Prepare for a fascinating exploration of the unsung urban ecosystems with author Peter Alagona. We'll navigate the intricate ecological and historical facets of his book Accidental Ecosystems, tracing the evolution of urban parks, the impact of climate change on human-wildlife interactions, and the implications of zoonotics. Venturing into the green realm of urban parks, we'll examine their metamorphosis from pastoral to forest-like settings. Together, we'll unravel Central Park's genesis and the often misconstrued concept of wilderness, while casting a critical eye on the North American Model's approach to wildlife management. At the end of our conversation we get into the pressing concern of biological diversity loss and its far-reaching implications.
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Prepare for a fascinating exploration of the unsung urban ecosystems with author Peter Alagona. We'll navigate the intricate ecological and historical facets of his book Accidental Ecosystems, tracing the evolution of urban parks, the impact of climate change on human-wildlife interactions, and the implications of zoonotics. Venturing into the green realm of urban parks, we'll examine their metamorphosis from pastoral to forest-like settings. Together, we'll unravel Central Park's genesis and the often misconstrued concept of wilderness, while casting a critical eye on the North American Model's approach to wildlife management. At the end of our conversation we get into the pressing concern of biological diversity loss and its far-reaching implications.
Show Notes:
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
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Stephanie:You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Peter Alagona on his book Accidental Ecosystems: People and Wildlife in American Cities. This was a particularly interesting episode and book, given that everyone interacts with urban wildlife on some level every day. Just this morning I looked out my front window and saw this box trotting happily across the way in the park across the street from me, and it was also a good reminder that they're going to be out more with cooler temperatures, with fall setting in, and I'll probably need to curb my unsupervised, un-supervised free range time for the chickens in the backyard because unfortunately I got a lesson in wildlife last fall with one of my other chickens.
Jennifer:I love that you guys just have all these chickens in your backyard Makes me happy. I have to admit, when Jen Haas with Island Press sent us the list of upcoming releases, I was intrigued by Accidental Ecosystem. I know that it was kind of one of the books that I wrote on your list, but I didn't know that it sounded like anything that we had covered before and I wasn't sure when I started reading how pertinent it really would be to the planning field. But it turns out actually we in the planning field are partially responsible for creating these Accidental Ecosystems.
Stephanie:We touched on this in a number of subtle ways when we dove into the history of the park's movements and towards the end of the conversation we talked about urban waterways and I really wanted to get into this more during the episode but I didn't know that it sounded like anything so. But we had such a really great conversation with Peter that we tended to do more deeper dives and back and forth conversation on some of our earlier questions, so we didn't get to some of the later ones that were on our list.
Jennifer:One of the aspects of the book that I couldn't stop thinking about after I read it was the impacts that climate change is having, and will continue to have, on the relationship between humans and wildlife. Right now, we're seeing a small surge in COVID cases again nothing like in 2020 and 2021, but it doesn't make it any less concerning and Peter makes a great point that things like pandemics are just going to become more frequent and potentially more severe if we don't stop forcing animals into smaller areas and start planning for better habitat preservation.
Stephanie:Yeah, that's a really great point and while we didn't get into it a whole lot during the episode, peter really discusses the topic of zoonotics a lot in his book and does a great job addressing it. All right, let's get into this episode with author Peter Alagonia on his book Accidental Ecosystem People and Wildlife in American Cities. Well, peter, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book, the Accidental Ecosystem. In the introduction you recount a story that set the stage for writing the book. The story highlights how urban ecosystems are one of those things that you don't really notice until you do and then you see it everywhere. Why do you think it's taken so long for ecologists and planners for that matter to notice and realize its value?
Peter:Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, stephanie and Jennifer. It's a pleasure to be with you today and to get an opportunity to talk about this book and this topic, which is one of my favorites. If you go back in history, people have always noticed the plants and animals around them, and as increasingly more people lived in urbanized areas or at least built environments, they continued to do that, but it was mostly naturalists. It was mostly just people who were interested in their surroundings, including folks who were interested in animals like birds. Birders have been watching birds in cities for a very long time and documenting them. But I think to understand why we're in this predicament that we're in now, where we know in some ways less about the species that surround us on a daily basis than we know about the big, iconic ones that live very far away in remote areas.
Peter:I think, you have to recognize a couple things about the history of science itself, and what I mean by this is that ecology, which is a primary field by which we study wildlife and organisms in their environments, really emerged a little over a century ago as a way not just of studying how organisms interact but as a way of understanding deeper patterns and processes in evolution. Ecology was really about understanding evolution. If you understood how a species lived, then you understood how it evolved over time and then that gave you a sense, a much better sense, of this kind of deep properties of the history and function of life on Earth. And many ecologists early on in the history of the field believed that in order to truly unlock those kind of evolutionary relationships you had to study organisms in their pristine natural environments. Because if you studied them in cities then you were looking at something that had just emerged in the past.
Peter:In recent decades or centuries or maybe millennia you weren't understanding those deep historical evolutionary relationships. Now, after World War II in Europe you start to see people become much more interested in urban environments, in some cases because they were confined to those environments, like in West Berlin after the Second World War. But it really wasn't until the 1990s and early 2000s that ecology as a field really started to recognize that it was missing a lot by not studying urban areas and, in particular, that you could actually learn a lot about evolution itself that thing that so many ecologists have always been interested in by studying urban environments, because urban environments were themselves a kind of laboratory for evolution that was much different from but could tell you very interesting things that you might not be able to see if you just studied animals in remote pristine environments and wilderness areas. And so we've come a long way, but I still think we have a long way to go on this.
Jennifer:I have started taking note of the animals in my neighborhood in an entirely different light after reading this book. So in your introduction you define the term urban. When thinking about wildlife, generally most people think of the term as a downtown core or major cities like New York or San Francisco. But really, how should we be thinking about urban when it comes to considering its connection with wildlife?
Peter:That's a great question, jennifer, and thank you for saying that you've become more aware Creatures around you, because that's really a big part of the reason why I took on this project. So that warms my heart a little bit to hear that. You know, I think colloquially, particularly in the US and in kind of English language discourse, you know, urban often does conjure up this idea of those downtown cores. You know Manhattan, the Chicago, luke, san Francisco, places like that. But if you actually look at how not only planners but people like geographers and demographers, folks who work for the US Census Bureau, agencies like this, define the term urban, it's evolved over time, it's changed over time. Initially, I think the term urban, if I recall correctly, referred to groups of people in a particular area that had something like more than 2,500 residents. You know something we would think of today as a very small town, and it's changed over time and so urban broadly refers to a kind of clustering of people and built structures and you know if you're doing science or if you're, you know part of the Census Bureau or something like that. You need to draw boundaries right. You need to have boundaries around precincts or designated census areas so that you can collect data and then analyze those data. But if you're an animal, you tend to see things differently. Those boundaries disappear when you're trying to make your way through a complex landscape like an urban region.
Peter:And so I think that there are two terms that I really like to use and to think about when I try to imagine not just how planners or scientists or even historians might think of urban areas, but how animals experience them. And so one idea is the idea of a gradient, and the notion of a gradient is simply that you know, if you take a kind of classic model in our mind of an urban area, most places don't really conform to this, but if we were going to conjure one up, we might want to use Chicago as a relatively good example. You know, you start out in that kind of wildland area. You know, maybe you're up in Minnesota or something, and then you move into the cornfields and there's a lot of cornfields, and then eventually you move into the outer suburbs and then older suburbs and eventually you're in the loop itself, in the urban core of what we imagine as the center of urban life. So animals experience these gradients of more wild, more rural to more urban without really maybe making note to themselves of those dividing lines that we might draw when we study these areas.
Peter:But then there's another term that I think is also very helpful when we think of how animals understand these spaces, which is the term mosaic.
Peter:Mosaic is, of course, an artistic term, but it's also an ecological term, and so you might hear ecologists use the word landscape mosaic, and so a landscape mosaic might refer to some place like New York City where you have downtown urban areas, you have older suburbs, you have newer suburbs, you have large parks, you have areas of open water and shorelines and wetlands, a very kind of complex urban landscape. And so this is a different kind of environment that animals have to navigate their way through in order to be able to live in an urban region, and oftentimes these mosaics are very useful to animals because they can do things like commute Animals like us, some of them commute right. They'll spend their days hiding out in green spaces and maybe their evenings wandering along the fringes of the more developed areas, where they can do things like access, more food in water and also other members of their own species. And so the term urban. It seems very simple, but it has a lot of complexity and nuance built into it.
Stephanie:Yeah, I'd love that you bring up the transect idea, because in our very first podcast episode to almost two years ago, when we talked about rural by design, we were talking about the urban to rural transect and how it changes from a planar perspective. But it's interesting to think of it on the flip side, from an animal's perspective, of how the gradients change as they're moving between urban to rural.
Peter:Yeah, Stephanie, and this is something that really varies from place to place too. In parts of the eastern portion of North America and the eastern US you tend to see landscapes where the urban environment fades pretty gradually into a rural environment, Whereas in cities like Los Angeles or San Diego you have dense suburban development, very dense suburban development, right up to the edge of steep mountain slopes, public lands, national forests, what we call the wildland urban interface. This area gets a lot of attention because of wildfire risk along those urban fringes. But this is also an area that's very, very interesting for animals that can access and use both the green spaces outside of the urban wildland interface and also the more developed ones inside of it.
Stephanie:Yeah, and there are some interesting stories around that in the book that people need to definitely check out. So in the book, parks are both the cause of ecological decline and the savior of it. So the original park concept leveled everything and created these pastoral settings, but over time urban parks evolved into more forest-like settings that allowed species like the gray squirrel to repopulate. So, looking back on history, were parks good or bad, and should we be designing them differently than we do today to support urban ecosystems?
Peter:You know I have to laugh about this a little bit because when I was writing the book I had no idea that the story that would resonate most with people, that they would ask me most about, was the squirrel story. I had no idea that was going to be the case, but that has proven to be the case over the last year that people really, really liked that and are really interested in that, because it's kind of a hidden history. It's something that they would have never guessed. But then it turns out that there's this real backstory to this very, very familiar urban animal. We could talk a little bit more about that or your listeners can read about it as well.
Peter:You know it's important to recognize that a lot of urban parks didn't really destroy habitats. They were actually built in places that were already profoundly transformed and, in many cases, degraded habitats, and I think that the classic example of this is Central Park in New York City. You can go online and see pictures of Central Park in the 1840s and 50s, shortly before it was designated a park and then began to be redeveloped and it was just a bombed out, denuded area. It looked. You know rubble, no trees. You know it was a pretty rough area, but there were people who were living in portions of the Bupakim Central Park who were living in interesting communities like freed, former slave African American communities and other kinds of very interesting communities outside of the kind of core of urban society at that point we might call squatters today, but actually we're really full-fledged and established communities in Central Park. Those were often removed to create this park. And then what was put in place I think you're right is a kind of idealized version of nature, often associated with, you know, iconic figures like Frederick Law, olmsted and others, and these spaces were really designed to kind of uplift and sometimes actually just modify people.
Peter:There was a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety among elites in society in the 19th century and the Victorian era in particular, about the kind of dangers of having all of these rapidly growing urban areas with all of these immigrants from all over the world. What would happen? It was going to be chaos and pandemonium and there was this notion that building these kind of idealized versions of nature in the city would provide a kind of outlet for some of those potential dangers but also kind of uplift citizens and integrate them more into society. And so these parks were really created for people. They weren't created for animals. They were created for a particular civic purpose.
Peter:Now, I do think that where parks were destructive in some cases is where they were created in places where then they became vehicles for creating a manufactured idea of pristine nature and wilderness at the expense of the people who live there, who are often indigenous people. And so now, unfortunately, in many of our national parks, the US and Canada and many other places, we're living with a legacy, for example, of fire suppression, which is tremendously damaging our forests, creating much more fire danger, having really severe climate and ecological impacts, in part because the people who are managing, intending and fostering those ecosystems were removed from them to create an artificial notion of wilderness. I think you're absolutely right. They have a very complex role to play in this. Overall, I think that urban parks are really good things. We need more of them, not fewer of them, but they do have a complex history. They were not created for animals, they were created for people, but they have become, over time, really important wildlife habitats.
Jennifer:So Stephanie got to ask the gray squirrel question because she got her question in before I did. But I have taken multiple courses in the history of urbanization and I can guarantee you that never once did I learn about the history of the squirrel coming back to the cities in that, and it's just, it's a great story.
Peter:Well, you know, jennifer, if I could, I think that there's a really important point to make there, which is that you know and I try to make this point in the book that the period in history went so much of the idea of what a modern city is and should be was developing late 19th, early 20th century. This kind of crucial moment in the history of urban thought, of urban theory, of urban planning. That still casts a very long shadow and you're much more of an expert in this than I am, but still cast quite a long shadow, I think, over urban theory and urban planning today.
Peter:That was the exact moment in history when there were the fewest animals in the city. Many of the domesticated animals, the livestock, the kind of barnyard animals, were being actively removed out to the countryside at that time, put on leashes, brought in the people's homes, etc. And the wildlife hadn't really come back, the wildlife that had been decimated in the century or two or three, depending on where you were before. And so we have this situation in which we are now trying to develop some new ideas, some new theories that actually match with the reality of today, which is that we do live those of us who live in urban areas live in multi-species communities, even though those foundational bedrock kind of urban theories of a century ago didn't really include that in the way they imagined modern city.
Jennifer:Right, I mean one of the very first things that we would think of as a planning conference of sorts in New York City happened to discuss removing horses or managing manure. So really even one of our first planning theory situations was around removing animals from a city. So it's an excellent point.
Peter:That's absolutely right, and it's easy to forget what important roles those domesticated animals played in 18th and 19th century cities in North America, in Europe and beyond, in part because it's just hard to imagine that, given the extent to which they were ultimately removed.
Jennifer:Although you do make the point that every now and then, a cow does still get out in New York City.
Peter:It happens surprisingly often.
Jennifer:And speaking of managing animals in general, the largest system in the country for managing wildlife in the US is the North American model of wildlife management. I've had to study this setup in some of my environmental law courses, so I find it really interesting. Can you give us the background on this system and why it is or shortly really could be a failing system in the country?
Peter:I should mention that just late last night I returned from a research trip in Spain where I was studying efforts to conserve and coexist with wildlife in northern Spain and the Contabrian Mountains in particular, looking at efforts to coexist with a resurgent population of brown bears, which we call grizzly bears here in the US, and that's a topic that's very close to my heart, that I spend a lot of my time on.
Peter:But the reason I'm mentioning this is because there's maybe this is obvious, but there's no North American model of wildlife management in Spain. It looks very different there, the model looks very different, the way of going about this looks very different. So what is this thing called the North American model? Well, it's part observation, part fiction and part aspiration, I would say, among a certain kind of person.
Stephanie:And so what do I mean by that?
Peter:So the North American model is something that developed over a long period of time but was not called that really. That term was not really coined, or at least popularized, until about the last 20 years, even though the model itself probably dates back in many ways, at least in the 1930s and perhaps to the closer to the latter part of the 19th century. And the idea is that, basically, if you want to conserve wildlife, you can't just have this be a free for all. You need to manage it, you need to manage it by science, you need to have bureaucratic agencies who were in charge, and you also can't have people just harvesting animals to sell them. The idea of harvesting animals should be more of a recreational pursuit.
Peter:Now, there was a lot of racial and class issues involved in this when this model started to emerge in the late 19th and early 20th century, because different values and different needs were conflicting.
Peter:So people who lived in urban areas, who needed to hunt to help make ends meet, for example, saw their access to resources decline, whereas folks like the Teddy Roosevelt of the world were able to stand on top of an elephant he had just shot and proclaimed that conservation.
Peter:And so today we have this model that really includes basically like seven or so-ish principles, and these principles all have to do with scientific management, the rule of law, the primacy of hunting as a recreational pursuit, the notion of animals as resources and also the kind of idea of equal access in theory in theory, if not in practice to things like hunting permits and fishing permits. Ok, but there are a lot of problems with this, a lot of problems. The first problem is that it doesn't really exist, and what I mean by that is that the way that these principles are laid out are sort of aspirational, in the sense that in practice, for example, there's not equal access to wildlife resources, it's very unequal. So that's just one issue, but that kind of emphasizes this notion of this being an aspirational thing, not just an observation of a real situation.
Stephanie:But there are a lot of other problems too.
Peter:One of the first problems, I think, is the notion that wildlife is not just a resource, but only a resource. So other animals are there to serve us. We are there to manage them, just like we would manage crops. Take one of my favorite animals, a grizzly bear. You manage a grizzly bear population like you would manage corn, and I'm kind of reducing this to something oversimplified, but you get the idea. It's a resource to be managed for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of people for the longest time. This utilitarian notion of resources, a utilitarian notion that's focused on human needs, I should say so. Wildlife is a resource, but only a resource, and I think a lot of people disagree with that, including, in particular, many people in indigenous communities who see wildlife as resources, but also many, many other things. The second is there's no real concern for animals that are not game species, that are not to be hunted. That's a problem with this.
Stephanie:So what about all those?
Peter:other animals that people may see value in or have inherent value for themselves, but are not animals that you can really harvest as a resource. The North American model doesn't really account for that. It doesn't address justice issues. We mentioned this unequal access but we also haven't talked about things like the destruction of wildlife in North America being part and parcel of a historical process of the destruction of indigenous societies and cultures Genocide. The most familiar story of this is the destruction of the bison on the Great Plains, but here in California the destruction of the grizzly bear was something very similar. The grizzly bear was the animal most associated with indigenous cultures, and so it had to be removed.
Peter:Closer to the point of this book, this doesn't work. The North American model doesn't work in areas where hunting is generally prohibited. What are areas where hunting is generally prohibited? Well, in national parks, to be sure, but also in urban areas. Why is hunting generally prohibited in urban areas? Because it turns out that going around and shooting guns in urban areas tends to be a bad idea, and so some urban areas allow things like bow hunting or trapping.
Peter:Trapping tends to be very controversial in urban areas. People have very different views on it. We outlawed trapping here in almost all cases in California several years back. But bow hunting can be quite dangerous, and the reason for that is when you go out and hunt deer with a bow, you very rarely kill the animal immediately, and so then what you have is a wounded, terrified animal running through the streets or through the town, and that can be a very dangerous situation, particularly in areas where there are cars around. And then the final thing and I'm sorry for the long wind and answer here, but this is a lot here the final thing is that if the system ever once worked, its time is probably waning, and the reason I say that is because hunting is declining dramatically as a pastime in American society.
Peter:There are still many areas in the United States where hunting is a very important part of the local culture and also of wildlife management, but in most states it is declined dramatically, and the simple reason for that is that most states have become much more urban in recent years. California, which is the most urban state in the nation 95% of people live in census designated urban areas. The thing about this is that when you move from a rural area to an urban area let's say you're an 18-year-old and you want to go to college or you want to get a job and you have to move out of your small town. You end up in an urban area.
Peter:You tend to lose that hunting tradition, and hunting has such a high barrier to entry that people who didn't grow up hunting almost never pick it up as adults. The things you have to do in order to become a hunter if it's not in your family, it's huge. It's more than even other activities and sports that have a notoriously high barrier to entry, like sailing or skiing or something like that. And so the North American model has had some successes over the last 100 years or so, basing this idea of wildlife as resources that should be managed by science and under the law. But it's a problematic system and its time is probably on the decline, and so what we need is we need new models, and I think a lot of folks who are out there looking for those right about now.
Stephanie:You mentioned the barrier to entry. With hunting that touches close to home. Because of my dad, no hunters in the family and at some point when I was a little kid he thought it would be interesting and had to learn all the nuances for hunting, whether it be with guns or you eventually got into bow hunting. And then you have to make all the connections for the landowners to be able to go hunt on their property, and so it always, I think, has a feeling that it's been wasted on all of his kids. That didn't really stick with hunting.
Peter:Stephanie. I think that's a great example. It's all rings true to me and I'll say it's not impossible. It's not impossible to take something like that up, but it's very difficult. It takes a lot of resources and most people don't do it. And when most people don't do it, the number of people who do declines over time.
Jennifer:My dad is actually a hunting guide. We own multiple accretion properties and hunting properties and I have grown up in it, so that's partly why this legal structure however you want to refer to it has been so important to me, and we have seen a significant lack of even people coming from Lincoln and Omaha who want to learn, want to have access. We're a really easily accessible group and there's very low charges and my dad will teach you how to shoot your gun appropriately, and all that without a charge, just because he's so passionate about it. And in the last 10 years we've probably seen a 60% or 70% drop in people even coming from the urban areas in Nebraska, a notoriously hunting friendly state. So it's very interesting.
Peter:Absolutely and regardless of what your personal view or your family history is around hunting. I think that this brings up a really important point, which is that this has economic implications. So if you want a business like your family, then of course that has economic implications for you. But it also has economic implications for the state and for funding for conservation itself. Leading up to the 1930s, and then especially in the 1930s, arrangements were put in place that generated funding for a wide variety of conservation activities through hunting and fishing permits, and this was seen as kind of a user pays principle. So if you're using the resource, you pay for it. You help to preserve it for perpetuity.
Peter:Well, in states like West Virginia, pennsylvania, even Idaho, places like that, where hunting really supplied almost all of the funding for many conservation initiatives for many years, at least at the state level. Now, when you see these kinds of declines 20%, 30%, 40% over the course of a decade or so it's not clear how to backfill those funds, particularly at a time where the needs are increasing. In a place like Idaho, you have fewer and fewer hunters, but you also have a rapidly growing urban population, rapidly growing demands to use natural areas. If it's not for hunting, maybe it's for hiking or fishing or skiing or whatever, and so this is a really challenging situation for a lot of very dedicated folks of the state agencies who are trying to figure out how to develop a new financial model to support their conservation work.
Stephanie:So this next question. You touched on a little bit when you talked about studying animals and how it's changed over time. But species have the ability to adapt over time and evolve, and some have done so in a very short span of time, in just a few decades, while others tend to go extinct. This idea of survival of the fittest doesn't work, because you say that as long as humanity continues on its current course, extinction will outpace evolution and our world will become less diverse. Some people listening might not think that's a big deal, but what are the consequences of a less diverse world?
Peter:Thanks for asking that, stephanie, and I'm sure that in part there's a little bit of a tongue in chief there, maybe, but I do know that you're right, that there are folks who don't think that. So I'm just going to put my cards on the table here and say that if you don't think that the impoverishment of life on earth is a big deal, then I'm not sure what you would think is a big deal. What else could possibly be bigger than that? Right? But I do understand that for most people, more immediate concerns are much more important, and so it's hard to think about oh, biological diversity loss. How does that affect my children? How does that affect my home, my community? And so I do understand that, as an abstract concept, it can be difficult to pin particular kinds of values on. So this idea of the survival of the fittest I just want to mention this is not a biological idea, this is a social idea. This term was coined by a philosopher named Herbert Spencer. It became kind of a motto for what became known as social Darwinism. This is not biological Darwinism, it's social Darwinism. Darwin talked about natural selection, herbert Spencer talked about survival of fittest. They're different ideas with different purposes.
Peter:However, I do think you're right to point out that, although some species are evolving quite rapidly under intense human induced pressures, many more aren't or can't, and so over time, the diversity of life on earth is declining and declining quite rapidly, and this has a lot of effects, both realized and potential, for people in communities. So first of all, I think there are economic effects. So the decline of biological diversity can mean the loss of everything from recreational opportunities to harvestable resources to increases in natural hazards, threats like wildfire and things like this that we don't tend to think of as resulting from a loss of biological diversity. But ecological decline is what is in many ways making forests, for example, much more likely to go up in flames, and there's a long history there. I think scientific values are really important.
Peter:Some folks may not worry too much about this but of course, healthy ecosystems, biological diversity provides all sorts of opportunities for learning about natural world and about ourselves, and health is a huge, huge part of this. We all know, I think, by now, that disease ecology is a very complex thing and it's important not to draw too many broad brush conclusions about health and its relationship to animals and ecosystems. But what I will say is that there's a significant body of literature, many examples out there that show that the decline of biological diversity, the fragmentation of habitats and the way in which that exposes people to more wildlife, exposes wildlife to domesticated animals and kind of stirs up pathogens, makes us much, much more likely to experience health consequences of that, particularly through diseases that pass from animals to human zoonotic diseases. We don't really know exactly where COVID came from. There's, of course, a lot debate about that, but if you look at emerging diseases over the past century, about 75% of emerging diseases are diseases that we share with other animals, and many of those have been passed on to people due to wildlife exploitation, trade and habitat fragmentation. So that's really important.
Peter:Another one is climate. Biological diversity enables ecosystems to store carbon and also to be more resilient to change. That's a really important thing for the future. And then, finally, there's a whole series of questions that involve ethics and values that are way too complicated to get into too much here, but I guess I would pose a question of what right do we have to wipe out ecosystems, to destroy species in ways that reduce the richness of life on earth for all time? For all time in the future, because we think it's not so important or it's convenient to do so today, and so there are many ways to talk about this, I think, many reasons to be concerned. For me, our relationships to other organisms that's one of the most important things we can really think about and work on and prove today.
Jennifer:In furthering our understanding of everything that we've been talking about. One of the biggest problems we have on understanding impact to wildlife is actually a lack of data. You mentioned that conducting fieldwork in cities can be really difficult. Some of these areas are linked to private property issues, so you can't just go trade seeing into someone's backyard but public land. I found this so frustrating. Public land is evidently just as inaccessible, or even more inaccessible, to you because of all of the red tape that's put in place to study the animals that we should be trying to use for public lands to preserve and protect. We're planners, so we kind of stay away from the federal government a little bit, but what can cities and counties do to assist in this type of data collection?
Peter:Yeah, that's a really great point about the red tape. I'm here in my day job as a faculty member at the University of California. I'm very involved in something called the UC Natural Reserve System, which is a system of field stations that we use for teaching and research. The reason the first field stations were created, going back to the middle of the 20th century, was that it became increasingly difficult to conduct research either on private lands, which were being developed very rapidly at that point in California, or on public lands, where there was often a lot of red tape to do so, and so the university went about, in part, creating its own system of field stations in order to provide spaces where people could do that kind of work and learn about the environment, learn about ecosystems, learn about species. So, yes, you're absolutely right that both can be challenging.
Peter:I remember, when I was writing this book, that I met with someone who had been involved in something called the Gotham Coyote Project in New York City, looking at the colonization of the New York region by coyotes and the ways in which they were using ecosystems and habitats and also interacting with people, and he told me that when they first started doing their research, maybe I don't know, maybe 15 years ago or so, they went to the city of New York and said we want to be able to do this work in parks and other kinds of lands, and the city of New York the city with the greatest capacity probably of any city on the continent for doing this kind of thing had no process in place to allow people to do research on its lands, and so it had to invent a process from scratch, and it did that to the credit of the city for permitting this kind of thing, and so I would say that now New York is probably ahead of a lot of other places that haven't done this.
Peter:But I would say that there's this one question that actually has a relatively simple answer, which is that cities can become a little bit more aware of this and create a process that allows them to partner with researchers, with universities, with museums, with other local civic institutions that are doing both research and education. That provides them with a simple and straightforward process in most cases for doing this kind of thing. Now there will be other cases in which other kinds of permits are necessary. So, for example, if you want to trap animals, you generally need permits from state agencies and that sort of thing, to be able to be licensed and permitted to do that and cities can't do that kind of thing.
Peter:But oftentimes we're talking about noninvasive kinds of things, like setting up camera traps, motion activated cameras that allow you to monitor wildlife without being invasive or doing anything else to the land or to the animal and so these are the kinds of things that, if we had simple processes in place, we could make it a lot easier and make it a lot more attractive, both for researchers and for the constituencies that they're working with, including schools and young people, who have a tremendous opportunity to partner with researchers and to learn about these things in their communities.
Stephanie:So I would argue that this next question is the most important question of this episode, and you may have already answered it, depending on how you define urban species. But what is your favorite urban animal and why?
Peter:Oh, this is a really. This is a really tough one because I love so many of them. You know, the way I structured this book was that each chapter sort of begins with the kind of anecdote it's often like animal does something in city, people freak out, how do we explain it?
Peter:kind of structure, and so there's a little bit of slapstick humor in there and there's like some unexpected things and it involves a lot of different kinds of animals birds, mammals, reptiles, others and so, you know, I see so much fun and interesting and engaging in all these stories that it's very tough for me to pick.
Peter:But what I'm going to do is I'm going to answer this by mentioning something that didn't get mentioned in the book, and that's this because we are bipedal primates, we tend to walk around and think that the world revolves around us and that everything that happens in particular happens on land.
Peter:When people think about urban spaces, they don't generally think about water, right, maybe you think about a lake in a park shore or a wetland, or you can go and walk around on the boardwalk if you have an opportunity and see birds, that kind of thing but what we don't think of is marine spaces.
Peter:Many of our biggest cities are at harbors, and harbors are extremely urbanized marine spaces, and so if you live in a place like New York or San Francisco or Seattle or South Los Angeles or Miami, wherever you might find yourself either living or visiting, then you might want to think about what it's like for marine species to experience urbanized oceans, and so I think that this is kind of a, in a way, a little bit of a next frontier of urban ecology, thinking about urbanized marine spaces, and there are many species that are using these spaces in very interesting ways that we don't know a whole lot about. It's a great opportunity, and so maybe you're used to seeing sea lion or a seal on a dock or something like that. That's a start, but that's only a start, and so I think that, although this doesn't really answer your question, I can imagine a future in which some of the most interesting things that come out of urban ecology and some of the most fascinating urban species end up being ones that we can't really see very well because they live underwater.
Jennifer:Interesting observations. Stephanie and I are in the land lockiest of land locked states. I don't know that we probably really ever do think too much about mammals and ocean areas.
Stephanie:But a fun fact about Nebraska is that we have the most miles of shoreline of any state, just because of all the rivers.
Jennifer:All the rivers.
Stephanie:Wow.
Peter:I had no idea. That's an amazing and fun fact. What I will say is that there has been quite a bit of work done on urban streams less so on marine environments like harbors, but a lot on urban streams and I have to say, unfortunately, that streams running through urban areas are among the most degraded and impacted ecosystems on the continent in the world. Certainly, in cities there's a thing called the urban stream syndrome, which describes many of the shared characteristics that many urban streams have accumulated over time. It is not a pretty story, and some of the best opportunities for doing research that helps people and animals in urban areas has to do with restoring and recovering streams in ways that provide cleaner water, more recreational opportunities and also protection against floods and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a sad story as far as urban streams in many areas, but there are also tremendous, tremendous opportunities there, and I think a lot of cities are really seeing that today.
Jennifer:Yes, but don't talk to your watershed managers about rewilding rivers. You get kicked out of meetings. So there are a lot of really great questions that we were not able to get to in this conversation, since we do try to keep these in like compute sized podcasts. So we would very highly recommend everyone go get a copy of the book. It was great. But since this is booked on planning, in addition to reading X and L ecosystems, what is at least one other book that you would recommend to our readers?
Peter:Yeah, sure. So I'm actually going to recommend two books that I am assigning this quarter in my class on human relations with wildlife that I teach here at UC Santa Barbara. Our term starts next week. The first one is by an author named Michelle Nighouse. Some of your listeners may be familiar with her. She's written for publications like New York Times and the Atlantic and others. She published a book a couple of years ago called Beloved Beasts. It's a history of conservation in the United States and it's a really well done one, and so if you want to learn more, for example, about the background of the North American model of wildlife management, or if you want to know why the focus has been on such rural and wildland areas instead of urban ones, that book is a beautifully written book that gives you a lot of context. It's fun to read, it's well read on Audible you can get it and it's a really fun book.
Peter:The second one I want to recommend is a book that I'm reading right now and that I'm planning on assigning later this quarter. I'm very excited about it because I've been lecturing on this topic in this class for a few years, but I finally found a book that just came out this year that really gets at some of these issues and it's a book by Bethany Brookshire and it's called Pests and I forget the subtitle right now. I have to look it up. I'm sorry about that. I'm in the process of reading it right now.
Peter:It's a really wonderful book because it talks about how and why certain animals, in certain contexts, become labeled as pests. A pest is a very contingent thing. It's not an animal, it's a relationship between people and animals. In one context, an animal may be a beautiful wild animal or even endangered species. In another context it may be a pest. And so Bethany is very interested in understanding this kind of contradictory and sometimes even kind of nonsensical way in which people create situations in which certain animals do things that are inconvenient to them. Then they label them pests and then we try to control them, and so it's kind of an odd cycle. But it's a really funny book and it's a great introduction to this and in a way it's kind of the flip side of conservation, of trying to protect scarce wildlife and endangered species, is this very very long and pretty complicated history of managing animals that we call pests.
Jennifer:I have to check out her take on cockroaches, because I just don't know how you defend that relationship.
Peter:Well, the way you defend it is you show how we create habitat for them and then, when they arrive, we punish them for it. So how are the ways this is a little microcosm, right how are the ways in which, instead of attracting them and then killing them which is there's a term for that? In the literature, it's called an ecological trap how can we instead discourage them from showing up in the first place by not creating the kinds of conditions that attract them to us? How's that?
Jennifer:That sounds great and I think it's a great way to end the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
Peter:Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.
Stephanie:Yes, thank you. This was an awesome conversation.
Jennifer:We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Peter Alagonia on his book Accidental Ecosystem, People and Wildlife in American Cities. You may even actually change your mind about how you feel about cockroaches. You can get your own copy through the publisher at islandpressorg and check out the other great titles they've got. While you're there, Island Press has an awesome deal going on until the end of the month. You can get three transportation books for just $75 with free shipping, and we've covered at least two great books from the list and I'm sure we'll get to a few more next season. Just go to islandpressorg. Slash toolkit.
Stephanie:And remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Bokeh Don Planning.