Reflections on Urban Ecology after reading the article “Urban Natural Areas” by Mark Griswold Wilson and Emily Roth in Restoring the Pacific Northwest.
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I admit it. I don’t like cities.
I never have. To me, cities were far to filled with people and far too lacking in nature. I feel claustrophobic in an environment where everything I see, everything I touch, everywhere I go is purely a product of human intervention– where nothing grows without a human putting it there.
By contrast, nature is supposed to be the opposite: someplace far away from cities, from people, where plants and animals live out their lives in in some magical ecological harmony. Nature is wilderness, it is wild, it is “pure and fresh/untouched by human flesh,” it is all things non-human.
But this dichotomous idea, which is incredibly pervasive to Western thinking, is neither fair to humans nor nature. Humans, the species homo sapien, are organisms with the same origins as every other on this planet. True, our cities were built with a territorial instinct, pushing out all other species– but this does not mean we are incapable of coexisting with a healthy, functioning ecosystem. In fact, our future may depend on it.
Nature, by the same token, is not a force so easily held down by human efforts. Alligators sun themselves on golf courses and coyotes ride public transit. Plants seed themselves on abandoned stretches of urban railways, creating new ecosystems out of dry gravel and iron rails. We are disinclined to call these incidents “nature,” as they come in the wake of human activity. How arrogant is that?
Wilson and Roth propose another approach: “Many still believe that nature begins ‘out there somewhere,’ rather than in our own backyards, and urban ecosystems are a place to change that perception.” Urban centers do have their merits: residents of Manhattan use a mere 29% the energy of average Americans, and individually occupy a much smaller land area. Denser urban areas are the only way humans can sustain their population without completely pushing out all other species on the planet. But for the good of our species, and others in and around our cities, commitment to an urban ecological system is imperative to our collective future.
Cities still make me uncomfortable (Portland notwithstanding, for this place is really not so urban as it seems at first glance). For years of studying architecture, I have felt like a double agent– designing buildings to limit their impact on the nature I hold so dear, all the while feeling queasy about the whole enterprise. I think urban ecology illuminates a better path: with every design we create, we make space for other species to coexist. I’ve gone from undercover to outright revolutionary– without giving up on our species at all.