WHEN TRAVELING, I walk to restore myself. Even in the loudest, most congested cities I usually find remnants of the natural world hiding in plain sight. I take photographs with my mobile-phone camera of moving water and light and sky, and critters—a groundhog shimmying across the greens of a university campus in upstate New York, a tangle of trout in a Connecticut stream, a fox slipping through downtown Little Rock —and as I stand there, I send these photographs to my wife. The camera gives me the excuse to stop, look, and listen.
One November afternoon in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in search of lunch, I walked out the front door of a Holiday Inn and ambled north along a commercial strip.
There were no sidewalks, so I kept to a grass berm, walking through parking lots, across gravel, to a street with no pedestrian crosswalk or pedestrian light. The drivers were mad with desire, the traffic an endless knot. I waited for a long time at a stoplight, then made my dive across the road. I trudged past Hooters (packed) and a Dream Girls strip joint (not so packed), to another intersection. I crossed the pavement of a gas station, then went down a grass slope to an Applebee’s. I ate while reading the news on my phone, surrounded by flat screens. Sports announcers were drowned out by the recorded song of the generic male bodice-ripping rocker. I paid up. Outside, I noticed a side street and a hint of woods, so I headed in that direction. I still heard the heavy traffic beyond the trees, and an occasional car went by, but this piece of the natural world slowly found me.
I looked up through bare branches at the gray cirrus, and watched a red-tailed hawk circle and swoop. I recalled something I had recently learned: Filmmakers will often dub the prosaic red tail’s haunting cry over the image of the more exotic bald eagle, because the nation’s symbol sometimes sounds like a dog’s squeak toy. I wondered what the hawk sees, and I already knew the answer: anything it wants to see. Above the trees, above the hawk, leaves were falling from the sky. Maybe they were sent aloft this afternoon by the same upwell that supported the hawk, or perhaps they were captured by a whirlwind weeks ago, and only now are coming back to the earth.
I continued walking. I came to a chain across a path buried in leaves. A No Trespassing sign hung there. Stepping over the chain, I followed the path deep into the woods. A few minutes later, I came to a concrete bridge over a slow-running creek, where I stood and peered into the water. Leaves rolled along the brown mud. As I watched the current, I recalled using Google Earth to locate the creek of my boyhood, and finding it, or what was left of it, as I looked down from a virtual sky.
Now something heavy and frantic burst through the tangle of vines. A fleeting brown flank. The thud of hooves. Then silence. I held my breath, looking for the deer—it was there but I couldn’t see it, like the mouse in Goodnight Moon. A sound like rain came from the nearly bare limbs above and I looked up to see leaves still clinging to the high branches, or shaking as they let go. The wind rose, the clattering grew, the sound and smell of water and earth and sky and deer and me and the whole world beyond Hooters spiraled upward into the gray-blue sky.
Opportunities to find the natural world are all around us, even in the densest cities. But, unless we act quickly to conserve and restore these places, and create new ones, then nearby nature will become a quaint artifact of another time. The alternative is that nearby nature can become a central organizing principle of modern life. Earlier, we explored the importance of the role of the bioregion in our personal and regional identities, the importance of reinhabiting the places in which we live. We also looked at our homes and gardens, and how they can be re-natured. The challenge we turn to now is the larger built environment, our neighborhoods, suburbs, and countryside. Whether we’re individuals, city planners, architects, wildlife specialists, or conservationists, we can all help reshape that environment. And some of us can make a living doing it.
Not long ago, I spent a pleasant afternoon with students at Cornell University who were studying for careers in botanical gardens. I accompanied several of them and their instructors on a walk through the adjacent Cornell Plantations, the university’s home for an arboretum and 4,300 acres of natural areas, including bogs, gorges, glens, and woodlands. As we sat in an open-air shelter for lunch, we discussed the Garden Cities movement of the early twentieth century, which was infused with the idea that nature experience was connected to human health, and we talked about how that connection has been all but scrubbed from public consciousness and urban planning.
The education of these students was focused on creating botanical gardens to enhance city life. I asked them if they had ever considered careers that could lead to turning entire cities into botanical landscapes. They were intrigued by the question, and no, they had not considered that career path—yet.
Now comes a natural urban renewal movement. For half a century, governments have attempted to revive decaying inner cities, with mixed results. What was once called “urban renewal” often made life worse, as planners razed blighted neighborhoods and replaced architecture of character with massive projects that, through their poor design, undermined a sense of community. But in the twenty-first century, the most vibrant cities will be those that integrate the population into an urban environment enriched by both natural and re-natured habitat. Even for cities ravaged by the economy, perhaps especially there, the potential for greatness presents itself. With the natural world at the center of an emerging design philosophy, cities could once again be seen as gardens. In fact, they could become gardens.
In urban neighborhoods, thousands of redundant shopping centers could be replaced by mixed-use ecovillages, with both higher residential density and more habitat for nature. Fanciful thinking? Not if some of the most advanced community and architectural design techniques prove replicable. Enlightened public policy will offer special incentives to developers who build ecovillages in the inner neighborhoods and in those outer suburbs that are in need of renovation. Whenever possible, these green urban villages should include parks with native vegetation and be connected by wildlife corridors that allow animals, including people, to travel through neighborhoods.
Timothy Beatley, in his book Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities and his film The Nature of Cities, points to several ecovillages and urban plans that are transforming parts of older European urban areas.1 In Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, Sweden, for example, a densely built community is connected to a grove of ancient oaks. A car-limited housing project in Amsterdam was planned to allow space for residents to plant gardens in the common area, and another neighborhood features a “free range” habitat for children. In Malmö, Sweden, the Western Harbor community features green roofs and rainwater retention in courtyard ponds and channels to support plants and wildlife within an urban setting. With solar collectors, wind turbines, and other measures, the community now draws all of its energy from locally produced renewable sources.
In the United States, a handful of dense urban neighborhoods have been resurrected as ecovillages, including Cleveland EcoVillage, two miles west of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, which has twenty-four energy-efficient town houses, cottages, and homes. The revitalization of this urban district came about through a partnership of nonprofits, the regional transit authority, local residents, and private developers. The EcoVillage organic garden, on what had been unmaintained vacant lots, offers abundant produce from raised beds. And the community includes a park on a former gas station site, now planted with drought-resistant species.2 Not far from downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, Enright Ridge Urban Ecovillage includes a sixteen-acre nature preserve, a community greenhouse, residential and community gardens, and a two-mile trail through a park called Hundred-Acre Wood. Residents boast of having nearby wildlife, chickens in the backyard, friendly neighbors, and services within walking distance.3
Inevitably, cities will grow up. Literally. Residential towers and increased urban density are a given for those urban regions predicted to expand rapidly. Architect Prakash M. Apte, a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Architects and the Institute of Town Planners, sees this brand of high-rise development as dehumanizing, a tearing of the cultural fabric. “Case studies all over the world have documented the inappropriateness of high-rise resettlement projects in poor areas,” Apte writes. “The social and economic networks which the poor rely on for subsistence can hardly be sustained in high-rise structures.”4 But what if we built different kinds of skyscrapers: residential high-rises and towering office buildings as vertical farms? In 1999, Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, began to promote the concept of dedicated, high-rise hydroponic farms, which draw energy from the sun, wind, and wastewater. He estimates a thirty-story tower could feed fifty thousand people. In 2007, a lower-rise design for a vertical farm for Seattle won a green building contest. Theoretically, this design would supply about a third of the food needed for four hundred residents of the building.5
More extravagant plans call for spearlike skyscrapers, wrapped in spiraling agridecks that vine top to bottom, capturing rain or piped-in water and recycling it down the spiral to irrigate crops and flowers. Office workers or residents would see the outside world through rich gardens, or be able to walk outside to tend the plants, or simply to enjoy them. In New York, a plan for a 202-apartment complex called Via Verde, or the Green Way, includes an eighteen-story tower, a midrise building with duplex apartments, and town houses. Sixty-three units would be co-op apartments, and expensive; the rest would be lower-cost rentals. Starting at ground level, the complex’s garden would spiral upward to a series of roof gardens and a sky terrace.
Even without vertical farms, urban agriculture is looking up. Every available roof and wall could provide natural habitat for humans and other critters. Aztec cities had their lush rooftops; so can we. Green roofs not only reduce heating and cooling costs and last longer than the typical roof; they can also absorb rainwater, provide habitat for wildlife, and help lower urban air temperatures. Green roofs and living walls can produce food and be used to purify polluted water. Obviously, they also add beauty.
In coming years, vast sections of existing urban neighborhoods will require renewal. Consider Detroit. In recent decades, that city was devastated by factory shutdowns, suburban growth, and disinvestment. “Just about a third of Detroit, some forty square miles, evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie —an urban void nearly the size of San Francisco,” Rebecca Solnit reports in Harper’s Magazine. She describes wandering through one of the neighborhoods, “or rather a former neighborhood,” where “approximately one tattered charred house still stood per block.” Much of this area is usually depicted as a postapocalyptic urban wasteland, but something remarkable has occurred in Detroit, and it goes beyond, and deeper than, traditional, energy-efficient green design.
In 1989, a nonprofit organization, The Greening of Detroit, formed with a goal of combating the loss of a half-million city trees to Dutch elm disease.6 The group also uses reclaimed vacant lots as growing grounds for trees that will eventually be replanted in the community. Their projects now include neighborhood vegetation restoration, park plantings, and the promotion of small-scale vegetable gardens. The organization reports on its Web site: “For each neighborhood nursery, we clean the lot, then build berms, spread mulch and plant trees. We install landscape plants, fencing and signage to improve the appearance of the lot and create a signature look, helping to reduce vandalism. The nurseries are initially planted with small tree stock that is allowed to grow for 3-5 years while it is cared for by the community and The Greening’s Green Corps.” The nonprofit has hired more than five hundred Detroit youths since 1998 to help maintain plantings and learn about urban ecology. This Green Corps program has been expanded, opening its doors to adults who want work experience and on-the-job training.
One example of the group’s effectiveness is Romanowski Park, a twenty-six-acre urban park that includes a farm, playground, teaching pavilion, walking trail, sugar maple grove, and, yes, athletic fields for the soccer kids. During the growing season, the organization teams with neighborhood schools to teach students about gardening and nutrition. There’s more: “The Greening of Detroit has inspired its volunteers and community partners to transform miles of public and private open space—including some of Detroit’s 60,000 vacant lots —into usable, productive resources,” the organization reports. “We’ve helped our planting partners to create hundreds of vegetable gardens and numerous perennial gardens and neighborhood tree nurseries throughout the city. These production greenspaces produce hundreds of trees and tons of produce for use in Detroit’s neighborhoods each year.”
None of this makes up for the economic devastation of Detroit. But Solnit was cheered after exploring what used to be the dense urban core and finding truck farms, where everyday people tilled the soil in abandoned lots to produce food for the table. She writes: “The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It’s going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place.”7
Many urban and suburban dwellers are independently transforming their own homes and neighborhoods, much the way Karen Harwell enhanced her property, creating Dana Meadows Garden. Even beekeepers in Manhattan recently stepped out of the shadows and are now allowed to tend their hives legally, thanks to a long-sought health department ruling. In Gresham, Oregon, the city council in 2010 reversed an ordinance that excluded chickens from the city. Katy Skinner had raised chickens in Portland, and she started the Web site TheCityChicken.com, before relocating to Yacolt, Washington. “I like chickens because they are the easiest of pets next to a goldfish; there aren’t many downsides to them,” she says. Some families are finding that they prefer chickens to dogs or cats as pets, partly because they can be less work. And (until breeders correct this oversight) dogs and cats don’t lay eggs. In Backyard Poultry magazine (that’s right, there’s a magazine devoted to this) Frank Hyman reports his experience successfully working to change city policy toward urban chickens in Durham, North Carolina: “In 30 years as a political activist I’ve won four races as a campaign manager, served on a city council, helped start political organizations, been president of a neighborhood association and worked on issues like affordable housing, living wage and recycling. But I never once imagined I would be working to change the laws to allow people to have backyard chickens.” Hyman’s wife, Chris, “thinks of hens as ‘pets with benefits.’”8
The dream of an edible city sounds a lot like the marginalized community gardens movement of decades past—until you consider the booming organic food industry. Then add another ingredient: the Slow Food movement. This movement was launched in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, an Italian who took one look at a new McDonald’s restaurant being built at St. Peter’s Square in Rome and decided the way to fight fast food was with better taste. He created the first Slow Food campaign, in northern Italy, to protect “the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and life.” Since then, Slow Food conviviums (from the Latin word for feast or entertainment) have sprouted everywhere.
The potential for the growth of urban agriculture is even greater than it might seem. A report by Rutgers University and members of the Community Food Security Coalition’s North American Initiative on Urban Agriculture charts the national trend: across the country, “significant amounts of food” are cultivated by entrepreneurial producers, community gardeners, backyard gardeners, food banks in vacant lots, parks, greenhouses, rooftops, balconies, windowsills, ponds, rivers, and estuaries. A third of the two million farms in the United States alone are already located within metropolitan areas and produce 35 percent of U.S. vegetables, fruit, livestock, poultry, and fish (little surprise given urban sprawl). “The potential to expand urban production is enormous,” according to the report. Add to this the growing concern about food security: “Times of war and conflict render tenuous our dependence on distant food sources, especially in this post-9/11 world.” Although fear is a motivator, pleasure’s more the point —the pleasure of a connected community.
After a conference of urban arborists held in Berkeley, I was walking down a street with Nancy Hughes, a leader in urban forestry. She pointed to a tree hemmed in by a tight container. “Once you start noticing shade patterns, you’re never the same.” Hughes believes we need aggressive municipal greenscaping policies to help clean the air, reduce surface heat, and please the senses. Trees absorb atmospheric carbon. Urban forests also retain and filter water. Creating an effective urban forest requires a good deal more knowledge and a larger investment than some policymakers might think.
Here’s one example of the complexity: when planting trees to control air pollution, not just any tree will do, since some spread a little pollution of their own. Take your California sycamore or liquidambar. These trees are the arboreal equivalent to that ‘66 Imperial my Uncle Horton used to drive. Well, maybe not that bad, but they do emit chemical compounds that play a role in tropospheric ozone formation and aerosol production, according to research done at the Washington State University Laboratory for Atmospheric Research. Meanwhile, the avocado, peach, ash, sawleaf zelkova, and eastern redbud trees are low-ozone emitters. They’re fine air-purifiers, the good citizens of treedom.
Sacramento’s regional effort has led the way in California. The Sacramento Tree Foundation educates the public about the benefits of tree planting, pointing to a 270 percent return on investment in the urban forest. In 2005, the foundation launched its regional Greenprint initiative that hoped to double the region’s urban tree canopy by planting five million new trees in twenty-two cities and four counties by 2025. Meeting that goal would mean a welcome three-degree drop in the city of Sacramento’s average temperature during summer months and an estimated $7 billion in long-term savings on energy, air-pollution clean-up, and stormwater management. Another benefit is health. Sacramento has the second-highest skin cancer rate in California. The region has lost countless native oaks to housing developments, even though its residents need the shade.
Toronto also hopes to double its tree canopy, but officials there decided that achieving that goal would be impossible without more public involvement. Andy Kenney, a professor of urban forestry at the University of Toronto, started a campaign called Neighbourwoods that trains homeowners to identify, plant, and care for trees in their neighborhoods and on their own properties. Meanwhile, some cities are developing new approaches to parkland, lengthening or creating natural networks that connect parks with trails and neighborhoods. Examples include the BeltLine, Atlanta’s planned streetcar or light-rail line circling the downtown core. The park will use existing rail-track easements to link green space with a walking and biking trail to forty new and existing parks. In Scottsdale, Arizona, Indian Bend Wash is a string of interconnected desert and grassy parks and recreation trails, known collectively as the Greenbelt. In Copenhagen, where one-third of the residents commute to work by bike, the city’s green cycle routes initiative, which connects close-in suburbs with more urban neighborhoods, provides some seventy miles of paths through parks, and along the water, with bridges over roadways that have heavy car traffic. These green networks, combined with the increasing number of wildlife corridors being created in cities, are important components in an emerging standard, the modern urban greenprint.
Their influence can seep into surrounding neighborhoods. Along with other community leaders, Mike Stepner, principal of the Stepner Design Group and a professor at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in San Diego, argues that the city’s natural canyons (in aerial photographs, the complex pattern of canyons looks like the region’s lungs and bronchi) offer a unique opportunity to use restorative design as a central organizing principle for the region’s future. Stepner believes in bringing the canyons to the neighborhoods, not just bringing the neighbors to the canyons. Urban planners and canyon protectors could extend the look and feel of the canyons by adding native canyon plants and other natural elements to surrounding neighborhoods, as well as along boulevards, in parks, plazas, and other found spaces. Every one of these canyons within walking distance of a public school is a potential outdoor classroom.
When I met Harlem’s Classie Parker, she practically raced across the community garden she oversees in New York City. She handed me a cluster of leaves from an herb she and her neighbors grow on this quarter-acre wedge between brownstones on West 121st Street in Harlem. “Don’t you just feel happy in this place?” she asked, beaming. Her fellow gardeners were in the midst of a beauty and productivity makeover of their garden, which has been here for well over a decade. They grow food for more than five hundred families on this little piece of land. She’s not an environmentalist, she told me. She’s a farmer.
Every day her father, going on ninety, sits on a bench in the garden, gnarled hands on his cane, the perfect image of a peaceful urban farmer.
“Don’t you feel like my dad is your dad?” she asked me.
That sentence has stayed with me since.
I was introduced to Classie by representatives of the Trust for Public Land (TPL), through their work to protect pieces of urban nature across the nation. Later, they took me to a public elementary schoolyard, where students had transformed bare asphalt into their own school garden. The teacher who oversees the garden told me that his students had begun to go beyond their garden, to study the street trees, comparing them with trees in other neighborhoods on the island of Manhattan. He also told me how some of his students had never seen the Harlem River, which flowed just beyond the buildings that front the river. I recall standing in that remarkable green space, still in Classie Parker’s spell of hope and healing and the sheer pleasure of life itself. I thought about the threatened, fragmented chaparral canyons in my own city, and how some of us hope to protect them by giving them a collective identity and name: the San Diego Regional Urban Canyonlands Park. Hurt one and you’ve hurt them all.
In New York City, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of green places, even green roofs, that could be stitched together politically and protected. What would such a network be called? There will never be another Central Park, but New Yorkers could make urban history by creating a park comprised of thousands of small play areas landscaped with native plants, a galaxy of urban emeralds on the ground and on the roofs. Perhaps call it by one name: New York City’s De-Central Park.
Play spaces—where adults as well as children spend time —could certainly be part of De-Central Park. Even in a city already dotted with parks, New York City’s children don’t have that many chances to interact with nature. To counteract this problem, a number of planners and educators are creating play areas where children and adults can roll down green slopes and climb rocks sheltered by trees. Surprisingly, green play areas can be designed to survive thousands of feet. During the last two decades, natural-play-area designers have become skilled at creating living landscapes that use specialized soil and plants, as well as new irrigation technologies; they design slopes to resist erosion; they cover walls with hanging gardens. To reflect sunlight and dispel gloom, designers place mirrors on nearby light-blocking buildings. Some of these techniques are now incorporated in Teardrop Park in Battery Park City, and are being planned for the larger Brooklyn Bridge Park. Plenty of opportunities are available to transform decaying asphalt playgrounds or vacant lots into natural play areas.
What better city than New York to go beyond the typical roof garden and create energy-efficient, habitat-providing green roofs, adapted for use as natural play areas? Says Yale’s Stephen Kellert, “There’s no reason why green roofs can’t be experientially more positive and aesthetically rich environments, especially given that rooftops represent the largest available habitat in most metropolitan areas for the photosynthetic effects of sunlight. The possibility of doing something with that habitat is exciting.”9
We also need to be more creative about what space is appropriate for nature experience, particularly because people have very different views about how existing open space and parkland should be used. In Australia, Peter Ker, environmental reporter for The Age, one of the country’s national newspapers, describes how, in Melbourne, “meddling with parks has always been easier said than done.” Plans to establish a community garden within one park sparked local anger. “One group of locals wanted the space to grow plants, while others saw the move as a reduction of existing park space for the benefit of few.” The passion evoked by the debate caught local officials by surprise. With that controversy in mind, Deakin University associate professor Mardie Townsend suggested to Ker the “scouring (of) the urban environment for places to establish new parks and community gardens,” including “taking advantage of laneways, disused blocks of land and river frontages that are unsuitable for housing developments.” In the long term, she added, private companies could turn some of their land into public recreation spaces. “Think of a place like Chadstone [shopping center], where they have miles of car-parking and have two or three layers. Why not make the top one a [nature] park, which keeps everything cool under that roof and provides a wonderful open space for people? People are far more likely to go to Chadstone if there’s a nice park there, where they can sit and have their lunch before going in to shop, so it becomes an economic attractor to business.”10
Neighborhoods can be more creative, too. In recent years, the land-trust movement has been a roaring success, especially when compared to the large national environmental organizations, which are facing barriers to increasing funding and membership. But, of course, large land-trust organizations can’t do it all. What if individuals and neighborhood groups were to step forward to protect the small green places closest to home, and then link them to an even larger green network? Remember the special place in nature that you had as a child —that wooded lot at the end of the cul-de-sac, that ravine behind your housing tract? What if adults had cared just as much about that special place as you did, when you were a child? Here’s an idea whose time may be coming: the creation of neighborhood “nearby-nature trusts.” Land-trust organizations could develop and distribute tool kits, and perhaps offer consulting services, to show neighborhood residents how they can band together to cut through red tape and protect those precious parcels of nearby nature —and these could be symbolically combined into de-central parks.
In Denver, when the Trust for Public Land, working with the Colorado Health Foundation, brought together groups concerned about the disconnect of people from nature, TPL leaders and I brainstormed on the future of land trusts in tough economic times. One of the TPL people suggested that neighborhood leaders might also identify abandoned houses, buy them, raze them, and turn the lots into re-natured parkland or community gardens. “We really do have to think about creating nature, not just preserving it,” he said.
Here’s an illustration of that kind of thinking. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the Catawba Lands Conservancy, a regional land trust, has protected seventy-five hundred acres. Catawba is also the lead agency for the Carolina Thread Trail, a trail network that will eventually weave through a huge area of North Carolina and South Carolina, reach into fifteen counties and serve over two million people. On its Web site, the Catawba organization describes the Thread Trail this way: “Simply put, it will link people and places. It will link cities, towns, and attractions. More than a hiking trail, more than a bike path, the Carolina Thread Trail will preserve our natural areas and will be a place for exploration of nature, culture, science, and history, for family adventures and celebrations of friendship.”11 If the full concept survives the legal and political challenges that are inevitable any time people pursue a vision this large, the Thread Trail will be one example of how regions can address a growing hunger for the health and well-being that nature provides human beings. To be sure, the availability of nearby nature is or should be seen as an integral element of our future health care system, for reasons related to both physical and mental health.
The central organizing principle of nearby-nature trusts would be do it yourself, do it now, with a little help and information from friends who know about land trusts.
What might these little parcels be called? Here’s my suggestion: button parks. Pocket park is the term for small parks created by governments or developers; button parks —well, people can sew those on themselves. The term makes particular sense in the Carolinas. The reason that the Carolina Thread Trail is called a thread trail is not only because of the image that word evokes, but also because of the Carolinas’ long dependence on the textile industries. In past decades, stitching shirts has given way to high-tech industries, but the regional sense of this history remains. While visiting with the good folks of Catawba, it occurred to me that the Carolina Thread Trail would be strengthened over time, politically and socially, if the people who live adjacent to the trail were to become more directly involved not only in the use of the trail but also in the embrace of button parks. These spaces wouldn’t need to be physically connected to the trail, but would serve as small extensions of the trail throughout the region.
There would be objections, no doubt, some based on the fear of liability and possible loss of privacy. But precedents do exist around the country. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, Jason Kissel, the executive director of ACRES Land Trust, suggests an intriguing possibility. ACRES has protected natural habitats throughout northeast Indiana, southern Michigan, and northwest Ohio. Kissel thought that button parks could be created by neighborhood associations, and that, at least in Indiana, public use of private land left in its natural state poses less danger of future litigation than land that has been “improved.”
By going through the process of creating button parks, people would learn about the growing importance of the land-trust movement and support it.
Creating livable cities isn’t only about green infrastructure; it’s also about how to consciously increase the urban wildlife population, and then how to get along with the new neighbors. In Portland, Oregon, wildscaper Mike Houck helps lead the growing national movement to rewild cities, and he describes the challenges that presents.
In Portland, developers and road builders chipped away for decades at urban wildness habitat. At the same time, invasive species such as Himalayan blackberry and English ivy overtook much of the publicly owned open space. Between 1990 and 2000, the city’s population increased by 20.7 percent,12 but consumption of open land went up only 4 percent.13 That was the reverse of the trend in most U.S. metropolitan regions. The threats, including a weakening of the state’s pioneering urban boundary limits, continue. Nonetheless, some elected officials, public agencies, and voters have quietly accepted a new paradigm of nature in the city, a shift in perception, from urban nature blindness to “wilder in the mind’s eye,” as Houck puts it. Portland officials are preserving more habitat within the urban boundaries and working to restore native vegetation. As a result, Houck happily reports a return of wildlife to the city. “The most productive peregrine falcon nest in Oregon is on the Fremont Bridge in Portland,” he says. Fifteen years ago, there were no bald eagles in Portland. Now they, too, nest in the middle of the city. “While it’s true the rebound of eagles and osprey is attributable to the ban on DDT, if the habitat were not in Portland they would not be here.”
Other cities are following Portland’s lead. Through the Intertwine Alliance, Portland formed an “alliance of alliances” with Chicago Wilderness, Houston Wilderness, the Lake Erie Allegheny Partnership for Biodiversity, and Amigos de los Rios in Los Angeles to lobby at the national level for funding for large regional biodiversity conservation that is focused on the urban environment.14 Similar efforts exist in the Seattle region with the Cascade Land Conservancy, and with the East Bay Regional Park District in Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the Bay Area in California. Austin, Texas, has protected an urban bat colony, and celebrates it as a source of economic development. Every evening, crowds gather to watch the bats swarm up from their home beneath a major city bridge; the living funnels are visible for miles. These bats not only help control the mosquito population, but also generate tourism dollars. The Texas highway department is building bridges with bat-attraction designs.
Other cities report different successes. Though many species remain threatened by pollution, development, and newly introduced invasive species, lake sturgeons are now spawning on an artificial reef in the Detroit River. “Think of this: 35 years ago we had major oil slicks on the Detroit River, elevated phosphorus levels, much more raw sewage, much more contaminants like DDT, PCP and mercury,” writes John Hartig (no relation to researcher Terry Hartig), refuge manager of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. And it’s not only fish that are returning to the cities. The beavers are back, too.15 Even New York is becoming wilder. “The 2007 wintertime appearance of a beaver in New York’s Bronx River, the first in two centuries, added to the interest in reconnecting the region’s 16 million residents with nature,” he adds. And most recently, bald eagles, down to one pair in New York State in 1976, have returned in respectable numbers, even in Manhattan.
Rewilding our cities and suburbs does come with risk. Especially in the northeastern United States, deer overpopulation is a real problem for motorists and gardeners. Their dominance is also a threat to balanced biodiversity. Proposed solutions, all of them controversial, range from controlled hunting to deer birth control. Another issue is tick-borne disease, which is related to deer population. In Southern California, Colorado, and other growing regions, encounters between humans and mountain lions or bears have increased as housing developments have crept deeper into the backcountry.
This trend requires clear thinking about risk. Approximately thirty thousand people die every year in auto accidents, but only about 130 die each year because of deer encounters —and most of these deer-related human deaths involve automobiles. In fact, horses kill more people —more than two hundred annually —than deer do. The odds are 50,000 to 1 that you’ll be killed by a large animal; by lightning, 56,000 to 1. Such statistics are small comfort to the relative handful of people who have encountered, say, an aggressive mountain lion, or who have had a child attacked by a coyote or fox —as has happened in recent years in the United States and the UK. But consider the risk from domestic pets. An American has a 1 in 50 chance of being bitten by a dog each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.16 Some eight hundred thousand Americans annually require medical attention for their injuries, half of them children.17 Page through the nation’s papers, and the headlines horrify. They tell of children killed by packs of pit bull terriers, the elderly mauled by their own guard dogs, joggers brought down by rottweilers. This is not to say that our pets aren’t worth the risk. In fact many breeds are underemployed. If mentally balanced dogs were given an expanded role as protective hiking companions for young people and adults, in those areas where they’re welcome, many people who might not otherwise enjoy outdoor experiences would feel comfortable going for outings in canyons, woods, and other natural areas.
A related issue: if we kept our cats indoors, we’d save the lives of countless songbirds, and we would protect our cats from coyotes, other wild predators, and outdoor hazards.
“Some people want a risk-free world. It’s not going to happen,” says Walter Boyce, wildlife veterinarian and executive director of the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California - Davis. Boyce is not unfamiliar with the personal pain that can occur during a close encounter with a wild animal. Three years ago, a deer attacked him. “We used to keep a captive deer herd here at the center,” he told me recently. “From twenty or thirty feet away, a buck charged me. It thrashed me with its big rack for thirty to forty-five seconds.” The deer damaged his thumb, possibly permanently, and pushed one antler deep into his leg. What invited the attack? Boyce made the mistake of crouching on one knee when the buck was in rut; such a submissive posture caused the buck to demonstrate dominance, “to prove he was the baddest boy on the block.” While the public can learn general rules about living in close proximity to wild animals, the limitations of that approach are illustrated by the fact that Boyce, an expert in animal behavior, could unintentionally invite a deer attack.
Wild animals are not, by definition, entirely predictable, which for human beings is both cause for caution and joy. Still, Boyce argues that public education is one way to reduce risk. We can also learn to view that risk in the context that media headlines seldom offer: the enrichment of our everyday lives.
Here are some basics for living with urban wildlife: Relocating wild animals generally doesn’t work; others move back into the territory. Feed your pets indoors, and do not feed wild animals. Try to get your neighbors to agree on this policy. Plant for wildlife: by planting native vegetation and leaving natural shelters intact, unwanted interactions with wild animals can be avoided and their company enjoyed. “One of the animals that has moved back into the Portland urban area is the beaver,” says Houck. “They’re wonderful to have around. On the other hand, they can be a pain in the butt if they dam up the wrong culvert. So we use a device called the ‘beaver deceiver,’ which allows the beaver to travel through a culvert, but prevents them from damming it.” As for ticks, Thomas N. Mather, professor and director for the University of Rhode Island Center for Vector-Borne Disease, recommends increasing the use of clothing repellents. He says that this single strategy, if used more regularly, could reduce tick bites and infection by five times or more. And, of course, adults and kids should do a physical check after an outing in tick country: around the head, neck, waistband, groin, under the tops of socks, and so on. Parents should seek advice from their pediatrician or from Web sites that specifically address nature risks.18
Public education will help, but wisely designed development patterns also buffer human-wild animal contacts in our cities. This is one reason Michael Soule, a key promoter of the field of conservation biology and former chairman of environmental studies at UC–Santa Cruz, has argued for a lengthy wildlife corridor system in Southern California that, he says, should go from the Mexican border to the Transverse Range, from the Mojave Desert to the Santa Barbara coast. Soule writes, “Otherwise, eventually, I’m afraid, we’ll lose the mountain lions in Southern California and that part of our mystery, of our wildness.” And that loss would present its own psychological and spiritual risks to human beings.
The Nature Principle is not anti-urban. In fact, it’s pro-city —it’s about growing the seeds of nature and authenticity that have already been planted and planting new ones. This morning I am in San Francisco, a unique domain within the Extranet. Stepping out of the Majestic Hotel, which was built in 1902 and has survived earthquakes and fire, I can see fog rappelling down the sides of the newer buildings and creeping along Sutter Street. I head out on an early morning walk toward the Fillmore District and Nihonmachi, also known as Japantown, depleted first by forced internment in the 1940 s and then by redevelopment in the 1950 s that widened Geary Boulevard and destroyed dozens of Victorian buildings. This is a place rich in human and natural history. As the San Francisco fog slips away to where fog lives in its off-hours, I think about my son Jason, now twenty-eight. He has lived in London, New York City, and Los Angeles—though recently he has been thinking about moving to Taos or Santa Fe. An urban guy, he has worked tirelessly for environmental causes, and he is sensitized to the physical world and what exists behind its surfaces and facades. He learned to surf the Extranet on slopes of California chaparral, so that now, even in a city, he finds wonder beneath the surfaces. I believe, and he agrees, that spending those many hours in the canyons of San Diego enabled him to become more observant of his surroundings and gave him the ability to look deeper into the organic terrain, even if mostly man-made. When he’s my age, or older, he’ll still have that ability, and the reassurance of the natural world when he needs it, especially if our cities become richer in nature.
A cautionary note about a risk that sometimes follows progress. In the past, as urban residents improved their lot, people with higher incomes moved in, and gentrification often pushed the pioneers out. The same thing could happen as urban gardeners green their neighborhoods. Greenification could push lower-income people further toward the fringes. Nearby nature could become a perk for the privileged. Some of the most impressive efforts to re-nature cities are, as we’ve seen, in lower-income neighborhoods. Public policies must assure that these efforts, including the ad hoc work by green guerillas—who have even torn up old asphalt to plant community gardens—aren’t displaced by their own success. These policies must also require that new urban developments aren’t just green fiefdoms for the wealthy. To an extent, this is occurring. For example, at this writing, Cincinnati’s Enright Ridge Urban Ecovillage does include affordable housing. One can buy a two-story, two-bedroom home with a full basement and large deck overlooking protected woods for sixty thousand dollars. That’s a start, but it’s not enough.
Again, the fiercest protectors of equity are not likely to be urban officials, but the people who live in and help create re-natured neighborhoods. Natural capacity isn’t only defined by the strengths that a culture brings to the creation of nearby nature. It’s also about a people’s capacity to marshal community organizing tools. Re-naturing the neighborhood is one challenge; protecting it is quite another. To be a sustainable garden, a city must be both biodiverse and economically diverse. The same is true for the new suburb.