Ecozoic City
Description
"The writer Thomas Berry described as the ecozoic the “reintegration of human endeavours into a larger ecological consciousness”. The ecozoic, Berry believed, would supplant the Anthropocene age, that we live in now, in which human needs take precedence over the health of the earth’s forests, oceans, and other living systems. Our species will only begin to make true progress, Berry believed, when
we learn to cherish the vitality of all life-forms equally – not just our own."
Discussion
John Thackara:
"Berry’s ideas could be dismissed as charming, but implausible – were it not for many small signs that just such a cultural shift may be brewing underneath the shiny surface of business as usual.
Over the ages we’ve invested huge amounts of effort and energy to keep cities and nature separate. The intensity of that effort was obscured until, in 1971, a geologist called Earl Cook developed a technique to measure the energy ‘captured from the environment’ in a modern city. A hunter-gatherer 10,000 years earlier, Cook reckoned, got by on 5,000 kilocalories a day. A New Yorker or Londoner today, by contrast, needs about 300,000 kilocalories a day once all the systems, networks and gadgets of modern life are factored in. That’s a difference in energy needed for survival, between lives that were part of nature, and lives lived apart, of 60 times – and rising.
Paving over the soil, and filling our lives with media, obscured our interdependency with living systems for a centuries. Now, as awareness of energy precarity grows, so do nagging questions about the ways we think about, and inhabit, our cities: How much energy does that skyscraper use each day? what level of resources are embedded in that flyover? What was it like here, before we paved it over?
In 2009, the Mannahatta exhibit began to answer that last question. It exposed New Yorkers to Manhattan’s ecosystem in 1609 – just before the first settlers arrived. Today’s city of asphalt and skyscrapers, it turned out, was once a diverse and life-filled landscape. Times Square was once a forest. Harlem was a meadow. A landscape of forests, fields, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, springs, ponds and streams was home to bears, wolves, songbirds, and salamanders. Clear waters jumped with fish. Porpoises and whales were at home in the harbor.
Mannahatta’s curator, the landscape ecologist Dr. Eric Sanderson, was not intent on returning New York to its primeval condition – but he did hope that the show would sensitise New Yorkers to the living systems that continue to support their city. And a question was posed: Could these hidden ecological functions be relevant to the city’s future development?
A growing worldwide movement is looking at cities through the lens of living systems. In countless practical projects, city dwellers are re-connecting with the soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water, and energy sources on which all life depends.
For the moment, this movement is mostly bottom-up, small-scale, and low-budget. It’s a barely visible mosaic in which rivers are restored by volunteers, car parks are depaved by activists, trees are planted by community teams, rainwater is harvested by neighbours, gadens are tended by school students, and nesting boxes for birds are installed by twitchers.
A lot of this work is carried out by community groups working street-by-street. As more small projects are completed,the to-do list expands. People notice that there are neglected parks to transform, gardens to revive, roadside verges to plant, empty roofs to green. There are vacant lots, abandoned buildings and empty malls to put to new use.
The fact that most of these actions are small does not diminish their significance. Change bubbling up from the bottom is how complex systems change – and cities are no exception. Besides, this proliferation of green shoots creates new work for for city managers and policy makers to do: Nurturing these thousands of tiny patches, removing obstacles, linking them together." (http://www.doorsofperception.com/locality-place/the-ecozoic-city/)