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What does ecotopia look like?
Dec. 27th, 2005 11:37 am"Among the major players [in a healthy ecosystem] are the ecosystems engineers, which add new parts to the habitat and open the door to guilds of organisms specialized to use them. . . .
"By constructing dams, beavers create ponds, bogs, and flooded meadows. These environments shelter species of plants and animals that are rare or absent in free-running streams. The submerged masses of decaying wood forming the dams add still more species that occupy and feed on them.
"Elephants trample and tear up shrubs and small trees, opening glades within forests. The result is a mosaic of habitats containing overall larger numbers of resident species. . . .
"Over millions of years, nature's ecosystems engineers have . . . coevolved with other species that exploit the niches they build. The result is a harmony within ecosystems. The constituent species, by spreading out into multiple niches, seize and cycle more materials and energy. . . . Homo sapiens is an ecosystems engineer too, but a bad one. Not having coevolved with the majority of life forms we now encounter around the world, we eliminate far more niches than we create. We drive species and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate than existed before and everywhere diminish productivity and stability."
-E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Chapter 5
My question is, in the absence of coevolution, can humans learn to be good ecosystems engineers? Can we build cities that furnish many more niches for creatures other than ourselves (without causing us too much inconvenience), while failing to stomp on ecosystems elsewhere with massive ecological footprints? (Although perhaps stomping on things wouldn't be so bad, if we could follow the elephants' example . . .)
What might such a city look like? Would it be some form of arcology, a single nearly-self-sufficient structure? Would it be like a strange forest in which the buildings look and act like trees? Or would it be stranger still?
"By constructing dams, beavers create ponds, bogs, and flooded meadows. These environments shelter species of plants and animals that are rare or absent in free-running streams. The submerged masses of decaying wood forming the dams add still more species that occupy and feed on them.
"Elephants trample and tear up shrubs and small trees, opening glades within forests. The result is a mosaic of habitats containing overall larger numbers of resident species. . . .
"Over millions of years, nature's ecosystems engineers have . . . coevolved with other species that exploit the niches they build. The result is a harmony within ecosystems. The constituent species, by spreading out into multiple niches, seize and cycle more materials and energy. . . . Homo sapiens is an ecosystems engineer too, but a bad one. Not having coevolved with the majority of life forms we now encounter around the world, we eliminate far more niches than we create. We drive species and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate than existed before and everywhere diminish productivity and stability."
-E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Chapter 5
My question is, in the absence of coevolution, can humans learn to be good ecosystems engineers? Can we build cities that furnish many more niches for creatures other than ourselves (without causing us too much inconvenience), while failing to stomp on ecosystems elsewhere with massive ecological footprints? (Although perhaps stomping on things wouldn't be so bad, if we could follow the elephants' example . . .)
What might such a city look like? Would it be some form of arcology, a single nearly-self-sufficient structure? Would it be like a strange forest in which the buildings look and act like trees? Or would it be stranger still?
