need most to feel like we are not merely passive observers, but active contributors to the future. And one of the reasons comics were created, and in particular why superhero comics were created, was to allow children, if only for a short time, to not feel like children. But to feel like they are the most powerful people in the world. And to think about what they would do to fix the world if, someday, they had the power.
Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places. Thompson teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College and the Bennington Writing Seminars. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. He was born and raised in Washington, DC, attended Oberlin College, and lives with his wife in Brooklyn, where they raised their two kids.
Clifford Thompson
In thinking about how to make the comics movement more popular (and it is, of course, immensely popular already), we might consider the following areas of content and aesthetics: Simplicity. Bold color. Human vulnerability. Serious and timely issues.
“You’re never alone,” a friend once said to me. What she meant was that when you hold an opinion, you can be sure that others hold it to. The question “How can we grow this comics movement and make it both effective and popular?” reminded me of my friend’s comment. That is to say, in thinking about what might attract large numbers of people to comics and graphic novels, a good place to start may be one’s own experience.
Mine began more than fifty years ago, when, as a boy of about seven, I picked up books of Peanuts cartoons, by Charles M. Schulz. A few years later I became a devotee of Marvel superhero comics. The simple forms of Peanuts made a lasting impression on my imagination, as did the bold colors I found in Stan Lee’s 1974 book Origins of Marvel Comics. What the two shared was an appreciation of human vulnerability; Marvel’s costumed heroes were the first who, for all their powers, exhibited the kind of emotional frailty you and I do, and of course Charlie Brown, the hero of Peanuts, was a kind of screen onto which readers could project their own insecurities. In terms of their visual appeal, the combination of Peanuts’ simple forms and Marvel’s colors informed my sensibility when it came to appreciating art, and I think others share this sensibility, if not its origin: those qualities are key components of work by the Impressionists and the Fauves.
Meanwhile, Art Spiegelman was at work on his game-changing work Maus, which demonstrated to the world that comics were a viable means of tackling serious real-world issues.
And so, in thinking about how to make the comics movement more popular (and it is, of course, immensely popular already), we might consider the following areas of content and aesthetics: Simplicity. Bold color. Human vulnerability. Serious and timely issues.
More, I think, needs to be said about simplicity. Schulz understood the power of suggestive simplicity: his characters do not look like flesh-and-blood children, but they allow us to imagine such children. Spiegelman understands it too. By contrast, at least for my own tastes—and one is never alone—many graphic novels, visually speaking, are too good, meaning that their illustrations have reached a level of (often computer-enhanced) sophistication and perfection that borders on the generic and, therefore, the boring. They do not engage the reader, at least this reader, because they ask nothing of one’s imagination, instead delivering everything right to one’s door, as it were. The Impressionists and the Fauvists understood the power of visual suggestion; photography was ending the need for technical perfection in painting, and artists were called upon to do something else, something that would make the viewer an active participant in creating visual impact rather than merely an awed onlooker. As someone once put it: Simplify, simplify.
Chris Uttley has been working for the protection and conservation of marine and freshwater habitats since his youth, working as both a practical ecologist and advising on conservation policy for aquatic ecosystems. For the last 9 years, Chris has worked at the cutting edge of nature-based solutions for climate adaptation and reducing flood risk, leading the Stroud valleys natural flood management project.
Chris Uttley
A comic can help people to visualise and hear about environmental problems and their solutions, in ways that cut through cultural expectations and norms to inform and entertain.
In summary, the answer is yes. Environmental problems are often complex and multi-faceted and don’t fit neatly into a good vs bad or straightforward paradigms. Even professionals sometimes struggle to articulate the problems in ways that everyone can understand. It can be even harder to visualise how we need things to change. That’s where storytelling and creative art can play a role and a comic is a great way of combining good art and good storytelling.
During the production of our comic, Joe Magee and I came up with the basic story very quickly, and I articulated what might be wrong with an engineered river, but explaining to Joe what the issues were and how to illustrate these, and how we want things to change was difficult and challenging. When I showed Joe photos of what a “Good” river looks like, he explained that he thought that was just “flooding” and not a healthy, well-functioning river occupying its natural floodplain. It shows that we are so used to existing in damaged and degraded ecosystems that when we are shown what “good” looks like, we think it looks wrong or a mistake, and damaged looks normal.
A comic can help people to visualise and hear about environmental problems and their solutions, in ways that cut through cultural expectations and norms to inform and entertain.
Charlie LaGreca Velasco has worked professionally in the comics industry for 20+years and began at DC Comics, where he emerged as one of the last generation of artists to grace the legendary bullpen before its closure. As a writer and cartoonist, he has created original comics for such companies, from Disney and Nickelodeon to the United Nations. Charlie's dedication to fostering literacy in socio-economically challenged schools shines through his founding of Pop Culture Classroom, an NGO that harnesses the power of comic books to promote literacy.
Charlie LaGreca Velasco
In my own experience of creating Environmental Comics for CUNY and the United Nations, I have been fortunate to witness the profound impact these comics can have on our society. However, it has been a process that has taken time and a focused commitment to the project over the course of a decade.
The following statements are made by a derelict cartoonist with no formal schooling whatsoever, other than thousands of wasted hours devouring, reading, and drawing comics.
Comics have enjoyed a small little remarkable run spanning 129 years and are still thriving today. They have firmly embedded themselves in the collective consciousness of various cultures worldwide, evolving into revered institutions, renowned national and global brands, and beloved franchises. Over the hundred plus years of existence they have explored almost every topics, genres, and artistic style—from traditional hand-painted works to digital masterpieces and even today incorporating AI—the power of comics shines through. They offer a universal accessibility and exemplify how this medium can captivate audiences in any genre or style, remaining perpetually relevant as a reflection of the times and places they emerge from.
Comics also possess the ability to weave engaging narratives that resonate deeply with our present-day realities, cultures, crises, and more. These timely stories serve an essential purpose, offering a much-needed platform for those seeking reflections of their own experiences and diverse broad themes that they can relate to. In this way, comics provide a sequential form of literary therapy, facilitating introspection, education, connection, joy, self-expression, and catharsis.
The potential for comics to broaden their audience and inspire readers to take action is undeniable, although I feel, it requires a long-term approach. It is important to acknowledge that achieving immediate success is not a realistic expectation. In today’s expansive landscape of media and art forms, to make a lasting impact often requires time and persistence, unless one has substantial resources available for extensive promotion and exposure.
Drawing from my own experience of creating Environmental Comics for CUNY and the United Nations [see image in the Bratspies contribution in this roundtable], I have been fortunate to witness the profound impact these comics can have on our society. However, it has been a process that has taken time and a focused continued commitment to the project and theme over the course of a decade. Their influence extends from individual readers, who are moved on a personal level, to entire communities or classrooms utilizing them as a tool to surmount environmental challenges and conflicts.
This artistry…the unique blend of words and pictures will only continue to shape and influence modern culture for years to come, and hopefully have a large impact on social and environmental change.
Shannon Wheeler, multiple Eisner Award winner, creator of Too Much Coffee Man, and contributor to various publications including the New Yorker, MAD Magazine, and The Onion. He lives on a volcano in Portland, OR with cats, chickens, and bees. He is easy to find, follow and like on various social media platforms. His website is tmcm.com. His many books are equally easy to find and purchase. Wheeler is currently working on a graphic novel project about his father’s commune.
Shannon Wheeler
Cartoons don’t do much. But comics changed me. It was MAD Magazine’s anti-establishment cartoons that inspired me to write and draw cartoons myself. The hatred for the lies from all directions steered me in better directions. I like to think that reading comics made me a better person.
Can comics change the world? No.
A cartoon about global warming is not going to solve our environmental crisis. Another cartoon about mass shootings is not going to change someone’s mind about the need for gun regulations. Cartoons don’t do much.
But comics changed me. At a very young age MAD Magazine taught me that advertising was not to be trusted. I learned from their cartoons, if someone told you that they could solve your problems by selling you something, they were trying to sell you something. It was their anti-establishment cartoons that inspired me to write and draw cartoons myself. The hatred for the lies that came from salesmen, politicians, and corporate shills steered me from a becoming one of those people myself. I like to think that reading comics made me a better person.
I drew a graphic novel about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighting the profound effects of an environmental disaster on everyday people. I also turned the Mueller Report into a graphic novel as a way to make the information accessible and to counteract the political spin that dominated the public discourse. Did my work change anyone’s mind? I doubt it.
But with any luck my work touched a couple people, fostered some empathy, and educated a soul or two. If I helped someone from losing their soul to the ruthless economic machinery of our modern world in the same way I was helped, I’d call that a win.
Midori Yajima is an illustrator and early career researcher in the natural sciences. Midori is visiting researcher at Trinity College Dublin and specialises in ecology and plant ecology, using traditional and mixed media for sciart and personal projects.
Midori Yajima and Cecilia de Sanctis
We live in a time when too many people see scientists as distant figures, giving advice from the top of their ivory tower. Engaging with stories can break that wall, and bring the discussion even beyond, by making it accessible, relatable, and maybe even more participatory. Still, it is right within the message that challenges hide.
Visual storytelling can definitely be a powerful tool for communication. It is able to harness complex themes in an engaging way, it sticks to the memory, or can even trigger emotional responses, rooting the understanding of something beyond the usual means used for science communication. We live in a historical time when even though more and more energy is spent in communication, too many people still see scientists as distant figures, giving advice from the top of their ivory tower. Engaging with stories can break that wall, and bring the discussion even beyond, by making it accessible, relatable, and maybe even more participatory. By opening a theme to a diverse audience, the potential of planting seeds of change just escalates, from simply sparking reflection to scaling up ideas and solutions to a greater scale, as big as the audience it reaches. If few informed (and determined) people can make a difference in a community, what could happen if the pool of people gets bigger? Bringing the discussion outside the usual set of people, means also bringing diversity to the ideas that can be generated, if the message is well delivered.
Still, it is right within the message that challenges hide. It would be important to find a narrative that does not hyper simplify concepts. Presenting a silver bullet explanation is great for delivering a message, but what happens when facts diverge from that? Especially as with social-ecological dynamics, where reality is multifaceted. After all, the mistrust that has been rising towards scientists shouldn’t all be blamed on the public.
Another challenge closely related is for the scientist to face: deconstructing our ego. It is unlikely that readers will engage if the story makes them feel silly. How to shape our communication with empathy? Of course this code switching is not easy at all for someone who dedicates so much time into a completely different dimension. But it is a direction worth exploring.
Last but not least is how to build the visual storytelling itself. Even though comics are great, there is a far greater constellation of visual means that is there available to use. No means is naturally best tailored, but the discussion often revolves around building linear stories, while sometimes this constraints complexity. Even a single image, or an abstract piece can inspire as much, depending on the audience, synthesising and still portraying a concept, just through a different lens, stimulating a different part of our brain.
So it is a matter of balance: understanding, completeness, depth in a continuous research for engaging with others in a meaningful way.
Cecilia de Sanctis is an illustrator and early career researcher in the natural sciences. She specialises in biodiversity conservation and monitoring and is a professional illustrator, her work featuring in NGOs, international organisation such as IUCN, and science communication projects.
We need nature-based solutions to not be relegated to being a buzzword but be seen as a standard when it comes to planning cities. And we need applications in the Global South to be context specific, not a copy-paste of what is done in the Global North.
“Sewage water is a bonus for us.”
This is what a farmer in the east Kolkata wetlands had to say about the traditional practice of farming using a mix of sewage and freshwater. The wetlands situated in peri-urban Kolkata, a metropolitan city in eastern India, have a fascinating history linked to the growth of the city. It is the story of the transformation of a miasmic swamp from a site of pestilence to a productive one—but a wetland whose benefits are in danger of being lost owing to urbanisation related land use changes. The question then is how can we have a broader vision for our cities that can incorporate urban ecosystems into urban policy and planning?
Nature-based solutions have become a popular concept in recent years. There is also increasing acceptance of nature-based solutions to address multiple urban sustainability challenges. But, while urbanisation in the coming decades is going to be concentrated in the Global South, nature-based solutions as a concept and in their application are more established in the Global North where much of the research has been focused. On the other hand, cities in the Global South, many of which have a scarcity of funds and capacity to invest in built infrastructure, have relied on services provided by urban ecosystems for millennia, without explicitly labelling them as nature-based solutions.
While nature-based solutions have the potential to address the urban sustainability challenges of the Global South, there are two main concerns. The first is how to incorporate urban ecosystems as nature-based solutions in urban planning when there is little recognition of their importance when it comes to addressing sustainability challenges. The second is how to ensure that nature-based solutions are not a copy-paste of what is done in the Global North but are context specific to cities in the Global South. We need “nature-based solutions” to not be relegated to being a buzzword but to be seen as a standard when it comes to planning cities.
What is required is an empirical documentation of existing urban ecosystems that already provide several ecosystem services and highlight their potential as emerging nature-based solutions in Global South cities. In this article, we look at a wetland situated in the peri-urban interface of a metropolitan city in urbanising India. We use this example to highlight how services historically provided by the wetland if viewed as emerging nature-based solutions can contribute to enhancing ecosystem services, provide a better understanding of trade-offs between ecosystem services and disservices and help address sustainability challenges in today’s urban planning.
From pestilence to productive: History of the east Kolkata wetlands
The Kolkata Metropolitan Area situated in eastern India is a megacity with a population of 14.1 million and is a historical city. The Colonial origins of Kolkata (then known as Calcutta) date back to 1690 CE when Job Charnock set up the headquarters of the British East India Company in a cluster of villages on the east bank of the River Hooghly. The choice of location for what was to become the first British imperial capital was strategic from the perspective of fostering trade and ensuring safety against invasions. However, the location was seen as less than ideal by others owing to the “marsh and rank vegetation, producing constant and unwholesome exhalations”—the saltwater lakes to the city’s east.
As the city expanded, and the population grew, the British were faced with the problems of sanitation and drainage. Originally the waste of the city was directed via canals into the River Hooghly to the west of the city. But, especially during rains, the inflow of water from the river caused flooding and led to sanitation, even epidemics, with high mortality rates. A main cause for the flooding identified in the early nineteenth century was that the drainage had been designed disregarding the topography of the city that had a natural slant towards the east into the saltwater lakes. To correct this, the British built a series of canals carrying stormwater and sewage water to the saltwater lakes that were completed by 1869 CE. Solid waste from the city was also transported eastwards in wagons and dumped in what came to be known as the Dhapa Square Mile. Initiated in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth century, the practice of farming and fishing using a mix of diverted sewage and freshwater helped support the livelihoods of people and served as a food source. Thus, by India’s Independence in 1947, the saltwater lakes began to provide two critical services for Kolkata—taking in and treating the waste of the city and generating food through fishing and farming.
Post-Independence, the development of Kolkata progressed rapidly. To accommodate the city’s growth large areas of wetland were reclaimed to set up townships, such as Salt Lake City, and for the construction of roads. The wetlands that once extended across thousands of acres began to shrink and were in danger of being completely lost. The livelihoods of the fishers and farmers were also under threat. But thanks to the efforts of individuals like Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, a sanitation engineer with the Government of West Bengal, and orders of the judiciary, 125 square kilometers of the wetlands were demarcated as the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW) and accorded protection. The EKW was also designated as a Ramsar site in 2002.
But today changes to the EKW, and areas of the wetlands beyond, have affected the multiple ecosystem services.
Wetland landscape with its mosaic of bheris and farms Photo: Seema Mundoli
A return to pestilence? Ecosystem services and disservices of east Kolkata wetlands
Provisioning ecosystem services and disservices
Sewage-based farming and fishing, important sources of livelihood and food, have both seen varying impacts over the years. Both were done using knowledge transferred from earlier generations, and their skill in finding the optimal mix of freshwater and sewage water for high productivity.
In the case of farming rice and seasonal vegetables, freshwater was used during the monsoon, and sewage water in the drier summer months. This allowed farmers to grow a second crop, with a higher yield using sewage. Sewage-based fisheries were done in bheris (ponds of varying sizes), privately owned, leased, or belonging to a cooperative. In addition to maintaining a balance of sewage and freshwater, lime (material), husks of mustard, and oilcake made from Madhuca longifolia seeds were added to ensure optimal water quality and good fish production. It was important to keep a close eye on the fish to prevent the spread of disease. While the treated sewage water provided food, organic compost such as cow dung, and more recently food waste for hotels and meat shops was also added. Both farming and fishing thus required special skill and knowledge to be productive.
But today farmers and fishers face multiple challenges. One was the changed composition of sewage from organic to toxic. Effluents from industries located within the city, from a leather unit in the wetlands, and inorganic discharge from homes into the canals have made the sewage water more toxic. Decontaminating the sewage water meant higher production costs. Water scarcity of both freshwater (due to the scarcity of rainfall) and sewage water (because of the siltation of canals, and overgrowth of water hyacinth) were another issue. Canals were also deliberately blocked or diverted due to political interference, enabling the diversion of sewage water to specific locations, and supporting the reclamation of more land to buildings. If there is not enough sewage water, then the water needs to be supplemented with fertilisers for farming and fish food in the case of fishing, increasing cost. This has other adverse effects. As one of the farmers said,
“The soil has lost its fertility, maybe from overuse of fertilisers. No more can we see earthworms in the soil.”
Fishing, and especially farming, was no longer as lucrative as it was even a few years ago.
Canals leading into saltwater lakes blocked by hyacinth and solid waste Photo: Seema Mundoli
Cultural ecosystem services and disservices
The landscape with its mosaic of land and water provides multiple cultural services. It is a site for recreation—a favourite picnic spot for residents trying to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Fishing cooperatives also allowed visitors to spend the day with facilities for children’s play areas. The scenic landscape is also a chosen place for shooting movies and television serials. But these activities have also increased littering, accumulation of garbage, and sometimes trouble from unruly and drunken visitors.
The wetlands are also home to the fishers and farmers, for whole pukurs (small ponds) are community spaces where old and young, both men and women, gather for conversation, sometimes talking for hours. While some ponds are used for bathing, others were considered sacred with a temple on its banks. During the monsoon, fishermen went to the Dargah (last resting place) of a local religious leader, Pir Mobarak Gazi at Ghutiari Shariff in the adjoining district. A saffron flag sprinkled with holy water was brought back from the Dargah, tied to a pole, and stuck in the mud, to safeguard the bheri.
Bheri with a sacred flag from the Pir Mobarak Gazi at Ghutiari Shariff Photo: Seema Mundoli
Regulating and supporting ecosystem services and disservices
The wetlands have been called the “kidneys of Kolkata” as they take in wastes from the city—a function that would otherwise have to be done by sewage treatment plants—that are used to grow food. The wetlands have enabled flood management and helped maintain water table levels in the region. They also act as carbon sinks, an important function in the era of climate-related impacts that we live in. The wetlands support biodiversity including several species of fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals including the Bengal marsh mongoose (Herpestes palustris), an endemic species found nowhere else in the world.
However, the land use changes resulting in the conversion of the wetland, have affected many of these regulating and supporting services. Water levels in tube wells had fallen in villages, and temperatures had increased. According to an interviewee,
“Now it’s impossible to work outside at noon because of the heat. Earlier I used to go to the farm in the afternoon but now I can go outside only after 4:00-4:30 pm.”
Native species of fish have been replaced by exotic varieties introduced by fishermen. The population of jackals, crabs, turtles, and snakes seem to have reduced drastically over the last 7-8 years. The fragmenting of land and changes in the quality of sewage have all affected the diversity of birds and mammals.
Nature-based solutions is still an evolving idea in the Global South. At the same time, many urban ecosystems in the region have been providing multiple ecosystem services traditionally. The east Kolkata wetlands may never have been classified thus but should be seen as an emerging nature-based solution in the Global South. Framing it thus will enable us to recognise the multiple ecosystem services going beyond the more visible ones as a source of food and livelihood.
We are not suggesting that recognising the wetlands as a nature-based solution will provide a panacea for urban sustainability challenges as there are many limitations primarily around trade-offs and ecosystem disservices too that have to be considered. Perhaps the greatest challenge continues to be in building acceptance of nature-based solutions in urban planning and policy in the context of cities in the Global South. Nature-based solutions to be meaningful has to move away from being a buzzword to a standard for attaining sustainability goals of cities.
Seema Mundoli, Abhiri Sanfui, and Harini Nagendra Bangalore, Mumbai, and Bangalore
Abhiri Sanfui is a Ph.D. scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Indian Instittue of Technology-Mumbai, India. She has done her Masters in English Literature from Jadavpur University. Her area of interest is Dalit Literature and Ecofeminism.
Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She uses social and ecological approaches to examine the factors shaping the sustainability of forests and cities in the south Asian context. Her books include “Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities” and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) (with Seema Mundoli), and “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India.
If there is a take-home message that ecologists and conservationists need to shout louder and louder, it is this: Re-wild parts of your yard!
Interior-forest specialist birds are reported to primarily require large, undisturbed forest areas in which to breed (Archer et al. 2019). Why do these species need interior forest conditions? Conservationists and research suggest that these species are vulnerable to the increased predators that are found in fragmented areas. Also, the abundance of food (e.g., insects) is often reduced when fragmentation limits the amount of vegetation and there may not be enough resources to raise chicks. Conventional thinking is that they avoid urban areas because these areas contain fragmented forests.
Over the years, my students and I have been conducting research to determine those forest birds that do and do not breed in urban areas. For example, in a review paper by Archer et al. (2019), we classified 16 species of birds as interior-forest specialists. Three species, Norther Parulas (Setophaga americana), Pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus), and Summer Tanagers (Piranga rubra), were all categorized as interior-forest specialists (Figure 1). However, one thing we noticed right off is all of the studies that helped defined these three birds as interior-forest species were primarily conducted in the Northeast of the United States.
Living in Gainesville, Florida, I and others noticed that Northern Parulas, Pileated Woodpeckers, and Summer Tanagers were calling throughout the breeding summer in multiple neighborhoods in Gainesville. Granted, these neighborhoods are typically older and contain large trees, but this evidence was anecdotal. Perhaps these three species do breed in urban neighborhoods. Pileated woodpeckers are a non-migratory species that nest and roost in cavities that they excavate in large, dead trees. Summer Tanagers and Northern Parulas are Neotropical migrant songbirds that breed in the United States and migrate to Central or South America for the winter. To explore this question, graduate student Natalie Pegg and I measured whether older neighborhoods in Gainesville, FL, contain enough vegetation to allow these birds to breed. Our overall thought was that perhaps something is different for birds breeding in the Southeast versus the Northeast United States.
We selected two older residential neighborhoods in Gainesville, FL. These neighborhoods are characterized by significant tree canopy cover (about 43% tree canopy cover on average), small forest patches occupying about 15% of the total neighborhood area, and each yard was a bit different from another yard in terms of the amount of lawn, trees, and vertical heigh structure (Figure 2). We set up bird survey transects and asked: 1) Do these species consistently occur in residential areas throughout the breeding season, and 2) are there vegetative features that seemed to attract each of these species?
Figure 2. (A) Representative yards in Suburban Heights neighborhoods. Credit: Natalie PeggFigure 2. (B) Representative yards in West Hills neighborhoods. Credit: Natalie Pegg
Aside from striking up interesting conversations with local residents — imagine walking through neighborhoods early in the morning, peering in peoples’ yards with binoculars — we detected quite a few breeding individuals throughout the summer. Northern Parulas were the most numerous (660 detections), followed by Pileated Woodpeckers (77 detections), and Summer Tanagers (51 detections). These three species were seen consistently throughout the breeding season (May–August). We concluded that these species were indeed breeding in these neighborhoods. Now, some may argue that we did not determine whether they had successfully raised offspring, which we did determine. It is possible that the breeding success is less than in areas of contiguous forest. However, we did see small family groups of at the end of the season flying about. Also, because they were consistently found throughout the season (and anecdotally, they do come back year after year), we were confident that they were breeding with some success.
Now, which parts of the neighborhoods are they found most often? How do the designs of yards and neighborhoods provide suitable breeding/foraging habitats? We determined that all three species were primarily found when vertical height structure was most prevalent within 5 meters of where a bird was spotted. What is vertical height structure? When you look from the ground to the top of the trees, the vegetation in-between is called vertical height structure. All three species occurred most often in areas with lots of vertical height structures. Additionally, Pileated woodpeckers and Summer Tanagers were found most often when small forest patches were nearby. Pileated woodpeckers were also more common in areas with more tree snags. Snags are dead or dying trees that are foraging for nesting habitats for woodpeckers. Northern Parulas were more common in areas with more oaks and also in areas with Spanish moss hanging on the trees. Overall, it seems like all three species gravitated towards areas where there were essentially lots of trees and increased vertical height structures. For more details on the study, see https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/UW500.
Interestingly, Northern Parulas are known to nest in tree epiphytes such as Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides). In Gainesville, Spanish moss is everywhere and readily available as a nesting substrate, In the northeast, it does not occur, but beard moss (Usnea longissima) does (Moldenhauer and Regelski 2020). However, beard moss is a sensitive species that tends to be found primarily in undisturbed, old-growth forests (Wetmore 2002). Thus, a partial reason for Northern Parulas not breeding in northeast urban areas may be because of the lack of beard moss in these urban landscapes!
In conclusion, we do believe that with enough vegetation in a yard and neighborhood, these species will breed in or near your yard in cities located in the southeastern United States. Probably the limiting factor is the vertical height structure. Re-wild certain areas of your yard! You can do this by planting areas of trees and bushes and simply not mowing this area (eventually, succession takes over and you get lots of vertical height structure). I (Mark Hostetler) have always been curious about and advocating that urban habitats do matter! I have blogged about the importance of stopover habitat in urban areas for migrants and the creation of residential areas that conserve biodiversity. If there is a take-home message that ecologists and conservationists need to shout louder and louder, it is this: small bits matter!
Natalie is currently a graduate research assistant at Kansas State University studying the demography of mourning doves in Kansas. She received her master’s degree from the University of Florida in the spring of 2022. There, she studied the use of residential neighborhoods during the breeding season by three avian species generally classified as interior forest specialists. Her research interests include urban ecology, resource selection, and habitat conservation.
References
Archer, J. M. J., M. E. Hostetler, G. Acomb, and R. Blair. 2019. A Systematic Review of Forest Bird Occurrence in North American Forest Fragments and the Built Environment. Landscape and Urban Planning 185:1–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2019.01.005
Moldenhauer, R. R. and Regelski, D. J. (2020). Northern Parula (Setophaga americana), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.norpar.01
Wetmore, C. (2002). Conservation assessment for Usnea longissima Ach. In the Upper Great Lakes national forests. United States Forest Service, Eastern Region, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The phenomenon of water scarcity and access to safe drinking water as a life-saving resource is a significant concern for human survival and should be recognized as such.
The growing significance of sachet water in Ghana — the machine-sealed 500ml plastic bags of drinking water, known in local parlance as “pure water” — as a primary source of drinking water for households is important. It has a major impact towards the achievement of universal access to improved drinking water in the country (Sustainable Development Goal, or SDG, 6) and should not be under-emphasized. Nonetheless, its end product of plastic pollutants poses an environmental menace to Ghana’s ecosystems and requires a balanced solution to curb the dilemma of water scarcity and ecological stewardship. Though not sustainable, the increased production and consumption of sachet water as a primary source of drinking water is an inescapable reality in rural and urban communities of Ghana today, irrespective of households’ differential experiences with accessing this product.
Granted, with surging urbanization, it is unlikely that Ghana will meet the required capacity to provide universal access to safe drinking water by relying on its piped water supply network (Moulds et al., 2022), as envisaged by SDG 6. The emergent dominance of sachet water in Ghana’s water supply landscape represents an insoluble dilemma of plastic pollution and access to safe drinking water to address the challenge of water scarcity, especially in urban communities where 51.5% of households depend on it as a safe drinking water source (GSS, 2022). It further inhibits efforts to establish the principle of water as a public good and providing access to safe and affordable drinking water as a public service.
In Ghana’s capital city, Accra, 78% of households use sachet water as a primary drinking water source (Moulds et al., 2022: 14). The ubiquity of the product in Accra and its growing presence across the country suggest that sachet water is an indispensable part of Ghana’s water landscape (ibid). As Justin Stoler (2017) posits, the ability of many West African states, including Ghana, to achieve universal access to safe drinking water depends on their willingness to incorporate the sachet water industry into an integrated drinking water platform. The significant contribution of the sachet water industry toward achieving SDG 6 is apparent. The earlier the government recognizes this and embraces a more holistic approach towards addressing the utility of sachet water and its nuisance as a plastic pollutant to the environment, the better.
There needs to be a stress on the quagmire and potentially conflicting public policy interventions to address the challenges of environmental degradation, preservation of water bodies, and the scourge of plastic pollution as an ecological and sanitation problem in Ghana. Against the background of the destruction of water bodies and the ecosystem through indiscriminate surface mining activities, popularly known as “Galamsey”, the odds are against the government finding a way out of this conundrum. The proliferation of bottled and sachet water manufacturing companies in the country adds to the problem, coupled with the general households’ preference for this product over pipe-borne water, which is perceived to be contaminated. This further compounds the issues and must be addressed effectively. Nonetheless, the official public lamentation of households’ preference for sachet water as a safe drinking water source speaks to the counterintuitive narrative of the denial of the polluted state of pipe-borne water. It is unacceptable.
Pipe-borne water is unsafe in Ghana
The argument that pipe-borne water is the safest source of drinking water in Ghana is risible. According to UNICEF, “seventy-six per cent of Ghanaian households are at risk of drinking water contaminated with faecal matter (UNICEF, 2023)”. Even more worrying is that “only four per cent of households in Ghana treat water suitably before drinking and ninety-three per cent of households do not treat water at all” (ibid). These facts reveal the limitations of the Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources’ recent public denial of the country’s contaminated state of pipe-borne water, arguing that it is the best source of drinking water. She asserts that reliance on the sachet water is a personal choice Ghanaians make, as if it is a matter of choice rather than necessity.
A girl drinks from a hand pump in the village of Moglaa, Ghana on Thursday, November 11, 2010. Source: (UNICEF/UN309598/QUARMYNE)
It cannot be true that the pipe-borne water produced and delivered to Ghanaian homes by the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) is the safest source of drinking water when, contrary to the Minister’s assertion, the 2021 population and housing census data report showed that 51.5% of urban households in the country depended on sachet water, while 33.6% of rural families survive on borehole/tube wells as a source of drinking water; compared to the 33.7% of urban families depending on pipe-borne water and 28.8% of rural households using same as their drinking water sources (GSS, 2022). The growing faith in and preference for the general population for less sustainable alternative sources of drinking water to pipe-borne water points to a critical failure of the water resource governance system in the country. This requires critical thinking to build back better and find a lasting solution to impending water scarcity and the ecological menace of the pollution that results from the mass production of plastics in the booming sachet and bottled water industry.
A woman carries a basin of water on her head as she heads back home in Savelugu, Ghana on Wednesday, November 10, 2010. Source: (UNICEF/UN128745/ASSELIN)
The phenomenon of water scarcity and access to safe drinking water as a life-saving resource is a significant concern for human survival and should be recognized as such. The politicization of this glaring problem of the contaminated state of pipe-borne water in the country is both baffling and worrisome. Access to safe drinking water is central to the sustainable development aspirations of Ghanaian households, and it is crucial it is for public health, socio-economic development, and healthy ecosystem development (UN, 2023).
The challenge of the unsustainability of sachet water
Indeed, reliance only on sachet water as a source of safe drinking water is unsustainable, but clearly depicts a much broader problem of the deplorable state of affairs in the wake of water scarcity, the contaminated state of pipe-borne water, and water system governance paralysis in the country. A few decades ago, access to pipe-borne water significantly meant access to clean water and governments in West Africa prided themselves on delivering access to pipe-borne water in homes and businesses as remarkable achievements worth commendation. Today, access to pipe-borne water in Ghana means nothing more than another contaminated water source. The worst is that plastic bottled and sachet water, regardless of its consequential end product of a disposable pollutant in our environment, is perceived as a safe alternative water source in our homes compared to tap water.
How did we end up here? The answer to this question is plausible: pipe-borne water is not a reliable source of safe drinking water anymore.
The mass production of plastics and pollution
The worrisome media report of a booming global plastic water industry with over one million bottles of water sold every minute worldwide in an industry that shows no sign of slowing down speaks to a catastrophic consequence of pervasive pollution of our ecosystem. The situation in Ghana is the same. Talk less about what the increasing patronage of packaged water products does to our psyche and the further emphasis on these sales doubling by 2030, according to a report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UN, 2023).
A chocked drainage of plastic and domestic refuse at Chorkor, a Suburb of Accra, Ghana. Source: (AUCC community project, 2019)
This calls for our attention to environmental stewardship, considering the threats mass production of single-use plastic poses to our environments, such as water quality degradation, blocked drains, localized flooding, and ecological degradation (Moulds et al., 2022). Wardrop et al. (2017) estimate that Ghana produced 14,000 tons of plastic waste in 2015, consuming 8.2 billion packaged water (ibid: 17). Given the current growth of the sachet water industry, we must activate our commitment to environmental stewardship, to protecting the environment and hold in check the desire to profit from a booming industry while recognizing the need not to undermine public water utility, the traditional notion of water as a fundamental human right, and establishing a system of water governance which views water as a public good (Moulds et al., 2022: 17).
Common sense solutions are valuable
Finding balanced solutions to the dilemma of increased plastic waste generated from mass production and consumption of sachet water and the utility of the product as an alternative and complementary choice of safe drinking water source requires a holistic view and approach to the compounded issues enumerated above.
Essentially, I subscribe to the idea of Gillian Tett (2021) that finding solutions for public sector challenges requires a much broader view of the problems than relying on hard science and one set of limited intellectual tools to solve them. Beyond the reliance on hard science and big data for effective responses to fast-moving challenges, such as lack of access to safe drinking water and the plastic pollution menace, it is crucial to recognize the significance of what she calls the “soft” science to understand human behaviour and culture. Tett (2021) posits that it is a profound mistake to consider relying on one set of intellectual tools deployed with tunnel vision to solve public policy problems. A lateral vision is needed to appreciate the broader human context and how elements outside the model of the extensive data set or scientific trial could affect what is happening (ibid).
An interview with a surface mining project supervisor at Anyinam community, Eastern Region of Ghana. Source: (AUCC Field Report, 2019)
Drawing insights from her postulation gives me the optimism to grasp the possible solution to the paradox of “faith in sachet water” in Ghana. Building partnerships with the private sector stakeholders, civil society groups, and the local communities and resorting to commonsense approaches, such as intensive plastic reuse, recycling, and innovative use of plastics for household needs, such as “trashy bags” initiatives, would go a long way to address the environmental challenge and re-establish public confidence in the water and sanitation management systems in the country.
Likewise, our society’s imprudence of a preference for a source of life-threatening breeding pollutants that endangers biodiversity, aquaculture, and animal species with a bearing on our survival as humans. Such a call for a diverse spectrum of commonsense solutions and efforts at building resilient partnerships helps create local coping mechanisms to address the myriad problems crippling the water governance system of the country. It will inure to the advantage of the government to move from denialism to making efforts to renew public confidence in tap water quality as a priority to promote water security. This is not aberrant with the SDG 6 advocacy for strengthening local community participation in water and sanitation management. Such participatory water governance mechanisms offer the best chance to re-establish the principle of providing water as a public service (Moulds et al., 2022: 18).
Moulds, S., Chan, A., Tetteh, J., Bixby, H., Owusu, G., Agyei-Mensah, S., . . . Templeton, M. (2022). Sachet Water in Ghana: A spatiotemporal analysis of the recent upward trend in consumption and its relationship with changing household characteristics, 2010-2017. PLOS ONE, 17(1), 1-22.
Stoler, J. (2012, December). Improved but unsustainable: accounting for sachet water in post-2015 goals for global safe water. Journal for Tropical Medicine and International Health, 17(12), 1506-1508.
Tett, G. (2021, December ). Listening to Social Silence: Anthropology is vital for building back better. Finance and Development, 37-39.
(2023, April 8). Retrieved from UNICEF Ghana: https://www.unicef.org/ghana/water#:~:text=Seventy%20six%20per%20cent%20of,not%20treat%20water%20at%20all.
Wardrop, N., Dzodzomenyo, M., Aryeetey, G., Hill, A., Bain, R., & Wright, J. (2017). Estimation of packaged water consumption and associated plastic waste production from household budget surveys. Environmental Research Letters, 12(7). doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa751f
Zurek, K. (2022, February 24). Sachet water main source of drinking water in Ghana – Census Report. Accra, Greater Accra, Ghana. Retrieved April 9, 2023, from https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/sachet-water-main-source-of-drinking-water-in-ghana-census-report.html#:~:text=The%20census%20data%20also%20found,was%20used%20by%2028.8%25%20of
To ensure the sustainability of life in the city, urban green spaces must be accessible and exist in their multiple types, forms, and dimensions.
As urbanization intensifies around the world, and the devastating effects of global warming are increasingly evident, it is vital to promote urban ecosystems as a tool to achieve ecological balance within the city. Urban ecosystems are the base to guarantee healthy and sustainable places to live, work and visit. Urban settlements can exist in ecological balance and, in fact, without it, urban areas as we know them, have their days numbered. Ecological balance ensures urban developments are sustained and resilient through time.
Designing cities begins with planning at a larger scale. Nature is not governed by the administrative limits imposed by humans. Ecological limits have been thoroughly studied and it is imperative that we respect them. Cities must accommodate for the natural elements and cycles, not the other way around. It is essential to maintain, preserve, and even increase the area of existing rural and natural areas so that urban areas are surrounded by natural environments. In fact, natural areas must enter rural areas, and rural areas must permeate the urban space.
Green corridors bring the ecological structure to and through the city and are essential elements for the ecological balance of cities. The ecological link between the countryside and the city must be restored, promoted, and nurtured as if life in the city depended on it. Because it does! Human connection to nature has been the basis of our existence for millions of years and, in a world where the effects of climate change reign, it is of the utmost importance that cities position themselves in favor of the transition to more sustainable and resilient environments and where the ecological services biodiversity are promoted.
The success of cities, which want to be green and based on nature, is only possible through a better knowledge of the entire ecological cycle, including air, water, soil, plants, and fauna, and through careful considerations about environmental quality, sustainability, and the well-being of populations. Urban ecosystems and green corridors are key elements of the city’s infrastructure, offering technical solutions to complex problems, such as stormwater management, for example. They are social spaces that provide healthy, sustainable, and pleasant spaces for the population’s contact with nature and are a support for biodiversity.
Parque Urbano do Infantado, Loures. Photo: Maria Aragão
All elements of the urban green structure are an important part of the system, each contributing to the balance of the whole. Planted medians and islands, permeable pavements, and small landscaped areas around buildings don’t have much spatial expression on their own, but together are essential for the stormwater management of the city. Balconies and green roofs scattered throughout the city are crucial for insects on their pollen collection route and as resting places for birds on their migratory journeys. The large municipal park is as important to the urban ecological structure as the alignment of trees or the small residential garden. A balanced system works as a whole. As time passes, the greater or lesser capacity for resilience of the elements of the urban landscape is what allows, or does not, for the balance in the system, because this system is open, dynamic, adaptable, and in permanent transformation. The design, development, and evolution of the city must be guided by the pursuit of ecological balance. To ensure the sustainability of life in the city, urban green spaces must be accessible and exist in their multiple types, forms, and dimensions.
The city carries out a commitment to sustainable development under the motto “Respira Pinamar”, inviting residents and tourists to walk, ride a bike, and meet along a revitalized public space that allows perceiving nature and art through education and community awareness.
In Argentina, as a long weekend arrives many people living in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires flee from the concrete and asphalt in search of Nature. There are many destination possibilities, but one that is undoubtedly a favorite is a garden city, 370 km south of Buenos Aires, which receives a million tourists in summer.
Its name Pinamar — pine + sea — describes the cultural landscape where sea and forest meet, following the vision of an urban architect 70 years ago. Jorge Bunge, Pinamar’s founder, brought the idea of a garden city from Germany, where he studied Urban Planning at the Polytechnic School of Munich. Upon his return to Argentina in 1939, he began to develop the idea of building a 2,700-hectare garden city.
Thus, Pinamar had an origin that makes it almost unique in Argentina: it was conceived as a private initiative of a company that decided to develop its own land. This development was made with a particular urban vision: respecting the topography of the dunes but transforming the original natural landscape into a human-made one, creating a pine forest on grassy dunes (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 First plantations to fix dunes (Pinamar SA).
Its strong identity is linked to a way of building a city in the middle of pines, acacias, and eucalyptus forests that completely reject the colonial legacy imposed by the Spanish conquerors in Latin America: cities with very little vegetation arranged in a grid.
In Pinamar, the urban matrix expanded over large lots with garden retreats, curved streets, and tree-lined avenues (Fig. 2). A technical management of the urbanization was also used with a layout that follows the unevenness of the topography, the curves of the dunes, the rain runoff, and areas reserved for parks that include water channels.
Fig. 2 Large lots with garden retreats and curved streets (A.Faggi).
There are very few examples of garden cities in Argentina: Palomar Hills in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, also built in 1944 by German architects, City Bell in the vicinity of La Plata, and a few other garden neighborhood projects, linked to large industrial companies and designed for the residence of their officials and workers. Almost all of them finally remained as islands surrounded by a dense built-up matrix, under pressures imposed by the advance of growing urbanization. This is not what happened in Pinamar.
The city has kept environmental qualities, especially since it had gradual urban planning designed to achieve harmony with the landscape. Today, the spirit of the garden city is maintained, but not as a static sample based on the garden-city typology that Ebenezer Howard presented in 1898, which over the course of the century in different parts of the world was biased towards transforming neighborhoods for wealthy classes. However, it is necessary to remember that this was not Howard’s motor purpose. His aim was to reform society, claiming a new social organization through an urban and territorial model. Since he was not an architect by profession, he associated with two who were: Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. Together they built the city of Letchworth, in England, as the first garden city which became an urban model of the 20th century.
Pinamar, a real estate development that was conceived as a vacation place, presents today a lively dynamic, carried out by a young municipal management group committed to sustainability. They keep the garden city identity, through a healthy balance between the origins and image of the city and the need to adapt this built landscape to the current environmental challenges. For this reason, the green is jealously maintained and today reaches 54% of its area with reforestation plans (Fig. 3). There is a forestry compensation strategy: for each pine or eucalyptus extracted, three specimens in 20-liter pots of native trees must be delivered to the municipal forestry bank.
Fig. 3 Forested areas in green (S. Anguiano)
In the planting of new specimens, an attempt is made to recreate a mixed forest where native trees, produced in the municipal nursery, are merged. These plantations provide boulevards and crossroads with greater biological diversity and improve aesthetics throughout the seasons with different textures, colors, and aromas.
The strategy means to discourage the planting of exotic pines, which although they gave the city its identity and name, do not achieve longevity and present a risk of falls by storms, which are frequent at the coast. They stopped planting Australian eucalyptus, for example, which are large trees that require a lot of water, a limited resource for a growing city.
Water for human consumption is a central theme and it is estimated monthly. Sidewalks are transformed into rain gardens to increase infiltration and prevent surface runoff and erosion (Fig. 4). These sustainable urban drainage systems are valuable water management tools. They generate considerable improvements in hydrological processes, strategically integrating runoff control elements into the urban landscape, with attractive aesthetics biotopes creating habitat and food for hummingbirds and insects such as bees and butterflies.
Fig. 4 Rain gardens on sidewalks in a main avenue (A.Faggi)
Fig. 5 Ecological restoration of dunes (A.Faggi).
Another improvement strategy is the ecological dune restoration as well as the revitalization of the public space at the waterfront (Fig.5).
The city carries out a commitment to sustainable development under the motto “Respira Pinamar”, inviting residents and tourists to walk, ride a bike, and meet along a revitalized public space that allows perceiving nature and art through Education and Community Awareness. Urban sculptures, a 5 km linear park as an aerobic corridor, interpretive walks strategically designed to enhance the landscape while incorporating recreation, and leisure areas are valuable landmarks in town. This, perhaps an unintentional and ongoing commitment, honors Howard’s inspiring ideas and underpins the transformative social ideas of the garden city model that inspired him over a hundred years ago. The city goes beyond what was built, a thoughtful set of multiple elements that surprise the length and breadth of the city. Paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks (Fig.6), those elements that Kevin Lynch defined as building the image of a city are in Pinamar exceptional.
Paths
Edges
Nodes
Districts
Landmarks
Fig.6 Distinctive elements that give the city of Pinamar its own image (A. Faggi)
In a past contribution to TNOC in 2022, we mentioned that many families moved to Pinamar.
The city had a demographic growth of 17.5%. Building construction in Pinamar has grown 225%, eight times higher than the country average. Today, the city has 40,259 inhabitants spread over 3520 hectares. In other words, it has 7 times more space per inhabitant than Howard would have allocated for his garden city. This indicates that the growth potential is huge. This opportunity for development should be accompanied by smart and efficient governance so that the city does not lose the character of a garden city in the future.
We wish it to be so!
Ana Faggi and Maria Samanta Anguiano Buenos Aires and Pinamar
On The Nature of Cities
She is a specialist in landscape design with an ecological perspective.
Currently, she is the Secretary of Landscape and Environment in the Municipality of Pinamar.
My hope is that by exploring and better understanding the zone of reciprocity, urban residents can learn to appreciate how their own health and well-being (as well as that of their families and communities) is closely linked with that of non-humans.
According to modernist philosophy, cities are “human only” spaces built by and for the exclusive use of homo sapiens ― clean, sterile, artifacts of human imagination that symbolize humanity’s separation from nature. Aside from cultivated garden plants and a handful of companion or work animals whose presence is tolerated, non-human life in cities is regarded as matter out of place: inconvenient and unwanted at best and at worst, reviled and exterminated (Houston, 2018).
A new awareness is emerging, however, which problematizes the overly simplified nature/society dualism discourse. It brings to light the fact that cities have always been assemblages of multiple species, the product of numerous human and non-human co-evolutionary processes (Alberti, 2008). Critiques from disparate literatures, including zooarchaeology, animal studies, urban environmental history, multispecies ethnography, and the post-humanities have arisen to further unsettle the notion of urban human exceptionalism that has become ingrained in popular consciousness.
Running parallel with the multispecies analysis, the subject of urban biodiversity has matured greatly within a broader framework of the urban ecological sciences. It has grown from an “ecology in the city” paradigm study of “remnant populations” to a field that looks at the numerous ecosystem services provided by non-human life in the city, and how human/non-human co-habitation can be enhanced through appropriate design. There is an emerging understanding that cities may often support greater levels of biodiversity than surrounding areas (particularly industrial agricultural zones) and can function as refuges for certain threatened species (cite). As many of the world’s fastest growing cities are on the edges of some of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, research is being conducted on how urban development and biodiversity conservation can be co-managed, supported empirically by research fields such as “reconciliation ecology”. Urban biodiversity has now become an area of global urban policy, planning, and governance, documented in the extensive “Cities and Biodiversity Outlook” report drafted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (Elmqvist, 2013).
Paperback edition will be available May 31st. Please email the author at [email protected] for digital review copies.
Mainstream studies on urban biodiversity, however, typically examine the issue through a highly reductionist lens: focusing on quantifiable data that can be extrapolated into generalizable best practices, applicable to planning and architectural strategies in any city in the world[i]. Seldom is attention paid to questions of politics and power as they apply to urban biodiversity. Which populations benefit from the ecosystem services provided by non-human life in cities, and are those populations represented in decision making processes related to biodiversity? How might certain people’s survival be closely linked with the well-being of urban non-humans? How can justice, equity and fairness for human urban residents can be furthered by forming mutually symbiotic inter-species partnerships. Going further, it can be asked whether non-humans have just as much of a “right to the city” as humans do ― are squirrels, birds, insects, amphibians, fish, fungi, weeds, and microbes as equally entitled to life and liberty in the urban ecosystem as humans?
Admittedly, answers to these questions are hard to come by on account of the paucity of research related to them. For a long time, concerns related to social justice and biodiversity conservation have been at odds with each other, with considerable tensions between communities advocating for either. There are many examples of conservationists, arising from “edenic” traditions and ideologies, seeking to create wilderness preservations that are off-limits to humans, indigenous or otherwise, even when humans may historically have played pivotal roles in the creation and functioning of those ecosystems (Heise, 2016). The separation between conservationists and social justice activists is further complicated by the fact that the divide often corresponds to race and class distinctions, with more typically white, Northern, and affluent conservationists accused by the later of caring more about animals/plants/ecosystems than they do about the suffering of members of their own species (the same critique has been similarly applied to advocates of urban greening vs environmental justice). Surely, in low-income urban communities it can be difficult to convince someone struggling to put food on their table that they should care about the well-being of the birds and the bees living around them. This alienation is compounded in cities by the so called “luxury effect”: a phenomenon where wealthier neighborhoods are observed to have higher rates of biodiversity than poorer ones (Leong, 2018).[ii]
What work has been done to try and bridge the divide between social justice and biodiversity conservation? Are there concepts that can be used to reconcile these seemingly disparate movements?
One potentially bridging framework is “biocultural diversity”. The United Nations Environment Programme coined the term ‘biocultural diversity’ in 1999 to describe the ‘inextricable link’ between the interrelated and co-evolved manifestations of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity manifesting in complex socio-ecological systems (Buizer, 2016). Primarily focusing on indigenous and traditional peoples, the study of biocultural diversity contrasts the retention of biocultural knowledge among indigenous groups against its loss as a consequence of socioeconomic modernization. With a primary focus on rural communities, urban biocultural diversity studies have been few. A few recent publications, however, have started this conversation. Focusing on changing and evolving agrobiodiversity practices in peri-urban spaces, they have put forth the key concept of ‘biocultural creativity’, or the creation rather than the preservation of biocultural diversity (Buizer, 2016). This concept can be extremely useful for framing the rebuilding of symbiotic mutualisms between humans and the non-human life in novel urban ecosystems, and for making linkages between biodiversity and social justice. Another interesting boundary concept is “multispecies environmental justice” (Haraway, 2018), that asks what environmental justice looks like when extended beyond the human.
Discussing urban biocultural multispecies diversity-justice is a complex task ― there are many angles from which to explore the relationship between humans and non-humans in cities and how they relate to broader questions of equity, fairness, and justice. Rather than producing a generalizing “unifying theory” of urban biodiversity justice that strips away the important differences, nuances, and fractal micro-stories that exist in multiple locales, I’ll instead attempt to explore broad patterns of these relationships and speculate how they may later lead to the development of a more robust theory.
My primary focus on urban human/non-human relationships is within what I refer to as the “zone of reciprocity”. This refers to a space of human/non-human relationality located in between the highly domesticated (dogs, cats, other pets, farm animals, garden vegetables, etc.) and the non-domesticated urban “wild” (non-food producing trees, wild birds, most insects, urban deer, foxes, and coyotes, for example)[iii]. Somewhere in the middle of this messy continuum is the reciprocal zone: a collection of species across the taxonomic spectrum with whom we engage in mutualistic symbiosis with on a semi-controlled, semi-chaotic manner ― a give and take based on an ethos of respect and interdependency that is resistant to both domination and diffusion.
My hope is that by exploring and better understanding the zone of reciprocity, urban residents can learn to appreciate how their own health and well-being (as well as that of their families and communities) is closely linked with that of non-humans. The direct, tangible exchanges with these handful of reciprocal species makes it clear how benefits to humans and non-humans are shared. While the survival of humanity is of course entirely dependent upon the continued health of the global ecosphere, urban ecological alienation often causes people to be under-aware of this truth. Synanthropic relationships can provide a first step towards cultivating connection, empathy, and the awareness of reciprocity with species on the outside (wilder side) of the zone, ultimately leading to the cultivation of a broader biocultural justice and ecological literacy.
There are a number of species, that while indeed synathropic, I am not including in the zone of reciprocity. For a relationship to be considered reciprocal, both entities must benefit in some way from their exchanges. This excludes so-called “nuisance species”: mice, rats, rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, skunks, and opossums. Despite, or perhaps because of their success at co-habitation with humans, these animals are commonly maligned, reviled, and systematically relocated or exterminated. While I fully support changing our relationship with these species and learning ways to co-exist with them that do not involve mass killing, disturbance, or poisoning, I am currently not including them within the zone of reciprocity as, honestly, I am presently hard pressed to see how our relationships with them could become genuinely mutually beneficial, and not just less toxic. This is not to say it’s impossible, or that models do not already exist that I am unaware of. Crows and pigeons, two other common urban “nuisance” species, have been studied for their relatively unknown and overlooked symbiosis potential (Klein, 2007). It is my hope that these two examples could serve as inspiration for creating improved human/non-human relationships with other “nuisance” species.
I’m also leaving aquatic species out this discussion, focusing instead on terrestrial animals and plants. While it is completely conceivable possible to have reciprocal relationships with aquatic life (oysters and carp are good examples), I discuss this at length already in the water chapter, and for the sake of simplicity will exclude them here.
So, then what species are within the reciprocal zone? In addition to the aforementioned pigeons, I include silkworms (and mulberry trees), bees (both honey bees and “native” bees), black soldier flies, maple trees, wine cap mushrooms, … This is admittedly a very short and limited list. There are countless other species of semi-wild edible and medicinal plants growing in cities that people have reciprocal relationships with, selectively harvesting them for food and medicine while providing protection, pruning, care, fertilization in return. Numerous studies on urban foraging detail these relationships in depth ( (Poe, 2014) (Shackleton, 2017) (McLain, 2014)), I will not replicate them here. Instead, I will discuss this handful of species as they are the few that I have had direct firsthand experience with and believe to show promise to be further developed.
Pigeons
Humans and pigeons have a fascinating and highly complicated co-evolutionary relationship. They are one of the few species that on its own accord has chosen to live alongside us in the built environment, and in so much has arguably domesticated itself. Prized by people throughout history for meat, manure, and message carrying, these beautiful birds are now commonly maligned by many urbanites, unlovingly referred to as “rats with wings” and subject to massive and costly campaigns of exclusion and extermination. Despite their undeserved poor reputation, pigeons make a fascinating subject for studying human/non-human relationships in cities. Representing true “boundary objects” (Akkerman, 2011), pigeons straddle the edges of domestic and feral, resist attempts at control, and defy modernist mythologies of cities as “human only” places.
History
The pigeon or rock dove (Columba livia) is a bird that has lived in proximity to humans for millennia and is likely the first bird to be domesticated by humans. Native to the Middle East, parts of Europe, and east to India, the aptly named rock dove would build its nests in holes in rocky cliffs, flying short distances to find food to fulfill their diet of grains, berries, and seeds. In approximately 3000 BC, the first cities were built by people in the region. Towers made of mud, stone, and clay closely resembled the native cliff habitat of pigeons and were soon colonized by the birds. Feeding off our wastes and enjoying the reduced number of predators (raptors) found there, pigeons quickly adapted to urban living, prospering among us and often preferring the built environment to their own.
The human/pigeon mutualism further developed when people became aware of their value for both meat and manure. In order to enhance their habitat, niches were carved into towers (literal “pigeon holes”) and clay pots were hung. Both served as nesting spots for the birds, a very early form of reconciliation ecology that allowed urban pigeon populations to increase. The designed habitat made it easier to catch the birds (“squab”, the meat of a young pigeon, is considered a delicacy in many places to this day) and to collect their droppings in concentrated piles (“guano”, the manure of pigeons, is a potent nitrogen-rich agricultural fertilizer)[iv]. Shortly afterwards, “dovecotes” ― structures designed purely for the use of pigeons for roosting and breeding – were constructed. Dovecotes were built in a stunning variety of architectural forms, at times resembling beehives or miniature castles, that were common features not only in early cities but on European estates as well.
The ability to keep pigeons and maintain dovecotes has not always been equitably permitted. In 17th century France, only those in landowning professional classes could maintain dovecotes, and the number of pigeon nests within was determined by the size of their lands. The pigeons of the nobility were despised by local peasants as they fed on and caused significant damage to their crops. The unjust nature of pigeon keeping and the resentment it brewed are cited as contributing factors to the French Revolution, after which many dovecotes were destroyed (Cooke, 1920).
Pigeons have a highly developed homing instinct that allows them to navigate back to their home roosts, even after being transported away for many miles. The exact mechanism that they use to navigate is still not completely understood by scientists, but it’s believed to be a combination of magnetic sensors in their heads along with their use of visual clues. Pigeon’s homing abilities were recognized very early after their domestication and were utilized for sending messages at a speed much greater than over land travel. Early pigeon message delivery systems were created where written notes could be relayed by pigeons rapidly over great distances.
Fast forward to the present day, pigeon populations are enormous in most cities, with an estimated one to seven million birds or more living in New York City alone. The birds, largely brought over to North America by Europeans in the 1600s as a food source, have readily adapted to life in the modern metropolis (Nigro, 2012). Regarded with disgust by many, pigeons are often regarded as dirty, foul creatures that make messes and spread disease. Much money is spent trying to exterminate or control their populations, with nearly one billion dollars alone in the US each year. The bad reputation of pigeons is largely undeserved, however. While it’s true they may leave droppings, about twenty-five pounds per bird each year, (Mooallem, 2006) on buildings and statues causing some damage due to their acidity, people’s concerns regarding them are mostly cosmetic. Pigeons, like all animals, may carry certain human pathogens, however they rarely pose any significant risk to healthy individuals or to the public health at large despite sensationalistic reporting that has claimed the contrary (Haag-Wackernagel, 2004) (Jerolmack, 2008).
Today, pigeon raising is still common in cities, though not as prevalent as it once was. In many cities, pigeon coops on the roofs of row houses are a common sight. The pigeons kept in these coops are typically not the average feral pigeon but are fully domesticated breeds that have been raised specially for purposes ranging from racing to homing to pure fanciful showiness. Pigeon coops are mostly wooden structures with wire siding that protect the birds and create nesting spots for them. The owner will typically release the birds each morning, allowing them to fly about freely. Because pigeons have such a strong homing instinct, they will typically return to their coop each night, especially if nests are present and food is provided. Rooftop pigeon flying, a urban pastime that transcends racial and class boundaries, is increasingly threatened by the forces of gentrification which view it as being “messy” and unfavorable to upscale development (Berger, 2013).
Pigeons, chickens
Pigeons and chickens have been domesticated for longer than any other bird species. Pigeons, the first to be domesticated, outnumbered chickens for hundreds of years. Today, however, the inverse is true ― the number of domestic chickens has greatly exceeded that of pigeons. While there are currently an estimated 250 million pigeons on earth, chickens come it at a stunning 22.7 billion, most of which are bred in confined industrial farms for human consumption (Bennett, 2018). How can that shift, and discrepancy, be explained? Pigeons, simply stated, do not grow as big as chickens, and produce fewer eggs (a hen in her prime can lay one egg a day while a pigeon may lay one or two over several weeks). Also, because they’re not capable of sustained flight, chickens are easier to contain. Taken together, these factors have made chickens more amenable to concentrated, intensive farming practices, and has led to their subsequent human-assisted global population explosion.
In consideration of this, why would anyone choose to raise pigeons over chickens? If their desired goal is simply to produce food, it wouldn’t make much sense. Raising pigeons, however, provides benefits that make it a complimentary strategy to keeping pigeons.
Pigeons are unique among domestic animals in that they still can feed themselves through foraging, an ability that has otherwise been largely de-selected for in other domestic species. In a dovecote system, pigeons are provided shelter and nesting sites (and wintertime food) but are still allowed to fly freely in search of food, returning to the nest daily to deposit manure and rear their young. In urban applications then, when permitted to forage, pigeons could be thought of as “free-range” urban birds who uses the entire city as their “pasture”.
Chickens, by comparison, are far more dependent on having food provided to them by humans. In an urban area, there are few areas where it’s possible to raise free range chickens. Most chickens will need to be put in an enclosure, in order to protect them from predators and to keep them away from gardens, which they’ll destroy if allowed to have access to them. In an enclosed area, they will very quickly strip it of vegetation. Aside from the occasional bug that hops through, enclosed chickens will be entirely dependent on food being brought to them.
By raising chickens and pigeons together, it is possible to engage in both intensive (chicken) and extensive (pigeon) parallel and complimentary agricultural strategies. Pigeon and chickens can even share the same coop ― a secure structure that can protect them from nocturnal predators[v]. Pigeons will however need separate nesting boxes high up in the coop that chickens cannot access ― chickens would likely disturb a nesting pigeon and would probably eat their babies too!
A concern that immediately arises when discussing free range pigeons is whether they are accumulating toxins in their bodies by foraging in potentially contaminated areas. One study, examining the potential use of pigeons as bioindicators of lead toxicity, has documented how pigeon blood lead levels correlate with those of children in respective New York City neighborhoods (Cai, 2016). This would suggest that their may be some concern about eating free range urban pigeons ― blood lead levels are not necessarily indicative of levels in muscle tissue. As use of pigeon manure as a fertilizer is more common than eating pigeon flesh though, I have personally run an analysis of pigeon manure with an x-ray fluorescence machine and had detected negligible amounts in the sample (1.2 parts per million). More research in this area is warranted.
Pigeons at Radix
The Radix Center provides a home to a sizable flock of pigeons who share a coop shelter with our chickens. The pigeons use the same door entrance as the chickens, but have designated nesting boxes built at the top of the coop where they are protected from the chickens (adult pigeons and chickens get along just fine, however chickens will attempt to nest in pigeon boxes and will displace pigeons and eat their eggs in the process ― the pigeon boxes are placed at a height unreachable by flightless chickens and are additionally secured with entrance reducers that exclude chickens). Pigeons build their nests in these boxes, gluing sticks and twigs together with their own manure, where they raise their young.
Many people are surprised to learn that the pigeons were initially intentionally placed at Radix and are not just feral street pigeons that moved in on their own ― pigeons on purpose, as we say. Our pigeon colony began with a group of ten birds purchased from Broadway pigeon supply in Brooklyn at six dollars each. They were an odd mix of colors and breeds, some of them having “Jesus saves” printed on their plastic leg bands. They were kept inside the coop for two weeks before being allowed to fly free ― a process called “re-homing” through which they’ll accept the new coop as home base. Once adjusted, the birds were let out and were free to come and go as they choose. They’ll often spend the day outside, perched on the roofs of neighboring buildings and coming back to Radix to sleep and feed. I do not provide any special food for the pigeons ― they peck at the leftovers of whatever the chickens have been fed and drink from the same waterers. This food, and in addition to whatever they forage, is apparently enough for them to survive and breed ― at any given time there are likely babies being raised. Over the years, the population of pigeons has fluctuated considerably. Predator pressure has pushed it down at times, and at others there seem to be twenty or more birds living in the coop. I must admit that I do not keep track of individual birds, so I truly don’t know if any of the pigeons I have now are descended from the original group of pigeons I started with several years ago or if they have been entirely displaced and replaced by feral pigeons. While I have never eaten any of our pigeons, I do occasionally scrape out their manure and use it as a garden fertilizer.
While their manure is valuable, my main purpose for keeping pigeons is for their educational and symbolic value. On one level, they are one of the few agents at Radix who regularly leave the boundaries of the property, interact with, and mix with the outside community, and return on a regular basis (honeybees may be the only other example). This helps to break down (at least my own) perceived feelings about the “permeability” of the space ― energetic and material exchanges with the world outside Radix’s fence line promote mixing and make it feel like less of an “isolated” system. On an educational level, I routinely enjoy bringing a pigeon out for people to pet or hold. Despite regularly being around them, very few people have ever had any direct contact with a pigeon. By allowing people to interact with a one, they may question their own internalized attitudes about these “rats with wings” and hopefully better appreciate these beautiful and underappreciated birds. Pigeons also travel well. When visiting local elementary schools, I have brought pigeons with me as a way to teach about urban biodiversity. After giving students an opportunity to pet the bird, we then collectively release it and watch it fly (typically) back in the direction of Radix. When the same students later come to visit, they can once again see the same bird. In this way, the pigeon provides a way for children to think differently about the spatial relationship between Radix and their school.
Figure 1 Inside of Dovecote
Silkworms/Mulberries
Silkworms (Bombyx mori) are an insect that has been raised for many centuries for their use in producing silk fibers. While more domestic than semi-wild (arguably silkworms and honeybees are the only two domesticated insect species ― a result of the extent of genetic alteration they have undergone through selective breeding), I include them within the zone of reciprocity because of the obligate symbiosis between silkworms and mulberry trees (genus morus), upon whose leaves they exclusively feed. While domestic silkworms are not naturally found anywhere in North America and depend completely on humans for their survival, mulberries are a common ruderal (disturbance tolerant) tree that grows and spreads prolifically in urban environments. The relationship between this domestic insect, wild tree, and humans makes an interesting subject for the exploration of reciprocal urban biocultural diversity.
“Sericulture”, or raising silkworms for silk production, is a practice originating in China that dates back thousands of years (Barber, 1991). In it, larval silkworms are raised in protected environments and fed the leaves of mulberry trees[vi]. As a larval caterpillar, the silkworm undergoes a rapid transformation from a tiny egg to a nearly three-inch caterpillar in a matter of weeks, gaining nearly 10,000 times its original weight. Once its growth is complete, the silkworm will spin a cocoon around itself and undergo metamorphoses into an adult silkmoth. In silk culture, this process is interrupted by placing the cocoons in an oven, or in boiling water. This kills the insect and allows people to begin unwinding the single silk thread that makes up the cocoon (about 1,000 yards in length). It is from these silk threads that silken fabrics are woven (unwinding the cocoons is a terribly labor-intensive process ― one of the reasons why commercial silk production was not widely practiced in North America[vii]). Were it allowed to complete its metamorphoses, an adult silkmoth would emerge from the cocoon as a flightless white moth that only lives for a short period, long enough only to mate and (for females) lay eggs. Because it can’t fly and contrasts so much against green leaves, it would have little chance of surviving predation in the wild and therefore poses no threat of being invasive.
While silkworms are not raised for their silk fibers at Radix, they are valued as a feedstock for animals. The mature silkworm caterpillars (or their pupae) make an excellent, high protein, fat, and calcium feed for chickens or fish (silkworm pupae are also commonly eaten by humans). By avoiding having to unwind silk cocoons, the labor costs of raising silkworms are hugely reduced. Furthermore, the droppings or “frass” produced by silkworms make a valuable fertilizer.
Apart from any utilitarian purpose, silkworms make a fantastic educational tool for children. For one, they are an extremely docile, slow-moving insect that will neither bite, sting, attempt to run away or escape confinement. Their skin is soft and fleshy and can easily be held in a child’s hand. These factors alone are great for helping children to extend empathy to insects, a group of animals that have a high “yuck factor” ― connection with them reduces disgust sensitivity and fosters compassion towards non-humans. Beyond this, their rapid growth rate and ease of care make them an effective learning tool for children with limited attention spans.
Figure 2 Silkworms
Mulberry Symbioses
Mulberries are a type of tree in the genus Morus consisting of several species found throughout the world. Morus rubra, or the red mulberry, is native to the Eastern United States and is often hybridized with the non-native white mulberry. Along with the black mulberry, these three species are commonly found in disturbed locations throughout urban environments. Producing delicious berries, mulberry fruits are enjoyed by humans and birds alike and are widespread on account of the latter’s dispersion of seeds. Some cities are home to large concentrations of mulberries (or “moriculture” farms) that are the surviving legacy of bygone attempts at establishing an American silk industry[viii].
I have found mulberries to be numerous enough in Albany that it is possible to collect enough leaves on my way to the Radix Center to sufficiently feed a colony of one-hundred plus silkworms without having any noticeable impact on the tree’s density of foliage. Regardless, I have planted them in numbers at the Radix Center for their multiple other uses. Extremely fast growing, I have placed mulberries around the periphery of the chicken run to provide shade and food for the chickens (by shaking the branches, I can cause multiple berries to drop inside the chicken’s fence, which they quickly devour). Berries not eaten by chickens become food for humans (great for jams) or for wild birds (who are far better at accessing berries in the tall, thin branches). Furthermore, the proximity of the mulberry leaves makes feeding silkworms a more convenient task.
Figure 3 Silkmoth
Maple Trees
In the late winter, when daytime temperatures push above freezing ― yet still fall below the freeze point in the night – and the number of daylight hours start to increase, the sap of maple trees (genus Acer) starts to flow from its roots to its buds as it prepares for the coming spring. The environmental triggers of temperature and light entice the tree to convert starches (stored throughout the winter in its roots) into sugars, which are carried in liquid sap upwards through the trees’ vascular system. By creating small holes in the trees’ bark, the sugary sap (a two-percent sugar content) can be collected and boiled down into maple syrup, a deliciously sweet product that is now known and sold worldwide. When employing best practices, maple trees can be sustainably tapped year after year without negatively impacting the health of trees (Berg, 2012). In this sense, maple tapping is regarded as a sustainable non-timber use of tree products, and has parallels with similar practices throughout the world including rubber tapping, pulque, and palm wine production (Osa, 2013). The flow of sap is one the first signs of spring in the region ― connection with it gives a feeling of movement, life, and animacy during a time of year that may otherwise feel endlessly bleak. While traditionally associated closely with rural life and spaces, maple tapping can be carried out in urban environments as well with little modification. A fun and multi-sensory activity, tapping urban maple trees is an excellent way to foster a sense of reciprocity, biocultural diversity and urban forest justice (Poe, Urban forest justice and the rights to wild foods, medicines, and materials in the city, 2013) among participating youth.
Maple tapping is a technology originally developed by indigenous peoples of eastern North America for whom it had great nutritional and cultural significance (Kimmerer, 2013), and is still practiced by their descendants today (Murphy, 2009). The practice was thereafter adopted by European settlers in the northeastern US and Canada (for a time maple sugar was regarded by Northern abolitionists as a morally-preferable, locally made alternative to cane sugar produced through slave labor (Sturges, 2018)). While traditionally carried out by hanging hand-collected buckets from taps or “spiles” in the sides of trees and boiling off water with locally harvested firewood, maple extraction in the later 20th century has expanded into a large-scale industry that produces millions of gallons annually. Employing yield-increasing technologies such as reverse osmosis and vacuum pumps, industrialized sugarbushes consist of miles of tubing crisscrossing the forest that deliver sap to fossil fuel powered evaporators. More recently, a high-yield method has been developed that involves cutting the tops off sapling maples that, when coupled with sophisticated technology, effectively transforms maple tapping from a perennial semi-wild practice into a highly controlled annual monoculture (Brown, 2013). The high capital costs of these innovations have made it extremely difficult for small-scale maple producers to remain competitive (Gorelick, 2016). The focus of this section will be upon more traditional technologies and practices requiring reduced capital and energetic expenses.
Within their North American range (primarily the northern and eastern half of the country, extending into southern Canada), maple trees form dense stands and are often the dominant tree species in particular ecosystems (Duchesne, 2005). The trees are abundant inside of cities within this extent as well, with maples consisting of eighty percent of all street trees in Worcester, Mass. (the trees were planted extensively in the 1950s on account of their availability and shading however they are now threatened by the Asian long-horned beetle) (Green, 2008). While the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is regarded as producing the best quantity and quality of syrup, it is possible to produce fine syrup from any tree in the acer genus including red maples, silver maples, box elders, and the Norway maple (other tree species, such as sycamores, birches, and walnuts are also tap-able but will result in low yields) (Farrell, 2013).
At the Radix Center, maple syrup production is an integral component of our urban ecosystem justice curriculum. Each year we are granted a permit from the City of Albany to tap the stands of maple trees in neighboring Lincoln Park, as well as a number of trees on public school campuses. Youth are engaged in every aspect of the process including selecting trees to be tapped, drilling and tapping, regular sap collection, and sap boiling/syrup finishing. The finished maple syrup (which does not legally need to be produced in a commercial kitchen ― unlike jams, jellies, and other added value products) can then be sold by the youth throughout the year[ix].
Figure 4 Tapped Maple Trees – Photo by Cait DennyFigure 5 Boiling Sap
Scaling up
Once you have mastered small scale syrup making, you could consider scaling up your production. At Radix, we put out approximately (50) five-gallon buckets and taps to collect sap. Large buckets are too heavy to be hung from spiles when full, so they are placed on the ground and a length of sap tubing is run from the spile through a tight-fitting hole in the lid of the bucket (buckets must be kept sealed in order to keep out rain). Sap is collected on a regular basis and transferred to a large storage barrel/pot that is kept cool by being packed in snow (it is important to keep sap cool ― if it gets too warm it becomes vulnerable to bacterial contamination/fermentation).
Black Soldier Flies
Another insect within the “zone of reciprocity” that can be partnered with for purposes of both protein production and waste management is the black soldier fly. Black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens), or BSF, are a species of fly in the family Stratiomyidae that superficially resemble a wasp more than a fly. They have beautifully iridescent wings, stubby antennae, and streamlined bodies. Slow flyers incapable of biting or stinging, they can be picked up and handled without difficulty, often landing on humans while resting. As adults, they do not eat – all their feeding is done while in their larval states. Since adults have no interest in food, they do not buzz around picnic tables or come into kitchens and spread disease in the way that common house flies do (BSF larvae actively compete with house fly maggots, further reducing their pestilence). Upon metamorphosizing into an adult, BSF only live for a few days ― long enough to reproduce, lay eggs, then die shortly afterwards. A short, elegant cycle of living and dying.
Figure 6 Black Soldier Fly
While in their larval phase, BSF are voracious consumers of organic wastes, particularly “putrescent” wastes including meat, dairy, manures, carcasses, and cheese ― high nutrient materials prone to putrefaction, decay, and odors that are otherwise difficult to compost with conventional methods. Despite being historically regarded as a pest (Tomberlin, 2020), the ability of black soldier flies to rapidly consume putrescent wastes has now been widely recognized and studied and has been put into use throughout the world (Nguyen, 2015)[x]. BSF composting can be carried out on scales ranging from the mega-industrial to the micro-sized DIY and can be either rigorously controlled or minimally managed (Nana, 2018). This scalability and accessibility makes BSF composting a promising tool of both urban and rural communities for ecological regeneration, particularly for upcycling putrescent wastes into fertilizer and feedstock.
In addition to their waste reduction capabilities, BSF have also been heavily studied for their use as a livestock feed. Rich in both fat and protein, BSF larvae will be gleefully eaten by chickens, reptiles, and notably, fish ― therein potentially helping to reduce the aquaculture industry’s use of bycatch-based feeds (a significant cause of oceanic depletion and obstacle to the development of sustainable fish farming) (Swinscoe, 2019). While significant legal and cultural boundaries remain, there is also considerable interest in growing BSF as a protein source for humans (Wang, 2017). Not without precedent, BSF entomophagy remains a practice of some traditional societies (Chung, 2010)[xi]. Topping off their list of benefits are the facts that BSF wastes, a dark-crumbly compost, are themselves excellent gardens fertilizers (Sarpong, 2019) and that the fatty oils in BSF may be extruded and used as a fuel for bio-powered maggot-mobiles (Li, 2011). By upcycling waste products into a edible protein, BSF have promising potential to create more cyclical urban metabolisms in regards to both waste and food.
BSF are native to the Americas, although they can now be found throughout many tropical and temperate regions of the world, having been either intentionally or accidentally introduced[xii]. As adults are most active when temperatures are above 80F, low temperatures have limited their northward migration (Spranghers, 2017)[xiii]. Due to climate change, however, the range of the BSF will surely increase, along with that of many other insect species (Bradshaw, 2016). Without any solid data to support it, I have personally observed BSF in northern locales with greater frequency over the past decade. I suspect that their larvae are surviving winters inside of outdoor compost piles, which provide both heat a food source. It is possible that BSF occurrence in cities is greater than surrounding rural areas, with the urban heat island and abundance of organic waste giving them an edge on survival as it does similarly for other insects (Frank, 2020).
Figure 7 Soldier Fly Larvae
Relationships
Despite many years of trying, I have never been reliably successful in controlling the breeding and growth of the black soldier fly. My attempts at containing and intensively managing their life cycle have been hit or (mostly) miss, with successes often being accidental and short lived. A dense colony of BSF raised in confinement will frequently collapse for no apparent reason, some aspect of humidity, temperature, food, pathology, or other unknown variable causing them to tail-spin into a positive feedback loop of mass sudden die-off. This doesn’t mean I have not had robust BSF cultures on our land, they have just been in open-air compost piles under minimally-managed conditions, living, reproducing, and dying on their own terms. I provide them with food waste and in return they rapidly consume it, giving me finished compost as a by-product (along with the ability to occasionally harvest some of their larvae as animal feed). This resistance to total domestication and regulation is partly what makes BSF fascinating to me ― they thrive under open, chaotic, semi-wild, conditions, willing to engage in reciprocal ecological relationships, but with their own agency.
BSF’s resistance to being contained does not mean that it is impossible. On the contrary, there are industrial-scale BSF breeding facilities throughout the world that seek to reduce, mechanize, and standardize the fly’s life cycle so that it may carried out continuously while in confinement without regard for outside environmental conditions or seasonal fluctuations and producing neither odors nor offense ― an entirely regulated biological waste consumption machine fully compatible with the aesthetic demands of modernity. Environmental anthropologist Amy Zhang brilliantly explores this “circularity and enclosure” in an ethnography of a Chinese facility tasked with mending a city’s broken ecological waste metabolism with BSF while crafting an illusion of seamless techno-utopianism (Zhang, 2020).
Cultivation of BSF can happen on a micro-scale as well ― there are multiple online DIY designs for BSF composters that use little more than a five-gallon bucket and some tubing, as well as several pre-manufactured molded plastic BSF composters that are commercially available. They all feature a container where BSF larvae are kept and where food waste is deposited for them to eat. The designs take advantage of the “self-harvesting” behavior of BSF ― upon pupation, the larvae will climb up a ramp to a drier, higher spot where it is easier to fly away from after becoming a winged adult. The deceptive ramp terminates in a hole through which the BSF fall ― into a collection bucket where they are then gathered. Unlike house flies, BSF do not lay their eggs directly into food but instead in a nearby location. When the eggs hatch, the baby larvae will crawl to the food source. The designs also take advantage of this trait, allowing the adults to deposit their eggs on the outside of the container, but leaving small openings for the larvae to crawl through.
It may be possible to keep a colony alive through the winter in an enclosed BSF composter. Soldier fly larvae produce a great deal of heat through their own metabolic processes. Provided they are sufficiently fed, this heat can be enough to keep the larvae alive and active. Although they will not be hatching into adults until the warm weather returns, the larval colony can still be kept alive and continue to process putrescent wastes. Raising BSF in cold climates is an active field of research (Alvarez, 2012).
Figure 8 Insectorium
The alternative to raising BSF in a designated composter is to instead cultivate them in a semi-wild manner where they can effectively reduce wastes without continual maintenance on your behalf (it will also be less convenient to harvest the larvae). The first step in building a reciprocal relationship with BSF is to establish a healthy local population. Compost piles make ideal sites for BSF colonization, providing both food and warmth to the larvae and offering the possibility of overwintering a population. If BSF are already abundant in your area, they will likely arrive in a compost pile on their own. If they are not already common, or if you want to speed up the rate of colonization, another strategy is to “seed” a local population. This can be done by purchasing a container of black soldier flies, commonly sold as a reptile food under various trade names. While the greater the number of larvae you initially inoculate a compost pile with will determine the likelihood of success, between 250-500 larvae is a good start. Once a population is established, a colony can grow at a nearly exponential rate, as the female BSF (which are attracted to pheromones given off by the larvae) will lay upwards of 500 eggs each (Givens, 2013). While compost piles dominated by BSF can have putrescent foods put in them, be sure all the food waste is being eaten before adding more so as not to create odor problems. Larvae can be easily harvested from pile, as they typically congregate at its top. Pushing aside the top few inches of material will reveal them, after which they can be collected with a small shovel or a spoon. Provided the compost pile is large and fresh enough, it may continue to produce enough heat through the winter to keep the population of BSF alive. During the cold season, the larvae may migrate to the core of the pile where it is the warmest and may not be visible near its surface.
Educational Applications
It would be hard to describe black soldier fly larvae as being beautiful ― admittedly the first time I ever saw them, they filled me with feelings of disgust ― super-sized maggots crawling throughout food waste slime in a compost pile. For this reason, they will likely trigger “disgust sensitivity” (Jensen, 2019) within most people, particularly among those unfamiliar with the composting process.
Honeybees and Native Bees
Honeybees are a type of eusocial (Gowdy, 2013) insect that has been kept, tended, or cultivated by humans for their honey and other products for over seven thousand years (Oldroyd, 2012). While the western honeybee (Apis mellifera) is the species most raised today, there are traditions of harvesting honey from several bee species throughout the world (including Melipona beecheii, a stingless bee which was raised by the Maya in the Yucatan (Villanueva-G, 2005)). The western honeybee, originally native to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East (Han, 2012), has now been spread by humans throughout the globe with an estimated ninety million kept beehives worldwide.
Industrial monocultural agriculture is highly dependent on Apis mellifera, relying on them nearly exclusively to pollinate a great number of flowering staple food crops including almonds, apples, blueberries, melons, broccoli, and others. Insufficient insect pollination results in low or no fruit set, and cannot be substituted by technological means (despite dangerous technofix attempts such as robot bees (Potts, 2018)). Making a migratory loop throughout the country (a process that is highly stressful to bees (Simone-Finstrom, 2016)), commercial beekeepers transport hives via truck bed to different farms as their crops start to bloom and are an integral part of the world’s commercial food system. While much concern has been raised about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a still-mysterious and multi-causal affliction that caused significant losses of beehives in the early 2000s (Andrews, 2019), CCD poses more of a threat towards industrialized food production than to insect pollinators populations in general (although many of CCD’s causes ― pesticides and habitat destruction ― are also contributing to the broader losses of “the insect apocalypse” (Goulson, 2019), and honeybees populations serve as a proxy for insect health at large).
Although modern day beekeeping is a highly managed practice that can involve genetic manipulation and the use of pharmaceuticals and pesticides, I still situate honeybees in a semi-wild, reciprocal zone category that is resistant to both domestication and domination. Even in the most chemically dependent and intensively monitored commercial beekeeping operations, there is a recognition of the bees’ own powerful agency in their relationships with humans along with a sense of collaboration vs. control that distinguishes bees from other livestock such as chickens or cows (Nimmo, 2015). For one, honeybees defy containment and property boundaries ― as honeybees have a typical foraging range of two to three miles (Beekman, 2000), no fence, netting, or structure can be built to confine them. Like the pigeons at Radix, bees are transgressive agents ― freely leaving the site and providing community pollinating services to neighborhood gardens abound. When a colony has grown too large or if conditions are less than ideal, the hive can abscond outright in full or in part by “swarming” – leaving their human manufactured boxes and taking up residence elsewhere in a tree, wall cavity, or other hollow structure. Visible as a dark and writhing mass of bees clinging to a tree branch, “wild swarms” originating from these feral colonies can with skill and luck in turn be “captured” and relocated to a bee box, providing a beekeeper with a free colony of local winter-hardy bees. In the springtime, when bees typically swarm, I often receive calls from panicked residents notifying me of a swarm in need of removal. Assuming they are dangerous, few realize that bees are exceptionally docile when swarming. Despite multiple attempts, I have yet still to be successful in collecting a wild swarm, a reminder to me of bees own wild agency and fiercely independent spirit.
Figure 9 Honeybees at Radix
Raising honeybees in urban environments has become more popular in recent years (Moore, 2013), with beekeepers maintaining hives in underutilized spaces such as vacant parcels, parking lots, and rooftops. Honeybees are kept at Radix primarily for their service as pollinators (we allow them to keep the honey they produce to improve their chances of surviving the winter). With thousands of young to feed and a willingness to forage from a wide range of plants, honeybees are highly effective pollinators, greatly boosting the yields of fruit trees and vegetables alike. They also are fantastic for educational purposes ― it is great for children to taste raw honey straight from a comb or to handle a non-stinging drone (male) bee.
It is made clear to visitors, however, that honeybee pollination is a parallel strategy to supporting native pollinating bees. Recognizing the challenges of beekeeping (CCD, varroa mites, nosema disease) and that Apis Mellifera is not native to North America, we simultaneously create habitat and food for the hundreds of species pollinating bees, wasps, butterflies, and other insects native to New York (Cornell, 2020). While not honey producing, when present in sufficient numbers these native insects can provide pollination services that are equal to (Winfree, 2007) or potentially better than (MacInnis, 2019) honeybees. For certain pollinators, such as mason bees, we will construct housing and nesting tubes called “insect hotels” to enhance their productivity (Fortel, 2016). Our main strategy for supporting native insects, however, is to allow spontaneous vegetation to arise and go to flower in the marginal spaces alongside of gardens, creating un-mowed urban meadows (Norton, 2019). Pollinators drawn to the flowers of the wild plants will also be attracted to the blossoms of the nearby vegetables and fruit trees, therein creating food security and biodiversity enhancement simultaneously. In this way, it is possible to illustrate biocultural diversity, demonstrating to urban youth clear linkages of how the well-being of insects is interwoven with food production and in turn their personal, family, and community’s health.
Figure 10 Mason Bees Emerging from Bee Hotel
Wine Cap Stropharia
The last example of semi-wild relationships I wish to describe, if only briefly, is the cultivation of the wine cap stropharia (Stropharia rugosoannulata). Wine caps are a gourmet edible type of litter decomposing fungi that thrive in non-sterile environments, growing rapidly throughout substrates such as soil and wood chips. At the Radix Center, wine caps are grown in the chipped walkways between garden beds and the mulch donuts around the bases of fruit trees. When conditions are right (typically spring and fall following a rain) the mushrooms will fruit and grow to enormous sizes approaching ten inches in diameter (thus the reason for their moniker “garden giants”). The mycelial lenses, or clusters of woodchips tightly bound with fungal hyphae, can be transplanted into new areas to start new wine cap colonies. Provided they are “fed” new wood chips on an annual basis, stropharia patches will reliably produce each year. I include this fungal species within the zone of reciprocity on account of its predilection for non-sterile habitats. Many other edible fungi species demand highly specific growing substrates and conditions and must often be initially cultured in sterile laboratory conditions with technical expertise and significant capital costs. Furthermore, sterilizing or pasteurizing the grain or straw substrates needed by these fungal strains is time and energy intensive. The technical and financial requirements of these fungi limit the number of people on a global scale who may be able to cultivate them. The fact that wine caps may be grown in literally dirty conditions, and then may be propagated and shared through simple division, greatly increase the potential for them to be grown on a broad scale. While their fruiting times may be somewhat irregular and defy attempts at precise control, they nonetheless can provide a fairly reliable protein source to their human counterparts, placing them in the category of “semi-wild”.
Beyond being a food source, research has revealed the potential of using wine-caps for mycoremediation of a number of organic pollutants that contaminate urban soils (see the Urban Soil Justice chapter for more details) (Pozdnyakova, 2018) (Valentín, 2013) (Castellet-Rovira, 2018). Their ability to rapidly spread through the soils of polluted vacant parcels while oozing enzymes makes them a promising candidate for remediating toxins in the heterogynous, uncontrolled, wild and dirty environments that are urban brownfields.
Figure 11 Wine Cap Stropharia – photo by Ben Atwood
Conclusion – Zoonoses and the Limits of Nature-Society Reunification
This chapter has demonstrated relationships and pathways between humans and the semi-wild that attempt to bridge the duality of nature and society, a false dichotomy that I believe lies at the core of many of the attitudes and behaviors that drive ecological degradation and human exploitation. An emerging area of study (that is underexplored in this chapter) is around the idea of urban microbial rewilding, or designing urban spaces to maximize their microbial diversity for public health benefit (Flies, 2018) (Mills, 2017). This is a fascinating and important field of research as studies have suggested that many autoimmune disorders may be attributed in part to a lack of exposure to beneficial microorganisms in early childhood (Wasko, 2020) (Panelli, 2020). Are there, however, potential negative consequences that might result from the haphazard mixing of species and their associated microbiomes? Even before the creation of the nature-human dualism, were there still some codes of respect, distance, and balance that maintained the discordant harmony between human and non-human worlds that must now be remembered? Despite these codes, did unintentional crossovers still occur that created disruptions? Zoonoses, diseases with origins in non-human animals (chiefly viruses and bacteria), are a reminder and manifestation of what potentially can occur when species overlap and combine in novel configurations.
The Earth’s virosphere is vast, with estimates of potentially ten trillion species yet to be discovered (Zimmer, 2020). The vast majority of those viruses co-exist with humans non-threateningly, with viral endosymbiosis being a major driver of evolutionary transformation (Margulis, 2008). Occasionally, however, a virus will jump from one species to another and cause illness in its efforts to co-evolve (generally to a less virulent strain). The human consequences of these zoonotic illnesses can be devastating, with the histories of bubonic plague, smallpox, measles, certain influenzas, HIV, rabies, Lyme disease, and Ebola illustrating the potential effects. Many of these zoonoses are the result of agricultural intensification, animal domestication, and ecological disturbance (Jones, 2013) ― when species are driven out of their normal habitat or when they are newly hunted, opportunities are created for viral spillover (Quammen, 2012).
As I write this, we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, another zoonotic virus originating in bats that has crossed over to humans, taking over a million human lives so far (Mega, 2020) and wreaking havoc upon the world. Coronavirus is very much a disease of the Anthropocene, with ecological disturbance, social inequality, hyper-connectivity, and political ineptitude compounding to amplify the suffering created by it (O’Callaghan-Gordo, 2020). In this way, COVID-19 has served as a grim reminder of our planetary inter-connectivity, exposing the myths of individual or national isolation and separation for the dangerous illusions that they are.
With so much effort now to control the spread of the disease through its focus on vaccines, contact tracing, masks, and so on, the public health discourse frames the coronavirus as a uniquely human challenge. While appreciating this urgency, and acknowledging that good work has been done in mapping the socio-economic and environmental inequities of the disease (Bowleg, 2020) (Lenzen, 2020), I would hope that a parallel discourse could be undertaken that frames covid-19 and zoonoses in general as a more-than-human phenomena, planning prevention of future pandemics with the most holistic strategies. Specifically, I am eager to avoid an overly technocratic response to future disease threats that creates greater ecological alienation, further separating nature from society and placing blame upon the world’s poorest. Such holistic frameworks are already being developed, with the platforms of one-health, eco-health, and planetary health providing global systems-level analyses of the interrelationship of human and ecological health (Lerner, 2017). Further philosophical work needs to be undertaken that frames pandemic response as a post-normal science embracing complexity, and that re-narrativizes the human-nonhuman relationship (Waltner-Toews, 2017). In this analyses, concerns about social justice, power, politics and global equity must also remain central, resisting the tendency of affluent researchers in the Global North to place the responsibility for causing and preventing disease upon subsistence farmers and hunters (Asayama, 2020) (Scoones, 2018).
I’m eager to avoid policies enacted to prevent future pandemics that favor practices of agricultural modernization that would further erode traditional lifeways. For instance, there has already been a push to confine chickens to darkened and cramped enclosures to prevent any possibility of them mixing with wild bird populations and being exposed to avian flu (Davis, 2006). Along with the forced preventative culling of backyard chicken flocks, such actions were taken in Cairo, Egypt in 2005 under the logic of “biosecurity” recommended by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (Hinchliffe S. a., 2008). These measures unquestionably increase the profits of a handful of centralized industries and destroy a critical component of food security for the urban poor. While the threat of disease is serious, I believe it is important to implement more measured approaches that:
Emphasize best practices of health and safety for small-scale poultry flocks (recognizing that birds that are well-fed, non-stressed, spaced apart, genetically diverse, and exposed to sunlight are less likely to get sick than their inbred counterparts in confined operations)
Question the dynamics of power and access as they relate to who controls the food supply
Recognize that cities are multi-species environments where inter-species entanglement is inherent (Nading, 2013).
Keeping these principles in mind, and in anticipation of the authoritarian technocratic policies potentially to be rushed in following the end of the coronavirus pandemic, I believe it is time to re-examine the “politics of conviviality” (Hinchliffe S. a., 2006) that describe the “recombinant ecologies” of cities and the multi-species co-evolutionary assemblages they are. Let us hope that biosecurity mindsets driven by fear and the impulse to control do not further modernize urban ecosystems by segregating and exterminating species, but rather foster relationships of reciprocity and respect that recognize the enormous fluidity and interchange that occurs between species and their exchanging virospheres. It is my hope that the relationships outlined in this chapter may provide a few examples of how just and reciprocal urban biocultural diversity may be cultivated.
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[i] See concepts like “biophilic cities” (Beatley, 2011)
[ii] The exact causes of the luxury effect are debated – it may result from wealthier resident’s preferences for more biodiverse areas, or be a consequence of the large “cultured diversity” of cultivated ornamental plants found in wealthier neighborhoods. In my own experience and that of others (Ryznar, 2001), I have noticed multiple exceptions to the luxury effect where low-income neighborhoods seem to have higher rates of biodiversity on account of the preponderance of un-maintained and forested lots/parks/cemeteries that unintentionally function as biodiversity refuges.
[iii] I will emphasize by restating that this is indeed a continuum – in no way intend to reify the false dualism between the domestic in the wild. Rather, I see “domestic” and “wild” as vague poll points of reference along a spectrum of possible relationships. Many times, species will easily move from one poll towards another. “Feral” animals are a good example of this – once domesticated species or their descendants becoming less co-dependent on humans. Similarly, formerly wild species can become synanthropic – tolerant of humans and successful at co-habitation with them.
[iv] Later in history, pigeon manure was used for both tanning leathers and for manufacturing saltpeter, an additive in gun powder. Additionally there are stories of British and French armies fueling their war machines with the huge guano piles commandeered from the pigeon coops of wealthy landowners.
[v] It should be mentioned, though, that pigeons are definitely at risk from aerial predators, such as falcons and hawks. Many birds of prey, in fact, choose to nest in skyscrapers, attracted to cities by the abundant pigeon food supply. There’s not much that can be done to protect free range pigeons from raptors. You just have to hope that, considering how many pigeons live in cities, statistically your birds are less likely to be hunted).
[vi] While Bombyx mori is the most commonly raised species of silkworm, there are other domestic and semi-wild species of silkworm that eat other species of plants besides mulberries.
[vii] It should be noted that the global silk industry has often relied upon bonded child labor (especially in India) in order to produce its products – essentially a form of slavery with terrible working conditions for children (Human Rights Watch, 2003).
[viii] Florence, Massachusetts is one example. The 19th century utopian community “Northampton Association of Education and Industry” (of which Sojourner Truth was a member) once ran a cooperative silk industry there (Clark, 2019).
[ix] Before the project began, we were concerned about the potential for lead or other contaminants to be soluble in the liquid sap and to concentrate in the finished syrup. After being unsuccessful in finding any published studies regarding the safety of urban syrups, we partnered with researchers at Siena College to run an analysis of the finished product. Their testing with an X-ray fluorescence machine revealed concentrations of metals in the Albany syrup that were comparable to those found in a control sample taken from a rural location.
[x] The internet is full of time lapse videos displaying soldier fly’s ability to reduce various animal carcasses to bones in matters of hours.
[xi] Care should be always be taken to be certain that BSF are dead before being consumed as they are capable of otherwise surviving in the human digestive track, resulting in the horrific condition of myiasis (Lee, 1995).
[xii] The potential impact of black soldier flies on ecosystems to which they are not native is understudied, however at least one study has rung the alarm bell following their apparent escape from a breeding facility (Jonsell, 2017)
[xiii] Inaturalist data shows BSF ranging into the northeastern US and parts of northern Europe (Villazana, 2019)
Canada is aiming to double its population within decades, but our largest cities are already congested by decades of car-centric infrastructure investment. Laying out a green belt around each is the first step to preventing more automobile dependency, followed by budding (as a plant buds) into that green belt with a new fully planned city.
How economic flows and bottlenecks affect urban growth
When we encounter a contradiction, it’s very likely that we are facing an unresolved “problem of organized complexity,” to paraphrase Jane Jacobs. Such is the situation with the crisis of urban home affordability and NIMBYism, where everyone agrees that the supply of homes is below the need, but none concede that it is their neighborhood’s growth constraints that must be lifted. We are currently trapped in a political deadlock where the energy invested in removing constraints is met with an equivalent increase in the energy applied at protecting these constraints.
In this essay, I intend to introduce the concept of flow, of linked processes of production, to help explain these contradictions in urban affordability. The key insight will be understanding the phenomena of flow bottlenecks, how they arise, and ultimately how cities must use the principles behind the Theory of Constraints to progress through the contradictions of urban growth and unblock the production of new homes and dwellings.
The concept of economic flow was discovered in the field of industrial organization and generalized later to non-industrial economic activities such as management and marketing. For this audience, I, however, first present flow from the perspective of abstract systems, then describe how those systems express themselves in factories, to then arrive at an accurate depiction of economic flow in urbanization. With such a depiction we can finally imagine a form of urban planning and governing that satisfies both the demand for new dwellings and the need of homeowners to protect their neighborhoods from new growth.
What is flow, and what makes it meaningful?
Hydrological flows are well understood by civil engineers and landscape architects, and traffic flows have also been studied for decades. But what of economic flows, in demand and supply? This flow represents the change of a supply of goods over time, and while in economics it is assumed to be either elastic or inelastic to price by the good’s intrinsic nature, in practical matters it is the result of very complicated processes of production that are susceptible to both deterioration and improvement.
In Eli Goldratt’s business novel “The Goal“, where the Theory of Constraints is introduced, a businessman is challenged with accelerating the time a customer’s order requires to be processed by his factory, against his intuition about efficiency and complicated by the opaqueness of the factory’s behavior. It seems that the dimension of time in production has escaped anyone’s control. His breakthrough insight occurs when observing a system of flow in a non-industrial setting: the behavior of a line of children hiking in the woods. Let’s begin our examination of flow starting from this simple model.
In order to complete the hike, the entire group must have arrived at their destination, which is to say that the group has completed the hike when the last member of the group has completed the hike. The surprising insight of flow theory is that the order in which the children walk the trail affects the arrival time of the whole group, and there is an optimal order to place them in.
Let us first imagine two (or more) children, one taller and stronger, and a second much younger, on a hike through a forest. Let’s imagine that the children carry equally weighted backpacks of supplies and walk in order from tallest to shortest. Along the way, children inevitably get distracted or hit obstacles that slow their movement, and because they walk in a single line those children that are walking behind immobile children are blocked from advancing. Slower children that are blocked from moving ahead by children in front of them will not be able to catch up after the faster children once those get moving again. They will also become tired much more quickly from carrying relatively more weight for their strength. The end result is that the whole group will only reach the goal (the whole group arriving at the destination) at the pace that the slowest child can keep, and that pace can be interrupted by any obstacle encountered by the children in front. The slowest child controls the flow of the group, and anything that speeds up the faster child will not help the situation. The slowest child is the bottleneck of the process.
Although it might increase the probability of adding a slower child, adding more children to the group makes no difference to this constraint, but it does make the cause of the slowness more opaque to the outside observer and more difficult to improve. This was the situation faced by industry when the Theory of Constraints was proposed.
A flow of equally-burdened children walking a trail, depicted as a temporal sequence line-by-line. As time advances from line T1 to T6, the smaller child gets delayed by the taller one and loses energy at a greater rate.
To remove this bottleneck to flow, Goldratt presents two improvements.
The first improvement is to put the slowest children at the front. As a result, whenever a distraction or obstacle creates distance in the line, the speed of the children at the back allows them to catch up and shrink the distance down again. The entire group of children arrives at the destination simultaneously, despite any blocking events during the hike. (Pacing the process of production to its slowest step was an incendiary proposition to industry when the idea was first proposed by flow theorists, but the statistical results were undeniable. Processes that can be delayed must have the ability to run faster than the rest of the system to ever catch up after a delay. It follows that the slowest steps are the ones where delays have the most long-term impacts, and where delays must be prevented.)
The second improvement is to take the load off the backpacks of the smaller and younger children and hand it to the strongest, such that energy levels remain even across the entire line and the fast children slow down, but never slower than the slowest children. This increases the velocity of the bottlenecked younger children in return for a reduction in the velocity of the stronger ones and allows the entire group to move faster.
An improved flow of children walking a trail makes stronger children carry more weight and slow down so that the younger ones can keep their best pace. The finish line is reached sooner by the group.
In Goldratt’s paradigm-defining story, the businessman discovers that one piece of equipment in his factory is the controlling bottleneck of the flow, and must reorganize his production line around keeping that piece always at maximum potential use by reducing the workloads at other steps in the production, against the expectations of accountants, other production managers and factory workers who must sacrifice their own individual productivity goals to improve the productivity of the constraint. The work of flow improvement is first a technical and analytical effort but ultimately becomes a political challenge as the protagonist must change the mindset of the organization to serve the needs of the constraint.
This is an unconventionally holistic view of production processes, and it was so unintuitive to industrial managers that a generation of consultants made good livings teaching and persuading factories to adopt these improvements.
If flow is a general phenomenon relevant both to economic processes and to recreational activities like hiking, could it be also relevant to urbanization, and how would it express itself?
How can we observe urban flow?
In a smoothly flowing urban growth process, we should see the delivery of new floors, new houses, new streets, and new amenities constrained solely by the physical limits of our technology. Improvements in constraining technology would result in the accelerating production of new dwellings and amenities, an increase in the available living space per citizen, and an improvement in amenities, in every city in the world that learns of this technology.
Microeconomics creates the illusion that these problems operate independently of external constraints and can solve themselves. This does not appear to be our intuition about the growth of cities, so what actually happens in the process of adding a floor to a building? A house to a block? A street to a neighborhood? A new neighborhood entirely? How does flow express itself for real-world cities? This is often more a matter of production scale than free markets. Much like a factory grows so large that its flow of production becomes opaque, as cities grow larger, their flow of production also becomes harder to perceive and are subject to deterioration unless carefully attended to.
As any complex system starts from something simple and iterates into complex relationships of many parts, understanding the behavior of urban flow must start from the embryonic state, meaning the smallest possible flow of production. Such a flow is typical of the pre-urban settlement, where no construction, development, or renovation has been taking place. Flow begins once one person or a group of people project to add an expansion to one of the dwellings ― either a new room or a floor to an existing building, even just a garden.
The delivery of this project proceeds through a sequence of steps, from first imagining the project, to acquiring the rights to the property, assembling the materials, organizing the building crew, erecting the structure, cleaning up the site, finishing the interior, etc. Each step in the sequence must wait for the preceding step to complete (with some flexibility in start-stop times) to be able to proceed and may delay the subsequent step if it is blocked. If, for instance, the building crew is otherwise occupied at farming, hunting, or throwing barbecue parties, then the flow is blocked or must wait until the crew becomes available, and accelerating the cleanup of the site is unlikely to deliver the product sooner.
The flow of an embryonic urban area is constrained only by resources. Acquiring and organizing them explains the bulk of the time cycle.
The significance of this law of processes increases as we progress in scale from the embryonic settlement into a recurring system of city building. Once expanding the city with new dwelling space becomes a frequent event, it becomes economically optimal to establish a permanent professional construction crew involved in building these projects. (After enough time has passed the community building crew disbands and focuses on barbecuing parties, slowly losing their skills at construction and the ability to “take weight off” this production step.)
While two projects being initiated concurrently is improbable in a small settlement, a professional crew makes economic sense when a queue of waiting projects has formed, and this professional crew must necessarily complete a project before starting work on another, potentially blocking the next projects in the “pipeline” from starting should any unusual event delay the construction schedule (and something unusual usually happens). Another source of delays would come from governance. In the embryonic city, a building right can be acquired from the community by a simple debate in the town forum. Once these debates start occupying all of the forum’s time, it starts to make sense to adopt a building code that automatically accepts projects that fall within some agreed-upon scopes and limitations, and employ specialist city planners to verify that the codes are respected and grant the approbations. If one project attempts to cheat, the planners are occupied by the project and the others must wait. At one production stage or another, one project has the potential to delay or block the others from progressing, in a pattern typical of the factory described by Goldratt.
A flow of a scaled urban area, where the permitting process and construction process are always utilized and begin to professionalize. Being utilized implies the possibility of a queue of waiting projects forming if delays arise.
A step that is perpetually blocking others or forming a waiting queue is usually the bottleneck of a flow. Improvements at other steps will be absorbed by bottlenecks, resulting in even longer waiting queues. For example, there is no point in accelerating the acquisition of building materials if the building crew is too busy to start using new materials. More effort at this step will only produce more waiting, leading to the decay of these materials, more waste, and higher costs. (Eliminating this waste, generated by fruitless efforts to improve efficiency elsewhere but at the constraint, is how flow consultants earned their fees. Their mantra was reducing inventories and their holding costs, until arriving at a just-in-time flow.)
Constraints are involved even more extensively in city planning. Industrial theorists see constraints as obstacles to overcome or work around but, in city planning, we have used constraints to stabilize the structure of a city against the impacts of its growth. In a city, more production can result in worsening living conditions. Value is being created in one place but subtracted in another. (For instance, preserving views of the sea has been an objective of building codes in the Mediterranean since the Roman-Byzantine era, shaping many cities with the characteristic morphology of the Mediterranean as a result. https://www.intbau.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/besim-hakim-mediterranean-urban-and-building-codes.pdf)
Because of how successful constraints have been historically at stabilizing urbanization, inventing new constraints is the usual response from citizens, politicians, and urban planners to new forms of instability. Thus, in the past century, we invented zones, detached housing, floor-area ratios, parking minimums, and, at the most enormous scale, the green belt. Urban planners are deliberately blocking and obstructing flows of production in the expectation that these flows will divert themselves to less destabilizing paths, such as a building mass that does not obstruct the view over the sea of a neighboring building. Invisible to the stakeholders of these new constraints is the increased cost in flow imposed by the constraint, but some visualizations can help.
The flow of urban growth under stabilizing constraints creates interruptions in the delivery of new projects. Some of these can be absorbed or prevented, but only until the natural limits are reached.
The impacts of controlling constraints
Have these new constraints brought us the wanted stability? Have they instead introduced a new kind of instability where flows are dwindling everywhere and production capacity is decaying from lack of demand, while we simultaneously observe skyrocketing price increases in existing dwellings? This is the argument put forth by activists in favor of removing growth constraints, who propose that regional or national-level regulation must prohibit municipal codes from constraining certain forms of flows. (Essentially laws that make other laws unlawful, a bet that local authorities can be forced to accept growth. This practice has already escalated to fines on recalcitrant communities in Europe, with no end to the escalation or visible improvement in flow.)
There is a moral argument to be made both for and against these initiatives, but this is not the intent of this essay. What we explore here is whether an initiative to prohibit constraints would be effective in a complex and opaque system of constraints (human, technological, and political).
In North America, we have assumed that the bottleneck constraint to urban growth was financing. The belief was that anything would become possible if consumers could have more purchasing power to “access” homeownership. Thus, programs to insure mortgages and provide tax incentives on mortgage interest have expanded over the past three generations, along with the expanding scale of urban agglomerations.
The cost of dwellings has risen to match and made access to property ownership as difficult as it was at the beginning of those programs. Thus, we observe constraints absorbing other improvements in the flow of production. Any effort not applied at the constraint will be ineffective.
Let’s consider, once again, our embryonic simple project, but now in the context of a regulation promoting flow. This is what the groups championing accessory dwelling units in single-family detached house areas hope to realize ― more dwellings within a stabilizing pattern. How much additional flow could this deliver? There is a great difference between an accessory dwelling unit being constructed out of economic scarcity, and one constructed out of economic speculation. Cities in history grew slowly and incrementally because the resources activated by the building flow were scarce. Accumulating the capital to grow a building might take a family an entire generation, and the risks of production were covered by the entire community, which also formed the construction crew. The picturesque cities of Europe and North Africa are literally the product of millennia of growth.
In a modern metropolis of millions, where single-family detached housing dominates the landscape, professional construction crews outcompete homeowner-operated dwelling expansion. Taking on a construction project in the midst of the bureaucracy, financial instability and production risk of such a project is daunting for most middle-class property owners, for whom their home is their single largest and most at-risk financial asset. In fact, in countries such as France, entire consulting firms have formed to provide municipally-sponsored coaching and project management to homeowners. (Accessory dwelling units being legal countrywide has not prevented the flow of new projects from dwindling to nothing from larger constraining trends.)
It is tragic that energy is being invested by various activist groups in lifting very specific constraints without considering the whole flow of the urban economy. There is nothing that ensures that a larger constraint will not absorb these improvements and leave us experiencing a perpetually stalled flow. What if the competition for construction crews or the lengthy permitting process or the reluctance of insurance companies to guarantee loans prevents these flows from completing? What if homeowners are too exhausted by their lives to grab the financial incentive to rent out their properties? In order for a real improvement to be achieved in the supply of dwellings, we have to realize an improvement at every step of the delivery process, discovering the constraint along the way.
Only a holistic perspective on the production process can help us improve it, as Goldratt painstakingly elaborated in “The Goal” and throughout his career.
Natural Constraints
Considering flow from the largest of all stability constraints, the green belt or urban growth boundary, helps us tackle the issue holistically.
Urban growth processes, unlike industrial flows, are accretive. Each one increases the scale of the system and brings it one step closer to an inevitable failure. Urban planning was classically invented to handle this problem by means of the ordered, right-angled street grid. The hope was to prevent the congestion breakdown of improvised, cow-path city growth. Despite the solution being known from antiquity, and many Hellenistic and Roman cities of that period having been settled on grids, cities today are nevertheless still burdened by cow-path street plans (not to speak of congestion in general). This must not be a constraint of technology or know-how.
The problem of structural improvisation failing at scale is not unique to urban growth processes, it is also characteristic of software systems, and software engineering has developed a deliberate strategy to resolve it ― the refactoring. Software projects have no natural boundaries within which to organize themselves. While there are projects blessed with carefully laid out designs, technical architectures, and orienting requirements, it is quite common for software systems to be the result of a spontaneous improvisation by software analysts required to meet an urgent and immediate need. The software that results from improvisation is typically poorly legible and vulnerable to failure, but that in itself does not motivate an improvement to the structure of the software. A software program could function perfectly well for years, well beyond the duration of the memory of its human analysts before a change in its production context justifies its modification. This latent disorganization in the software is referred to as technical debt, a problem to be fixed in the future.
What typically happens to real-world systems is that, absent any force opposing it, the scale of the program grows as an accumulation of disorganized improvisations, and each improvisation confuses the impacts of the next one until the moment it becomes completely impossible for the human analysts to determine how the software can be enlarged and still function. When this crisis arrives, humans must face a politically tense reality ― that the only way for the system to meet today’s needs is to destroy and rebuild the parts that are disorganized. The stakeholders of the system must accept a painful teardown of features they had accepted as granted in exchange for the possibility of future improvements, on a schedule that the analysts have great difficulty predicting. The alternative choice is to allow the system to stagnate and the memory of its behavior to decay until some time that it is abandoned or replaced by an upstart design.
A flow of improvisations generates technical debt in software.A reverse flow of software development in a refactoring effort. The scale of the system has not increased, but it has gained the potential to increase.
Readers knowledgeable about the history of urban planning will immediately recognize the pattern involved. Cities grow in much the same flow of improvisations. Despite their best intentions at planning cities find themselves confronted with instability from improvisation at scale and suffer years of renovations to return to balance. Perhaps the most dramatic example was the renovation of Paris in the 19th century, and the operator of its refactoring into an industrial-scaled metropolis was Georges-Eugène Haussmann, prefect (mayor-governor) of the entire region encompassing the city.
Haussmann’s methods and plan remain controversial, and I will not take sides. For the purpose of this essay, I will summarize them as the deliberate demolition of dysfunctional neighborhood clusters to be replaced with structures that rearranged the scale of the city and defined new neighborhoods, using grand avenues and boulevards lined with apartment buildings designed uniformly by his municipal architecture staff. Those grand boulevards are today iconic for the city, and essential to its life, but one that happens at a larger scale than what the city could produce with its maze of medieval streets.[1]
Haussmann’s refactoring was not limited to circulation. He tasked the engineer Adolphe Alphand[2] with creating a new kind of amenity – the urban park – where woods had been preserved for military or hunting purposes at the edge of the city. Bois-de-Boulogne at the western edge and Bois-de-Vincennes at the eastern edge were redesigned for the deliberate enjoyment of the natural world and opened to the public. This event was a recognition that the city had grown so large that what was once taken for granted, that a city dweller could take a stroll out of the city and enjoy nature at will, was no longer realistically accessible to citizens of a city at the industrial scale.
The necessity of transforming cities to the scale they have reached is illustrated by the dramatic history of Paris’ renovation, and the necessity of limiting and constraining the growth in scale of cities is legitimized by the pains inflicted in conducting the renovation. Neighborhoods ceased to exist and social relations that had grown over centuries also ceased.
The lesson learned from the 19th century was to never allow cities to grow to the level of imbalance where they could stop functioning entirely. At the very local level, this meant density limits that ensured a single block of the city would not be overwhelmed with traffic beyond its designed potential. At the regional level, this meant limiting the removal of the natural world at a strict frontier by the declaration of a green belt beyond which urbanization is forbidden.
As the Theory of Constraints would show us, these political limits on growth eventually absorb any technical improvement in the flow of new dwellings. (Considering this flow is naturally accretive and pushes into those limits.) The supply of dwellings inevitably stops growing and only the increasing price can balance dwellings and citizens. The tension on price and crowding is yet another crisis brewing. We must accept that these constraints are temporary and find a technical resolution to the scale limit that has been reached.
Natural or artificial growth constraints eventually impose an obstacle on the flow, beyond which the supply remains stagnant over time.
Haussmann’s renovation is a warning against the pains of urban imbalance, but I suggest we do not yet appreciate its more significant lesson about how a city is brought back into balance: by creating a flow of large-scale, regional structures. In order for the flow of new dwellings to remain stable, there must be corresponding flows in infrastructures and amenities that match the scale reached by the city. Only when all flows at all scales are in balance is the city itself in balance. New dwellings will not impact traffic conditions around existing dwellings if they are planned around new traffic structures. New neighborhoods will not remove access to the natural world of existing neighborhoods if they are planned around new regional parks and ecological preserves. An end to improvisation in urban growth is the necessary solution to growth limits such as congestion, housing density, and green belts.
Removing bottlenecks with larger scales of flow
The green belt aims to stop exurban planning authorities from increasing the scale of the city with new sprawl. That is only half of a solution. In an ideal scenario, a green belt area would be partially transformed into a completely new city at high density, avoiding the improvised urban sprawl characteristic of edge development. This new high-density city matches the scale of the existing city and refactors it around itself as a center of gravity. The new city would be equipped with mass transit, universities, hospitals, and forested ecosystems before being developed with new dwellings.
The design of regional structures must have the ambition of shifting the center of the city outwards, towards its edge, and this must begin by designing mass transit lines that bring residents of the center city to the services, amenities, and recreational areas at the edge. This is the inverse of the typical planning strategy for regional transportation, which aims to bring residents of the suburban edge to center-city employment and commercial areas, at the political service of both the center-city constituency and the suburban residents, but at the expense of a failure in the whole system. The traditional strategy makes the city center even more central, more congested, and more expensive.
Synchronized flows of large-scale structures and small-scale structures keep unbalanced states moving out into the future.
This brings to our attention the long-tolerated and still growing technical debt of cities, where for many generations capital was invested into exclusively suburban infrastructures such as roadways to the edge and beltways around those roadways. In such cities, there exists no way to bring center-city dwellers to the regional edge except by car, unless capital investments matching all the money ever spent on roads are now invested in railways, bikeways, and walkways. Before any improvement can be experienced, enormous capital investments must be made to catch up to the imbalances, with all the painful politics also experienced in software projects with technical debt ― massive expense, loss of features, and uncertain timelines.
Having understood how flow determines the sequence by which regional problems can and must be solved, we can then design the political structures that allow us to remove the bottlenecks. The Paris region attempted just such a solution to its imbalance of scale in the mid-20th century with five planned new towns of up to a million residents[3], but the plan failed when local communities organized to force the scale back down to suburban edge sprawl. This regional governing experiment is ongoing and evolving, decade-by-decade.
Innovative politics are the ultimate bottleneck of 21st-century city planning[4] ― all the technological solutions are known, but none can be employed to impact dwelling scarcity without political alignment. Metropolitan regions are constrained by amenities and infrastructure. When this is obvious, for instance by the need for an airport to service global travel, the regional powers are quick to align behind an expansion of the urban boundary that resolves the constraints of noise in the urban settlement and land conservation at the regional scale. When this is invisible, such as a deficit of pedestrian mobility and regional mass transit accumulating for many generations, the regional powers are unable to engage in a conversation about how to approach the problem.
Today, political constituencies attempt to combat flow by becoming an absorbing bottleneck in order to prevent their own situation from becoming worse. Improving these local situations comes from investing in physical improvements, such as better transit and mobility, more schools, or simply more pleasant physical spaces. These “infilled” amenities can then be exchanged for concessions on growth limits and political boundaries.
In most North American cities, enormous areas of commercial zones and office parks could be upgraded to dense urban neighborhoods without disturbance to existing residential areas. They first need a large-scale public investment in redesigned amenities and connectivity, which only a higher order of governance can afford, one that has a mandate to fix a problem of regional scale.
Conclusion
Canada is aiming to double its population within decades. This implies at least a doubling of the scale of every city in the country, and greater than a doubling if some cities are bottlenecked and the flow of growth must be absorbed by the others. Our largest cities are already congested by decades of car-centric infrastructure investment. Laying out a green belt around each is the first step to preventing more automobile dependency, then budding (as a plant buds) into that green belt with a new fully planned city is the necessary way to welcome all these new citizens into the promised lifestyle.
The urban growth boundary is no more than a regional government embryo. It must be evolved into a true regional planning system. The green belt must be governed by the city it is a belt for, as an ecosystem preserve and ecological asset of that city. It must be governed at the scale of this city, such that its transformation into more dwellings does not worsen scale constraints.
Whether we succeed at our ambition to be the home for a new generation of immigrants while honoring our climate commitments will depend on our ability to break through our city planning bottlenecks and resolve the instabilities we have accumulated over decades of technical debt. The ambition of this project is tantamount to a national mobilization, especially for a country with one of the world’s heaviest carbon footprints and coldest climates. Despite this, it is a vision worth aspiring to as a model of growth.
[1] A century later, Robert Moses would template his own career path on the same social bargain – displacement of some in return for a modernized metropolis. His choice of technology was unfortunately much more destructive.
[2] After Haussmann’s firing and the fall of the Second Empire, Alphand would be tasked with managing the totality of the remaining urban planning transformations that had been initiated.
The Nature Futures Framework could support the creation of nature-positive scenarios for cities that should follow two important principles: First, consider the effects of actions well beyond the footprint of the city; second, consider equity in visions of the future.
Over the last few months, the metaverse has captured the attention of many professionals, including urban planners.
While some may fear a Spielberg-like scenario where we stop caring for our physical world, we can also think of the metaverse as a gateway to inclusion ― where most people could help shape cities from the comfort of their living rooms. This is what cities like Seoul envision, with large investments in the metaverse to improve civic services and lower barriers to participation in urban debates.
Credit: Noelle Ong
As this technology and other internet and communications technology (ICT) tools develop — fast ― can we leverage them to change how we design with nature in cities? Can they help develop biodiversity-friendly visions for the future?
Issues with existing nature-related visions
Frameworks that address the question of nature in and around cities are already abound. Some examples at the international level include the “Urban” Sustainable Development Goal, SDG 11, and the New Urban Agenda, which both promote greenspaces in cities: For example, SDG 11 proposes to measure the increase in the share of urban greenspace in a city to “provide universal access to safe, inclusive, and accessible green and public spaces”.
Multiple concepts taught in urban design and landscape architecture schools also paint optimistic visions centred around nature: Designing with Nature, Garden Cities, Biophilic Cities, and so on. All these have inspired greening policies in many cities around the world, including here in Singapore where we moved from a Garden city to a City in Nature in the course of a few decades.
Notwithstanding their contributions, these agendas and visions remain limited for shaping our cities’ nature-positive futures.
First, they typically offer general guiding principles or high-level targets that do not address on-the-ground challenges. For example, the goal of increasing the share of urban greenspace is laudable but insufficient when it comes to addressing complex trade-offs between land for transport, housing, and greenspace.
When concepts are more detailed, they lack an important dimension in that they do not reflect citizens’ values. Yet, for those visions to be legitimate, useful, and used, they need to integrate a plurality of worldviews about nature. In other words, recognizing that people hold different views related to nature, and therefore positive visions for the future of nature in cities will differ vastly between people.
In the “science-policy space, IPCC’s “shared socio-economic pathways” are other examples of narratives that embody various degrees of optimism ― or rather pessimism ― about our ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Although laudable, these pathways that make IPCC-scenarios relevant beyond climate models resulted in most scenarios being negative for nature. Probably not useful, therefore, as a tool for shaping hopeful futures for nature in cities.
Credit: Noelle Ong
Making space for positive and inclusive nature visions ―The Nature Futures Framework
Such diagnostic is what drove the development of the Nature Futures Framework by the IPBES working group on scenarios and models. The framework ― NFF in short ― was co-developed to emphasize the importance of plurality in scenario development. In this context, we do not let “experts” develop nature-positive scenarios but acknowledge that local values should drive this process.
In practice, the NFF distinguishes between three types of nature-related values: “Nature for Nature” values, that recognize nature in and for itself (driving, for example, the protection of endangered species); “Nature for Society” values, that emerge from an understanding of the benefits nature provides to people (think promoting urban parks for people’s enjoyment); and “Nature as Culture” values, a fuzzier set of values having in common that they do not set people apart from nature, but rather embrace our relationship with nature (think educational programs developing a sense of nature stewardship in early age).
All these values have overlaps, and, as individuals, we likely hold multiple, perhaps conflicting, values ourselves. Yet, recognizing and mapping such values, for example, using the triangle below, will help understand individual and organizational perspectives on nature, negotiate potential trade-offs, or look for win-win solutions, where multiple types of values are promoted.
The Nature Futures perspectives associated with 3 different types of values. Adapted from: PBL 2018
Using the Nature Futures Framework for cities
The NFF has only just started being applied as a visioning tool for cities, for example, urban growth scenarios in the Atlantic forest of Brazil.
In a recent publication, we explained how the framework could support the creation of nature-positive scenarios for cities: In addition to reflecting different types of values (“for nature”, “for society”, and “as culture”), scenarios developed with the urban NFF should follow two important principles: First, considering the telecoupling effects; i.e., actions taken in a city, such as reducing food waste, may have effects well beyond the footprint of the city, such as in agricultural expansion in sourcing countries. Second, considering equity in visions of the future, both through an inclusive participatory process and in designing for environmentally just futures that provide equitable access to the benefits of nature.
Recently, we also applied the NFF as a screening tool to analyse a particular “pool” of urban visions and determine whether some perspectives were missing. For example, my lab has analysed a set of serious games ― games with an educational or professional purpose ― to show that they were promoting “nature for society” values, and therefore painting a utilitarian picture of urban nature. Could future serious games be developed with a more balanced view of nature?
Similarly, we have used the framework to scrutinize visions for new towns in the Greater Jakarta Metropolitan area, through a masterplan analysis. By identifying the values associated with different visions and practices, we emphasized how new towns could inspire each other and become more “nature-positive” without necessarily involving more financial or land resources.
Both of these projects provide a mirror for existing practice and help researchers and practitioners design or re-design tools that will cater to a broader range of valid, nature-related values.
Yet another framework?
Is the NFF yetanother tool to consider for cities interested in “building greener”? Yes… and that is fine. IPBES is one among many organisations ― with or without the UN system ― promoting participatory processes in urban governance. Its legitimacy and recognition will help the diffusion of the framework and will promote innovation, which is needed for local governments, NGOs, and civil society to accelerate the protection or restoration of urban nature.
Upcoming guidance will help promote the tool in the ways I described above and many other applications. Technology such as the metaverse can enable further applications, of course. As an intelligent urban thinker recently put it: “Urban practitioners should use AI in combination with other tools and methods, such as community engagement and stakeholder consultations, to make informed decisions about sustainable and inclusive urban development.”
But most importantly, NFF guidance will help the scenario and modelling community standardize lessons learnt through engagements and improve the usefulness of the NFF in future applications. It will promote the creation of toolkits and capacity-building materials critically needed for cities with lower resources. While megacities typically have capabilities to catalyse the work on urban nature, secondary cities may benefit from more resources and tools to effectively implement participatory processes for urban nature.
Secondary cities do not have millions to invest in the metaverse or expensive technology but they have real-world issues to address regarding the use of a precious resource: land. With the expected urban population growth, especially in Asia-Pacific, it is critical to provide urban actors with resources to articulate future visions and develop a deep understanding of what right- and stake-holders care about. Research and practice demonstrate over and again that this is a prerequisite to sustainable and inclusive urban planning.
As a community of practice working on urban nature, we can leverage technology ― the metaverse or a flipchart and marker ― to step up the work on participatory planning, scenario visioning, and further advance our shared understanding and progress toward a City in nature. The Nature Futures Framework can help us do that.
Thank you to colleagues in my lab and participants in the IPBES workshop on the Nature Futures Framework (November 2022) for inspiring this post. Special thanks to Shaikh Fairul Edros and Aura Istrate for their active work on the topic and for reviewing this post
How many highways are named for the things they ruin? And how many places in New York are named after people made money from slavery? A lot, it turns out.
I spent the last few years working on and off on a book that I tentatively titled Who Was That Major Deegan Anyway? That title reflected the book’s origin story. My husband Allen and I used to get stuck in traffic on the Major Deegan every time we tried to visit my parents in Pennsylvania.
Photo of Maj Deegan Expwy by Rebecca Bratspies
I would grumble (ok, curse) and ask, “who was that Major Deegan anyway.” Finally sick of my whining, Allen said “why don’t you find out.” Out of that casual challenge, a hobby was born—finding out about the lives behind the names that adorned so much infrastructure in New York City. Major Deegan was first, but I soon became hooked on this whimsical pathway into the history of the City I love.
One thing led to another, and I became a local world’s expert on New York City’s named roads, bridges, and institutions. People would ask me questions, and before I could stop myself, I would be giving mini-lectures on New York history. Nobody likes a know-it-all, so I learned to focus on the soundbites. Did you know that the Outerbridge Crossing was named after a person named Outerbridge? That the New York Times called Van Wyck “the most corrupt mayor in New York City history“? That the Holland Tunnel was named after its Chief Engineer? That Gracie was business partners with Alexander Hamilton? That Peter Cooper invented Jell-O? There are fascinating life stories behind each one of the names that have become New York City’s urban short-hand for traffic jams, culture, and recreation.
I started this book in 2014 after Allen suffered a catastrophic cardiac arrest. He was in the hospital for 6+ months, with the first month in a coma hanging between life and death. I had no emotional energy for my usual environmental scholarship, but desperately needed a project to keep me mentally engaged as I sat by his bedside. Working on this book was a way to connect with our past as I waited to see if he would recover. That story has multiple happy endings. Although he has limitations, he made a truly miraculous recovery and is even able to compose again. And. . . I wrote a book.
I was having a hard time starting this blog post. Since the academy is all in a tizzy about AI, I asked ChatGPT to write an essay about the sustainability lessons from how we name infrastructure in New York City after famous people. Here is how the AI post began:
“New York City is one of the most iconic cities in the world, and as such, its streets, monuments, and landmarks have been given names that reflect its history, culture, and values. From the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building, the names of many of New York City’s most famous places commemorate the individuals and events that have shaped the city’s history.”
Not a bad start. Sort of. If you ignore that, unlike so much of New York City’s infrastructure, the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building are not actually named after individuals or events.
Rather than relying on technology, I preferred to rely on my network of friends and colleagues.
His brother, author and artist Jeff LaGreca made the book’s fantastically silly trailer.
Environmental reporter Andy Revkin and environmental educator Lisa Mechaley graciously consented to be among the book’s earliest readers. For a book blurb, Andy wrote:
“In the rush of daily life, we tend to traverse our communities with little awareness of the visions, struggles and travails of those who shaped vital structures or whose lives are memorialized in their names. For the world’s greatest metropolis, Rebecca Bratspies has helped fill that awareness gap by crafting an illuminating guide to the people behind New York City’s transportation, recreational and institutional landmarks.”
He and Lisa shared that they “always joke ruefully about how many parkways are named for the things they ruin.” Their examples—the Hutchinson River Parkway and the Sawmill River Parkway—both of which cut off community access to the rivers. Moreover, the salting of these roads, not to mention the traffic they create, contributes significantly to air and water pollution that drives a host of health impacts in the surrounding community.
Aside from the fact that my friends are far more talented and insightful than any AI could ever dream of becoming, this project taught me two important lessons about urban sustainability.
First, that no amount of road construction will ever solve the problems of congestion. The justifications for the Holland Tunnel, the Goethals Bridge, and the Pulaski Skyway in the 1920s, and for the Van Wyck in the 1950s was to alleviate congestion from automobiles. These names are now synonymous with congestion. This lesson is critical as we consider the role of public transportation, and ongoing proposals to expand the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the New Jersey Turnpike leading to the Holland Tunnel―you guessed it, to alleviate congestion. Initiatives to reduce private automobile travel through congestion pricing are far more likely to succeed. After years of wrangling, New York finally seems poised to implement congestion pricing for parts of Manhattan. And, of course, the best way to reduce congestion is to invest in more and better mass transit and to continue to build the protected bike lanes that have proven immensely popular.
Second, profound economic transformation is possible. It was educational (read: shocking) to discover just how much New York infrastructure is named for those who participated in and profited from the slave economy. From its earliest days as New Netherlands, until it was finally made illegal in 1827, slavery was “part and parcel” of New York’s economic organization. Among those I write about in Naming Gotham, Alexander Macomb enslaved 12 Black persons, the Rikers family enslaved at least 10, and Lennox enslaved 4. Even after the formal end of slavery in New York, trade in goods that were made by enslaved persons continued to enrich a generation of New Yorkers. The names of these enslavers are familiar, even if their association with slavery is not. There is still tremendous work to do to acknowledge that history, and to grapple with what these names mean going forward. Yet, there is an additional lesson to learn. The visionary campaigners who fought against the evils of slavery were often derided as impractical dreamers who were unable to face economic facts. Nevertheless, they persisted. And they won. It was a long, hard, and bloody struggle, one that faced resistance every step of the way from those whose fortunes rested on the enslavement of others. But we ended the economy that put enslaved labor at its core. This gives me hope that we can do the same for the economy built on fossil fuels.
Imagine what New York City will look like if we learn both lessons at once. We can eliminate our dependence on congestion-creating private vehicles while we simultaneously replace fossil fuels. We can have city streets that are safe for pedestrians and bicyclists, with rapid, non-polluting mass transit. Not only can we do this, we must! The IPPCC’s latest report makes that abundantly clear. What then of New York City’s network of roads, bridges, and tunnels that all have congestion as their rationale? And most importantly, what will we name our new, more sustainable infrastructure?
The contributors to this round table, including artists, curators, environmentalists, landscape architects, and scientists, have all reflected on what they learned from meeting and working with the Harrisons.
The Harrisons (Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022)) are widely acknowledged as pioneers in bringing together art and ecology into a new form of practice. They worked for over fifty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues. The works they made in various places from the second half of the 1970s stand as proposals for putting the well-being of the web of life first. The Harrisons’ visionary projects have, on occasion, led to changes in governmental policy and have expanded dialogue around previously unexplored issues leading to practical implementations variously in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
In writing and inviting people to contribute we sought advice and received extensive help from both the Harrison Studio/Center for the Study of the Force Majeure (CFM); from Kai Resche and Petra Kruse, curators and editors with the Harrisons (and also the Berlin branch of CFM), as well as from David Haley (who was the project manager for Casting a Green Net and Associate artist for Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2007-09).
We offered the following passage from one of the Harrisons perhaps less well-known works as a prompt, encapsulating their approach
Trümmerflora, or rubble plants and trees, are a special phenomenon unique to heavily bombed urban areas. The bomb acts as a plough, breaking brick, mortar, metal, and wood into fragments and, in a single gesture, mixing these with earth from below. The earth often contains seeds, dormant from the time of first construction on the site, that may have been buried for a century or more. These seeds come to light, and those that can live in this new and special earth, grow and flourish. Other seeds, dropped by wind and by animals, also survive in limited numbers in this new soil, this rubble. Hence the name Trümmerflora, or loosely translated, rubble flowers.
Harrison and Harrison 1990 ‘Trümmerflora: on the Topography of Terrors’ in Polemical Landscapes California Museum of Photography pp 12-13
This 1988 work by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison during a period of residency in Berlin emerged in response to overlooking the derelict site that had been the headquarter of the Gestapo, Storm Trooper, and Secret Service Operations, i.e. the bureaucratic center for the Death Camps and Labour Camps of the Nazi regime. Earlier attempts by others to create an appropriate monument or memorial to the horrors of this urban site had failed. As Jewish people, this site was hugely significant. However, the Harrisons characteristically turned their attention to a possibility of healing brought about through an ecological understanding of the site, creating a proposal that enfolds this history, the destruction of the infrastructure of terror reducing it to rubble, lending itself to new life through the forces of nature.
The contributors to this round table, including artists, curators, environmentalists, landscape architects, and scientists, have all reflected on what they learned from meeting and working with the Harrisons. For some, this starts with Portable Fish Farm: Survival Piece #III which caused a furore when it was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1971. A number of others were involved in various ways (curator, environmentalist, scientist, artist, and project manager) with the Harrisons’ work Casting a Green Net: Can it be we are seeing a Dragon? (1998) made as part of ‘ArtTranspennine98’, a major regional collaboration between the Tate Gallery Liverpool and the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust. Others have much more recent experiences of Newton Harrison as he continued the practice, including curating an exhibition Eco-art Work: 11 Artists from 8 Countries for Various Small Fires in Los Angeles in 2022, and developing the work Sensorium.
Contributors reflect on how working with the Harrisons in various different ways informed, changed, and developed their practices. Some talk about having the strictures of their respective disciplines and working practices lifted and their thinking transformed. Others talk about the love, the love between the Harrisons, and the wider empathy reaching beyond human-centredness that they engendered.
Leslie Ryan’s contribution touches specifically on the Trümmerflora piece as she was working with the Harrisons as a studio assistant during this period. She describes how, having studied Landscape Architecture and encouraged by the Harrisons scepticism of the profession to question of the limitations of her discipline, she was taken on a journey that profoundly changed her understanding of that practice, including “always looking beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of here and now.”
Lewis Biggs, who was one of the curators of ArtTranspennine98, is one of two contributors who had experienced Portable Fish Farm in 1971. He too comments on the dynamic between Helen and Newton, but he also notes “being impressed with how the artists would pounce on specific words that emerged in the public workshops, and highlight them for further discussion” and their “their Rorschach process to ‘discover’ iconic images from maps.”
The other contributor who saw Portable Fish Farm is Simon Read. Simon Read offers one of the counterpoints or serious questions based on his experiences during the Greenhouse Britain project. Coming from a place-based practice he is somewhat troubled by the Harrisons’ willingness to develop a response to a place without having inhabited it. That being said, he acknowledges the point made by a civil servant at the time, that the Harrisons were “refreshing in that they feel able to unabashedly talk about the big idea.” As authors who also worked on Greenhouse Britain, it is interesting to reflect that the Harrisons’ focus was on the question of climate adaptation and how to draw attention to that, when all policy at that time was focused on mitigation. We worked for 2 years on the project, and the Harrisons visited the UK eight or ten times, each visit lasting perhaps 2 weeks, during that period. The project had been instigated by David Haley through a series of workshops held from Aberdeen to Devon. But in the context of the Lea Valley, one context that was featured in Greenhouse Britain, we knew it far less well than Simon did as a result of his three or more years focusing on it during the Hydrocitizenship project (2014-17).
The various contributions from people involved in Casting a Green Net open up the process. They include Lewis Biggs, curator; Les Firbank, ecological scientist; David Haley, artist and project manager; John Hyatt, artist and educator; Jamie Saunders, futures and policy maker, Richard Scott and Richard Sharland, environmentalists. Casting a Green Net was pre-emptive planning for the area across the North of England, recognising the diversity of soils and making a case for developing diversity of species and landscape types across the region. The work is archetypal of the Harrisons’ practice in the scale (addressing a region), in the timescale (understanding the Romans as part of the story of becoming), and in the ways that different sometimes conflicted voices are brought to bear on the issues. The refrain in the work is also a beautiful example of their poetry,
I said
If not here then elsewhere
You said
If here
then elsewhere will know how to proceed
Les Firbank, a scientist acknowledges not really ‘getting’ the way the Harrisons worked with maps, having students remaking them by hand at scale, until he saw the audience engaging. His observation of the way audiences physically responded to the large-scale maps, moving in and out, very engaged, is what persuaded him that this work was significant.
Richard Sharland, an environmental activist also involved, comments on the Harrisons’ differentiating ‘discussion’ from ‘dialogue’, and their consistent intention to keep the process open. But he goes on to say that planners invited to discuss the work “were surprised and intrigued that these artists from California had much more data about the unsustainability of human life in northern England at their fingertips than they did.”
Richard Scott, with a particular interest in wildflowers and meadows, highlights how the Harrisons’ approach related, amplified, and helped develop the approach of his organisation, Landlife, to developing sites for wildflower meadows.
John Hyatt, who was a Professor of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) at the time, draws out the importance and functionality of the title of the work, the conversations and propensities that led to it, and suggests what it did for people, adults, children, experts, who encountered the work. David Haley, just finishing his MFA at MMU at the time, became project manager for the project, weaves the narrative across decades, linking Casting a Green Net with Greenhouse Britain as well as explorations in Taiwan and Central Europe. He positions the term ‘post-disciplinary’ as encapsulating this form of practice.
The issues which drive the need for approaches such as post-disciplinarity are picked up by Jamie Saunders, a policy maker and ‘futures’ practitioner. He talks about the importance of the “preferable, probable, possible, plausible”.
The dynamic between Helen and Newton comes to life in various ways across several pieces. Yangkura talks about a conversation with Newton in 2019 not long after Helen had passed away, a conversation that centred on the power of love to ride both good and bad times. Leslie Ryan and Barbara Benish both draw out the complex and sometimes fractious dynamics—the weaknesses as well as the strengths, Benish remembering, “Newton’s occasional amnesia towards female autonomy or ‘otherness’ in the room, [when] Helen would gently, or forcefully, pull him back in”. David Haley, reflecting on working with the Harrisons over many years, comments that this friction was sometimes performed, allowing an audience to recognise that the issues are conflicted and that disagreement is allowed. Benish describes the deep intergenerational dynamics of the Harrisons’ way of working that has led to the development of art Dialog/Art Mill, a not-for-profit organization working in sustainable education via the arts and sciences in the Czech Republic.
Ruby Barnett, the Harrisons’ Studio Manager, and Senior Researcher from 2017-2021, opens up the Harrisons’ process of ‘morning conversations’, a practice they developed from Adelbert Ames Jr – Ames believed that you should set yourself a problem before going to sleep and that your unconscious mind would work on it providing a solution in the morning. The Harrisons developed their practice of ‘morning conversations’ as part of their process of collaborating—Work Place was their contribution to Arlene Raven’s 1983 exhibition ‘At Home’ documenting ten years of West Coast Feminist art. Work Place was an installation representing the front room of the Harrisons’ own house. They inhabited the installation, beginning “…their day at the museum just as they normally do in their home in San Diego – with a ritual of coffee, meditation, and dialogue”. Ruby Barnett’s contribution also hints at the ways in which the Harrisons understood how, as Donella Meadows put it, dance with systems.
Some of these themes are picked up by Beth Stephens, who with her wife Annie Sprinkle, are artists, academics, and ecosexuals and who worked with the Harrisons on Green Wedding to the Earth (2008). The Harrisons provide the ‘wedding homily’ for this performative wedding. They came together to explore the potential of a Ph.D. program focusing on environmental art but Stephens predominantly recalls the experience of exploratory conversations that connected them in a process of give and take across shared interests.
Another aspect is picked up by Petra Kruse and Kai Resche, curators and editors of The Time of the Force Majeure, the career survey and Harrisons’ autobiography published in 2016. Petra Kruse and Kai Resche adopt the approach the Harrisons used to explain an intertwined story from two perspectives. While some contributors met the Harrisons and had their world re-framed, Kruse and Resche found in the Harrisons’ approach something they had been seeking.
Newton Harrison’s particular turn of phrase is captured in Janeil Engelstad’s contribution. Newton was involved with Billy Klüver’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) initiative at the end of the 1960s (as well as with the Los Angeles County Museum’s Art and Technology project in the early 1970s). Engelstad was co-curator on 9e2 Seattle, a programme revisiting the key questions and ambitions of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, the one of the iconic parts of E.A.T. Engelstad included a discussion with Newton Harrison reflecting on Billy Klüver’s initiative, during which she reports, “He had it all wrong… and I told him thus…”
Ranil Senanayake is perhaps the longest collaborator who has contributed, having met the Harrisons in 1974. Senanayake introduced the Harrisons to the crab Scylla Serrata indigenous to Sri Lanka’s lagoons. The crab becomes the central ‘character’ of the Harrisons’ seminal work, The Lagoon Cycle, and Senanayake excerpts key passages from that work to narrate his relationship with the Harrisons during that period. He goes on to tell us about working with Newton again in Korea in 2021 and how their approach has informed his work in ‘analog forestry’, an approach he developed, which uses a synthesis of traditional and scientific knowledge to optimize the productive potential forestry. He also highlights EarthRestoration, a blockchain approach to supporting local farmers to grow trees. Using a tradeable digital ledger NFTs are issued providing farmers with an income for incorporating living photosynthetic biomass into their farms.
Aviva Rahmani, another contributor who knew the Harrisons from the early 1970s, highlights their ability to deconstruct power at scale, their support for an interest in her works over a lifetime. Rahmani was one of the artists Newton chose to include in the exhibition he curated for Various Small Fires. Other contributors to the same exhibition had only gotten to know Newton in the past 3 or 4 years. They included Salma Aratsu and Terike Haapoja. Both found their practices shifted by the experiences despite the short period of acquaintance. Arastu attributes to the Harrisons her own development in creating a feminist environmental position that can bridge science, art, and faith. Working with calligraphy she has become able to see a connection between the energy in natural systems and that of the lyrical poetry and patterns of Islamic art and the Qur’an. Haapoja focuses on Newton’s understanding of empathy as ‘feeling for’ and ‘solidarity with’ the more-than-human, particularly evident in the work Apologia Mediterraneo (2019), a work in which Newton addresses the increasing levels of industrial pollution in the Mediterranean Sea. She builds her understanding of empathy through Newton’s early experience of hearing the earth screaming in response to industrial forms of excavation.
Even scientists like Johan Gielis found that Newton Harrison in his late eighties knew the right questions to ask, in this case, whether the study of relations between individual organisms could inform continuity. Gielis, a Belgian mathematician-biologist, works on encoding the shapes and connections between organisms in search of a unified description of natural forms. They shared a starting point in holistic thinking in relation to the web of life, challenging and redirecting the ecocidal direction human society was and is currently taking. Gielis, like the Harrisons, works with metaphor [“switching between [heart] as a cylinder (for transporting blood) and a Möbius strip, a one-sided body for exchanging oxygen in the lungs and cells”], displacing old metaphors for new more appropriate ones. For Reiko Goto-Collins, working with her partner Tim Collins, it is Harrisons’ insights into metaphor as a dynamic critical tool that most struck her about their work. In particular, she retraces their pathway from dysfunctional metaphors, ‘flipping’ these to open up choice in the way we relate to the world around us, here explored through Collins and Goto’s research into the Scots Pine.
Ruth Wallen and Brandon Ballengée, both artists, outline the various ways they have learned from, been inspired by, and worked with the Harrisons. Ruth Wallen’s work for a residency at the Exploratorium in San Francisco was inspired by the Harrisons’ approach. She had followed their Masters and she also raises the importance of metaphor in their work. For example, Serpentine Lattice (1993), seeing a forestry practice as a lattice, identifies crucial points to begin processes of restoration. Ballengée’s current work Memory of a Cajun Prairie uses the same approach as the Harrisons’ Future Gardens works, asking what can adapt and what supports adaptation. It was developed in dialogue with Newton Harrison and embeds ecological research into the process of imagining what ‘scaffolding’ adaptation might mean in the Louisiana context.
Several contributors speak about the Harrisons as teachers in various ways. Tim Collins contributes a piece of writing originally developed in 2000 with the Harrisons, Jackie Brookner (1945-2015), Ruth Wallen (another contributor), and Josh Harrison. This text is a pedagogical proposal focused by the challenge of involving artists in civic discourse. It highlights in particular a lack of capacity in the languages and processes of ecology, politics, and sociology. This pedagogical proposal outlines in broad terms the challenge, “the emerging biological revolution is all but abandoned to the sciences” and outlines the requirements for a new approach to visual art education that would equip artists to participate in the global environment challenges. Twenty years on and whilst there have been multiple attempts at establishing such courses, they remain outliers and many have closed.
The character of this challenge is well articulated by Cathy Fitzgerald, an environmental scientist who has ‘transferred’ to the arts. She sets out her experience and the role of the Harrisons both as models and as empathetic and timely supporters. The lack of interest in the biological revolution and the unwillingness to recognise the value of engaging with the languages and processes of ecology and politics was a challenge for Fitzgerald throughout her studies at Masters and Doctoral levels.
Jo-Ann Kuchera-Morin, a composer and artist working in complex systems research, and her team including Dr. Gustavo Rincon, Dr. Kon Hyong, and Myungin Lee, met Newton in 2021 through the development of Sensorium. Their technology, AlloSphere/AlloLib has developed significant immersive environments engaging the public in matters of concern. Their work with Newton on Sensorium provoked thinking around how such an environment could function as a pre-emptive planning system, among other functions including education. Together they nurtured a culture of respect between researchers, one science the other arts “investigating the lifeweb from true empirical inquiry and truthful interrogation.”
Wu Mali was the instigator of the work that the Harrisons did with David Haley in Taiwan in 2008. Wu, as co-curator of the Taipei Biennial in 2018, included Newton Harrison’s On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland as a centrepiece of the exhibition. She comments, “many works pointed out the difficulties and challenges faced by the contemporary world, but the Harrisons demonstrated how we could apply wisdom to allow species to coexist and prosper.”
Tatiana Sizonenko, curator of the 2024 exhibition Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, which will form the keystone of the fourth iteration of Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, highlights how the Harrisons’ approach informs her curating. Sizonenko had previously curated Art as Agency which combined the Harrisons work Peninsula Europe IV with works from younger artists influenced by them.
We have written extensively on the practice of the Harrisons, but this process of hearing the many different perspectives of artists; curators; landscape architects, environmental activists and policy makers; and scientists, has opened up new aspects of their practice. One of the fascinating aspects in the enduring connectivity over very extended periods involving ongoing dialogues as well as collaborations on multiple projects woven through this collection.
The other aspect that becomes clear from these different responses is the ways in which the Harrisons opened up their process to others. From the various contributions we can begin to understand how this enabled individuals to find themselves by being invited into the practice and being involved in the work. The pretty consistently recurring sense is that across the arts and sciences, even those who questioned the Harrisons’ approach, were able to engage with it and understand it, and able to develop their own approaches.
In one of the last published interviews with Newton Harrison he is asked what he would say to younger artists. He offers the following,
Let us forget originality. Let us forget our signature on our work. Let us begin to do what we do best, which is improvise with a new culture that will be covalent with the life web itself, and let’s get together and create. (Harrison, N., and KUPPER, O., 2022. Newton Harrison: Force Majeure. Autre Magazine, 13 Biodiversity. p.257)
Chris Fremantle and Anne Douglas
Ayrshire and Aberdeen
Anne Douglas is a Professor Emeritus, previously Chair in Art in Public Life at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen Scotland. She has focused, over the past 25 years, on developing doctoral/postdoctoral research into the changing nature of art in public life, increasingly in relation to environmental change.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Salma Arastu, BerkeleyI hear his voice when I read Channeling the Lifeweb again and again. The words echo in my mind every day and night.
Brandon Ballengée, ArnaudvilleThey encouraged me for decades to continue, to go deeper into the research and ask the question ‘how big is here?’, then to follow fearlessly what I discovered.
Ruby Barnett, Santa CruzThe work of the Harrisons caused a shift that has enabled me to embrace complex systems in a more visceral, thorough way than in my previous work.
Barbara Benish, Santa CruzTheir understanding of the consequences of ‘framing’, of giving humans a vision of the earth’s crisis in a way that is not catastrophic but regenerative, was the Harrison’s gift to us.
Lewis Biggs, ShanghaiWe were all impressed with the quality of the research that went into the production of the various maps, and how very thought-provoking their synthetic approach (art-science-text-image) could be. That for me is their significant legacy.
Tim Collins, GlasgowArtists have always critiqued and revealed belief systems, the program we are about to describe will teach artists to be effective agents of change. We seek to define the pedagogy of engagement.
Janeil Engelstad, SeattleAt the center of their work was love and perhaps this is the greatest legacy that the Harrisons leave.
Les Firbank, LeedsOur art/science dynamic was based on mutual respect and talking through different approaches to common questions, rather than the more usual multidisciplinary approach of artists seeking to illustrate the science.
Cathy Fitzgerald, Hollywood ForestFor me, this is the most profound legacy of the Harrisons’ work – understanding how creativity is an essential driver for holistic ecopedagogy across all education.
Johan Gielis, AntwerpenWhat matters is not the individual forms, but how they are connected. Newton’s specific question was whether this would also teach us about ecosystems and continuity. He challenged and inspired me to look more deeply and broadly at ecosystems and our planet.
Reiko Goto Collins, GlasgowThrough this conversation I have learned three things: 1) metaphor can be physical, 2) physical metaphor can be dysfunctional, and 3) a metaphorical flip informs how we understand a functional metaphor.
Terike Haapoja, New YorkFor Newton, this kind of awakening had happened early in life, when he was driving along a highway in California, seeing the broken landscapes under constant, violent human excavation. Suddenly, he said, he could hear the earth screaming.
David Haley, Walney IslandThrough working, touring, and engaging with Helen and Newton, my ecological arts practice continues to be found and like them, I hope to enable others to seek their ecological arts practices.
John Hyatt, LiverpoolI was interested, amongst other things, in how they kept all parties engaged, brought them together, and kept them involved: the creation of an ecology of collaboration.
Petra Kruse, BonnFrom the very first moment the two of us met with Helen and Newton, we were convinced of their ways to work, and felt it to be very similar to the way we wanted ― and finally achieved ― to work.
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Santa BarbaraWhat I have learned from the brief time of working with Newton and viewing the work that he and Helen have accomplished is the collaboration of two bio-eco artists who were interested in investigating the life web from true empirical inquiry and truthful interrogation, using their expert artistry and scientific inquiry.
Aviva Rahmani, New YorkWe had parallel interests across many years, but they understood far better, how to platform and establish visibility for those interests.
Simon Read, LondonI can see a lot of connections and regret that I was never to follow up an acquaintance with the Harrisons since they seemed to be operating in a parallel area both conceptually and technically.
Kai Reschke, BonnFrom the very first moment the two of us met with Helen and Newton, we were convinced of their ways to work, and felt it to be very similar to the way we wanted ― and finally achieved ― to work.
Leslie Ryan, Santa CruzListening to the Harrisons talk about repairing our relationship with the land and working ― always ― to advantage of the life web was a watershed moment for me, a siren call that changed everything.
Jamie Saunders, LeedsTheir work stands as a guide. When I remember, when I am provoked, they hold fast to more than the immediate concerns and less-than-life-enhancing work of day-to-day living. The life-web: see it, breathe it, hear it.
Richard Scott, LiverpoolTheir practice was enabling and real and embodied timeless wisdom for people and nature, and these principles and their artworks will stay with me.
Ranil Senanayake, DavisFrom creating a lagoon in a tank with Helen and Newton, I moved on to create a forest in a garden.
Richard Sharland, AltarnunBoth Helen and Newton had this wonderful gift of memory for stories and information and ideas, which they drew upon to evolve their work, to help others to evolve.
Tatiana Sizonenko, San DiegoNewton’s impact, along with Helen’s, on the field of environmental art practice and research, and socially engaged art more generally, is incalculable.
Beth Stephens, Santa CruzNewton and I were friends. Unlikely friends, but friends, nonetheless. Even though we could not have come from two more radically different worlds, we somehow connected and got a deep kick out of each other.
Ruth Wallen, San DiegoWorking in collaborative partnership, the Harrisons’ use of dialogue, with stories unfolding as they augmented or interrupted each other, amplified the generativity and generosity of their metaphors while spawning more.
Mali Wu, KaohsiungThe Harrisons demonstrated how we could apply wisdom to allow species to coexist and prosper. This is what we should learn anew, and that art can contribute to.
Yangkura, CityAfter I encountered Harrison Studio’s works, I was able to redefine my works with an omnidirectional view. I learned that I must be in a position where I can communicate and collaborate with various types of people who have similar thoughts and integrate them.
Chris Fremantle is a producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. He produces ecoartscotland, a platform for research and practice focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers.
Introduction
In Berlin, the Harrisons characteristically turned their attention to a possibility of healing brought about through ecological understanding, creating a proposal that enfolds the destruction of the infrastructure of terror, reducing it to rubble and then lending itself to new life through the forces of nature.
The Harrisons (Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) are widely acknowledged as pioneers in bringing together art and ecology into a new form of practice. They worked for over fifty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues. The works they made in various places from the second half of the 1970s stand as proposals for putting the well-being of the web of life first. The Harrisons’ visionary projects have, on occasion, led to changes in governmental policy and have expanded dialogue around previously unexplored issues leading to practical implementations variously in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
In writing and inviting people to contribute we sought advice and received extensive help from both the Harrison Studio/Center for the Study of the Force Majeure (CFM); from Kai Resche and Petra Kruse, curators and editors with the Harrisons (and also the Berlin branch of CFM), as well as from David Haley (who was the project manager for Casting a Green Net and Associate artist for Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2007-09).
We offer the following passage from one of the Harrisons perhaps less well-known works as a prompt, encapsulating their approach:
Trümmerflora, or rubble plants and trees, are a special phenomena unique to heavily bombed urban areas. The bomb acts as a plough, breaking brick, mortar, metal, and wood into fragments and, in a single gesture, mixing these with earth from below. The earth often contains seeds, dormant from the time of first construction on the site, that may have been buried for a century or more. These seeds come to light, and those that can live in this new and special earth, grow and flourish. Other seeds, dropped by wind and by animals, also survive in limited numbers in this new soil, this rubble. Hence the name Trümmerflora, or loosely translated, rubble flowers.
Harrison and Harrison 1990 ‘Trümmerflora: on the Topography of Terrors’ in Polemical Landscapes California Museum of Photography pp 12-13
This 1988 work by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison during a period of residency in Berlin emerged in response to overlooking the derelict site that had been the headquarter of the Gestapo, Storm Trooper, and Secret Service Operations, i.e. the bureaucratic center for the Death Camps and Labour Camps of the Nazi regime. Earlier attempts by others to create an appropriate monument or memorial to the horrors of this urban site had failed. As Jewish people, this site was hugely significant. However, the Harrisons characteristically turned their attention to a possibility of healing brought about through an ecological understanding of the site, creating a proposal that enfolds this history, the destruction of the infrastructure of terror reducing it to rubble, lending itself to new life through the forces of nature.
The contributors to this round table, including artists, curators, environmentalists, landscape architects, and scientists, have all reflected on what they learned from meeting and working with the Harrisons. For some, this starts with Portable Fish Farm: Survival Piece #III which caused a furore when it was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1971. A number of others were involved in various ways (curator, environmentalist, scientist, artist, and project manager) with the Harrisons’ work Casting a Green Net: Can it be we are seeing a Dragon? (1998) made as part of ‘ArtTranspennine98’, a major regional collaboration between the Tate Gallery Liverpool and the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust. Others have much more recent experiences of Newton Harrison as he continued the practice, including curating an exhibition Eco-art Work: 11 Artists from 8 Countriesfor Various Small Fires in Los Angeles in 2022, and developing the work Sensorium.
Contributors reflect on how working with the Harrisons in various different ways informed, changed, and developed their practices. Some talk about having the strictures of their respective disciplines and working practices lifted and their thinking transformed. Others talk about the love, the love between the Harrisons, and the wider empathy reaching beyond human-centredness that they engendered.
Click here for a more in-depth reflection regarding this roundtable.
Anne Douglas is a Professor Emeritus, previously Chair in Art in Public Life at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen Scotland. She has focused, over the past 25 years, on developing doctoral/postdoctoral research into the changing nature of art in public life, increasingly in relation to environmental change.
Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1927-2018) were artists that pioneered art and ecology, developing an approach that characterised them also as educators. In their artworks, the Harrisons collaborated with planners, scientists, and communities on bioregional scale projects addressing ecosystem health in the context of climate change and the need for adaptation. Helen brought a perspective from her deep knowledge of literature, psychology, and education. She had held senior roles in Higher Education before beginning to collaborate with Newton. He had studied visual art and was already an acclaimed artist before beginning to collaborate with Helen. Their life's work wove together these different knowledges and experiences, generating a unique and appropriate aesthetic that addressed the wellbeing of the web of life.
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
Scotland becomes the first country in the history of countries
to intentionally give back more to the life web than it consumes
when the deep wealth of the country is understood
to be in part a vast commons, with the topsoil as vital
The wealth becomes magnified when the topsoil is attended to
beginning by transforming all organic waste into humus
and continuing the regenerating of carbon in the topsoil mat
while banning all inorganic fertilizer
The deep wealth of the country is maintained
by the oxygen that trees give forth
and the COy the trees and all green growing things sequester
When COg sequestering lowers the atmospheric CO2
and the oxygen production is greater than the consumption
the wealth in the atmospheric commons of the country grows
True for all culturally generated CO2 production
but also true for the breath of the 5.3 million people in Scotland
that requires some 1500 square miles of open canopy forest
Assuming 70 trees per acre or 30 trees per person
to compensate simply for the privilege of breathing
Breathing in the country and the consumption of oxygen
and the production of COy equalize as the forest matures
Thereafter wealth grows as the forest commons grow
The moment is urgent….if business as usual continues
Scotland as usual will continue to have
a carbon footprint over three times its physical size
to do nothing risks the death of the life web
to do too little risks near death and a sixth extinction
to do enough we cannot know without the doing of it
The wealth of the country is in its waters especially the rainfall
about 113 cubic kilometers fall a year on average on these lands
If the excess waters that form the aquatic commons of the nation
are redirected into an array of estuarial lagoons
or into drought ridden farming areas
or into bogs and small lakes and wetlands
The redirection expressed in new food that is produced
also the biodiversity of the country increases
and the cost of flood control decreases
So increases the deep wealth of the nation
When the wealth of the Scottish nation becomes great enough
to trade for what it cannot produce
and this wealth springs from the life web in such a way
that the web’s overproduction is harvested
the harvest preserves and can even enhance the system
It is in this way that Scotland becomes
the first nation in the history of nations
to generate its deep wealth ecologically
tuned to the original peoples’ life ways
and the delusion of an invisible hand disappears
The deep wealth of this nation can grow exponentially
when agreement is found in a majority of its 5,300,000 population
to gain a collective responsibility for the well working of the life web
sufficient to stimulate the web to overproduce
in ways that advantage the web and advantage the human community
Scotland has this opportunity
appearing most clearly in the relationship of a modestly sized educated population
to the 30,000 square miles of land variously available
coupled with an initial unity of beliefs at work
Scotland can become the first modern country to stimulate
then put to work the overproduction of the life web as vast public good
In so doing also becoming the first people in modern history
to reach an ecologically informed commons of mind itself a Meganiche
among the multimillion species that nest within the great web of life.
Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1927-2018) were artists that pioneered art and ecology, developing an approach that characterised them also as educators. In their artworks, the Harrisons collaborated with planners, scientists, and communities on bioregional scale projects addressing ecosystem health in the context of climate change and the need for adaptation. Helen brought a perspective from her deep knowledge of literature, psychology, and education. She had held senior roles in Higher Education before beginning to collaborate with Newton. He had studied visual art and was already an acclaimed artist before beginning to collaborate with Helen. Their life's work wove together these different knowledges and experiences, generating a unique and appropriate aesthetic that addressed the wellbeing of the web of life.
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
From Peninsula Europe: The High Ground – Bringing Forth a New State of Mind 2002
Is Peninsula Europe at a bifurcation point?
At a point of change and self-transformation?
After all, from the Romans through the Middle Ages
through the Renaissance
the Enlightenment
from Modernity to the Now,
that territory we call Europe
has many times rebuilt its landscape
economically, politically, culturally.
It has rebuilt its belief systems
and rebuilt its ecosystems.
Now we imagine a new set of emergent properties
suggesting that this is indeed a bifurcation point in a state of
becoming
a point of reorganisation of its own complexities
into a new form of entityhood.
If so Peninsula Europe becomes the center of a world.
Peninsula Europe moves towards entityhood
when its boundary conditions become
more permeable
to what it understands
as contributing to its wellbeing
and
less permeable
to what does not.
Peninsula Europe moves towards entityhood
when its discourse
can focus on the carrying capacity of its terrains
for industry, farming, fishing
information production
and cultural divergence.
Peninsula Europe moves towards entityhood
as it transforms its wastes
into that which is useful and valuable
while successively reducing the wastes
that are damaging to itself
and when
its organic waste disposal
becomes a vast topsoil regenerating system
insuring green farming
remodeling its food production systems
on natural systems.
Peninsula Europe moves towards entityhood
when its river systems, estuaries, ocean edges,
forests, wetlands, meadowlands, and eco-corridors
are valued sufficiently
and enabled to co-join
into a complex biodiverse life web
self-sustaining in nature
an eco-net of the whole
and its high ground, grassland, and forest communities
contribute ecological redundancy, continuity, and mass
at a continental scale. Peninsula Europe moves towards entityhood
which its diversity of cultures is protected
and they are valued for themselves
and are encouraged to be seen as self-creating entities
adding improvisation and creativity
diversity and uniqueness to the cultural web.
Entityhood happens when each part feeds value to the whole
and the whole complicates itself
following the natural laws of self-organization
and creating a complex entity.
Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1927-2018) were artists that pioneered art and ecology, developing an approach that characterised them also as educators. In their artworks, the Harrisons collaborated with planners, scientists, and communities on bioregional scale projects addressing ecosystem health in the context of climate change and the need for adaptation. Helen brought a perspective from her deep knowledge of literature, psychology, and education. She had held senior roles in Higher Education before beginning to collaborate with Newton. He had studied visual art and was already an acclaimed artist before beginning to collaborate with Helen. Their life's work wove together these different knowledges and experiences, generating a unique and appropriate aesthetic that addressed the wellbeing of the web of life.
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
From Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom 2007
The news is not good and it is getting worse
And for this island
Which is a much loved place
the news is not good and is getting worse
For instance
The Greenland Ice Shelf is breaking up
more rapidly than anyone thought
and this alone could cause an ocean rise
of up to 7 metres
Looking at the first two metre rise
Looking at the storm surge thinking about protection
thinking about where monies might come from
to protect land and people
The news is not good and it’s getting worse
animals are on the run plants are migrating
if the temperatures on the average
rise above 2 degrees Celsius one scenario predicts
Europe, Asia, America, and the Amazon
will lose 30 percent of their forests with concomitant extinctions
Looking at the 4 metre rise
Looking at the shape of the storm surge
we examined what a 5 metre ocean rise might mean
and we are looking at
about a 10,000 square kilometre loss of land
with about 2.2 million people displaced
…
Finally understanding
that the news is neither good nor bad
it is simply that great differences are upon us
that great changes are upon us as a culture
and great changes are upon all planetary life systems
and the news is about how we meet these changes
and are transformed by them or in turn transform them
As a woman, artist, and mother, I work to create harmony by expressing the universality of humanity through paintings, sculpture, calligraphy and poetry. Inspired by the imagery, sculpture and writings of my Indian heritage and Islamic spirituality, I use my artistic voice to break down the barriers that divide to foster peace and understanding.
Salma Arastu
I hear his voice when I read Channeling the Lifeweb again and again. The words echo in my mind every day and night.
I met Newton in March 2021 through my friend Heidi Hardin who was a student of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison at UC San Diego in the early 70s. I was working on my project ‘Our Earth: Embracing All Communities’ which was inspired by the ecological verses from Quran. I published the book and Heidi Hardin arranged a Zoom meeting presentation about my book and invited pioneer Eco Artist Newton Harrison. I felt honored and was very grateful to learn that he has agreed to attend the Zoom meeting! I thanked Heidi Hardin for this great opportunity to join in conversation with Newton Harrison in this important talk “Women and Web of Life“.
After that first introduction and hearing his encouraging comments, I emailed him my thanks and mailed a copy of my book too. He replied “Very interesting talking with you. I think you have an opportunity to engage your whole country using the Quran’s environmental positions to support your own or what you discover.” He shared his work, and we continued our communications through emails. He kept encouraging me by saying Female empathy and compassion must advance to save all life on Earth. He related an inspiring story of Helen’s compassion and dedication. He offered me to participate in the exhibition Eco-art Work: 11 Artists from 8 Countries at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles which was a great honor for me. I was given another honor to attend his surprise 89th birthday party on November 20th, 2021 with his close friends and that day I told him that I would like to visit him and meet in person. After that, he tried to schedule the time for my visit on March 24th, 2022 and, unfortunately, the cancer diagnosis happened, and the situation changed. I treasure his last email dated 5/17 when he sent me the image of his last work with these words:
“Thanks for your concern and good wishes. My treatments for the cancer have slowed me down. They are radioactive with added chemo. The course of treatment should end in about 2 1/2 weeks, and about 2 weeks after that I might be civil. Don’t want to lose contact. Very much hope things work out with your work and our gallery. Give me a call in about a month and I’ll see if I can’t make an afternoon with you. I am attaching a draft of my most recent work where I briefly become the voice of the Lifeweb, perhaps channeling in such a way that some of the stuff that I said surprised me after the fact.”
All the best, warm regards,
Newton
I hear his voice when I read Channeling the Lifeweb again and again. The words echo in my mind every day and night. My work after our meeting in March 2021 is totally impacted by his teaching. I have followed all projects executed by Helen and Newton Harrison, in particular through their book The Time of the Force Majeure.
I have found myself immersed in research to gain deeper knowledge in science and faith to find remedies to save our planet and its ecosystems. I have found underground network of mycelia that is regenerating, activating, and healing the damaged state of our environment and invisible tiny benefactors Microbes who are an integral and essential part of the web of life. Bridging Science and Faith creates a visual discourse that bridges science, religion, Islamic diversity and diaspora, language engaged with the plight of humanity, the soul, and the soil. Now my artworks juxtapose the ecological phenomena of interconnectedness through mycelial flow with concepts from the Quran as expressed through Arabic calligraphy and Islamic patterns. The new series mirror contemporary issues with possible solutions based on science and spirituality expressed through moving lyrical lines.
Brandon Ballengée (American, born 1974) is a visual artist, biologist, and environmental educator based in Louisiana. Ballengée creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. Since 1996, a central investigation focus has been the occurrence of developmental deformities and population declines among amphibians and other ectothermic vertebrates.
Brandon Ballengée
They encouraged me for decades to continue, to go deeper into the research and ask the question ‘how big is here?’, then to follow fearlessly what I discovered.
Helen and Newton inspired me to open my mind to the possibilities of art moving beyond objects and ideas toward concrete actions that benefit communities ― ecological, biological, and social, and that connection of their special way of viewing challenges with systems thinking.
They also encouraged me for decades to continue, to go deeper into the research and ask the question ‘how big is here?’, then to follow fearlessly what I discovered. Along these lines, Newton encouraged the creation of Atelier de la Nature. Here in 2017, my wife, children, and I purchased heavily farmed land in rural Louisiana. Since this time, we have worked to regenerate the ecosystems from soybean and cane sugar fields into a nature reserve and eco-campus.
As a component of the restoration, Newton along with soil scientist Dr. Anna Paltseva have started a living artwork called Memory in the Life of a Cajun Prairie with the planting of 2.5 acres of native Louisiana “Cajun Prairie”. This type of prairie ecosystem is found nowhere else in the world and is considered an “endangered” habitat with less than 150 intact acres remaining today.
Memory in the Life of a Cajun Prairie is a living artwork that poses three questions. Is Cajun Prairie an effective means of sequestering carbon? As recent studies have shown prairie grasses work better than trees to sequester and store carbon in the soil. How do different types of disturbances affect biodiversity? There is a body of evidence that grazing and annual burning may change species interaction and diversity. Through this kind of collaborative art and science project, can we increase awareness? Can we inspire larger-scale Cajun Prairie habitat restoration?
Memory in the Life of a Cajun Prairie came about through discussions between Newton and me, and our desire to work together on something at the Atelier de la Nature. Between 2017 and 2021, the soil for Memory in the Life of a Cajun Prairie began to be worked by rebuilding topsoil and removal of nonnative species. In February 2022, we seeded over a dozen native prairie plants and took soil samples to record pre-prairie carbon levels. Over the next nine years, the plots of Memory in the Life of a Cajun Prairie will be experimented with by reseeding, carrying out various disturbances to monitor species diversity, and recording the effectivity of carbon sequestering.
Helen and Newton’s ideas will continue to bloom through Memory in the Life of a Cajun Prairie as well as in all of us they inspired so much.
Ruby (Ruthanna) Barnett, Studio Manager and Senior Researcher at the Harrison Studio and Center for the Study of the Force Majeure from 2017-2021. After earning her Ph.D. in Linguistics, she provided advocacy in housing and homelessness, debt, employment, and welfare. As a lawyer in Oxford, she specialized in immigration and human rights.
Ruby Barnett
The Harrisons – Greater than the Sum of their Parts
The work of the Harrisons caused a shift that has enabled me to embrace complex systems in a more visceral, thorough way than in my previous work.
I worked with Newton from 2017 until 2021. In those first months, Helen visited the studio daily and I had the privilege of witnessing their deep love and tenderness. I traveled extensively with Newton and there is an inescapable intimacy accompanying a person in their 80s on long-distance travel. I prepared slides for talks, checked on his insulin supplies, laundered his clothes, drafted abstracts for conference proposals, and made sure his nose was moisturized.
Newton Harrison 11-1-19
Spending time immersed in the works of the Harrisons, as well as being part of the development of new works, has affected me deeply. My perception is forever changed. Newton liked to use Cezanne‘s Mont Sainte-Victoire series to speak on perspective but, for me, the work of the Harrisons caused a shift that has enabled me to embrace complex systems in a more visceral, thorough way than in my previous work. The form and non-form; the category of both-and; creating momentum, energy, from the oscillation between polarities. Understanding humanity as only one small part of the web of life, while at the same time comprehending the value of my own self-realization as an individual. The difficult and the charming. The tolerance and impatience. The compelling use of beautiful metaphor (“every place is the story of its own becoming”) contrasts with stark truths (“a tree farm is not a forest and tree farm floor is not a forest floor”). The duality is often shown as a conversation between elements—sometimes Newton and Helen themselves (Serpentine Lattice, Greenhouse Britain) or between others (the Lagoon Maker and the Witness in The Lagoon Cycle, the male and female voices in the Sacramento Meditations).
Inspiration for these arose from Helen and Newton’s ‘morning conversations’, developed after reading the Morning Notes of Adelbert Ames Jr., a scientist whose work was in vision and later in perception, developed a practice of setting a problem in his mind before bed, allowing his unconscious mind to work on it overnight and finding often that a solution had come to mind by morning. Helen and Newton experimented with this, conversing over coffee each morning to further elaborate ideas. In the later works, after Helen’s passing, Newton sought to call in her thinking, her voice, since they had actively worked to “teach each other to be each other” in the years prior, knowing that one may eventually be required to carry on the work alone.
The Harrisons knew that we can interfere, manage, or guide the life web only in limited aspects and that there may be unintended consequences. At the same time, choosing to take on the work, the only work of value in our urgent times, is balanced by knowing that all work addressing the continuing of the life web will by its nature be ennobling. It will change, benefit, and grow the one seeking to act. Helen and Newton’s fearless approach allowed them to face the stark reality of our likely future, and to plan pre-emptively, accepting some outcomes as inevitable. They maintained deep love, delight, and playfulness enabling them to model their vision and invite us to learn to “dance with the rising waters”. Helen and Newton’s lives and works embodied the whole being greater and other than the sum of its parts.
Barbara Benish is a California-born artist, who moved from Los Angeles to Prague in 1992 as a Fulbright scholar. She founded ArtMill (est.2004) in rural Bohemia, an international eco-art center. From 2010-2015 she served as Advisor for U.N.E.P. in Arts & Outreach, and since 2015 is a Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center, (University of California, Santa Cruz).
Barbara Benish
Their understanding of the consequences of ‘framing’, of giving humans a vision of the earth’s crisis in a way that is not catastrophic but regenerative, was the Harrison’s gift to us.
Helen and Newton arrived at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2009, the same time I did. When the mandatory faculty luncheon serendipitously had us seated next to one another on that warm fall day, overlooking the Monterey Bay, I felt elated to re-meet the pioneers of environmental art, surprised to find them in Northern California. It was an auspicious meeting, as I started a six-month Artist-in-Residence and teaching position at UCSC. We would become friends during that period, sharing Czech meals, (after learning of Helen’s Czech roots), but mainly talking about plants, rivers, maps, and things of the earth and sea. The Harrison’s were always willing to come to speak in my classes, generous with their time, and anxious to connect to the younger generation who would inherit the earth. They were natural teachers, both in and out of the classroom.
Helen and Newton Harrison with Barbara Benish
Their understanding of the consequences of ‘framing’, of giving humans a vision of the earth’s crisis in a way that is not catastrophic but regenerative, was the Harrison’s gift to us. Keenly aware of the connections of western capitalistic extraction, loss of natural resources, and culture, they kept the dialogue poetic and not didactic. During the times of Newton’s occasional amnesia towards female autonomy or ‘otherness’ in the room, Helen would gently, or forcefully, pull him back in. They were not a duet, but created a symphony between them, with their deep love and understanding of the natural world that was contagious.
Newton came to Prague at the invitation of our organization, ArtDialog, to lecture to several rapt audiences in 2019. We’d shown the Harrison’s work at our space, ArtMill in the Czech Republic, taught it in my lectures at the University, and skyped him in for Q and A’s over the years. He connected with my eldest daughter, Gabriela, who is now running our NGO, and listened to him talk since she was 13 years old. Over the past two years, ArtMill has been hoping to expand the Future Gardens project for Central Europe, working closely with Josh Harrison and the Center for the Force Majeure. Fittingly, the next generation will realize that dream.
Helen and Newton Harrison with Barbara Benish
The last visit with Newton, was on his porch in Santa Cruz, California, not far from our home here. It was summer and we were discussing our upcoming show at VSF in Los Angeles which he was curating. He would show his ‘obituary’ piece, an image of which he printed out on his xerox machine to show anyone stopping in. He knew he was dying, and yet still liked a good joke. When he called me to come over on the phone, he said “and bring me some of your cheesecake” (a forbidden treat due to his diabetes). When we talked about the plans for Future Gardens of Central Europe, which he originally wanted to name after Helen (Helenovice, “Helen’s Village”), home of her ancestors, he raised his hand for me to be quiet. “I’ll consult with the Life Web” …. and he closed his eyes. We were silent for many minutes, and it seemed the yarrow in the front yard was breathing with us. “Yes,” he smiled when he opened his twinkling eyes, “it will be good”.
Lewis Biggs is Distinguished Professor of Public Art at Shanghai University (since 2011), and an independent curator (Artranspennine 1998; Aichi Triennale 2013; Folkestone Triennial 2014, 2017, 2021; Land Art Mongolia 2018). He is also Chairman of the Institute for Public Art, a global network of researchers concerned with place creation through culture / art-led urbanism, and supporting the International Award for Public Art.
Lewis Biggs
We were all impressed with the quality of the research that went into the production of the various maps, and how very thought-provoking their synthetic approach (art-science-text-image) could be. That for me is their significant legacy.
I first became aware of ‘the Harrisons’ as a result of the controversy sparked by their contribution commissioned for the exhibition 11 Los Angeles Artists at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1971. Chiefly I recall a curator for whom I had great respect remarking that the artists were ‘charlatans’, which struck me forcibly. Had I paid insufficient attention to my own (still very youthful) enthusiasms for art in deciding which people involved were charlatans and which were not? Where is the line between shaman and charlatan? What is the role of authenticity in art? Is acting an art form? Portable Fish Farm: Survival Piece #III elicited many reactions that were more extreme than ‘charlatan’, and so contributed to the considerable expansion of the frame of reference for art in the following 20 years.
So, when Robert Hopper, with whom I was curating Artranspennine98, suggested in 1996 that we commission Helen Mayer and Newton to contribute to our exhibition, I was delighted to agree. The exhibition invited its audience to travel across the North of England from coast to coast (Hull to Liverpool or vice versa) experiencing around 40 mainly newly commissioned / site-specific artworks or exhibitions in 30 different locations. It was an invitation to artists and audiences to engage with the history and geography of the birthplace of the industrial revolution, the place where the modern understanding and appreciation of ‘landscape’ was invented.
Helen Mayer and Newton were accommodated at Bluecoat Gallery Liverpool, where Bryan Biggs (no relation) the Director was a very welcoming collaborator and host. They were invited to collaborate with local people to explore the possibilities for regeneration in the area and to exhibit the resulting maps at the Bluecoat and on the internet. They proposed that all the rivers should be cleaned, and woods and meadows expanded. That the geological timescale of re-establishing flora and fauna to ‘health’ could be speeded up through better use of existing ‘wastes’ and spoil heaps. The project was titled Casting a Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing A Dragon? The image they found in the coast-to-coast map of the country showed the body of the dragon through the industrialised lower ground and valleys, the wings of the dragon in the Pennine hills.
I’m not sure what or whether they contributed to a shift toward social consciousness about the environment. I remember being impressed with how the artists would pounce on specific words that emerged in the public workshops and highlight them for further discussion. A process of simplification presumably resulting from their many years of practice with workshops and focus groups. Bryan remembers how they constantly bickered with each other, and I remember thinking that their approach was aggressively ‘direct’ in that un-English way. But we were all impressed with the quality of the research that went into the production of the various maps, and how very thought-provoking their synthetic approach (art-science-text-image) could be. That for me is their significant legacy, plus the fact that they were gifted communicators: I think of their Rorschach process to ‘discover’ iconic images from maps every time I’m faced by an artist who struggles to find an image or a metaphor that expresses their project.
The Collins + Goto Studio is known for long-term projects that involve socially engaged environmental art-led research and practices; with additional focus on empathic relationships with more-than-human others. Methods include deep mapping and deep dialogue.
Tim Collins
Art and Change: The emerging social and ecological impetus
Artists have always critiqued and revealed belief systems, the program will teach artists to be effective agents of change. We seek to define the pedagogy of engagement.
A Dialogue from 2000 – with some edits and approval to publish from 2023.
Original Authors: Jackie Brookner, Parsons School of Design, New York Tim Collins and Reiko Goto STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University Newton Harrison, and Helen Mayer Harrison Emeriti, University of California, San Diego Ruth Wallen, Artist and biologist, San Diego Josh Harrison, Director, Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, UC Santa Cruz
In 2000, we were engaged with the Harrison’s traveling to their home in San Diego with some regularity. Everyone involved in this discussion was struggling with adjunct, temporary, and year-to-year academic contracts. The Harrison’s proposed a dialogue which we might use to shape our individual and collective futures.
Art and Change Pedagogy
Philosophy: Nature as model, as measure, as mentor
Foundation Concept: Symbiosis and the biological imperative
Program: Ecologically engaged, Politically engaged, Socially engaged.
Emerging Issues: The public realm (social and natural) is in need of interventionist care. The visual arts with a history of value based creative-cultural inquiry are best equipped to take on this role. The long term goal, is to develop a cultural discourse which will:
1. expand the social and aesthetic interest in public space to the entire citizen body,
2. re-awaken the skills and belief in qualitative analysis (versus professional-quantitative analysis), and
3. preach, teach, and disseminate the notion that everyone is an artist.
The Problems: Artists are unprepared to take a productive role in civic discourse. Students graduate without the tools and bridging experience to allow them to learn the languages and process in the areas of ecology, politics, and sociology, and are therefore unable to enter into effective creative communication.
While information technologies is a burgeoning area of technical expertise, theory, and expression in the university setting, the emerging biological revolution is all but abandoned to the sciences. There isn’t a single department in the country with a program area which addresses the changing meaning of nature, restoration ecology, and bio-technology.
The traditional subject matter of art as well as the teaching methods taught in US art schools need an additional layering of information and training to expand the efficacy of an artists voice into these complex realms. Artists have always critiqued and revealed belief systems, the program will teach artists to be effective agents of change. We seek to define the pedagogy of engagement.
An Eco-Cultural Engaged Art: We propose a rigorous program of engagement training, providing artists with the theoretical and practical skills allowing them to productively engage the civic realms of politics and society with a primary focus on ecology/biology. In affect, we seek to transfer the language and skills which will allow artists to engage their colleagues in the professions of planning, design, and policy with equity and efficacy. Furthermore, to meet the challenges of a public realm increasingly challenged by private interests and legacy impact, the position of the artist will be defined in relationship to civic discourse rather than primary authorship.
The proposal includes a Graduate Major structure, an Undergraduate Minor/Concentration and a University Level Interdepartmental Credit Foundation Course. This was classic Newton, as he thought through the economics and the progression of creative/intellectual development which would be necessary for this new course of study. We can ‘hear’ both Helen and Newton’s voices throughout this proposal. We can also feel the love and care they put into this.
Janeil Engelstad is the Managing Director of the Global Innovation and Design Lab and an Embedded Artist and Lecturer at University of Washington, Tacoma. The Founding Director of Make Art with Purpose, Engelstad produces Social Practice projects that address social and environmental concerns around the world.
Janeil Engelstad
Helen and Newton Harrison: Re-imagining the Context of Art
At the center of their work was love and perhaps this is the greatest legacy that the Harrisons leave.
The following text recounts one of many experiences I had with Newton and Helen Harrison, as well as a sketch of their creative process. The Japanese term, kenzoku, which literally means family and the presence of the deepest connection, expresses our relationship and exchange.
In October 2016, Newton Harrison came to Seattle to participate in 9e2 Seattle (9e2), a festival that marked the 50th anniversary of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (9 Evenings). Produced by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, the original 9 Evenings was the first of several art and technology projects that would evolve into the non-profit group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). 9 evenings consisted of hybrid art performances and video, created by ten recognized artists working with some 30 engineers from Bell Labs performed at the New York City 69th Regiment Armory, from October 13 – 23, 1966. The performances were as much about the new technologies the artists employed to realize their work as the themes being explored.i In contrast, 9e2 examined contemporary themes impacting the way people experience life on Earth, such as climate change, AI, and social justice.
Conceived and produced by Seattle writer and cultural producer John Boylan, 9e2 was organized by a curatorial team from the arts and technology fields. Boylan’s purpose was three-fold: to teach and inform (the history of 9 Evenings was little known among the local tech and creative communities); to build connections between local, national, and international artists and technologists; and to explore ideas about how artists, technologists, and other creatives function in the world. “Underpinning this purpose,” Boylan recalled “were the questions: What are you doing? Why are doing it? How are you doing it and, to an extent, what does new art mean?”ii
As a member of the 9e2 curatorial team, I organized a handful of projects and programs, including a conversation with Newton. He was thrilled to participate, for this was an occasion for him to publicly reflect on his conversations with Billy Klüver around the time that E.A.T. was being organized.iii “He had it all wrong,” Newton recounted, “and I told him thus: artists and engineers should not be focused on creative experiments exploring the impact of technology on the individual and society. Rather they should focus on how technology can be of service to ecology and the planet.”iv The growing impact of climate change, Newton believed, had proved the relevance of the environmentally focused work he had produced with his wife and creative partner, Helen Mayer Harrison and the misdirection of Klüver’s focus.v Additionally, Newton appreciated that the larger purpose of 9e2 connected to the Harrisons’ inquiry into the meaning of art and art making in the latter half of the 20th century, as the impact of commerce, industry, and development on the Earth’s eco-systems were becoming more and more evident.
Throughout their careers, Helen and Newton cultivated a wide creative and scientific community and I would wager that almost everyone in this community could tell dozens of anecdotes like the one I shared about 9e2. Long-time academics, Helen and Newton naturally imparted their experiences, ideas, and wisdom through storytelling and conversation. They were also skilled at asking questions that moved and transformed ideas and thinking into deeper reflection and expanded consciousness.
At the forefront of environmental art and interdisciplinary, collaborative design and production, the Harrisons imagined and were utilizing design thinking before companies like Ideo and Stanford’s d.school brought the process into the mainstream. Making Earth, Then Making Strawberry Jam (1969-1970) begins with Newton’s growing ecological awareness and empathy for earth. Through his research, Newton learned that “the topsoil was in danger in many places in the world. So, I took the decision to make earth . . .,” he wrote about the project.vi
The Harrisons would invest months and sometimes years in the empathy phase of their projects. Researching and meeting with people who had expertise in the history, ecology, and politics of the place and/or problem that a project might address. They sought information and expertise from noted professionals, as well as people on the edges of mainstream thinking and from Indigenous people before it was politically correct to do so. Practicing deep listening, they had conversations with the Earth itself. Then, they would define problems in poetic texts that framed their initial research into inquiries, conversations, wonderings, and proposals, which they sometimes called think pieces, such as Tibet is the High Ground:
Thinking about the greening of Tibet approximately 772,000 square miles
Which is eighty percent of the 965,255-square-mile Tibetan Plateau
We imagined a domain that was about eighty percent savannah
And twenty percent open canopy forest
For a productive, self-sustaining & complicating landscape to develop
Bold experimentation becomes an absolute requirement
For instance with glaciers retreating
We imagined assisting the migration not so much of species
But of species ensembles that form the basis
For a succession ecosystem to form
That follows glaciers uphill
We then imagined a water-holding landscape
Where terrain was appropriate
And subtly terraformed so that rains
Stayed on the lands on which they fell
In order to locate species groupings
that would form the basis for generating
a uniquely functional future landscape
Where harvesting preserved the systems
Also, drawing botanical information from the recent Pliocene
When the weather was the same
As that predicated in the near future
Taking on the problem of inventing an edible landscape
Which will be self-seeding and perennial
A landscape unique in its food-producing qualities
As the harvest preserves the system
And this kind of designing as endlessly repeatable
A green plateau can sequester 3 gigatons of carbon a decade
Tibet is the High Ground, 2005vii
Rich with ideas, metaphors and instructions, Helen and Newton’s texts offer tutelage in communion; setting out on a course of action; prototyping, testing, then putting into place projects around the world; a handful that will continue well into this century.
At the center of their work was love and perhaps this is the greatest legacy that the Harrisons leave. Love of life, love of each other, love of people, and love of the planet. This value fueled courage and gave them the freedom to let go, experiment, and knowingly create work that would come to fruition after they passed. This letting go of ego, creating work where Earth was the client, was critical for the Harrisons and should be for all of us who wish to advance solutions that lessen the impacts of climate change and improve life for humanity and the planet.
* * *
i While a few performances, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Open Score, were an indirect commentary on contemporary issues such as the Vietnam War, Klüver did not position his curatorial work on the impact of technology on society until the organization of E.A.T. About 9 Evenings he wrote: “It is important to realize (understand) that 9 Evenings was a realistic event. It wanted to achieve very specific practical and social goals. Its development was coincident in time with the spreading mysticism about technology, the McLuhan concept that the communication means were extensions of the body, the psychedelic experience as an element of art! 9 Evenings was none of that. (The artists and the engineers) were rigorous, energetic, and authoritarian and would demand completely controlled situations. That the forces behind 9 Evenings should have converged at that time, must have been separate from political developments of the global art, psychedelic kind of situation.” (foundationlanglois.org)
ii J. Boylan, personal communication, February 2023.
iii One of E.A.T.’s first activities was to organize loose, international groups of artists and engineers, by geography, to potentially collaborate with each other. Newton was an early member of the United States’ West Coast group.
iv N. Harrison, personal and public communication, October 2016.
v N. Harrison, personal and public communication, October 2016.
vi Harrison, Helen Mayer & Harrison, Newton. (2016). The Time of the Force Majeure. Munich, Germany: Prestal
vii Center for the Study of the Force Majeure. (2018). The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure. [Pamphlet]. Center for the Study of the Force Majeure.
Les Firbank is a British ecologist specialising in the sustainable management of land, with a particular focus on European agriculture. He collaborated with the Harrison while working at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and then at North Wake Research, both in England. He has recently retired from his chair in sustainable agriculture at the University of Leeds, and is a member of the European Food Safety Authority panel on genetically modified organisms.
Les Firbank
Our art/science dynamic was based on mutual respect and talking through different approaches to common questions, rather than the more usual multidisciplinary approach of artists seeking to illustrate the science.
For me, it was about the process and not the product, it was about the collaboration and not the outcome. I’m a professional ecologist (now retired) and first came across Helen and Newton when one of their helpers phoned me up one Friday afternoon to ask for access to some landscape data I had access to. If I had been busier, or if it had been another time of the week, I would have pointed her to our website and left it that. But I was intrigued, Why did you want them? She didn’t know but would get the project leader to call back. Newton called from Manchester and explained they were mapping the north of England. Quite why a Californian artist duo wanted to map England from a base in Manchester baffled me, so I went down to meet them and their team. They were working on the ArtTranspennine98 piece entitled Casting a Green Net: Can it be we are seeing a Dragon? piece, re-imagining the area between Liverpool and Hull. The eventual outcome was a series of hand-coloured large-scale maps of the region. Each showed a different aspect of the area, one with planned housing developments, one with nature areas, and so on. I wasn’t too impressed until I went to the exhibit, and watched people react to the work. They moved in closer and back out, walking from map to map, getting a sense of their area and what was nearby. It was like a GIS but required physical interaction and engagement. For me, the work was the fun. I met with people from the industry, regulators, and the arts, but unlike in most of my meetings, people were able to be open and honest about their thoughts, as it was ‘only’ an arts project. This allowed a level of communication not possible in more formal settings, where the participants have their ‘party lines’ to protect. Communities of practice were set up that persisted long after the project ended.
Gabriel, Helen Meyer, and Newton Harrison on Dartmoor, 2007. Photo by Les Firbank (copyright L. Firbank)
I worked with them again when I moved to Devon in 2007, where with David Haley we started a pilot project to design a sustainable village in the area. We set up a week-long workshop based in an agro-ecological research station in the region, enlisted an environmental GIS specialist Bruce Griffith, and set about our work. We made a good start to the work but, for various reasons, it did not really develop. The story can be found in a book chapter we wrote ‘A story of becoming: landscape creation through an art/science dynamic’ (Firbank, Harrison, Harrison, Haley, and Griffith. In Lobley and Winter (eds)2009, What is land for? Taylor and Francis). Again, the pleasure was the discussions that addressed key questions which academics tended to shy away from, they were too broad. What do we mean by sustainability? How much carbon should one household have access to? Do we need livestock (yes!)? Was this really art? Before I had met the Harrisons I would have said no, this was ecology. But they taught me that anyone has the right to ask these questions and to seek and present answers, framed as they see fit. I framed my work in scientific papers, they used works of art. I used statistical tables; they used poetry and images. They are complementary, reaching different people.
Our art/science dynamic was based on mutual respect and talking through different approaches to common questions, rather than the more usual multidisciplinary approach of artists seeking to illustrate the science. Such questions have since become more widely asked, but tend to be answered too quickly, lacking in rigor. But I have tried to retain this questioning attitude and to pass it on to my students.
Dr. Cathy Fitzgerald, Founder-Director of the global online HAUMEA ECOVERSITY. Empowering creative, cultural, and business professionals for wise, compassionate, and beautiful creativity.
Consultant, international speaker, advisor, and mentor on ecoliteracy & accredited ESD transformative learning Earth Charter educator and Research Fellow on Art & Ecology for the Burren College of Art.
Cathy Fitzgerald
For me, this is the most profound legacy of the Harrisons’ work – understanding how creativity is an essential driver for holistic ecopedagogy across all education.
Helen and Newton Harrison’s work has powerfully influenced my thinking and creative practice since the late 90s. I still clearly remember the afternoon coming across a summary journal article about their work in the library of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. I recall feeling intense relief at finding a comprehensive articulation of the multi-constituent aspects of ecological art practice and over time it shone a light on a path for me to develop similar creative ecological endeavours. The Harrisons’ reflections on their dialogical, participatory, question-led practices helped me understand why integrated, more holistic practices are a radical departure from the conventions of modern art, and why they have the social power to inspire people to live well for place and planet. Today, largely inspired by the Harrisons’ practice over many decades, I would argue ecological insights must inform and guide creative practice—and all our activities—for personal, collective, planetary, and intergenerational well-being.
However, with little college or peer support, my progress to develop and articulate a similar practice to the Harrisons was very slow. Around the late 90s, I was also reading art critic Suzi Gablik’s Re-enchantment of Art and Conversations Before the End of Time. For many years afterwards, I was mystified why the Harrisons’ and Gablik’s work was rarely discussed in my undergraduate or postgraduate art studies, or even during doctoral research that I completed in 2018. Looking back, I believe I came to this topic earlier than most because I had previously worked in science and environmental advocacy. It also took me time to appreciate that illiteracy around ecological understanding, common in current art education, profoundly precludes many from understanding the gravity of humanity’s predicament, and correspondingly why ecological insights insist on a paradigm shift in contemporary art and the dominant culture as a whole.
My difficulties to develop an ecological art practice continued through my doctoral studies; I found it difficult to push past artistic conventions and disinterest that the ecological emergency was a crisis of the dominant culture. Even with my background in science, I had to persist to explain my audacity to explore creative practices that crossed disciplinary boundaries and lifeworld experience. Here the published journal articles on the validity and importance of the Harrisons’ pioneering prescient practice, with others following in similar ways, literally gave me permission to continue my practice and research. I will always be grateful, remembering a particularly difficult time around 2011 when I was considering abandoning my doctoral studies, when Helen and Newton wrote to me out of the blue ‘Dear Cathy, from our perspective, very good work!’
Professor emeritus Newton Harrison with Dr Cathy Fitzgerald in San Deigo, in March 2022. Newton invited Cathy to share her research on the relevance of the Harrisons’ ecological art practice for emergent holistic sustainability education at his workshop for The Web of Life
Today, I feel the relevance of the Harrisons’ work is stronger than ever. I can also confirm that the importance of their journey to develop and articulate ecological practice extends beyond the contemporary art world to contribute to envisioning best practices in broader sustainability education. These realisations arose recently after an unexpected opportunity to learn with leading international sustainability educators at Earth Charter International, which hosts the UNESCO Chair of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Looking at their key research insights of emergent holistic education for sustainability —integrated approaches to advance wisdom on how we must live well with others and the wider Earth community— I realise that the Harrisons’ real-world ecological art practices, facilitating communities to creatively question and embrace many ways of knowing, exemplify developed participatory, multiconstituent ecopedagogy. Additionally, the Harrisons provide much insight to sustainability educators on how creative practices, in particular, are essential to make sustainability learning inclusive and inspiring to diverse communities. As our society and the art world becomes more ecoliterate, I believe the Harrisons’ (and similar creative-led ecological practices) leadership will be more appreciated. For me, this is the most profound legacy of the Harrisons’ work – understanding how creativity is an essential driver for holistic ecopedagogy across all education.
Johan Gielis (1962-) is a Belgian mathematician-biologist, originally trained in horticultural engineering and landscaping. He has worked in plant biotechnology for over 25 years, with special focus on mass propagation and molecular and physiological aspects of tropical and temperate bamboos. In 1997 he discovered the Superformula, based on observations in bamboo.
Johan Gielis
A botanical Kepler and his Newton
What matters is not the individual forms, but how they are connected. Newton’s specific question was whether this would also teach us about ecosystems and continuity. He challenged and inspired me to look more deeply and broadly at ecosystems and our planet.
My time with Newton Harrison was brief but intense. He had learned of my unified description of natural forms and phenomena and contacted me on December 28, 2021. As an artist, he had worked with Feynman, Murray Gell-Man, and Bohm, so I was surprised that he approached me, a biologist. Initially, he invited me to review his new work in progress Sensorium but, in our email correspondence, we also tried to find common ground (which we both expected might take months or years).
My work, which has its origins in botany, shows that shapes as diverse as starfish, flowers, squares, and cacti, the shape of atomic nuclei, and even our universe itself can be encoded in a geometric transformation called Superformula. So far, we have studied over 40000 individual biological samples, all of which are described by the Superformula; interestingly we found no circles or straight lines, the basic tools of our sciences. Our methods have now become a complete scientific methodology, with surprising new insights into how nature works and speaks to us. The attraction of the Superformula may lie in humanity’s need for a unified and continuous approach to life, nature, and our universe, as opposed to the discrete, random nature of our scientific worldviews.
What matters is not the individual forms, but how they are connected. Newton’s specific question was whether this would also teach us about ecosystems and continuity (he did not think the term sustainability should be used). He challenged and inspired me to look more deeply and broadly at ecosystems and our planet. How can we use these insights to “reshape and redirect the suicidal and ecocidal direction in which our Western civilization has taken us,” as Newton put it.
This is the direction I am currently pursuing with my mathematical friends. It is indeed possible to describe complete systems. The heart, once thought to be a pump, turns out to be a simple helical structure. Furthermore, the entire circulatory system combines the functions of transport with those of exchange, switching between a cylinder (for transporting blood) and a Möbius strip, a one-sided body for exchanging oxygen in the lungs and cells. These models should also work for ecosystems, translating holistic views into precise mathematics, as a language for the sciences and, he hoped, for the web of life.
Like nature, science is a never-ending endeavour, and what is cutting-edge today will be fossilized in the not-too-distant future. The Superformula is seen by many as the linchpin in this evolution. Another realization is that mathematics in its current state is a poor substitute for our deep knowledge. Mathematics is known as the language of science, the science of patterns. It is bad because it fails, as I call it, in its task of describing both patterns and the individual. With the Superformula, we can now study both the general and the particular, and link the discrete and the continuous.
After the publication of my article in the American Journal of Botany, many were excited by the idea of a unified description of the large and the small. This happened earlier in the sciences when the work of Kepler and Galilei inspired Isaac Newton to develop his System of the World half a century later. The American Mathematical Society wrote: “A botanical Kepler waiting for his Newton.”
How fortuitous it then was when Newton H. contacted me. It was not the Newton who would develop an updated world system or theory of everything based on my work. Instead, I got the opportunity to know Newton Harrison, a great artist and human being. However brief, our communication left a deep impression and will continue to be an important inspiration for my work in the sciences.
Goto employs an experimental practice of empathic exchange with people, places, and things. She earned her PhD in Ecology and Environmental Art in Public Places in 2012. Collins is driven by the pursuit of transformative experiences and ideas that can empower people, places and things. He received his PhD in Art, Ecology, and Planning in 2007.
Reiko Goto Collins
Through this conversation I have learned three things: 1) metaphor can be physical, 2) physical metaphor can be dysfunctional, and 3) a metaphorical flip informs how we understand a functional metaphor.
During my Ph.D., I interviewed Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison Bristol, 2008. The text below is a segment of the conversation.
Helen Harrison: Our normative cultural behaviour, and then you see if there is some way that you can reverse it. When people see the flip, and the reverse, they understand.
Newton Harrison: Let me give you an example. Flood control is a metaphor. Now, what is flood control? Flood control is defined by dams and dikes that hold the river, keep it from flooding and wrecking a town. But the dikes also destroy the river.
Helen Harrison: Flood control is also the destruction of flood plains. Flood plains are meant to be flooding.
Newton Harrison: And the destruction of river life – a lot of destruction in that metaphor. If you flip the metaphor, flood control is the spreading of waters – then you give me the twenty million dollars that you were going to put in the dikes; I will go and buy land above; and a whole load of design will happen which we call ecological design.
Helen Harrison: We will return the flood plain to the river. We will have removed …
Newton Harrison: Reiko is not understanding how one got to begin at the beginning again.
Reiko Goto: Hey, dikes are not metaphor – they are real structures!
(Goto Collins, 2012, p.70).
Through this conversation I have learned three things: 1) metaphor can be physical, 2) physical metaphor can be dysfunctional, and 3) a metaphorical flip informs how we understand a functional metaphor. A metaphorical flip’ is like ‘light and shadow’, ‘pull and resistance’, and ‘joy and sorrow’. It reveals or creates a dual reality.
A dual reality is not imagination, it is also found in the natural environment. For example, Caledonian pine, known as Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), grows differently in different environments. In forest plantations the competition makes them grow tall and straight.
In open areas, the branches spread out to catch more sunlight.
Both natural events and human actions affect the shape of the tree. The dual reality of the pine tree has two different values: straight-utilitarian value and curvilinear-aesthetic value. Understanding two different values of Caledonian pine can give us choices in how we relate with the tree.
Image left: A small pine forest near Applecross, Scotland. Digital image: Collins + Goto Studio, 2012. Image right: A Caledonian pine in Black Wood of Rannoch, Scotland. Digital image: Collins + Goto Studio, 2013.
Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York. Haapoja’s work investigates the existential and political boundaries of our world, with a specific focus on issues arising from the anthropocentric world view of Western traditions. Animality, multispecies politics, cohabitation, time, loss, and repairing connections are recurring themes in Haapoja’s work.
Terike Haapoja
For Newton, this kind of awakening had happened early in life, when he was driving along a highway in California, seeing the broken landscapes under constant, violent human excavation. Suddenly, he said, he could hear the earth screaming.
Like many, I was introduced to Helen and Newton Harrison’s work in art school. In the early 2000s, when I studied, ecology wasn’t yet trending, and their work seemed like fresh air for someone like me who felt that the most urgent question in the world, the environmental crises, was surrounded by a numbing silence. My own work, however, was video-based and centered on the figure of the animal, and while our works sometimes ended in the same shows, we never met in person.
Then, on one dark evening in 2019, I saw a message request on Facebook, and when I clicked on it I found a message from the legendary Newton Harrison. He had encountered one of my works somewhere and wished to connect. I was delighted and honoured, and we started an exchange that evolved into emails and Zoom calls and lasted until his passing.
One of the first works he sent me was a meditation on sea ecologies called Apologia Mediterraneo. The ten-minute video combines found footage and Newton’s voice-over, reciting a poetic letter addressing the sea and the troubles and pains it has to endure. Newton’s voice radiates empathy and solidarity with the Mediterranean Sea, and this empathy towards and solidarity with the more-than-human world always characterised his attitude and our discussions. He would passionately side with the web of life in our conversations on environmental justice: he wanted to be responsible and accountable to it directly, not to a human political system that represented a species he called ”an ungovernable exotic” that always hoarded resources to ”the human reproductive machine”.
We discussed empathy and what awakens it in people. We agreed that it had to be an embodied, particular experience because one can not convince another to feel for an animal, or an earthworm, or earth itself by rational arguments. For Newton, this kind of awakening had happened early in life, when he was driving along a highway in California, seeing the broken landscapes under constant, violent human excavation. Suddenly, he said, he could hear the earth screaming. From then on, earth was someone, not something.
He talked about his career becoming huge at the age of 88. There was no sign of slowing down, on the contrary: he didn’t want to make compromises or to scale his ideas down, but for the world to change, and his work to become more than a representation of what life on earth could be. He wanted it to be the real thing. Helen’s Town, a homage to Helen in the form of an eco-village with a production timeline of hundreds of years (because that’s how long it takes for trees to grow) was a serious dream and his frustration with curators who instead wanted something gallery size was palpable.
In 2020, when the pandemic had locked all of us in, I invited him to contribute a dialogue with me to a small exhibition I made about art, love, and relationality. My premise was that as artists our practice is always impacted by the relations that carry us, and our muses, whether they are human or more-than-human. In our dialogue he talked about his lifelong work with Helen and their mutual excitement towards their work and life together, and how it was her who had initially led them to the question of climate change. And how everything that he did was and would be informed by her and their work together, and how her perspective still acts as a moral compass to Newton. Because, he said, ”Helen had the best ethical sense of anybody I ever met in my life, with one exception: Eleanor Roosevelt. So I put the bar high.”
I remain grateful for that Facebook message and that I had the honor of befriending this pioneering ecological thinker for these last years. In an email on the 10th of March, 2020, Newton wrote: “If possible I would love to democratize a little bit of hope in what
appears to be an ongoing and increasingly intense array of
catastrophes.”
David makes art with ecology, to inquire and learn. He researches, publishes, and works internationally with ecosystems and their inhabitants, using images, poetic texts, walking and sculptural installations to generate dialogues that question climate change, species extinction, urban development, the nature of water transdisciplinarity and ecopedagogy for ‘capable futures’.
David Haley
Through working, touring, and engaging with Helen and Newton, my ecological arts practice continues to be found and like them, I hope to enable others to seek their ecological arts practices.
Seeking An Ecological Arts Practice
Seeking an ecological arts practice, my Masters in Art As Environment course at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) concluded in 1996 with an invitation to project manage and lead the research for Helen and Newton’s Artranspennine98[1] project, Casting A Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing A Dragon? The project gave me the opportunity to develop arts-led, practice-based processes of research that opened new ways of questioning the Countryside Information System of The Institute of Terrestrial Ecology[2], and led to my Ph.D.. Mapping the ecosystems of Northern England became a ‘whole systems inquiry’ that included the environmental terrain, agricultural, cultural, and economic contexts, as well as the map-makers intentions. Satellite and field study data was supplemented by many car journeys back and forth, between Liverpool to Hull, to see the terrain and talk with many people from different disciplines and walks of life. Thanks to Professor John Hyatt, the project itself and the production of the six large maps was based at MMU’s Department of Fine Arts. We had regular ‘Open Studio’ events to generate conversations with academic, industry, and civic experts, and arts and design students.
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison giving the keynote lecture at Evolving the Future conference, Shrewsbury, 2005. Photo: D. Haley
The exhibition opened at Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, and in 2000, thanks to Richard Scott of the National Wildflower Centre, was shown at the Society for Ecological Restoration’s (SER) first World Conference, at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool. The Harrisons gave a keynote presentation with the work, in the hotel’s capacious lobby. My relationship with SER, as Ecoart Symposium Coordinator/Chair culminated with their World Conference in Manchester in 2015.
In 2005, I was commissioned to curate Evolving the Future, an international three-day conference as part of the Charles Darwin bicentennial celebrations in Shrewsbury. At the end of The Harrisons’ closing keynote lecture, I invited them to consider a project that would focus on mainland Britain as one ecosystem under stress from climate change. We toured the length and breadth of Britain, for a year, meeting many people, to develop a project proposal for potential funders. Finally, Chris Fremantle made a successful application to Defra UK[3], as the Harrisons and I flew to Budapest for a conference. We appointed Chris as Producer and I became Associate Artist. Gabriel Harrison designed and produced the exhibition and the project became Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. It toured six UK venues (2007-2008) and several in the USA (2009-2010), before becoming integrated into the Harrisons’ Force Majeure (2010) works.
At one point, Defra nearly withdrew Greenhouse Britain’s funding, as they perceived the work to have exceeded the Government’s climate change remit of ‘raising awareness’ to include ‘behaviour change’. We renegotiated the terms of the project to comply with the restrictions, letting the poetics carry the impact further. Meanwhile, a friend from Casting A Green Net, Professor Tony Bradshaw, called me one evening, concerning sea level rise mitigation: “…, but the Environment Agency are developing plans for managed retreat.” I explained that ‘managed retreat’ used engineering and military metaphors, while the Harrisons had coined the phrase, ‘graceful withdrawal’ – metaphors of becoming and acquiescence. And this insight chimed with the Tai Chi concept of ‘yielding’ that has grown through my practice – Yield: give way to gain (Haley 2018). Greenhouse Britain also contained several sub-projects and initiatives including, ecological development of the Lea River Valley, a charrette with Professor Paul Selman’s landscape research students at the University of Sheffield, flood strategies for the River Avon and the River Thames; and opportunities for contained ecological housing/food production to protect the headwaters of all the rivers rising in the Pennines. However, the final UK exhibition at London’s City Hall (2008) met with resistance from the incoming new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who saw our work as challenging his proposed Tilbury desalination plant. After a week’s stand-off, Boris Johnson backed down when he realised that the Guardian newspaper was writing an article that depicted his first act as Mayor being the banning of an ecological arts exhibition that offered opportunities to save the Capital from sea level rise.
Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison: Pendle Valley, researching Greenhouse Britain 2007. Photo D. Haley
Through 2007, while working on Greenhouse Britain, the Harrisons and I toured Taiwan to develop the unrealised Greenhouse Taiwan. However, as we toured, we developed the idea of ‘Post-disciplinarity’ ― around a roundtable, all the disciplines sit with equal status while maintaining the integrity of their discipline. Then, the most urgent problem/question of the day is placed at the centre of the table for all to address, together.
We didn’t always agree. And that was one of the ways we learned from each other. They didn’t always agree. And that was one of the ways they learned from each other. Through working, touring, and engaging with Helen and Newton, my ecological arts practice continues to be found and like them, I hope to enable others to seek their ecological arts practices.
References
Firbank, L. Harrison, H. M., Harrison, N., Haley, D. Griffith, B. 2009. A Story Of Becoming: Landscape Creation Through An Art/Science Dynamic in eds. Winter, M. & Loby, M. What is Land for? The Food, Fuel and Climate Change Debate. Earthscan, London.
Haley, D. 2018 Art as destruction: an inquiry into creation, in ed. Reiss, J. Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene. Vernon Press, Wilmington Delaware, and Malaga, Spain.
[1] Artranspennine98 was an initiative between Tate Liverpool and the Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, to create a corridor of artworks between the two cities. The Harrison saw the ecological opportunity of ‘rhyming the Humber and Mersey estuaries.
[2] The Institute of Terestrial Ecology merged with other environmental research agencies to become the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
[3] Defra UK is HM Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
John Hyatt is a painter, digital artist, video artist, photographer, designer, musician, printmaker, author and sculptor.
As an artist, Hyatt has exhibited in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Portugal, Japan, the UK and the USA. He has a long and varied career and involvement in cultural practices, pedagogy, industry, urban regeneration, and communities. A transdisciplinary theorist, he is a polymath with an interest in arts and sciences.
John Hyatt
Strange Attractor of the Harrisons
I was interested, amongst other things, in how they kept all parties engaged, brought them together, and kept them involved: the creation of an ecology of collaboration.
In 1997, I was Head of Department and Professor of Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. I arranged for the Art School to host Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison whilst they were making work for Art Transpennine ’98, a large exhibition across the Northwest of England, curated by Lewis Biggs, Director of Tate Liverpool, and Robert Hopper, Director of the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust in Leeds. I had worked with Lewis previously when, as an artist, I made a large eco-art, climate change installation for New North at the Tate in 1990 and with Robert when I was Henry Moore Printmaking Research Fellow at Leeds Polytechnic 1988/89. Art Transpennine ’98 spanned the M62 corridor: a development zone identified by the EU, which morphed into later development notions, such as The Northern Powerhouse.
The Harrisons worked with us for some months. They used the school as a central space for a region-wide investigation, inviting all sorts of experts to collaborate and contribute to an evolving, largely unspecified ecological art/science inquiry. I was interested, amongst other things, in how they kept all parties engaged, brought them together, and kept them involved: the creation of an ecology of collaboration.
I assigned an eco-art Ph.D. student of mine, David Haley, to look after the Harrisons’ needs and to interface with the participating students. The project began with drawing practice. Drawing is a research methodology common to both art and science. Large O/S maps of the area were coloured and re-drawn with the assistance of MA Art as Environment students. The colouring in was to change the emphases of the maps. For example, one map was altered to show only water and watercourses. Through this process, a second stage emerged. The shape of the geographic area of inquiry was made visible and I remember Newton, in front of a wall-sized altered map in the Holden Gallery, chatting with me about whether we were “witnessing a Green Dragon”. The maps created a place where the question could be legitimately asked. They became scenery for an enactment of dialogue. This new, greener dragon flew to the north of the territory of the Welsh Red Dragon. It was anchored in and extended historic cultural narratives. These early stages evolved into the final project title, still interrogative – Casting a Green Net: Can it be we are seeing a Dragon?
The primary drawing stage can be interpreted as ‘Casting a Green Net’. The image of the net came from Helen. She imagined a giant standing at the mouth of the Mersey throwing a fishing net across the Northwest. I always presumed the net was a philosopher’s net made of curiosity.
Illustration by John Hyatt
The second part of the title, ‘Can it be…’ sets up an open invitation to create with no right or wrong answer: a new receptacle. ‘we are seeing…’ invokes a communal act of perception. ‘… a Dragon?’ makes a metaphorical transference of map shape to mythic beast and is pure art, disarmingly naïve seeming, that invites multiple perspectival input from wherever it may derive art or science. It does not require a subject expertise to engage. It is available to children or adults, amateur or expert. The title question created and still creates a level playing field for access to the project.
I just want to dwell on this naming of the project out of these fundamental stages. It seems like a simple thing and so it is. It is also incredibly sophisticated and complex. What this question did going forward was act as a ‘strange attractor’ in the sense of how the term is used in Chaos Mathematics. A ‘strange attractor’ is a simple equation or fractal set that is a root for a complex structure and the pattern of behaviour of a whole (eco) system. Here, there are characteristics of the solution/response already carefully embedded in factors of the equation/question: greenness, community, imagination, and power. The imagist, folkloric question, ‘Casting a Green Net: Can it be we are seeing a Dragon?’, was an auto-generative, immaterial centre around which the fields of inquiry could find their overlapping shape determined by greenness, community, imagination, and power.
I have taken this experience into my own practice. For example, the regeneration of a derelict district of Liverpool by re-drawing it and naming it the Fabric District, emerging from its history, and organising an art/science festival in 2018 for the new District around an open non-intellectual/intellectual concept, Time Tunnel 1968-2018, asking, in a city known for its history of cultural radicalism, What has happened since May 1968?
Looking back down my own time tunnel, I remember the Harrisons with affection and respect.
Since 1984 work as art historian (PhD) and editor for various publishing houses and museums, among others, as deputy director of the German Bundeskunsthalle (Federal Hall of Fine Arts); responsible management of numerous international projects; since 2001 development of concepts, project management, budgeting, editing, design and production of exhibitions and books for public and private institutions worldwide together with Kai Reschke.
Petra Kruse and Kai Reschke
From the very first moment the two of us met with Helen and Newton, we were convinced of their ways to work, and felt it to be very similar to the way we wanted ― and finally achieved ― to work.
Having known, been friends, and worked with the Harrisons for almost 30 years, we discussed, developed, and implemented many projects with them ― exhibitions as well as books: The most important one was probably The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years Counterforce is on the Horizon, a comprehensive retrospective of Helen Mayer Harrisons and Newton Harrisons work (published in 2016).
Wedding ceremony in San Diego: Kai & Petra and their witnesses Helen & Newton, Nov. 7, 2001
Thereafter, we took part in the activities of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, joined the board of directors, and founded a European branch of the center.
Newton & Kai on board the historic sailing vessel »Stella« working on the Sensorium project, June 23, 2019Newton & Petra in Santa Monica, in the background the Harrison’s piece »The California Wash – Terminus of Pico Boulevard at the Santa Monica Promenade (1988), Dec. 29, 2019
I, Petra, had the pleasure to meet Helen and Newton in 1994, when they designed ― together with their son Gabriel Harrison ― the initial Future Garden project Endangered Meadows of Europe.
The exhibition opened in 1996 on the rooftop of the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn. As a leading member of the museum’s team, I had the privilege to accompany the process of developing this highly complex project from the very beginning up to its realization and the successive projects that derived from it.
To me, this work seems programmatic for Helen’s and Newton’s systematic approach, and it opened my eyes to the complexity and understanding of ecological systems:
Since an increasing number of agricultural areas are being maximized with regard to productivity or turned into building sites, meadows are one of the most endangered biotopes. A 400-year-old meadow from the Eifel area, which would have otherwise been destroyed, was rolled up, transported to Bonn, and unrolled on the museum’s roof. Collectively, the meadow contained 164 species of plants, among them several from the red list of endangered species, where normally there would be 30 to 35.
The roof garden of the museum had been mowed twice a year so that hay and seeds could be harvested which were then applied to more than 10,000 square meters of a meadow area along the Rhine and other places in Bonn: A Mother Meadow for Bonn: Future Garden 2 was created.
Since then, the concept spread, and many Future Gardens of different kinds were and are still being established all over the world.
I, Kai, first met Petra at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, where she was deputy director and I curated an exhibition on Alexander von Humboldt, the great 19th-century holistic scholar. She introduced me to the Harrisons in 1999 when the project Peninsula Europe appeared on the horizon.
There was no time to think about the exhibition itself but the development of a catalogue concept seemed practicable and above all most challenging:
The works conceived by Helen and Newton had so many entirely different formats that they could not possibly be squeezed into one book with a defined size without losing their integrity and comprehensibility.
Consequently, we developed a publication which, at first glance, looked like a book but when opened up consisted completely of adjustable foldouts with an individual size for each work.
The Harrisons were enthusiastic, the bookbinder was not ― and the result was convincing.
So was my first encounter with Newton. A vague feeling of being interrogated soon faded into the notion of having found some kind of ‘brother in spirit’ while studying and contemplating Humboldt’s theories and their essence that “everything is interrelating”: A true holistic thinker considering the arts as important as the sciences for communicating the central issues of human interaction with nature.
Petra and I had both reached a point of cognition with former projects where we had purposely been seeking interdisciplinary advice, but never in such a consequent methodical way as the Harrisons did combining a diversity of disciplines with different knowledge, perspectives, and approaches to collaborate and actually provide the basis for perceptions and results which an isolated individual could not generate.
From the very first moment, the two of us met with Helen and Newton, we were convinced of their ways to work, and felt it to be very similar to the way we wanted ― and finally achieved ― to work:
The permanent dialogue between the two of them;
The ability to find advisors, scientists, politicians, and other collaborators or supporters and form and maintain a powerful team;
To start a discussion and continue it without an end in sight;
To integrate new information into an existing concept;
To change plans, if necessary, without losing the objective;
To be convinced of and devoted to this objective;
To remain open and curious;
To never say: It is not possible.
Thus, a mutually beneficial relationship between the four of us started, developed, and remained more than close ― as Newton put it: We were their friends, designers, editors, and thinkers.
Since 1982 work as curator, consultant, designer and organizer of exhibitions on numerous large-scale projects worldwide, many of them emphasizing on arts and ecology; since 1993 lecturing on
book and exhibition design, planning, production, technology, didactics, and evaluation in collaboration with various national and international government agencies and universities; since 2001 development of concepts, project management, budgeting, editing, design, and production of exhibitions and books together with Petra Kruse.
Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin Composer, Director, and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility, is Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on creative computational systems, multi-modal media content, and facilities design. She created and was Chief Scientist of Digital Media for the University of California.
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin
What I have learned from the brief time of working with Newton and viewing the work that he and Helen have accomplished is the collaboration of two bio-eco artists who were interested in investigating the life web from true empirical inquiry and truthful interrogation, using their expert artistry and scientific inquiry.
I first met Newton Harrison very recently in the fall of 2021, when we were both invited to speak at a National Academy of Sciences Salon regarding our research and creative practice involving the Getty Pacific Standard Time 2024 Biennale integrating Arts and Science. Newton was discussing his and Helen’s work regarding their Sensorium World Ocean Project. The project had gathered a vast amount of information concerning the world’s oceans and the condition that our current environment is in due to the pollution from the land into ocean runoff as well as from the thousands of ships on the ocean floor polluting the waters and the plastics and other pollutants in the sea. The project’s current state at that time was an art installation that also had much science involved due to the tremendous amounts of scientific data that they had collected over many years.
In Newton’s own words, he wanted the Sensorium to become a “fully interactive 3-dimensional human-centered interface, where the floors, walls and even the ceiling act as ‘live’ surfaces, connected to real-time data, information, and modeling/simulation tools. Newton wanted the Sensorium to have a series of functions including education and holistic decision-making, and to allow people to interact directly with the ocean through the interface. Most significantly, Newton wanted the Sensorium to operate as a generalized pre-emptive planning environment where oceanographic problems, mostly of human creation, can be seen and acted upon because their interconnectivity is understood at one glance and all together.” This is exactly what my research and creative practice entail. I am a composer/media artist working on complex systems research and have made a fully interactive/immersive instrument/laboratory called the AlloSphere and complex system software AlloLib that investigates multi-dimensional complex problems through visualization, sonification, and interaction, building immersive installations for artistic/scientific discovery.
Sensorium Project as displayed in the AlloSphere instrument.The beginning for the Sensorium Project as displayed in the AlloSphere instrument.
The AlloSphere instrument can be designed in any shape and size to accommodate any installation space, laboratory, or situation room, and the AlloLib software can scale accordingly from the AlloSphere current size of a three-story 2000 square foot lab that houses 26 projectors, 54 channels of sound, completely multi-user and interactive, to museum-size installations, the desktop, and immersive VR helmets.
Sensorium, developmental sketches, 2023, Courtesy of the Newton and Helen Harrison Family TrustSensorium, developmental sketches, 2023, Courtesy of the Newton and Helen Harrison Family Trust
The AlloSphere instrument and Laboratory is located within the California NanoSystems Institute, where we work with physicists, chemists, biologists, and other scientists in visualizing, sonifiying, and using interactive computation to explore complex systems. My AlloSphere Research Group is now working closely with Newton’s organization, the Center for Study of the Force Majeure, to make a unique and compelling immersive installation for the Getty Pacific Standard Time (PST) 2024 initiative as well as taking this artistic/scientific research to the next level integrating experimental and simulation models into a laboratory dedicated to ocean world research.
What I have learned from the brief time of working with Newton and viewing the work that he and Helen have accomplished is the collaboration of two bio-eco artists who were interested in investigating the life web from true empirical inquiry and truthful interrogation, using their expert artistry and scientific inquiry. They viewed the system holistically and have paved the way for systems solving not just problem-solving.
I include the following media artists/researchers from my AlloSphere Research Group, who are currently working on the Sensorium for the World Ocean Project.
Some of the members of the AlloSphere Research Group:
From left to right: Dr. Gustavo Rincon, Dr. Kon Hyong Kim, Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, and Myungin Lee.
Dr. Kon Hyong Kim (is Post-Doctoral Researcher with the AlloSphere Research Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from UCSB, he focuses on generating various mixed reality environments and high dimensional mathematical artwork. He is the lead Graphics researcher on the Sensorium Project.
Myungin Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research includes digital signal processing and visual/sonic machine learning for interactive computational design. He is one of the lead designers of the content of the Sensorium Project working with the Ocean Health Index database of ocean scientist Dr. Ben Halpern at UCSB.
Dr. Gustavo Rincon Ph.D. Media Arts and Technology, M.Arch UCLA, MFA, CalArts) is a media artist, sculptor, and graphics immersive artist. His research focuses on spatiotemporal architectures and structures, extending from the virtual to the material. As a member of the AlloSphere Research Group his research focuses on shaping spatial structures through self-organizing algorithms. He is the lead in architectural design in the Sensorium project.
Dr. Timothy Wood is Research Director at the Center for Research and Electronic Arts at UCSB and AlloSphere Media Systems Engineer. His research looks at new ways of utilizing human computer interactivity, virtual worlds, and somatic movement practices to deepen and empower our relationship to the body and nature. Dr. Wood received his M.S and Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology and was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at University of California, San Diego. Dr. Wood is working on human computer interaction for the Sensorium Project.
Dennis Adderton is the Technical Director of the AlloSphere Research Facility and works with Dr. Kon Kim, Dr. Wood and Myungin Lee on hardware systems design.
Aviva Rahmani began pioneering ecological restoration as transdisciplinary artmaking in 1969. She authored, "Divining Chaos," and co-authored, "Ecoart in Action" in 2020. Her "Blued Trees" (2015- present), focuses on how legal insights, expressed as art, can resist ecocide. Rahmani lives and works in Manhattan and Maine and is an Affiliate with the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder. Her undergraduate and graduate work was at CalArts and her PhD is from the University of Plymouth, UK.
Aviva Rahmani
We had parallel interests across many years, but they understood far better, how to platform and establish visibility for those interests.
Newton and his life partner Helen taught me how to deconstruct power at scale. I met them both early in our careers, not as a student, but as an equal in the late sixties in San Diego. What I saw was how they took the necessary steps to go from an eco-art point of view to policy implementation. What I saw over the decades was how valuable it is to understand power. We had parallel interests across many years, but they understood far better how to platform and establish visibility for those interests. As a younger, lone woman, without institutional support, I couldn’t break into the discourse, or find support for radical ideas as easily.
Newton and Helen 1979
I think the practical strategies I was testing, for how far simple ideas might become models for reciprocity and collaborative change, intrigued and inspired Newton. They both helped my career at many crucial turning points. Helen gave me my first job in the UCSD Extension in the late sixties and early seventies. In 1969, Newton asked me to form an ill-fated Dance Department at UCSD. He was an ardent supporter, assembling Eleanor and David Antin, and Pauline Oliveros to promote the project until politics shot it down. Newton and I had a more extensive and complex relationship than I had with Helen. Early on in my career, Newton sent me to connect with seminal art figures, whose collegial interests have remained my aesthetic lodestones in the extended art family I inhabited long after they all passed away: the collector, Stanley Grinstein, Allan Kaprow, who gave me a job as his TA and scholarships at CalArts and remained my mentor till his death, and the legendary gallerist Ronald Feldman. In our sometimes-volatile friendship, I was slowly provoked to aggressively carve my place in the art world.
Newton had a sculptor’s eye for form, which Helen deepened into a poetic narrative, serving them brilliantly in gallery and museum settings to frame concepts. He had a shrewd businessperson’s gift of the gab to narrate compelling visions to donors who allowed him to advance groundbreaking ideas in the art world. This, partnered with Helen’s pragmatism and diplomacy, also enabled advances in policy circles in Europe and the UK. Newton, and in a more muted way, Helen blended fierce competitiveness and professional generosity. Newton was intensely interested in two works of mine, Synapse Reality (1970), which made a social sculptural experiment of a small farming commune in Del Mar, California, and Ghost Nets (1990-2000), which restored a degraded former coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. In 1970, Newton taught a class at UCSD on Strategies, anticipating the need Joseph Beuys also foresaw by forming the Green Party, to engage artists in international environmental policy.
In 2022, after decades of participation in the eco-art dialog (1990-present), I had co-founded, Newton curated and arranged the group show, Eco-art Work: 11 Artists from 8 Countries at Various Small Fires in LA. His hope then was to catalyze a market for the burgeoning international eco-art genre which might carry on the hopes they both had to change the world with art. It was only then that Newton seemed to me to be acting on understanding that the change they sought could only come from a larger community in which they were a part but not the center. It was a project that reflected an understanding of how complex the human parts are that might fit together to save humanity from itself.
Simon Read is a visual artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Middlesex University. His practice relating directly to his current coastal and estuarine work, started in 1993 through the offer of a residency upon the Upper Thames leading in 1996 to the public commissioned work for the Thames Barrier: “A Profile of the River Thames from Thames Head to Sea Reach”.
Simon Read
The Harrison Studio:
What did you learn from the Harrisons?
I can see a lot of connections and regret that I was never to follow up an acquaintance with the Harrisons since they seemed to be operating in a parallel area both conceptually and technically.
My first introduction to the Harrisons was Portable Fish Farm in the ‘11 Artists from Los Angeles’ show in 1971 when I was a 2nd year student of Fine Art at Leeds University.
At the time, I was utterly non-plussed by the work since I had little concept of how it was compatible with my understanding of sculpture. I would have been unaware of the prescience of the work despite knowing European contemporaries such as Hans Haacke. However, at the time, I took more away from other artists in the show in particular Larry Bell, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, William Wegman, and the odd man out, Richard Diebenkorn. I think then I would have been looking more at studio work that was heavily influenced by conceptualism and artists’ use of the photograph. I was probably interested in the different schools of thought coming out of New York and California, where the Californian experience was so much more sensual.
I was very aware of the furore caused by Newton’s fish farm, due mainly to my then professor, Lawrence Gowing, who was vice-chair of the Arts Council and who took some responsibility for the show and wrote a spirited defence of the work in (I think) The Times.
After then, there was a long period when I was not so aware of the Harrisons until the Greenhouse Britain project in 2007 and my amazement at their securing funding from DEFRA. At that time, I had been collaborating with the arts consultants Haring-Woods on another project in Peterborough, who invited me to Gunpowder Park in Enfield to discuss further involvement with the Bright Sparks programme and was currently supporting the Harrisons’ work in the Lea Valley.
Admittedly, my response was sceptical, although I found the principle of a walk-through type of map environment absorbing, I was sorry to have missed the benefit of their presence to animate the project. I was sceptical because I reacted in an Anglo-Saxon way against the somewhat evangelical tone of the project and the belief that you could parachute in and propose a solution for a specific geographic location for which I felt there was insufficient prior knowledge. Although I am instinctively distrustful of proselytising, I can fully appreciate the response of a DEFRA representative that the Harrisons are refreshing in that they feel able to get straight to the point and unabashedly talk about the big idea.
So, upon reflection, I can see a lot of connections and regret that I was never to follow up an acquaintance with the Harrisons since they seemed to be operating in a parallel area both conceptually and technically. My difference lies in the belief that everything must come from somewhere and that the best solutions should be homegrown. This is what lies behind my desire to get under the skin of a project/location and community to be confident that whatever I propose is appropriate to the situation. So, a fundamental difference I’m afraid.
Since then, I have found their Lagoon Cycle project and the watershed works inspiring for their scope and sense of scale and the audacity that it is possible to conceive a project on a continental scale without having to implement it.
I know that Helen had acknowledged the idea of context and influence by saying that the ‘force majeure’ aspect of their operation justifies the use of any strategy, no matter where it comes from. My academic training says that the aspects of culture that you are exposed to and the cultural context that you operate within have a huge bearing on the range of possibilities that you access in the formal strategies that you take. Obviously, nothing is absolutely original and we all pass the same messages around but how we interpret them is crucial.
I was interested to learn that Newton’s early experience was as a painter, just as it was for me, but he was taught by early exponents of abstraction, if not abstract expressionism, and would have been aware of Clement Greenberg’s belief that the autonomy of the artwork was fundamental and that you should not need to look beyond the work itself for justification. Newton would have absorbed the sense that the phenomenological and behavioural characteristics of an artwork were the only narrative necessary to engage with it. I know that there is a strong means and ends argument here but the departure from the artwork as a vehicle for meaning in favour of the integrity of the work itself is also intrinsic to the Harrison’s belief in the primacy of natural processes and the living landscape itself.
There is also no way that Newton will have been unaware of the influence of conceptualism, which would have been a key justification for putting forward impossible ideas on a colossal scale because there is a cultural context to do so. The idea that the idea is sufficient and does not need to be activated is a basic tenet of conceptualism and indeed is the Harrison’s justification for proposing ambitious or even outlandish projects with such panache and certainty.
The early works such as the fish farm were shown in the context of a group of artists who we know had come directly from a conceptual (albeit Californian) mould. Even the pragmatic use of the unadorned paraphernalia of a fish farm allowed for the absence of a necessity for aesthetics and, as in other artists’ production, the opportunity to colonise criteria other than directly aesthetic for the organisation of material. Even with the context of this show, however, it would be fair to say that Newton Harrison’s work comes over as an outlier and already was on a journey somewhere else, clearly as a result of his alignment with Helen’s thinking.
Leslie Ryan is the lead design-researcher for the Future Garden climate-adaptation projects within the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, a research and educational center established by Helen and Newton Harrison. She is a registered landscape architect and long-time consultant and collaborator on the Harrisons’ projects.
Leslie Ryan
Listening to the Harrisons talk about repairing our relationship with the land and working ― always ― to advantage of the life web was a watershed moment for me, a siren call that changed everything.
When I met Helen and Newton Harrison I was fresh out of school with a degree in landscape architecture. The Harrisons didn’t think too much of landscape architects. As a profession, we were too literal, too focused on staying within property lines, and too beholden to clients, all of which tended in their view to alienate us from the natural world rather than foster respect and caring.
Listening to the Harrisons talk about repairing our relationship with the land and working ― always ― to advantage of the life web was a watershed moment for me, a siren call that changed everything. Their art practice modeled what landscape architecture could and should be: recognizing the land and the more-than-human others on the planet as partners with agency, rejecting framing nature as a set of ecosystem services that cast the natural world as a servant in service to human needs, and always looking beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of here and now.
I soon left the landscape architecture office and joined them as a lowly graduate student and studio assistant in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. Their support would become instrumental in my receiving the American Academy of Rome Fellowship in Landscape Architecture (1995), and Harrison refrains such as “how big is here and how long is now” and “pay attention to the costs of your beliefs” would reverberate throughout my research project while a Master of Environmental Design student at Yale, Newton’s alma mater.
The Harrisons threw me in the deep end when they asked if, for my first project as their assistant, I would draw the rubble flowers for Trümmerflora: On the Topography of Terrors (1988). I didn’t know which plant species would make sense, the site was haunted by a terrifying past, and the thought of nature improvising with the detritus, seeds, and memories buried in the rubble was overwhelmingly beautiful. Spontaneous urban vegetation has since become a significant field of study and the subject of books, papers, and thesis projects in landscape architecture, but at the time it was uncharted territory. There are common threads running through Trümmerflora and Future Gardens, one of the Harrisons’ final projects, as both focus on adaptation to change, natural regeneration, and the emergence of new ecological assemblages. As part of the Center for the Force Majeure, I continue to carry forward the Future Gardens work, with discussions underway for climate-adaptation projects in Central Europe and closer to home at UCSD/Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The Harrisons’ work mirrored what they saw in natural systems ― an inherent inventiveness and sustained improvisation and play with what was at hand (the practical and the playful were ever-present in their work). I see the Harrisons’ art as a type of rematriation. The fundamental rule of giving back is that what is returned cannot be broken or polluted, and what has been damaged first must be repaired. Indigenous cultures were a constant model for the Harrisons of cultural practices that work with nature rather than against it and how taking from nature could be done in ways that preserved the system.
Harrison porch in Santa Cruz
Each person at Newton’s memorial service in Santa Cruz had their own stories to tell. The Newton I knew was like the god Jupiter, bellowing from a mountaintop and tossing lightning bolts. Helen matched his thunder ― more than once I had to crawl out of sight as those two clashed. And then it would be dinnertime and only salads would be tossed. While the breadth of the Harrisons’ practice isn’t readily distilled into simple guidelines for living well on earth, there are a few elements that stay with me: the importance of invitations, of scale shifts and scanning for information, of redundancies and multiple perspectives, of imagining the potential consequences of our actions and then acting for the benefit of the life web.
A resident of north Leeds in the Aire Valley, Jamie has worked in a northern local authority since 1992 as a public servant in local government working in strategy, sustainability and regeneration. He is a former trustee of the Permaculture Association (Britain) and a qualified futurist (MA foresight and futures studies, Leeds Beckett University)
Jamie Saunders
Their work stands as a guide. When I remember, when I am provoked, they hold fast to more than the immediate concerns and less-than-life-enhancing work of day-to-day living. The life-web: see it, breathe it, hear it.
It took the eco-artists from far away, the spirited and determined advocates to reveal, remind and offer encouragement… to recentre on what really matters.
A life force for the life-web…
So, where to begin? With Newton, with Helen, with the Harrison Studio, with those ‘agent provocateurs’ and allies of those of us fortunate to have known them.
I can’t remember the first meeting, though this matters so much less than the essence of Newton, with Helen, through David Haley, creating connections across the Pennines. Teasing out a more ecological, more humane, and more progressive future for the North. A counter-point to the ‘business as usual’ of sprawl and expansion, into places and communities that could be woven back into ‘becoming’ as part of the life-web – as the Harrisons said, “every place is the story of its own becoming”. There it is again, that ‘life-web’. From ArtsTranspennine98 we saw a dragon emerging.
And I was ignorant of it in so many ways. It took the eco-artists from far away, the spirited and determined advocates to reveal, remind and offer encouragement—and some serious challenge to personal choices and professional practice—to recentre on what really matters. “How big is here?” they asked. For a north in need of thinking deeply about the future ahead, and not playing catch up with that there London and the South or creating a ‘global mega-city region’ of 15m people, this continues to be a critical question.
We meet again many more times than I realise or really thought likely. Each time adding layers to thinking, linking the long past with the deep futures ahead: preferable, probable, possible, plausible. Trying to better understand the best and worst of the bureaucracy of local administration, of localised politics, of siloed and constrained professions and disconnected communities.
Putting stewardship of place into place to work at the scale necessary for ecological regeneration and care.
Taking on ‘post-disciplinary practice’—with and alongside others—to do the research, to be commercial, to be life-enhancing. To do the work.
And gladly hosting Newton for an English Sunday lunch. And watching from away—as the global-local work of the Harrison Studio expands; from the glaciers, to the watersheds, from the meadows, to the cities, from the uplands to the top of the world. And back from the Pennines to the British Isles as a whole, responding to #astheseasrise. Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom—beyond the cleantech and the vested interests and out into the world of deep adaptation, of civic futures and the ‘force majeure’. Getting to grips with what co-evolution really means, over centuries, eras, epochs not just quarterly results, annual reports, and election cycles.
Albion, of many isles, is surrounded by water. As the fundamentals shift and we slowly, furiously, adjust to what is becoming. For our children, our grandchildren. To be more than good ancestors. At the heart of ‘sustainability’—reclaiming the concept from ‘financial viability’ and ‘sustaining the now’ to legacy and the global majority and the ‘more than human world’; of habitats, species, and dynamic complex adaptive systems.
So much more to be grateful for. So much more to reflect on, to embrace, and to share. Far more than ‘artists’, beyond ‘marketable self’ and galleries. Beyond ‘land art’ and environmentally-informed practice. Deep ecological advocacy of the living world. Of a world that will, as Gaia suggests, recalibrate with or without wiser human co-evolution. The American dynamism and bloody-mindedness are challenging, generous, and impatient with many. In later life, an elder when so many need such wisdom for their villages, towns, cities, and places to be post-industrial, post-colonial, post-normal. To be places where we live within the natural world; living well, with health, with care, and with a spirit that speaks to the best of us.
The world is a lesser place for the passing of Helen and Newton and their co-creation and collaborations with family, friends, and strangers. Their work stands as a guide. When I remember, when I am provoked, they hold fast to more than the immediate concerns and less-than-life-enhancing work of day-to-day living. The life-web: see it, breathe it, hear it. It is all around and in conversations, images, poems, and a deep body of work. The echoes and the opportunities remain.
Working through the ethos of life-web advocacy and stewardship may mean we can find the practical, imaginative, creative, collective means of living well in place. Testing out co-existence, beyond the ‘anthropocene’, and living more fully in the ecocene/symbiocene. The eco-art of Newton and Helen is as critical now in guiding those that follow in deep adaptation. Humane, bioregional, and planetary scales would be a fine continued legacy.
Richard Scott is Director of the National Wildflower Centre at the Eden Project, and delivers creative conservation project work nationally. He is also Chair of the UK Urban Ecology Forum. Richard was chosen as one of 20 individuals for the San Miguel Rich List in 2018, highlighting those who pursue alternative forms of wealth.
Richard Scott
Their practice was enabling and real and embodied timeless wisdom for people and nature, and these principles and their artworks will stay with me.
At the 1999 Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) Conference in San Francisco, a special art group was formed. David Haley from Manchester Metropolitan University proposed and went on to curate The Harrison Studio to contribute to the 2000 SER Conference in Liverpool. The work they presented and spoke about, Casting a Green Net: Can it Be We are Seeing a Dragon? was the first artwork I had seen that visualised and projected landscape-scale restoration within the context of climate change, poetically describing the need for us to “gracefully withdraw”.
The Harrison’s work was so playful and was the first time I’d seen artists enhance and translate classic ecological methodologies, signaling how we need to be bold. The Dragon highlighted the green East-West corridor between the river estuaries of the Humber and the Mersey. The Ordnance Survey maps hung splendidly on the wall of the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool and made for a very memorable piece because the shape of the biodiversity across the North of England equated to that of a dragon, sparking imagination. Significantly it almost exactly mirrored the original outlines of the proposed new Northern Forest (2018), and it definitely influenced the ambition of our thinking about the Northern Flowerhouse.
Craftivist Peter Carney’s -Weeds to Wildflower Banner- a talisman for sowing. Image Jane McNeil
As the organisation Landlife was closing, our vision for wildflowers as infrastructure and the locally coined ‘Northern Flowerhouse’ took shape, and the Singh Twins designed it up for us. Their art is doubly powerful, as they strengthen each other’s resolve and knowledge base, in the way they depict historic and current exploitation and the way in which they share traditional cultural practices and meanings. Working with my partner, Polly Moseley, enabled me to access and understand more of the calibre and potential of artists on Merseyside and to understand how important the Harrison’s partnership was over time.
In a video conversation, Newton said, “Overburden yourself, reflect and compose and look for original avenues” He talked of “playing catchup”, and spoke of big backyards and massive change ― accommodating the air, the land, the soil, and area ― above all avoiding ‘tower’ thinking of academia, and connecting with and through the citizen. Their work always included messaging, which was accessible and layered, like the messaging through Peter Carney’s banners, which have become our wildflower totems at events. Landlife (1975 – 2017)’s tenet which we attempted to embody was “creative conservation”.
Their Force Majeure “framed ecologically” was about articulating an evolving and boldness of vision ―this theme keeps appearing― and bold vision, and it reminded me of the simple advice from great gardener and writer, Christopher Lloyd, when he witnessed our wildflowers project in Liverpool in 1999, “Be bold” he said. The Harrisons always were direct and unapologetic with their work, including the Endangered Meadows of Europe. They understood the power and symbolism of moving meadow to cover an acre and a half rooftop on the top of the largest and most visited museum in Bonn, Germany, including an opening speech delivered by Angela Merkel. In Liverpool, we have positioned our landmark and gateway sites, around the Everton Lock Up badge, or along much-used trunk roads, and the Mersey Tunnel to achieve visibility, paving the way for a mosaic of habitat, urban or rural. It is about what we can do in different places, together, with real communities of interest, and heart and soul principles, be it Merseyside, Manchester, Cornwall, Morecambe, Dundee, or Auchterarder. And with the irony and humour reflected in Jamie Reid’s “Nature Still Draws a Crowd” (Suburban Press 1977). We worked with Jamie to create a large Ova in a huge field of wildflowers at the Lost Gardens of Heligan last summer. I think the Harrison’s would have approved.
Everton Park- Liverpool fans walk past the meadows on the way to a European Cup match. Image Richard Scott
The Harrisons to me were intriguing, curiosity-raising, and pragmatic. The more you found out about their work, the more depth it offers. Some were shocked by it. Spike Milligan ― a patron of Landlife the charity I worked for for 26 years ― was one. Spike arrived outside the 11 Los Angeles Artists exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1971 and smashed the Haywards’ glass front doors with a brick! The Harrisons were exhibiting a Portable Fish Farm an ecosystem that could be harvested and eaten. This triggered headlines, Arts Council anxiety, and questions in Parliament. When I discovered this, “Blimey” I thought.
The Harrisons’ philosophy avoids despair and wasting energy. For example, noting Scotland has a million foragers, and every person could have one hectare of land, points towards land reform with poetry and chutzpah. For me, the currency of seed and what you can do with it, experimenting with soil and substrates, and signaling massive change are all vitally important. As ecologists, we should take heart in reflecting on the work of the Harrison Studio, their belief in the power of the spoken word and bardic mystery, and their intolerance of technocracies. With wonderful dialogue of the possible, they brought attention to detail and employed simplicity. For example, in the recreation of Hog Pasture:Survival Piece #IWilma the Pig in 2012, how the Harrisons restaged that with joy, again, featuring meadow pasture and a pig (the pig had been denied by the art gallery the first time round).
Last year in 2022, I launched the Cultural Soil Charter (which grew out of discussion with the Chartered Institute of Ecology and soil advocates across the UK) at the World Congress of Soil Science in Glasgow, and was thrilled this coincided with the British Soil societies staging of Newton Harrison’s On The Deep Wealth Of this Nation, Scotland. I checked back and reflected on Making Earth (1969-70) when Newton made topsoil in front of his studio, and this connected in my mind with Glasgow CCA’s 2022 exhibition of tonnages of live soils. The Eden Project would do this as the origin of their own journey in building a theatre of plants and invite others to observe and participate, to show what we want to do with circular economies for soil, urban substrates, and what we can grow on them.
The Harrisons read this piece on ‘Mixing Mapping and Territory’ (2013):
Where would you begin? Where the terrain permits and the will exists. Choose Your Mountain. That is to say you can begin anywhere.
Their practice was enabling and real and embodied timeless wisdom for people and nature, and these principles and their artworks will stay with me, as Scouse Flowerhouse develops as a co-operative, and the National Wildflower Centre’s creative conservation work grows, in many ways, we will continue to honour and riff off their work.
Ranil Senanayake is a Systems Ecologist trained at U.C. Davis, He has developed Analog Forestry as a rural response to the critical need of restoring the worlds lost forests functions. He has served as Executive Director of the Environmental Liaison Center International in Nairobi, Kenya and as the Senior Scientist for Counterpart international, Washington D.C.
Ranil Senanayake
From creating a lagoon in a tank with Helen and Newton, I moved on to create a forest in a garden.
I began my relationship with Newt and Helen in 1972 while I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, my first time in America. My name had been given to them as an aquarist and they invited me to San Diego. That meeting led to a multi-year relationship much of it captured in their work The Lagoon Cycle. I moved from lagoons to rice fields to forests and today look at the Global Commons as the widest canvas.
Extracts From: The Lagoon Cycle’ – Helen Mayer Harrison/ Newton Harrison 1985
From The First Lagoon –
Lagoon Maker and Witness
He said
he knew of a creature a crab
and supposed that it could live under
museum conditions
… He said he was from Sri Lanka where the estuaries the lagoons and the ocean are amongst the richest in the world and if you want to know about lagoons you should go there and see them
From The Second Lagoon – Sea Grant
It was August The first shipment of crabs arrived from the marketplace in Colombo….
…… Those we ate were delicious, those we experimented with were hardy
The Third Lagoon – The House of Crabs
(of human behaviour)
While he expected the information gained to be privileged as he expected the information gained to become profit and we expected the information gained to become public as we expected the information gained to be public and he hoped the crabs would behave more reasonably from his point of view which they did not and as he hoped that we would behave more reasonably from his point of view which we did not and as we hoped he would behave more reasonably from our point of view which he did not the lagoon developed a life of its own about which we knew nothing at all
The Seventh Lagoon – The Ring of Fire, The Ring of water
Sometimes I dream of the water buffalo in its wallow in Sri Lanka the one that ran afoul of the gasoline engine and is being replaced by the tractor Now that the tractor does not replicate itself freely nor provide milk nor utilize the weeds as fuel nor produce fertilizer and fuel with its dung
… though the tractor is not graceful on the land and the buffalo will yield to that tractor although the buffalo finally is more efficient and its dialogue with the land more lucid
Clearly there is something about technology that does not like that which is not itself
Yet this is not
a necessary condition
this unfriendliness
to the land
From creating a lagoon in a tank with Helen and Newton, I moved on to create a forest in a garden where the structure and function of the original forest were used to design for restoration. Analog forestry is the methodology with which to design forest-like human ecosystems that provide the functions that the forest once did.
Looking at forest function, it soon became evident that the entire structure was fundamentally dependent on Primary Ecosystem Services provided by the photosynthetic biomass (leaves) of plants. This is the primary act of life, the Force Majeure, if you may. Meeting Newton again in South Korea; this was serendipitous, I designed a project entailing ‘seed clouds’ from the South to the North with the autumn winds was designed for the DMZ. Because wind is an irresistible force, beyond the control of a state. These ideas have progressed to ‘smart contracts’ to valorize PES into the Global Commons.
The Global Commons, as we discussed so often, was the stage for the Force Majure ignoring it was a reason for the ecological collapse today. In our work, to create value and restore the commons, a new value system to power Biocurrency, driven by the living world (www.restore.earth) is now being generated.
Richard Sharland has worked as an artist, community worker and environmental leader in the U.K. since 1975. Manager, Derby Community Arts ( 1982 - 1985), Director of Lancashire Wildlife Trust (1985 -1994), Director Groundwork St Helens (1994 -1999), National Director then COO at Groundwork U.K. (1999 - 2009), Director, Climate Change Planning, Manchester City Council (2009 - 2013) , Director, Terre Verte Gallery (2015 - current )
Richard Sharland
Both Helen and Newton had this wonderful gift of memory for stories and information and ideas, which they drew upon to evolve their work, to help others to evolve.
I first met Helen and Newton Harrison towards the end of the last century when they created a piece of work for the Art Transpennine exhibition in Manchester/Liverpool/Leeds/Hull. At that time, I was leading a local environmental organisation focused on ecology, wildlife conservation, and climate change: my background as an artist and community development worker informed an approach to my work that was open to innovation and prioritised engaging people and organisations in different ways. I worked with Art Transpennine as a local environmental leader and was part of Helen and Newton’s relationship networking on their project; subsequently, I met up with them when they were working on one or two other projects in the U.K. and in Aachen.
During one of our first encounters, Newton and Helen and I talked about the difference between ‘discussion’ and ‘dialogue’, and I was warmly reminded of the value of open-ended relating, of taking journeys of ideas whose destination is unknown. I say ‘reminded’ because I was already familiar with this from my youth, particularly from my childhood, but it was not the kind of conversation I had often in my workplace, where ‘adult conversations’ were often linear and closed, rather than open, enquiring and wondering.
“We don’t do discussion. We do dialogue ― you know, from the Greek.” I remember Newton saying, as we conversed. Discussions tend to be narrow and linear, they travel toward a conclusion, something fixed that has been determined as the conversation is begun; dialogue, on the other hand, can evolve in a more organic way and often travels to topics and views not envisaged at the outset. As I began to get to know them, I noticed how much Newton and Helen lived their lives and made their work with this approach, always evolving. There was always this creative interplay around them, in how they related ― to each other, to people in conversation, when talking about their work, when doing and being their work. It seemed to me that this made their art not just a response to a place in the world but also manifestly a living extension of themselves, somehow inseparable from them, and thus always itself unfixed, still growing.
So, when I am asked, “what did you learn from the Harrisons?” I first think of this, this way of being, and of connectedness. For me, this lay at the heart of them and their work. It is something fundamental to ecology, that everything somehow relates to everything else, but it often gets forgotten … even though it is ‘the big picture’. Helen and Newton lived alongside and amongst a lot of linear thinking, as we all do, yet they evolved a way of working and being that manifested ecological thinking, that always ventured into the big picture. And that way of being and working seemed to suffuse their approach to everything, particularly their work, the way it evolved, and the way it related to people. I am still learning from that.
Their northern England project of that time ―– Can it be we are seeing a Dragon? ― was rooted in four large wall maps of the region, each adapted to explore aspects of a more sustainable ecological future. I recall inviting a group of environmentally minded town planners in the region to the studio space where the maps were exhibited to meet Helen and Newton. Newton suggested to them that they were artists just like him, but that his mapping was steered by possibility and an imagination shaped by understanding the limits and opportunities of the ecology of the area, while their mapping was steered by the abstract requirements of policymakers or politicians. In the dialogue that ensued, the planners were surprised and intrigued that these artists from California had much more data about the unsustainability of human life in northern England at their fingertips than they did.
Both Helen and Newton had this wonderful gift of memory for stories and information and ideas, which they drew upon to evolve their work, to help others to evolve. It isn’t something we can all be as gifted in, but the encounter with the planners wasn’t the only one which illustrated their preparedness, their presence. It is something captured by a line from Dylan’s song ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ ― “know your song well, before you start singing”.
Tatiana Sizonenko is an art historian and award-winning curator working across the Renaissance, Modern, and Contemporary periods. She received her Ph.D. in Renaissance art history from the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego while also developing expertise in contemporary art. Ms. Sizonenko currently serves as the project curator for Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work at the La Jolla Historical Society, a project funded by Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time, Art + Science 2024.
Tatiana Sizonenko
Newton’s impact, along with Helen’s, on the field of environmental art practice and research, and socially engaged art more generally, is incalculable.
I am the curator of the exhibition Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, organized by La Jolla Historical Society and funded by the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time Art + Science 2024. This exhibition will explore the juncture between art and science, art and ecology, and art and social activism in the work of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison and will be displayed in four locations around San Diego simultaneously: La Jolla Historical Society (organizer), California Center for the Arts in Escondido, San Diego Central Library Art Gallery in downtown, and Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego.
Newton with Peninsula Europe in the background
I met Helen and Newton in 2015, at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, during the lecture-presentation on their recent Force Majeure projects. My collaboration with Newton started two years later when I first invited him to participate in the Agency of Art exhibition at the historical Mandeville Gallery of Art at UC San Diego. This exhibition highlighted Newton’s role as the founding member of the Visual Arts Department and the Harrisons’ impact on the multi-disciplinary art practice in the Visual Arts program. The Agency of Art juxtaposed the Harrisons’ Peninsula Europe (2000-7) with works of younger artists from the program. Starting as an assistant professor of painting in 1967 at UCSD, Newton would soon completely change direction and embark on making ecological art in the early 1970s in collaboration with his wife Helen. They then collectively made the decision to do no work that did not benefit ecosystems. During his time at UCSD, Newton was a hugely influential teacher and advisor, mentoring artists such as Martha Rosler and Alan Sekula among many others. He also influenced generations of environmental artists and scholars such as Lauren Bon, Tim Collins, Reiko Goto, Ruth Wallen, and many others. His impact, along with Helen’s, on the field of environmental art practice and research, and socially engaged art more generally, is incalculable. Peninsula Europe was chosen to feature the Harrisons’ approach to visual art as complex objects designed to reframe and re-imagine the critical problems of the environment and society today and so to improve the world and our interactions with it and one another.
Retiring from UCSD in 1993, the Harrisons never stopped working on ecological art projects. In 2009, Newton and Helen, as research professors, founded the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media Program. After Helen’s death in 2018, Newton continued to work until the last moment of his life. Just two weeks before his passing away, I visited his studio to make final selections of work for this next exhibition. Span across four venues and over the fifty years of their collaboration, 1968-2018, Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work will offer a critical reappraisal of the California-based works and will highlight the Harrisons’ approach to art and ecology often guided by the question “How big is here?” Working with Newton on California Work since 2019, I also encountered in practice their other main guiding principle for making art and establishing a truly ecological society that can be summarized as “listening to the Web of Life.”
The Harrisons proposed to use complex system thinking to treat nature as self-complicating, self-renewing, and self-continuing, a living partner to humans—thus the Web of Life. In our conversations, Newton emphasized that transformative thinking is exciting and works of art can change the world for the better, not just by enriching the life and spirit of those who love it but by proposing new solutions to problems revealed through an artist’s way of seeing combined with science, engineering, and social critique. The Harrisons’ commitment to the Web of Life, which they labelled, rather bluntly, a “Dictatorship of the Ecology,” led them to produce works of art that could act as just such social agents to reshape the world in which we live.
The Harrisons’ intention and guiding presence for listening to the Web of Life will be terribly missed. California Work intends to highlight how the Harrisons used the exhibition format in several ways, often in the sense of a town meeting, but always with the intention of seeing their proposals moving off the walls into planning processes, and ultimately resulting in interventions directed towards social and environmental justice.
San Diego as the Center of a World, Part II and Part IV (1974), photo by the author. Courtesy of the Harrison Family Trust
Elizabeth Stephens, Ph.D., is a filmmaker, performance artist, activist, and theoretician. Stephens gained her MFA at Rutgers in 1992 and completed her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at UC Davis in 2015. She is the Founding Director of the EARTH Lab (Environmental Art, Research, Theory, and Happenings) at UC Santa Cruz.
Beth Stephens
Newton and I were friends. Unlikely friends, but friends, nonetheless. Even though we could not have come from two more radically different worlds, we somehow connected and got a deep kick out of each other.
Newton, how could you have died on us? It still doesn’t seem possible that you are gone. Who is going to watch over the World’s Oceans, or the Life Web or the High Ground? You reminded me, on a regular basis, that everything is connected but that it is human hubris that destroys these connections; self-interest, capitalism, always looking for a profit instead of a reciprocal give and take. But you allowed for those rare human creatures, that act on behalf of the Earth – and of those, you and Helen were champions.
I initially met the Harrisons in 2007 when I was the chair of the UC Santa Cruz art department. Newton called and told my department manager that he wanted to talk to me. At the time, I was aware of the work of the Harrison Studio, but I didn’t know their work nearly as well as I would. Newton was interested in helping the art department form a graduate program, and Helen was firmly retired from being involved in the UC system. My department had its sights set on creating an MFA—which we have since done—however, Newton and I became convinced that we should create a Ph.D. focused on Environmental Art. I even earned a Ph.D. from UC Davis because the UCSC administration told us that we couldn’t launch a doctoral program because no one in the art department had a doctorate. What a fun adventure!!
The first creative encounter I had with the Harrisons was in Green Wedding to the Earth, (2008) part of a larger collaborative project I created with my wife/collaborator Annie Sprinkle. This performative wedding took place in UCSC’s Shakespeare Glen. Newton and Helen delivered the wedding homily. They instructed me and Annie, at the end of their oration, “And now let us go to the mountains!” I did go to the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia where I grew up. There I made my first environmental documentary, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2012). That film has had a long and fruitful run. In fact, this morning, someone from Paris emailed me to see if they could screen it. Of course, I said yes.
In addition to work-related memories, I have fond memories of dinners with Helen and Newton, first at their son Gabe’s house. I was astounded and completely impressed when Newton told me he was building a new house at the age of eighty. He designed his house with wide accessible passageways, heated floors, a walk-in tub, spacious art studio, and a room for a caretaker. He built that house for Helen—and I remember the day he told me that Helen suffering symptoms of severe memory loss—likely Alzheimer’s. I watched as he took care of her, powerless to ease her suffering as she entered the last phases of her life. I admired the fierce but tender care that Newton gave to Helen, and I appreciated that he made it possible for her to stay home until the very end. The house that Newton built for Helen accomplished its job. It sheltered her until her death, and it accommodated her caregivers. It allowed Newton to keep doing the work he was compelled to create ― to try to help everyone see and understand the necessary steps to assist our ailing planet and to continue to nurture the “life web.” There I spent hours talking to him about the ideas embedded in his projects, entropy, saving the world’s oceans, and finally, channeling the Earth itself. Although we did not agree on everything, and sometimes we disagreed mightily, we were always able to move beyond our differences, come back to the table, and resume our talks again and again. That house also sheltered Newton in his final days.
Newton and Beth
Newton Harrison was brilliant, and I recognize the huge contributions that he and Helen made to the art world, and especially to environmental art. But honestly, it was those moments of eating together or hanging out on his front stoop, chatting with his neighbors, and petting various dogs that I miss the most. Newton and I were friends. Unlikely friends, but friends, nonetheless. Even though we could not have come from two more radically different worlds, we somehow connected and got a deep kick out of each other. We recognized in the other the desire to try to make a better world than the world that we had inherited, through art. As we watched the Earth sending out increasingly urgent distress signals our mutual recognition created a bond that we recognized and appreciated as we sat together on his stoop and watched his front-yard meadow grow. In a world where the electrifying speed of our lives is exhausting beyond measure, to have a stoop, a little meadow, and a friend to visit, and talk to about art, life, and the state of the Earth, is nothing short of a miracle.
Ruth Wallen is a multi-media artist and writer whose work is dedicated to encouraging dialogue around ecological and social justice. Her interactive installations, nature walks, web sites, artist books, performative lectures, and writing have been widely distributed and exhibited. She was a Fulbright scholar and is currently core faculty in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.
Ruth Wallen
Working in collaborative partnership, the Harrisons’ use of dialogue, with stories unfolding as they augmented or interrupted each other, amplified the generativity and generosity of their metaphors while spawning more.
“Somebody’s crazy, they are draining the swamps and growing rice in the desert…” “What if all of that irrigated farming isn’t necessary?”[i] I first heard Helen and Newton Harrison speak about their work at a lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1977.
As a part-time art student, supporting myself working as an environmental specialist for the National Park Service planning office, the Harrison’s approach, distilling in-depth research into art-into metaphor, story, and performative activism―deeply affirmed my intuition to turn to art to promulgate an ecological ethic. They offered an enormously powerful example of employing art to raise crucial questions, spark imaginations, re-envision, and revitalize relationships between fragmented systems, and pose novel, ecologically sound approaches to environmental planning and policy.
Informed by their work, I received my first commission as an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium. When I wrote to the Harrisons thanking them for their inspiration, they responded most generously, inviting me to come visit. Eventually, I moved to San Diego to study with Helen and Newton in the MFA program at the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD) and stayed in dialogue with them ever since, as mentors became dear friends, a relationship for which I am forever grateful. Of all that I learned from the Harrisons, perhaps the most important was the use of metaphor as a tool for thought. Influenced by the work of Lakoff and Johnson, the Harrisons understood that human thought is largely metaphorical and that the artistic imagination is crucial to identifying metaphors that can transform ecologies. Indeed, when I was a grad student, the creation of metaphor was a central concept taught in introductory art courses at UCSD. As ecological artists, Helen and Newton identified potent metaphors by listening to the wisdom of place, being attentive to the systems within which the place was embedded, and by naming the patterns that emerged, the configurations of relationships often exposed by studying maps. Maps revealed watersheds, the circulatory systems of the earth, a major subject of the Harrison’s work. Metaphors such as the Serpentine Lattice, or Peninsula Europe served as powerful devices to spark provocative narratives, shift conversations, and guide environmental policies. The Serpentine Lattice not only made visible the network of watersheds of the coastal rain forests draining into the Pacific from Alaska to northern California but through the lattice form identified crucial points to begin processes of restoration. Conceiving Europe as a peninsula highlighted the importance of revitalizing the mountainous spines that housed vital sources of fresh water. Working in collaborative partnership, the Harrisons’ use of dialogue, with stories unfolding as they augmented or interrupted each other, amplified the generativity and generosity of their metaphors while spawning more. The serpentine lattice could be funded through an “eco-security system,” like the social security system of the US. It is not surprising that the voluminous compilation of their work not only presents each project but tells the story behind its creation. Both the work itself and these stories contribute to the process the Harrisons termed “conversational drift,” which envisions their work alive in the world, seeding discussion. A visit with the Harrisons was always an invitation to think in larger terms. Indeed, their naming of the “force majeure” and the development of a center dedicated to its study, came out of their continuing quest. But having named the problem of our times, Newton’s last piece comes back to the simple principle that must guide human actions: “Every species, without exception, must give back as much or more than they take” ― a maxim that the Harrisons certainly took to heart.
[i] Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, “Sacramento Meditations, 1977,” The Harrison Studio, accessed October, 2022. https://theharrisonstudio.net/sacramento-meditations-1977.
Mali Wu is a socially engaged Taiwanese curator, installation and conceptual artist. She is a professor at the Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Art at the National Kaohsiung Normal University (NKNU), Taiwan.
Mali Wu
The Harrisons demonstrated how we could apply wisdom to allow species to coexist and prosper. This is what we should learn anew, and that art can contribute to.
When I co-curated the Taipei Biennale in 2018: ‘Post-Nature—Museums as an Ecosystem’, we immediately thought of inviting the Harrisons, a pioneer couple of ecological art, to participate. During the contact process, we unexpectedly learned that Helen had passed away. And now, to our astonishment, Newton has also left us. While I try to remember some opportunities in meeting with them, I also deeply admire and appreciate very much having them as role models in the art.
On the Deep Wealth 2018
The 2018 Taipei Biennale presented On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland. One can see Harrisons’ consistent working methods. Through the research, cooperation, and dialogues with experts from different fields, to comprehensively understand the natural resources of a place, then, based on the needs of the developments, and from the perspective of environmental ethics, they provide suggestions for the adjustment of the land use and planning.
This creative method that is both scientific and rational, but also full of ecological care and connective aesthetics is different from the traditional way we used to regard art simply as perceptual expression and object production. Through art, they propose a more integrated, cartographic perspective, trying to reverse the way we build the world. This way of creation not only presents images of an ideal world but also uses art as an intervention, expanding our understanding of art. In “Post-Nature”, many works pointed out the difficulties and challenges faced by the contemporary world but the Harrisons demonstrated how we could apply wisdom to allow species to coexist and prosper. This is what we should learn anew, and that art can contribute to.
Newton, Mali, and Helen at Susan’s house in San Fransico 2005
I knew the works of Harrisons from the development of land art, and thanks to the arrangement of Suzanne Lacy I visited San Francisco in 2005 and met many eco-conscious artists from the West Coast of the United States at the house of Susan Leibovitz Steinman. Artists, including founding members of the Women Eco Artists Dialog (WEAD) and Harrisons et al. It was only then that I realized that these artists paid attention to how art, especially ecological art, can respond to real-world issues, rather than simply seeing art as an expression of opinion. Inspired by this, in 2006, I developed an art project By the River, on the River, of the River – a community-based eco-art project, inviting ecological experts, cultural workers, and community colleges to collaborate with and have public discussions.
In 2007, with the help of David Haley, Helen, and Newton were invited by the Taipei Cultural Foundation to give a lecture and exhibit documents of their projects at Taipei International Artists Village. At the same time, they were also invited to Dapu Township, Chiayi County, where the Zengwen Reservoir, the most important water source in southern Taiwan, is located, to conduct a two-day’s Master Workshop. Through the detailed explanation of their projects over the years and the recitation of the poems they created, we could better understand their extremely cross-discipline, integral, educational, dialogical, and poetic methodologies. And these events have brought significant impact and inspirational approaches for Taiwan in the field of contemporary/ecological/public art.
Today, because the climate emergency is being taken seriously, more and more artists in Taiwan are devoting themselves to environmental art. There is no doubt that the Harrisons have set a benchmark for us.
After I encountered Harrison Studio’s works, I was able to redefine my works with an omnidirectional view. And I learned that I must be in a position where I can communicate and collaborate with various types of people who have similar thoughts and integrate them.
Compared with my studies, which are about the ecological society of the area around the Korean Peninsula where I live, the Harrisons Studio’s ecological society has presented enormous research and scientific information over a considerable amount of time and an incomparably broader perspective.
There are so many people who do research, act, and study for the future environment and ecology. However, the target point of all of them is different and this makes for gaps.
Newton Harrison
For example, some say that trees should be planted for the future, while others say that rescuing dying animals and extinct creatures is more important. We know both are important, but this gap sometimes causes significant friction. I think this friction is because of their situations: they are surrounded by limited budgets and time. In other words, the various kind of limitation seems to make friction. So, I feel it’s quite hard to reach the common ideal goals.
Me, as an artist who deals with environment and ecology, which point should I look at? Where should I stand?
After I encountered Harrison Studio’s works, I was able to redefine my works with an omnidirectional view. And I learned that I must be in a position where I can communicate and collaborate with various types of people who have similar thoughts and integrate them.
I want to share a story that is still inspiring me.
The first time I met Newton Harrison was in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jeju Island, South Korea. I invited Newton Harrison to the exhibition that I curated about ocean environments.
After our successful exhibition opening, we had a tea break and conversation while we were on the way to the airport. It was not a long break. But, in that short time, Newton Harrison and I shared a very romantic story and I think this was the most important story that Newton could tell me as a senior artist.
It was the story of the first meeting between Newton and Helen. How the love began—the first feelings—Newton said that he felt 100% sure of love when he first met Helen. And he told me about both the good and hard times of living together as artists.
There were good times when they were spotlighted and invited to a lot of exhibitions. There were also hard times, of course, when there was no work at all. With all these times, being without consciousness of the outside world is important. This was possible because of being with Helen.
Although this was a very brief conversation, I felt that Newton Harrison had very happy and beautiful memories of his longing for Helen and all the things he’d had with her.
This short conversation at that time became the most important message for me, who was struggling with irregular anxiety while living life as an artist. The most important thing is love which is with a soul mate and Newton proved this. I want to live sincerely and faithfully like Newton Harrison’s words and actions.
The word potential in the title of this essay points to the hope of moving away from the cultural and aesthetic foundation of the lawn industry. While the contemporary lawn still carries the story of social and economic inequalities that propagated the commonly accepted aesthetic of high-intensity management of grasslands, more and more attention is drawn to how little sense this aesthetic makes nowadays.
What connects all upper-middle-class houses, public institutions’ buildings, stadiums, and golf fields? A hint: it is aesthetic, it is high-maintenance, and it is a prime example of a single species use. The answer is ― the lawn. The history of lawns goes back to the late Middle Ages, and is, from the very beginning, charged with a lot of symbolism. As a symbol of the upper socioeconomic class, the lawn has, throughout the centuries, stood for wealth, order, and elegance. This is due to the unproductive use of soil; only rich people could afford a piece of land with nothing but grass on it. With time, lawns have been introduced to upper-middle-class residential architecture and public institutions, as they decorate the front yards of courts, museums, and administrative buildings. They also greet guests to private houses, representing the owner as a neat and organised person with means ― if the lawn is well maintained. If the lawn is unkempt, it also says something about the owner.
Taking over many of the urban green spaces, lawns are also connected with concerning statistics about water and energy usage and an enormous public budget that goes into maintaining them. Not to mention biodiversity; from an urban ecology perspective, lawns are definitely not the most optimal urban low-height green infrastructure (LHGI). In the meantime, cities are on the frontline of the climate battle and have a significant potential for the future of conserving global biodiversity (Grimm et al., 2008, p. 759). The main purpose of this essay is to highlight the fact that with lawns dominating the urban landscape of LHGI, this potential will not be fully realised.
To fully understand the problematics of lawns, it is necessary to explain their history, socioeconomic context, and environmental consequences. What is the context of the contemporary popularity of lawns and their potential to become something more than green-coloured deserts?
The role of lawns in urban ecology
Ecosystem services (ES) may be the dominant framework for understanding urban nature nowadays, but our ancestors passed on to us certain habits of using nature with a strictly aesthetic goal in mind. Even though urban nature can (and should as argued by designers and architects such as Lance Hosey) be aesthetic, in the context of diminishing biodiversity and climate crisis, urbanites should think of more than just the looks. In his book The Shape of Green; Aesthetics, Ecology and Design, Hosey advocates for the kind of design that will bridge beauty with the green approach. He creates a “decalogue”, a beauty manifesto, as he calls it, with ten principles that help achieve this goal. To name a couple, he advises seeing good design and green design as uniform and consistent. The same goes for aesthetics and sustainable development. Also, the function and the looks should coexist, without one limiting the other (Hosey, Rasmus-Zgorzelska & Janicka, 2021, p. 171). While making up for a big part of the urban tissue, lawns do not adhere to these rules. Their purpose, maintenance costs, and ecosystem limitations they create make them not much more than merely an aesthetic quality of the place. In the meantime, cities, being the centres of creativity, science, cultures, and arts should take responsibility for going beyond aesthetics and redefining our relationship with urban nature.
As argued by Seto et al. (2013, p.1), “it is no longer possible to construct sound ecological science without explicit attention to urbanisation as a key driver of global ecological change”. At the same time, cities experience the urban heat island effect, water retention problems, and increased air pollution, which means they also depend more and more strongly on green and blue infrastructure to be more resilient. They need trees to bring shade and they need ponds, lakes, and soils to become sponge cities. In this sense, nature needs cities, and cities need nature. To understand this correlation, we have to look at cities as a form of an ecosystem, which has been done since the 1920s with the sociological research of the Chicago School. Needless to say, the contemporary perspective on urban ecology is very different from the one from 100 years ago. According to Grimm et al., “urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanised world” (2008, p. 756). Part of the city’s influence on nature is having a homogenising effect on the regional biodiversity, as humans enforce a very heterogeneous patchwork of habitats and species in and around cities, the more important it becomes to use this influence in a smart way. This means filling our cities (both in a public and private setting) with spaces that will support something that Steffen et al. call planetary stewardship. By that, they mean that the “business-as-usual” approach cannot continue, which becomes clear looking at the financial instability, social and economic inequalities, and, most importantly, environmental degradation. Planetary stewardship relies on a polycentric and multi-level engagement in the critical issues that have become apparent on Earth. In other words, it means taking responsibility for more than just human lives and representing other species in the battle for a healthier and liveable planet (Steffen et al., 2011, pp. 756-757). How does that connect with lawns?
Lawns are cultivated on the level of individuals, counties, towns, cities, and states. They are one of the most popular forms of green infrastructure people worldwide (especially in the Global North that has the means for a more responsible and engaged greening) choose for their front and back yards. This means there is an enormous amount of green space all around the world that is only serving the aesthetic function, while it could easily be transformed into something that adheres to Hosey’s principles. However, before we can dive into the concerning statistics that prove lawn management problems need our attention, we need to understand where the symbolic value of lawns come from.
The historical perspective
Why do we think lawns are beautiful? This idea was enforced by the English and French aristocrats who nurtured lawns in front of their castles since the late Middle Ages. Before lawnmowers and water sprinklers, it was also a very time-consuming type of land use, much more costly than it is nowadays. Apart from the upkeep costs, there was also the matter of productivity of land; only the richest people in the world could afford to have (often very big) pieces of land that produce nothing of value (Harari, 2017, p. 67). In this sense, it was somewhat of a “green extravaganza” to own a lawn. And so, a patch of grass became an attractive and powerful symbol of authority and by the late modern period, it entered the realm of public property. At the same time, lawns started playing an important role in the world of sports. Since the nineteenth century, lawns have been a central element of football, tennis, golf, and other high-end sports. Harari claims we can easily assume that if one plays sports on lawns, they are a person of high economic means (2017, p. 68). In the end, when we imagine children of non-privileged families training to become the new generation of football players: they are definitely not playing on grass, but on the concrete of the street or a dirt field.
Figure 1: Bowling lawn at the Caledonian Bowling Club in Dunedin, New Zealand. Picture taken in 1938 (Smith & Fellowes, 2013).
Thus, the lawn entered the minds of common people as a symbol of money, power, and prestige, and with that view, it prevailed until the present times. With the big wave of automatisation that marked the Industrial Revolution, came the automatic sprinkler and the lawnmower that quickly caused millions of families to fulfil the desire of having a “perfect” lawn in front of their house. The suburbia became filled with lawns and neighbours competing against each other to achieve the neatest grass in their gardens (especially the front yards obviously). Like many other aspects of the “modern dream”, a suburban house with a lawn gained the biggest popularity in the United States.
As highlighted by Harari (2017, p. 69) “grass is nowadays the most widespread crop in the US after maize and wheat, and the lawn industry (plants, manure, mowers, sprinklers, gardeners) accounts for billions of dollars every year”. In Europe, grasslands cover over a third of all agricultural areas (Velthof et al., 2014, p. 7). At least the majority of North American and European lawns are situated in areas where it was traditionally feasible to grow a lawn due to a mild climate (Smith & Fellowes, 2013, p. 158). In the meantime, the ideals of money, power, and prestige are widespread around the globe. And so, the symbolism of lawns becomes appealing also to countries such as Dubai and Qatar, located in very unsuitable climates for this kind of greenery. As a result, we see lawns being planted in the middle of the Arabian desert, which requires enormous amounts of water every day (Harari, 2017, p. 73).
Figure 2: Lawn in front of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, (Museum of Islamic Art Park in Doha, Qatar. Radisson Blu Blog, n.d.).
Contemporary lawns, in addition to being widespread, are also composed to adhere to the prevailing modern aesthetics of straight lines, symmetry, and unification that we inherited from the XXth century. Hence the ideal of a modern lawn consists of perfectly green layers of single-species grass, not taller than ten centimetres. However, before modern times, it was not the only aesthetic cultivated by lawn owners. In this sense, we can learn from the historical perspective on lawns. According to Smith & Fellowes (2013, pp. 157-158), the prevailing aesthetic was for a long time an imperfect lawn. They write that the mediaeval lawns were portrayed by artists as flowery, with, among other species, lilies, irises, poppies, primroses, and wild strawberries.
“For these species to survive, it would indicate mediaeval meads were likely to have been mown much less frequently than the usual twice-monthly mowing received by their modern lawn counterparts since both the intensity and frequency of mowing have a strong effect on the continuents of any sward” (Smith and Fellowes, 2013, p. 159). Such diversity of species, achieved through widened aesthetic boundaries for lawns (and little possibility for intense management) meant a better environment for pollination and hence for biodiversity. It also seems closer to the ideals represented by Hosey’s ten principles than the aesthetic of modern lawns. Therefore, we can understand the problematic symbolism of lawns through their historical context, but this context can also teach us about how to improve the lawn aesthetics and composition that we blindly inherited after the modern-era single-species lawns. The contemporary quantitative reality of lawn-keeping proves that this field needs many changes.
Modern lawns in numbers
The grandiosity of the lawn industry makes it a significant case study for urban ecology. Lawns-related data can be found for many different countries where the numbers are becoming problematic. Only some of them will be described in this essay due to the limits of this study, but the ones described already prove the existence of a larger problem. For example, according to Francoeur et al. (2021, p. 1), lawns take up from 8 to 16 million hectares of space in the USA. Being cultivated in both private and public properties, lawns, together with materials used to keep them up, have a significant effect on the city’s environment and ecosystem. Not to mention the budget put into mowing and watering them. In Poland, calculations have been made that point at annual public spending of 2 billion zlotys (roughly 425 million euros) on public lawns (Kosić czy nie kosić? Miasto Jest Nasze, 2019). Studies made in Newcastle, Australia, have shown that 11.6% of the total nonmethane hydrocarbons emission in the city come from the use of lawnmowers.
In the USA, gas-fuelled mowers have been proven to emit 26 million tonnes of polluting substances into the air each year, which makes up for almost 11% of the total pollution emitted in the country, excluding the transport industry emissions (Skłodowski, 2019). When it comes to watering, a lawn that adheres to the modern aesthetic requires 10 litres of drinkable water per square metre of grass. We should also not forget about the noise pollution caused by lawnmowers. They produce noise of the intensity of around 80dB, while the European Union norms consider all noise beyond 55dB detrimental (Skłodowski, 2019). All these statistics show that we pay a high price for the aesthetic of a modern lawn, while the aesthetic has not always been so strict. Similarly, to Hosey’s argument, the aesthetics of lawns can and should be related to their value for the natural environment and a lower energy cost. All it would take is redefining the aesthetic so lawns could be mowed less often, require less strict, care, and consist of more than one species. The benefits of such changes will be further explained.
Lawns vs ecosystem services
As shown in the previous paragraph, we pay a high price for the modern lawn aesthetic. However, having the goal of planetary stewardship in mind, we also have to consider how this aesthetic affects other species. The relationship between lawns and biodiversity is discussed by many authors, who investigate the effect of different types of low-height urban green infrastructures (LHGI) on ecosystem services (ES). Francoeur et al., (2021, p. 1) compare four different LHGI; “unmanaged sowed indigenous herbaceous vegetation (flower meadow), medium-sized hedgerow, highly maintained lawn and naturally regenerated shrub vegetation (natural)” to understand how their height, volume, plant richness, plant diversity, and maintenance affect two ecosystem services that they deem crucial in mitigation of climate crisis, namely habitat for biodiversity and urban heat mitigation. In their study, they prove how the plant volume of a lawn (around 6.83m3), compared to the volume of a flower meadow (around 39.16m3) negatively impacts the arthropod biomass, which increases by 0.109 mg per m3 of vegetation” (2021, p. 6).
The endangered population of arthropods is very important for pollination and hence for a more diverse habitat for other species, such as insects and birds. Biodiversity co-created by arthropods also affects the overall ecosystem functioning, persistence, and resilience (Francoeur et al., 2021, p. 2). As for heat mitigation, the authors observe that a higher plant structure lowers plot surface temperature. The temperature decreases by 1°C with every 1.53m3 increase of density of vegetation. In other words, the density, and the height of the GI matter, and as much as we need LHGI in our cities, especially in spaces unsuitable for tree plantation, they could be much more valuable for heat mitigation and biodiversity than lawns we know nowadays, which are often nothing more than green deserts.
Figure 3: Temperature differences depending on the type of surface (Ortega, 2021).
What could be done to improve ES provided by lawns? Francoeur et al. argue that this goal can be easily achieved through complexifying their oversimplified composition. This means lawns could be “enhanced through simple vegetation interventions” (2021, p. 2); improved by allowing for taller and more diverse vegetation, rather than single-species and 10 cm-tall norms. Maintenance, such as mowing, is proven to have a negative influence on plants, invertebrates, and soil microbes. It also directly affects plant diversity; low-intensity management of grasslands can increase plant diversity from 15% to 62% (Chollet et al., 2018, p. 122). This is because less mowing means higher plant volume and hence more space for vegetation. This problem is widely covered by the topical literature, as mowing has an individual dimension to it; for private lawn owners, it would just require mowing less to achieve better ES outcomes (Watson et al., 2019, p. 437). All in all, low-intensity lawn management is shown as a simple way to decrease maintenance costs (which, as shown above, are quite significant), promote urban biodiversity, decrease the urban heat island effect, limit weed and pest invasions (that are often highly allergenic), and finally reduce carbon emissions (Watson et al., 2019, p. 444).
Figure 4: From lawn to meadow in private gardens (Smith & Fellowes, 2013).
Additionally, all of this can be done without allocating entirely new spaces to urban greenery, but actually focusing on what we can change in the existing ones. The constraints of the new era of improved lawns are of political, cultural, and aesthetic nature (Francoeur et al., 2021, p. 7). However, as highlighted by Hosey, it is time to blend our cultural and aesthetic values with the environmental ones, which will hopefully be followed by policies that support such an approach. Only under such conditions can we ever achieve Steffen’s planetary stewardship goal.
Conclusion
The word potential in the title of this essay points to the hope of moving away from the cultural and aesthetic foundation of the lawn industry. While the contemporary lawn still carries the story of social and economic inequalities that propagated the commonly accepted aesthetic of high-intensity management of grasslands, more and more attention is drawn to how little sense this aesthetic actually makes nowadays. Under the contemporary circumstances of the desperate need for ES in cities in the dawn of climate catastrophes, we cannot afford anymore, both economically and environmentally, to hold on to this detrimental ideal of a perfectly mowed, one-coloured (and hence single-species) grass in our front yards, backyards and in our public spaces. The potential for a new era in the lawn industry, as well as in other LHGI, lies in the simplicity of the solutions proposed by scholars. Every individual lawn owner can incorporate and benefit economically.
The same goes for public institutions and municipalities that spend enormous amounts on lawn management, as shown above. Complexifying lawns is not a difficult task from a technical perspective, and it involves spaces that are already there, which highlights the aforementioned potential of cities in homogenising and enhancing regional biodiversity. All we need is a wider understanding of the context of the prevailing aesthetic, its historical roots, and its economic and environmental consequences.
Fortunately, the interest in ES is growing and with it, the number of people who put thought into the green spaces that surround them. Outside of the academic environment, people are popularising knowledge presented in this essay on social media and in online articles for passionate amateur gardeners. The aesthetic of a meadow is becoming increasingly popular among city dwellers and urban planners (Skłodowski, 2019). Even Netflix has recently added to its selection a documentary entitled British Garden: Life and Death on your Lawn which exposes the richness of life and the value of biodiversity in suburban gardens. Hopefully, it will draw the attention of a wider audience to the problem of lawns, but it is difficult to speak optimistically about this issue.
On one hand, the debate is engaging more and more people in rethinking the way they go about their gardens and urban dwellers and planners start seeing the advantages of urban meadows and incorporating them into their approach. On the other hand, many people with a very different approach come to the conclusion that the best solution is to install artificial grass in their yards. This is either because they only care about the economic consequences of lawn-keeping and want to save money on mowing and watering, or because they fall for greenwashing strategies of the artificial lawn producers who attract customers by highlighting how bad the real lawns are for the environment. As such, they bring in the arguments of the carbon footprint from mowing and water usage that goes into lawn management. They only fail to mention that their product, even if cheaper and requiring no care, is merely plastic and completely useless for biodiversity, heat mitigation, and other ecosystem services (Sztuczny trawnik – czy warto kupić? Zielony Ogródek, 2019).
We can only anticipate that it is the first, not the second approach that will dominate the enormous industry of lawns, and ultimately change their story from the story of inequalities and green deserts to the story of realised potential.
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Figure 3: Ortega, L. (2021, June 15). Zastanów się zanim Ostrzyżesz Trawnik! . Twitter. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://twitter.com/ortegadry/status/1404792037975760900?s=20&t=cpPV37Rfd-YnLzXPCvPu0Q&fbclid=IwAR322c-R5UuSW_c4jN75i0Az45zDEhFdz0bFHV6JMynew9TNxWOBJRUJSKc
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To test and experiment with different forms of street transformations and greenery, tactical urbanism is increasingly being implemented. Here are three examples enhancing green and open space in Munich
Due to urban densification processes and increasing confrontation with climate change, cities face the need to organize their public space in efficient and sustainable ways that take current needs as well as those of future generations into account. The Green Infrastructure (GI) concept is a widely used concept, introducing various approaches to implement green elements in urban areas that provide a broad set of benefits and values with environmental, social, and economic purposes (Hansen, et al.,2019; Pauleit, et al., 2011; Sturiale, & Scuderi, 2019). More specifically, the European Commission defines GI as a “strategically planned network of natural and seminatural areas with environmental features designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services such as water purification, air quality, space for recreation and climate mitigation and adaptation” (EC, 2019). One element of this GI concept is street transformations, particularly green street transformations (EPA, 2022). Streets make up to 50% of the urban built environment. Therefore, they provide great prospects for change in urban design and sustainability (Furchtlehner et al., 2022; Im, 2019; Pogačar & Senk, 2020; Rodriguez-Valencia & Ortiz-Ramirez, 2021). However, streets still mostly serve a motorized infrastructure – i.e., car lanes and parking spaces (Furchtlehner & Lička, 2019). Cities are thus considering street transformations to gradually redistribute the streets-space and prioritize pedestrians and bikers, and increase green spaces.
The recent COVID pandemic has pushed cities further to provide access to green spaces in dense neighborhoods. To test and experiment with different forms of street transformations and greenery, tactical urbanism is increasingly being implemented. It is defined as exploring with short-term, low-cost placemaking through bottom-up movements and civic collectivity. Pop-up public spaces, bike lanes, or green elements are installed as temporary solutions to tackle the lack of public space (Furchtlehner & Lička, 2019; Natividade et al., 2022; VanHoose et al., 2022). The attempt is to create a long-term change for the neighborhood despite the limited lifespan of the project. However, it is questionable whether longevity and a change in the behavior of the population can be achieved through such implementations. Particularly in recent years, the city of Munich has experimented with green street interventions such as pop-up bike lanes, summer streets, Kulturdachgarten, Parklets, and Schanigärten (Natividade et al., 2022). Besides the City Council of Munich, another major local player in such projects is the Green City e.V. This association is predominantly involved in experiments and developments around greening the city. This essay will discuss three projects of the Green City e.V. in Munich and critically assess the greening aspect and longevity of such short-term tactical urbanism.
Green City e.V. (2022a) aims to transform the urban living space to increase the quality of life within the city of Munich. The association was founded as a non-profit organization in 1990 and is one of the largest environmental organizations in Munich today. Green City e.V. is proposing several different programs around greening with a focus on participative urban design, clean energy, environmental education, and sustainable mobility. Through tactical urbanism, they are implementing around 150 events and temporary projects per year with more than 2,500 volunteers engaged in their projects. The NGO is politically independent and financed through funding, members, grants, and commissioned work. The main attempt is to engage as many citizens as possible for a greener and more livable city with the guiding principle of “fresh air, more green, less noise and air pollution – our Munich of the future, a Munich for the people”[1] (Green City e.V., 2022a). Green City e.V. organizes their projects around four pillars: (1) Mobility to enhance climate responsive and reduce motorized traffic, (2) Urban green to promote communal gardening, urban greening, and design, (3) Education and participation, and (4) Climate change mitigation and resource conservation. In terms of greening the city, current projects of the organization include the Wanderbaumallee, the Parklets, and the Quartierswende Lehel (Green City e.V., 2022a).
Three projects exemplify their capacity to enhancing greenery.
Wanderbaumallee
Move of the Wanderbaumallee (Source: Green City e.V., 2022b)
Die Wanderbaumallee (“walking tree alley”) is temporarily transforming neighborhood streets into green “alleys” or “avenues”. For the duration of six weeks, 15 trees are greening one street before being moved to the next location in an opening event. The project has proven its worth for the past 30 years, occupying over 60 different streets, and resulting in the planting of 150 permanent trees (Green City e.V., 2022b). The “walking tree alley” is always accompanied by a small exhibition on the values of trees for the microclimate, shadow provision, or aesthetics to educate users about environmental issues and urban greening (Green City e.V., personal communication, 3. June 2022). The overall goal is to raise awareness of the benefits of trees as providers of important ecosystem services, such as mitigating climate change, regulating runoff, reducing urban heat, air and noise pollution, as well as inciting physical activity (Baró, et al. 2019; Green City e.V., 2022b; Niemelä et al., 2010; Nesshöver et al., 2017). Green City e.V. is aiming for users to valorize the positive effects of trees in their streets and start initiatives to accelerate the greening process (personal communication, 3. June 2022).
Challenges for the Wanderbaumallee might include tree maintenance or whether they will permanently change the streetscapes of the neighborhood. For instance, the trees need to be watered daily during their stay. Green City e.V. (2022b) is therefore calling for neighbors, schools, and kindergartens to water and maintain the trees. According to the NGO (personal communication, 3. June 2022), this is usually no issue though as neighbors often apply for the “walking tree alley” at the district committee and are hence, quite invested and motivated for the project. With regards to the visions of Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs, residents themselves can be advocates to reclaim and transform their own streets through active engagement (Gehl, 2010; Jacobs, 1961). This will further motivate users to go beyond the mere project of tactical urbanism and demand the planting of permanent trees. The Wanderbaumallee will obviously not create an immediate effect on the microclimate but start an initial process that will expand further. There are several cases where the “walking tree alley” generated a long-term green street transformation, e.g., in Schrenk– and Steinstraße, Hofgarten, or Kaiserplatz (Green City e.V., 2022b). Before the trees are stored during the winter, the final Wanderbaumallee for 2022 has been set up in Blutenburgstraße, where the district’s committee itself is pushing the city to extend the green band of adjacent streets, initiating the greening process with this temporary project.
According to an Austrian study, five out of ten neighborhood streets in Munich currently contain street trees. Even though this number is higher than in other cities – such as Vienna for instance – and streets are often planted on both street sides in Munich, there is still room for improvement (Furchtlehner & Lička, 2019). Baró et al. (2019) discuss that street trees often go unnoticed when considering ecosystem services of green infrastructures. Though, they provide essential benefits, particularly in dense urban fabrics with lacking free space to implement larger green elements. Consequently, “walking trees” should be set up even more to ignite a green transition in other neighborhoods of Munich.
Munich’s Wanderbaumallee has been deemed a showcase experiment due to its longevity of more than 30 years and resulting in several successful green street transformations. It even inspired other cities to realize similar “avenues” such as the walking forest in Stuttgart and the Wanderbaumallee in Cologne.
Parklets
A second project initiated by the Green City e.V. is Parklets. Parklets offers (temporary) solutions to small public spaces along the sidewalk by occupying street parking. With a wide purpose range, they incorporate greenery, street furniture, exercise equipment, or bike racks to enhance social interaction, promote active mobility, reduce motorized traffic, and increase biodiversity. Particularly when dealing with a lack of space, they provide alternative public and green spaces integrated into the existing grey infrastructure. Initially set up in San Francisco in 2005, Parklets have now spread across 80 cities (Lydon et al., 2015).
In Munich, they were first installed in a pilot project in 2019 due to the increasing pressure for public spaces. Under the management of Munich’s Department for Urban Planning and with the support of Green City e.V., several Parklets are now set up every year with various purposes and designs, such as seating areas, bike repairs, and play spaces. Private individuals can submit applications for special use to the district committee and even request a small budget (Green City e.V., 2022c; Landeshauptstadt München, 2022). While Green City e.V. (personal communication, 3. June 2022) acts as an intermediary and supporting party, citizens themselves are responsible for the design and maintenance. There are no precise specifications, but the NGO strongly advises the integration of green elements (e.g., flowerpots, smaller plants, or even trees). In comparison to Schanigärten, which ignites outdoor spaces for cafes, restaurants, and bars, Parklets cannot serve commercial purposes but are committed to offering open and accessible spaces (Green City e.V., personal communication, 3. June 2022).
Parklet (Source: Green City e.V., 2022c)
Acknowledged as one of their Urban Green projects (Green City e.V., 2022c), it is debatable whether Parklets contain “enough” green to be considered as an actual green intervention. Green City e.V. could demand a certain amount of green elements to enhance the feeling of a green oasis or micro park and to increase the provision of ecosystem services. Moreover, it is arguable whether Parklets will push a permanent transformation given their short duration and low frequency across the city (Bertolini, 2020). A possible long-lasting effect might become apparent when Parklets have been created for several years. From last year’s experience, Parklets throughout Munich mostly got positive resonance, except for some complaints about noise and the loss of parking space (Landeshauptstadt München, 2022). In the long run, neighbors will hopefully appreciate the value of the generated spaces and the increased livability through these pocket parks. Besides the greening aspect, Parklets offer a great opportunity to experiment with alternative, low-cost open spaces in neighborhoods and respond to specific local needs (VanHoose et al., 2022). Currently, parking spaces account for around 20 % of Munich’s streetscape (Furchtlehner & Lička, 2019). Hence, there is a lot of potential for pop-up public spaces and green elements by reducing parking spaces.
According to the WHO, residents should reach green areas within 300 m (WHO, 2017). Inserting pocket parks in dense neighborhoods can increase the accessibility to small green spaces (73 % of Munich’s residents have green spaces in 300 m proximity, Richter et al., 2016), and the availability of green spaces per capita (currently at around 19 m2, Bayerisches Landesamt für Statistik, 2020). Therefore, Munich still has potential for development in terms of vicinity to green spaces. In conclusion, one Parklet will not achieve a green transition but, when placed more frequently and long-termed, and with a stronger focus on a greening aspect, they have the potential to transform the streetscape.
Quartierswende im Lehel
Visualization of the Lehel (Source: Green City e.V., 2022e)
Finally, looking at a larger-scaled project of Green City e.V., the Quartierswende Lehel is attempting a sustainable, green transformation of the Lehel, part of Munich’s central district Altstadt-Lehel. It has quite a large share of green spaces. Part of the English garden, Munich’s largest park with 417 ha surface, is within the district and the river Isar limits the southern border (München.de, 2022). Nevertheless, the inner neighborhoods of the district are quite dense and built up with few green spaces (see visualization in Figure 3). This negatively affects residents as well as their urban environment, which is why Green City e.V. (2022e) is advocating a redistribution of the inner district’s spaces. By initiating three temporary pilot projects, they strive for greater, permanent solutions. The projects were implemented in a participatory action in close collaboration between policy, administration, and citizens’ representation. Ideas and designs were collected and voted on in the neighborhood to accurately reflect the needs of the residents and to surge acceptance and satisfaction. Proposals included ideas around green elements, gardening, street trees, or green facades. As a result, during the summer of 2021, tactical urbanism projects were implemented at three sites with a focus on greening the city: Isartorplatz was transformed into a park with green spaces, street furniture, and playgrounds. St.-Anna-Platz enabled space for participation and sustainable education around topics like urban gardening, blue elements, and sustainable waste management. And Mariannenplatz inaugurated an open space around a variety of different functions.
However, the Quartierswende also brought some challenges. Particularly Mariannenplatz did not get the expected approval. Instead of transforming the entire streetscape and affecting traffic circulation, only small Parklets were granted by the City Council (Priwitzer, 2021). It is surprising that the city administration is still reluctant to such measures when Munich is striving to be carbon neutral by 2035 in their Urban Development Plan 2040 (Landeshauptstadt München, 2021). The city needs these greening concepts to achieve its goals of urban resilience and sustainability, and to increase the share of green spaces in the urban landscape, which is currently at 12 % (Bayerisches Landesamt für Statistik, 2020). Nevertheless, in the case of Lehel, the prospects seem positive after these tactical urbanism projects. Together with citizens and Green City e.V., the district committee is now striving for long-term solutions to initiate a permanent transition (Green City e.V., personal communication, 3. June 2022). However, critics claim that the Quartierswende might cause a process of green gentrification. Green gentrification is caused by the green transformation of a specific area, resulting in increasing rents and the displacement of lower-income groups (Gould & Lewis, 2016). Rent prices in Munich are already incredibly high, and this could even be aggravated. This will only show, though, once permanent developments have been executed.
Compared to the aforementioned projects of Green City e.V., the Quartierswende Lehel brings the largest scope and the most radical change. With a bit of risk and courage for change, the district – characterized by dense structures and grey infrastructures – could be transformed into a future-proof, green Lehel. A permanent transformation can then surge environmental benefits, enhance sustainable mobility, and expand social interaction and local identification.
Tactical urbanism and temporary green street transformations are increasingly applied to experiment with possible solutions for expanding green infrastructure and combating urban challenges. This essay discussed the extent of three temporary projects of Green City e.V. in Munich on greening the city and their prospects for permanent change.
Tactical urbanism projects offer citizens to transform their surroundings and reclaim the streets that are often car dominated. Implementing green elements can initiate a gradual transformation to increase the provision of ecosystem services and the quality of urban life. Moreover, they explore low-cost and low-risk measures, adapted to local needs. However, there is a chance that temporary projects might not result in long-term effects and the area will go back to the former status quo.
Green City e.V. initiates various tactical urbanism projects in the city of Munich such as the Wanderbaumallee, Parklets, and Quartierswende Lehel. The Wanderbaumallee moves 15 trees to a neighborhood street for a six-week duration. As a result, several streets were greened through permanent tree plantings. Parklets transform parking into public space in an attempt to generate a rethinking process. However, a green focus is not always achieved, and sometimes only small elements like flowerpots might be inserted, whereby a greening aspect could be pushed further. Finally, the Quartierswende Lehel explores placemaking and green interventions in a larger-scaled project of a central built-up district. Within the next years, citizens along with administrative organizations will plan the enduring development.
In conclusion, all three projects target a long-lasting green transition by exploring different forms of short-term interventions. While the Wanderbaumallee already caused several permanent tree plantings, both other projects are rather new, and their longevity is yet to be expected. Hopefully, all projects generate a rethinking process, where residents realize the benefits of green spaces in their neighborhood and claim for a permanent green transformation.
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[1] Own translation („Frische Luft, mehr Grün, weniger Lärm und Schadstoffe – unser München der Zukunft, ein München für Menschen.“ (Green City e.V., 2022a))
The heat of the day with its absence of shade appeared to interest a number of contributors and this is picked up further in Sue Woodward’s “standard bearer (dawn at eselfontein)”. The poem follows man and dog, walking from one farm to the next in the morning sun, as the shade spins around the axis of the man’s vertical form. He is a flagpole, casting a giant shadow over his dog, which (ignoring for a moment the immediate relief it must provide to his dog) haunts the page with anthropocentric significance: what shadow do we, as humans, cast over the natural world through our activities? Like the blistering sun the farmer faces, Heather Wishik’s diptych faces the topic of shade equity head on. In “Two Neighborhoods – 1960s Pittsburgh”, Wishik presents two urban portraits: one with shaded affluence juxtaposed against that of the workers’ treeless sidewalks that “burned children’s bare feet”.
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