One problem is
that ecology and
conservation science
still tend to frame
cities as the enemies
from which nature
needs to be protected.
Jon Christensen is executive director of the Bill Lane Center for
the American West at Stanford
University. Robert McDonald is a
senior scientist at the Nature Conservancy. Carrie Denning is an
urban-planning and transportation consultant in Washington.
B10 THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Roosevelt’s creation of a Commission on
Country Life amid profound cultural
angst about the fate of rural America.
fields together in unified, focused, and
pragmatic programs that integrate the latest advances in ecology and conservation
science with other disciplines concerned
with the urban. Unfortunately, that integration is taking place all too rarely in
isolated university programs, courses, and
design studios, although there are a few
promising exceptions.
THERE ARE two big problems here. The first is with architecture and urban planning, fields that are fractured by internecine battles
that pit environmentally minded urbanists against one another for control
of intellectual territory in academe and
in design ateliers. The debates between
“new urbanists” and “landscape urbanists” have been among the fiercest in
the field. Meanwhile, in most academic
departments as well as in practice, ecology is too often treated as a trendy design
element or embellishment rather than a
fundamental discipline, if it is considered
at all. And some very influential urbanists, like Glaeser, dismiss many ecological
concerns out of hand as impediments to
efficient economies of scale in cities, believing that the efficiency of cities is sufficient on its own to solve our ecological
problems.
The other problem is that ecology and
conservation science still tend to frame
cities as the enemies from which nature
needs to be protected, despite several
high-profile longitudinal studies of cities as ecosystems. These studies have
made good progress in mapping out
the metabolism of energy and resource
flows in the hybrid human and natural
systems of cities. But strange as it may
seem, by and large urban ecology is still
more marginalized in conservation science than it is in urban planning. That is
changing, however, under pressure from
the accumulating evidence that cities will
be the creative forces shaping the global
environment for better or worse in the
foreseeable future.
The sharp rise in attention to “
ecosystem services” and “natural capital”—
concepts which attempt to define and
quantify nature’s value for human well-being—is one measure of this change.
These terms have meaning only in relation to people, and in an era when most
people live in cities, nature that provides
goods and services such as clean water
for city dwellers will be increasingly
valuable.
The world’s largest conservation or-
ganization, the Nature Conservancy, is
deep in debate about how to refigure its
global strategies in light of these trends,
and its own aging, wealthy, white Ameri-
can base of support. This tweedy fly-fish-
ing and bird-watching demographic bears
less and less resemblance to diverse ur-
banites in the United States, not to men-
tion elsewhere in the world. “Conserva-
tion is facing a crisis of irrelevance—it is
an enterprise that is not urgent to most
people,” the conservancy’s chief scien-
tist, Peter Kareiva, recently warned its
members. “If conservation is to build the
support it needs, it must energize young
urban dwellers, who now make up most
of the world. The best way to get city
people to care about conservation is to
do conservation where they live, so that
nature is seen as relevant and connected
to modern life.”
Last year Kareiva invited us to con-
tribute to this debate by writing a series
of essays for the conservancy’s in-house
journal, Science Chronicles. We argued that
the Nature Conservancy needs to turn it-
self inside out quickly to engage the chal-
lenges at hand. Rather than continuing to
follow a fairly successful strategy focused
on big, relatively wild landscapes, we ad-
vocated a drastic shift to a city-centered,
outward-looking conservation strategy
that starts in the urban core and moves
out to the wilderness, rather than looking
in from wild nature and seeing the city as
a threat. Why?
