Zuz excerpts

Zuz excerpts The 2016 UN-Habitat World Cities Report states that “urban and environmental planning provides opportunities and formal legal mechanisms for biodiversity conservation through design guidelines, building codes, zoning schemes, spatial plans and strategic choices, all coupled with effective enforcement” (UN-Habitat 2016). Through detailed (desktop) analysis we sought to gauge the degree to which these sorts of mechanisms have been leveraged in the sample of the 33 hotspot cities. Our conclusion is that the overwhelming majority of these cities have not adopted long-term planning visions that include biodiversity values or, if they do, then they do not make such planning documents available or refer to the existence of such documents online. A notable subset set of cities (examples include Sydney, Perth, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles do, however, have transparent, readily available, variously integrated planning documents across levels of governance. We also found that cities with well-developed integrated governance at the national, regional, metropolitan/ municipal, and local levels were far more likely to have appropriately scaled planning capacity. While cities that do not operate in relationship with regional planning or governance entities lack the ability to create plans that look beyond current legal municipal boundaries, cities with disempowered local or municipal governments were not able to turn big-picture visions from national, state, or regional plans into local, spatial planning mechanisms or built interventions. The recent push for the creation of metropolitan levels of governance—as proposed in the failed Osaka Metropolis Plan referendum of 2015, which followed on the heels of a similar but successful bid for centralized metropolitan planning in Tokyo (Harding 2015)—might have the potential to create a unified structure for conurbations that would be better able to engage with planning at the level of the entire urban and peri-urban footprint. A survey of the cities’ promotional materials, popular press, and institutional publications also indicates a low degree of cultural association with being “hotspot cities” or hotspot stewards. Typically, we find that a city’s projected identity pertains to the characteristics of its urban core rather than its peripheral landscapes. A few cities–notably Cape Town, Perth, Sao Paulo, and to a lesser degree Los Angeles–have a robust narrative of their unique biodiversity, and their responsibility to preserve it. In the literature pertaining to the sample set of 33 cities, a major obstacle to the development of spatial biodiversity planning is the lack of baseline biodiversity data. Furthermore, this data, where it does exist, tends to focus on wildlife in the city rather than on ecosystem integrity at the periphery. If cities are to properly understand their relationships with biodiversity, there is a significant need to develop and share measurement and monitoring practices that relate to the peri-urban zone and how this zone functions as a filter and conduit for biodiversity both centripetally and centrifugally. Where particular cities have developed specific spatial assessments of biodiversity and long-term plans for biodiversity protection within their environmental departments, they still face significant challenges in finding common ground with other city agencies, especially in terms of allocating funds and resources towards biodiversity protection. Cape Town, arguably the city with the greatest biodiversity and greatest threats to that biodiversity in the world, is a leader in spatial, cross-municipal biodiversity planning. The city has developed a comprehensive, systematic, and spatially explicit biodiversity conservation network called Bionet that preserves critical areas for all remaining representative ecosystems in the city and which is being integrated into city planning policies (ICLEI 2012). Despite this commitment to planning for biodiversity across city departments, a Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) case study report found that conducting a successful and integrated biodiversity and ecosystem services assessment did not correlate with the hoped-for increase in budget allocation for biodiversity conservation planning (ICLEI 2016). Additionally, some cities that adopt biodiversity protection measures with the primary goal of attracting biodiversity tourism have found that without effective management plans and sufficient staffing these measures can erode the very biodiversity they set out to protect. For example, Woolong Nature Reserve, outside of Chengdu, China, which was established to protect giant pandas in 1975, has become more fragmented and less well-suited for panda habitat since its creation due in part to the huge number of tourists who visit the reserve each year (Liu et al. 2001). From Richard Weller, Huang, Kjaersgaard, Drozdz, & Dong. “Hotspot Cities : Identifying Peri-Urban Conflict Zones in the World’s Biodiversity Hotspots.” Penn: Current Research on Sustainable Urban Development.(2017). 5-6.

For centuries, the commonly accepted theory was that the Rapa Nui [the people of Easter Island] had a population of over 10,000 people with a complex, hierarchical and centrally-governed society whole elites could coerce their subjects to carve, build, and transport the statues. Archaeological evidence of a once-ubiquitous forest of giant palm convinced some researchers that the Rapa Nui sacrificed their plentiful Eden to their statue building and moving project, thereby bankrupting the fragile island ecology and initiating their own self-destruction (Hunt and Lipo, 1-19). The story of the Rapa Nui serves as a cautionary tale in the face of a growing swell of ecological crises including anthropogenic climate change, unprecedented rates of species blinking out of existence, and ecosystem collapse due to intensive land use. This parable resonates with many environmentalists today because it mirrors some of our most powerful cultural ideas about man’s relationship to nature. We start with a perfect and fragile nature—a paradise—that is wholly separate from man. When he arrives on the island, in his greed and religious fervor he destroys the nature that previously resided there. Although landscape ecologist Erle Ellis agrees that humans have irreversibly reshaped most of the terrestrial biosphere, he challenges the idea that far reaching human ecosystem disturbances are a recent phenomenon. Ellis’s work focuses on the ways in which humans have profoundly manipulated their ecosystems since prehistory through hunting, foraging, fire management, and especially agriculture (Ellis, 168). His research shows that “as early as 3,000 years ago, nearly half of the terrestrial biosphere, including about 60% of all of Earth’s Tropical and Temperate Woodlands, were most likely in use by shifting cultivators” (Ellis, 169). He argues that since we can only guess at the pre-human state of vast parts of the Middle East, India, China, Europe, and the Americas through imprecise paleoecological methods, “the “native state” of these ecosystems is therefore best described as anthropogenic (169). Recent advances in evolutionary biology suggest that ancient human ecosystem impacts might have even more pervasive influence on contemporary ecosystem makeup. James Estes studies the effects of trophic cascades—the significant, rippling effects that changes in the abundance of either top predators or primary producers have on ecosystems. He estimates that “human actions over time may have altered the natural evolution of ecosystems on more than 90 percent of the globe. The cascading impacts of those losses over the millennia were probably gradual and essentially invisible, and today are mostly unknown and possibly unknowable” (qtd. in MacKinnon, 108). Ellis and Estes establish that these profound environmental impacts are part of the fabric of the existence of our species. Ellis and Ramankutty have coined the term “anthrome”—or anthropogenic biome—to better describe the ecosystem changes wrought by human land use patterns (Ellis, 170). Rather than responding to the idea that humans have completely and irreversibly shaped most of the terrestrial biosphere—and that what remains unaffected will imminently be affected by climate change—with despair, Ellis sees it as a call to action: “the future of all species, including our own, now depends on better understanding and managing the human ecology of our anthropogenic biosphere” (Ellis, 180). Our cumulative actions will invariably shape our terrestrial biosphere. It is our responsibility to do so with as much intentionality and forethought as possible. Ellis’s idea of the anthrome weaves human influence into the fabric of the global ecology, giving us a framework from which to think constructively not only about how we have already shaped the global ecology, but also how we want to do so in the future. Given that to date our cultural patterns have eroded biodiversity, ecosystem health, and natural resources rather than preserving them, we need to proactively develop new cultural patterns that instead promote biodiversity, restore ecosystem health, and replenish natural resources. According to Michael Soule, the founder of the field of conservation biology and the Wildlands Network, culture making is a cyclical process, a positive feedback system because “when we choose the kind of nature we will live with, we are also choosing the kind of human beings we will be. We shape the world, and it shapes us in return. We are the creator and the created, the maker and the made.” (MacKinnon, 141). By making a cultural decision to embrace, protect, and engender an ecologically robust, biodiverse world, we start to build a new identity for ourselves as a constructive force in nature. If we are going to to be able to act with conviction in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, we will have to believe that we are capable of being a constructive ecological force. We can no longer hold the Rapa Nui up as a symbol of our own inherent tendency to destroy nature. Although we do not know whether the original Polynesians intentionally brought rats to Rapa Nui, we know that they could not have anticipated the devastating impact they would have on the palm forests. So many of our ecological crises are the product of unintended consequences, but now we must focus on dealing with those consequences and preventing further damage rather than assuming that every action we take will have negative impacts on our planetary ecology. The collaborative Rapa Nui statue building project, which anthropologists argue contributed to peaceful relations between groups distributed across the island, reminds us that culture can have unifying effects, and gives us hope that efforts towards mitigating global ecological crises can do the same. Excerpted from Zuzanna Drozdz. “Condemned to Art: Culture-Making in Response to Ecological Crisis.” Unpublished essay. (2016). 5-6, 11.