The Loss of the Wild — Pt.1
How redesigning urban areas can remind us how nature works.
Why is it that when we walk down the street most of us can’t name more than 3 tree species?
A U.S. Department of the Interior study found that the average American kid can identify 1000 corporate logos but can’t ID 10 plants and animals native to his or her hometown.
Is this the fault of our parents negligence, our schools or our society?
I believe there is a direct link between what we know and what we create.
Our communities and buildings are designed to be disconnected and separate because we perceive ourselves as separate.
We lack knowledge and an awareness of the natural order of things, therefore we neglect to include them in our blueprints.
We’re losing the wild parts of the world. Wild places untouched by people.
These are the places full of what inspire us. When we go on vacation we want to visit the mountains or the beach because being with nature calms us and helps us develop new ideas.
When American settlers went out west they we’re looking for their own slice of the wild we called it Manifest Destiny. This 19th-century belief was that the expansion of the US throughout the American continent was absolutely necessary – the birth of our somewhat twisted American Dream.
This expansion led to the obliteration of the native people and therefore native knowledge. These we’re the people who knew the land, animals, and plants the best.
Now we have to relearn knowledge of place in an increasingly complex and distracting world.
The End of The Wild
Fast forward to present day where we are facing an extinction rate of 3000 species a year and accelerating. According to The End of the Wild by Stephen Meyer, we can now predict that as many as half of the Earth’s species will disappear within the next 100 years.
The species that survive will be the ones that are most compatible with us: the weedy species — from mosquitoes to coyotes — that thrive in continually disturbed human-dominated environments.
If humanity is to survive, Meyer argues,
“We have no choice but to try to manage the fine details. We must move away from the current haphazard strategy of protecting species in isolation and create trans-regional “meta-reserves,” designed to protect ecosystem functions rather than species-specific habitats.”
Nothing in nature happens in isolation.
Reconnecting and Integrating: Urban and Rural
What happens to a field of corn without exposure to other species? Well it drains the soil of nutrients, causes algal blooms and hypoxia in local lakes, super-pests, and eventually erosion
What happens to an area with only one type of people living in it without exposure to other beliefs or skin colors? It tends to fester bigotry, anger and feelings of animosity.
Just look at the Trump platform – lets blame immigrants and others for my problems, instead of trying to adapt ourselves to a changing world.
Luckily many places are seeing a rise in mixed development projects.
Mixed-use development is a type of urban development that blends residential, commercial, cultural, institutional, or industrial uses, where those functions are physically and functionally integrated, and that provides pedestrian connections.
Mixed-use development can take the form of a single building, a city block, or entire neighborhoods. It leads to:
- reduced distances between housing, workplaces, retail businesses, and other destinations
- more compact development
- stronger neighborhood character
- pedestrian and bicycle-friendly environments
- greater housing variety and density
What we need to add now considering ecological principles:
- greater biological diversity
- inspiring natural environment integration
- more collaboration and sharing economies
- public meeting spaces — “placemaking”
- food interdependence
- places for creativity and exploration
I’ll pause here until tomorrow and end with a quote from Jane Jacobs, the influential community planner and as well as author The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs
Read part two here.
This is part eight of my series on Design & Nature.
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