cities, urban living, videophilia, urbanites

 

cities, urban living, videophilia, urbanites

Robert McDonald is a vanguard scientist with The Nature Conservancy's Conservation Strategies Division. Robert works to evaluate the drivers, trends and conservation implications of emerging or understudied threats to biodiversity. Prior to joining the Conservancy, he was a Smith Conservation Biology Fellow at Harvard University, studying the impact global urban growth will have on biodiversity and conservation.

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"The needs and wants of urban dwellers influence land-use on almost every hectare on Earth."

—Robert McDonald, vanguard scientist with The Nature Conservancy

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cities, urban living, videophilia, urbanites

By Rob McDonald

Whether conservationists like it or not, it's an urban world — and we need to speak more effectively to urbanites.

Homo sapiens is now a predominately urban species. For the first time in human history, a majority of people live in cities or towns. The United States and Western Europe have been urbanized for decades, but the developing world is starting to catch up, particularly Southeast Asia, India and West Africa. By 2030 there will be almost 2 billion new urbanites. Humanity is building the equivalent of a city the size of Vancouver every week.

While urban areas are only 2 percent to 4 percent of the Earth's land surface, they are centers of resource consumption. A city the size of London requires a land area of more than 20,000,000 hectares just to feed itself. Fish for sushi are flown in from Japan, as are vegetable from Africa, and corn from the Americas makes it way slowly across the Atlantic in boats.

Cumulatively, the needs and wants of urban dwellers influence land-use on almost every hectare on Earth. The Nature Conservancy has recognized this reality in many of our ecosystem service projects, which restore nature in rural locations to provide water to urbanites.

Urban Dreams, Nature's Reality

In a sense, the dreams of urban dwellers will become nature's reality over the next century. Thankfully, one of those dreams so far has been conservation. Many of our national parks in the United States came from a Manhattanite, Theodore Roosevelt. The push for wilderness protection came in no small part from the Sierra Club's base in San Francisco.

But there are disturbing signs that Americans are losing interest in directly interacting with wild nature, preferring to spend their free time looking at a TV screen or a computer monitor. And it's not at all clear if new urban dwellers in developing countries will fight for conservation, given the many other pressing environmental and social problems these cities face.

Like a lot of conservationists, I got into this field because I loved being outside, hugging trees. Conservationists are by personality wary of cities. We need to get over it. Like it or not, it will increasingly be a world of the city, by the city, for the city.

More and more, The Nature Conservancy can expect to have to justify our conservation actions to decision-makers who will likely never have seen a pristine ecosystem: We have to tell urbanites what they get out of conservation.

And more and more, the Conservancy will have to help urbanites gain a connection with nature so they support and fund our mission: We need to make sure the next 2 billion urbanites are as interested in conservation as the first 3 billion were.

(March 2009)

Photo credits (top to bottom, left to right): © Bridget Besaw (Urban sprawl of Quito); Courtesy of Rob McDonald