In defense of rethinking subdivisions and fragmentation -- using Blender 3d to teach urban ecology

 Chapter ?:  In defense of Subdivisions and Fragmentation

We’ve been taught, as environmentalists, to eschew “subdivisions” and fight “fragmentation”.  We learn in biology about how “habitat fragmentation” is the nemesis of conservation, understanding how the “edge effect” leads to erosion of any given conservation area.  We use the idea of an ice cube -  plop a big hunk of ice down on the table and it will slowly melt.  Chop it up into small fragments with a radically increased surface area to volume ratio and you can watch it melt away in real-time.  It is chilling (if you will excuse the backwards pun).
But is this the way landscapes hosting wildlife really operate? Is this the way the other ANIMALS and plants (and fungi and microbes) see it (or “experience it”)?

There is also the idea in biology that “MOSAIC” landscapes support more biodiversity.  Permaculture teaches us how to USE the edge effect to increase the niche space of an landscape.  By contouring an environment with berms and swales, with patches of forest and savannah, wetland  lowlands and dryland uplands, we can radically increase the amount of habitat for both crops and wildlife. The increased surface area can be everything from a marvelous location for microbiome/biofilm formation to new nesting sites and shelters for all kinds of critters.

So, should we be in praise of and defense of fragmentation and subdivisions too?

I think one of the big problems lies in the monolithic way we think of landscapes and the usual villain is the concept of heroes and villains, wildlife and humans, wilderness and the built environment, black and white, BINARY ways of thinking.
If we see “wilderness” as a big hunk of ice that is under siege by the melting effects of chainsaws and un-managed fires and impermeable paving over and cookie cutter housing construction and shopping mall development (And don’t forget the parking lots, Reg.  Yeah, the parking lots.), well then, of course fragmentation is a threat.  If we see the wilderness as a monolithic thing, as a virgin, inviolate in principle, ruined when deflowered figuratively and literally, then of course its invasion by “development” is a tragedy.  We use the words of the jealous patriarchy:  virgin forest, untrammeled, unspoiled wilderness.  This was the point made so eloquently by William Cronin in “Uncommon Ground” subtitled “Getting Back to the Wrong Wilderness”.  He and the authors in that landmark edited volume took pains to point out that what conservationists saw as “wilderness”, particularly our majestic national parks, were really gardens managed by native americans gardens that flourished with biodiversity precisely because their indigenous stewards managed the landscape with prescribed burns and culling and pruning and influencing species composition. 21st century science has shown us that the more predators in a mature and complex environment, the more prey species.  Today’s archeology, documented and  explained in “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and Wengrow, shows that the native peoples of Tampa and Lousiana actually INCREASED the abundance and biodiversity of shellfish beyond what natural systems devoid of human presence could have done.   Humans can be VERY good IF we have the right ethics.

Imagine, our built environment, our buildings and the fences that subdivide the land COULD (theoretically) IMPROVE the prospects for wildlife survival. We could make them THRIVE. We could create a true ZOOTOPIA.

But we need to change our paradigm. And we need to rethink sprawl – what we sprawl, how we sprawl, WHY we sprawl.

Supposing we look at fragmentation and subdivision in a new way.
Blender 3D may help us visualize this “new look” (after all, it is visualization software).

Let’s start with a plane.  A nice green plane:

What could we grow on a simple plane?
Well, clearly we can grow grass.  A Florida man’s dream: a monocrop of St. Augustine which we can mow and blow and weed and spray with biocides.

This is what an unfragmented plane looks like with no subdivisions on it.  Because of the way Blender 3D and other spatial geometry program works, there really isn’t much we CAN put in that plane.  I mean, we could substitute the grass picture with another picture that has a little more diversity in it, but it would be an illusion – the plain plane geometry doesn’t have any SPACE for more than one object.

Here is what it looks like with a picture of a lawn that has a few more species on it:

But all I can put on that single, untrammeled plane of plain geometry is ONE single image.  I certainly can’t put any flowers on it, or any critters.  To do that I would have to ADD geometry.
How do we do that?
By SUBDIVIDING THE LAND.

Yup, we create a subdivision:

Here is the plane without subdivision:


And here is the plane plainly subdivided into “four lots”:

Now I can QUADRUPLE the amount of biodiversity on this landscape:



I was able to subdivide the plane into four lots and create 4 new materials with image textures and assign each different plant species to a different plot.  I’ve multiplied the amount of possible biodiversity.

So now logic suggests that, up to a limit (depending on available resources and the needs of different species) I can keep subdividing the land and adding new organisms, creating vastly more niche space with each subdivision.  It is a lot like the keyhole garden I built at Rosebud out of cinder blocks, each a microhabitat for a different plant.



3D artists get it.  Developers don’t.
The problem is that 3D artists are subdividing to make things MORE COMPLEX while developers are subdividing to make things simpler.  Developers, as Yale professor James C. Scott points out in “Seeing Like a State: How Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have FAILED”, (which all of us in graduate school in Urban Planning cut our teeth on)  are trying to “dummify” the population and render landscapes more “legible” by the most myopic of humans. They are looking to create, as one HOA board member in the sprawl that surrounds Rosebud Continuum wrote to me, “UNIFORMITY and CONFORMITY”.  He wrote to me in our facebook group “Hale No! The Citizens Coalition for Responsible Development” as if it should be obvious that such uniformity and conformity were virtues worth defending. He really meant he has fantasies of control and wants to “retain resale value” to other possible home owners who harbor such fantasies.  He likes cookie cutter homes with nondescript lawns because of their sheer simplicity.

So let’s push back. 

Let’s change the paradigm and challenge the developers and commissioners and planners using the deeper understanding we get from our studies.  They are using the notion of “subdivisions” all wrong. They are applying the idea of “fragmentation” spuriously.

These are the mental transformations that occur to those of us who work in 3D/5D visualization; we begin to see how people are misusing terminology and abusing possibility management.

Here is my Blender plane subdivided into 16 lots, each with a different material assignment:

As you can see above, because I have designated a new material space to each subdivision, I can now go into the Shader Menu and add at Texture Coordinate Node and a Mapping Node to the Image and Principled BSDF and the Material Output and add a Florida Panther.  The image came in far too large for the actual square, so I’ve made these modifications (connecting the UV of the Texture Coordinate to the Vector of the Mapping Node and connecting its mapping node to the Mapping Node of the image), modifications which are metaphorically akin to what a zoo or wildlife park would have to do, feeding and taking care of the panther whose real range outside the zoo is thousands of kilometers – no, you can’t really fit panthers into a zoo exhibit.
But these are the sacrifices we make when we subdivide.


At least we can put a white tailed deer in the landscape to sustain the panther – it comes in too big, of course, for the square size we assigned it, so we have to modify the scale:

The point should not be lost on you though – if we didn’t subdivide the landscape and all it had on it was grass, neither panther nor deer could survive at all.  A monolithic landscape contains too few “textures”.  It becomes obvious if you think of a texture as a niche space.  An ecosystem is made up of a huge variety of overlapping niches. It is a food web, enormously complex. 
To model it properly you can’t use a two dimensional plane or any rigid geometric volume. 
Cubes don’t work, Cones and Pyramids and Spheres don’t work – the biosphere isn’t a sphere at all, there is nothing “smooth about it”.

Yet we insist on building cubes and rectangular boxes to live in.



Blender shows us, however, that when we further subdivide the world in 3 dimensions, adding a vertical component, we can radically increase the biodiversity – the cube that stands in for our house or building has a roof space amenable to rooftop gardens, if only we would elevate biodiversity in both physical space and in our esteem and importance.
The side walls receiving sunlight (east, south, and west in the northern hemisphere) are now amenable to the wall gardens made famous in Madrid.  And this is a mere box – imagine if we were to subdivide the space further, like the Empire State building – why we could create a modern analog of the hanging gardens of Babylon!

From the perspective of wildlife, every surface, every crenulation, every crevisse and abutment screams out “niche space available FOR RENT”.  The problem isn’t fragmentation or subdivision, it is UNIFORMITY AND CONFORMITY.  It is a LACK OF SUBDIVISION, a lack of true space – niche space – which is the thing that, from an animal or algae or fungus or microbes or plants perspective, is what really counts.

We need more subdivisions – planned well, to maximize biodiversity.  The rest will take care of itself, if only we allow it!

AD Heroes of the Year

 

To listen to the news, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that garbage was some kind of insoluble “wicked problem” – methane from your food waste is said to be the third largest contributor to the greenhouse gasses causing global warming-induced climate change, macro-plastics and micro-plastics in our oceans are said to be soon more numerous than fish – and it is all true.  Yet to listen to the cheerful awardees and speakers and vendors at the “AD (Anaerobic Digestion) and Biogas Industry Awards” conference sponsored by ADBA (Anaerobic Digestion & Bioresources Association) and WBA (World Biogas Association)  in Birmingham, England, which I attended a couple of weeks ago, you would be hard-pressed not to believe that humanity was joyfully in control of and basically done with the garbage problem – “consider it solved”!

And that is all true too.
In certain places.

I know it for a fact – I live and teach several of these paradigm-shifting solutions at home every day – and because of that fact, I was one of those cheerful, optimistic awardees, nominated for and ultimately receiving and taking home the “AD Hero of the Year” award for 2023.  

Since I moved to Egypt in 2003 to work on my Ph.D. in the Environmental Analysis and Policy field, specializing in Urban Planning and Urban Ecology,  I have devoted the last two decades  to studying and helping solve the global garbage crisis. 

The Awards Ceremony in Birmingham brought me and my team from our NGO “Solar C³ITIES” (“Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Solutions”) not just to receive accolades for our work in zero-waste education over the past decade and a half but to participate in a conference whose stakeholders are unabashedly enthusiastic about sensible and often simple technologies and the policies emerging around them which we are, as scientists and engineers, educators and businesses and policymakers, uncharacteristically confident can eliminate all of the problems associated with “production and consumption residuals” – valuable resources that people outside our industry erroneously consider “waste”.

Our Solar CITIES team members were recognized with 6 finalist nominations and  4 awards in three categories:

I gratefully received “AD Hero of the Year”.  Our Solar C³ITIES co-founder and my former student Kathy Puffer received the “Women in Biogas” Award, and our other co-founder and Solar C³ITIES CEO Janice Kelsey was short-listed as a ”Women in Biogas” finalist. 

Solar C³ITIES was short-listed for “Education Campaign of the Year,” while Kathy Puffer’s online “Biogas Education Hub,” which grew out of our applied STEM curriculum development work together in New York and Haiti, received “Highly Commended”.  Janice was brought up on stage to accept the winning  Education Campaign Award for our Solar C³ITIES  colleague Boma Mohammed Chi who took his own training with Janice and Solar CITIES. He has since become a world-renowned trainer-of-trainers, founding the “Common Initiative Group / RRECAM Group”, teaching small-scale biogas in his native Cameroon. 

The recognition our work received last month speaks to an old adage that has become a  “lived truth” that we have “life-tested” every day since I first incorporated Solar C³ITIES  in  Cairo, Egypt, in 2006 while living and working with the Zabaleen trash-recycling community:

  “One man’s trash is another’s treasure”. 

We have been teaching our own applications of these ideas in our international Solar C³ITIES network for the last 17 years. For 15 of them, we have been building our own household and community-scale biodigesters, teaching others around the world how to build and operate their own, too, so as to eliminate 100% of so-called “organic waste” at the point of generation and rendering the rest of the “trash” amenable to efficient and cost-effective recycling – even ‘upcycling’ . We learned from the Zabaleen – and quickly realized when we applied their paradigm to our own homes and communities  – that once you have removed or washed out the organic part of the ‘waste stream,’ (usually using it as a valuable input to a biodigester)  what remains behind (clean plastic, cardboard, paper, metal, glass) is now easy to shred, grind, granulate, crush and store. Because it no longer contains any material that would otherwise rot and stink and attract vermin, we can (and do!) easily transform it into value. 

 My wife and I stopped “taking out the garbage” five years ago. We turn all of our organics into clean fuel and fertilizer, as we have for the past 15 years, but are now selling or building with everything left over.  We will NEVER give away our “trash” to the municipality again!  

Transformed into slurries and powders and granules and fuel and fertilizer through our community scale home biogas systems and food grinders and shredders and hammer mills and other pieces of simple technology, 100% of our “garbage” is now valuable.   Even our #7 (“other” and supposedly “non-recyclable”)  plastic is now super useful (combined by us and our students with our crushed-glass-sand to make beautiful sculptures for the Florida Wildlife Corridor Curriculum Project at Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science Center).  We are an Education Hub in the “Precious Plastics Movement”.

Consider it solved; consider it done.

Likewise, the market-led and policy-driven ideas we are championing in our Solar CITIES PCGS think-tank/do-tank sustainability education approaches, ideas that were being lauded and celebrated at this international conference in England, are the result of people “seeing for themselves” what we know:  that forward-thinking municipalities now have the know-how, the knowledge base, the lived experience and ALL of the technology necessary to end the scourge of wasted resources once and for all. 

Educator-practitioners like me and our team and allies, who share our findings and experiences through open-source platforms like our “Solar C³ITIES Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners” Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/methanogens), where experiences and ideas and technologies are being shared daily by over 15,300 active members, and our blogs, like http://zabaleen.blogspot.com/, that teach everyone with an interest everything they need to know about “the gold in that there garbage” (ideas  I learned when doing my doctorate living with the Zabaleen people and other trash recyclers) are filled with hope because in our little corners of the world, most waste no longer exists. 

 These are messages I have been sharing and teaching in my work at the Patel College of Global Sustainability here at USF for the last 7 years in my “Food-Energy-Water Nexus” and “Climate Mitigation and Adaptation” and “Envisioning Sustainability” and “Waste Not Want Not: Repurposing Refuse as Resource” classes which are all extensions and complements to the Systems Thinking and Food, Energy and Water and Policy concentration and core courses taught in our college. 

In Systems Thinking, students learn that “transcending paradigms” usually has greater leverage than a mere change in the material or physical domains; we follow the work of Donella Meadows (Limits to Growth) and teach that the act of moving from “things-to-processes-to-goals-to-paradigms”  is often less effective than starting with a broader vision of sustainability and applying systemic change through improved intent, a change in the way we THINK of things. To end the wasteful scourge of “garbage,” we have to remove the metaphorical trash can in people’s heads, not just put more recycle bins at the curbside.

Critics of programs that rely on “technical fixes” to big problems will, of course, speak of “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” – they rightly tell us it doesn’t matter how nice or efficient the chairs are or how many recycle bins you have on deck,  or how comfortably positioned they are or how efficient the trash collection processes are if the entire ship is going down or if the garbage is being dumped overboard in the end. Nonetheless, when you find the right technologies and processes, such as we saw in action in England, you can’t help but leverage their existence into improved goals and paradigms. You can’t unsee the technical solutions once your mind is trained to see how they apply to the broader problems.  At some point, we all start to see the world through the lens of the Zabaleen, whose lived experience as entrepreneurial recyclers over the past century has taught them, and through them taught me, that there is “no such thing as waste”, that “waste” should never be used as a noun, but should always be a verb or adjective: folks, we are “wasting resources”, we are “wasting time”, all of those production and consumption residuals are marvelous and precious materials, valuable assets and resources, being “WASTED”.

A conference like the one surrounding the AD Industry Awards Ceremony in England is one that brings together systems thinkers, professional and academic,  who each are working in different domains, from the relational (transcending paradigms) to the material (changing techniques and creating more efficient technologies).  By moving through “intent”, “design”, “natural capital,” and “processes,” the paradigm of the World Biogas Council (which emphasizes a “win-win-win-win-win” approach to materials management)  shows its power for rapid true systemic change and explains the palpable sense of hope we all experienced in England and that made the awards, we can now leverage toward that change feel meaningful. 

We got to interact with the Dutch company Mavitec (https://mavitecgreenenergy.com/)

 with their mixed-municipal-waste solving “paddle mills”and micro-plastic elimination depacking equipment,  and with Kinetic Biofuels (https://kineticbiofuel.com/) with their surface-area-enhancing straw briquette system that eliminates the burning of agricultural residues;  we got to have long and inspiring talks with Thomas Runde of  Germany’s Tietjen GmbH (https://www.tietjen-original.com/produkte/schnelllaeufermuehlen/) whose all-purpose hammer mills and waste-to-value-chain processing equipment is being applied to developing countries that are too often on the receiving end of “first world” garbage dumping, and Germany’s Biotec ( https://www.biotec.de/)  whose slogan is “This is not a material problem, this is a behavioral problem”; we met with England’s Strategic and Technical Directors Ian Cain and Ian Sawle of  Ekogea (https://www.ekogea.co.uk/ ), who created a company to  make allies of bacteria and harness the magic of the microbiome to tackle climate change through a ‘Circular Farm Economy’; we chatted with the folks from  Ulster (https://ulstershredders.com/) and learned about their dual access industrial shredders that end the need for scarce landfills in island economies, PRM Waste Systems (https://www.prmwastesystems.com/), proving their “enviable reputation for cost-effective solutions to industrial waste and recycling problems”  and Atlantic Slurry Pumps (https://atlanticpumps.co.uk/), with a robust peristaltic design that enables the most caustic and abrasive materials to be moved to the right place in an industrial ecology. We talked with  India’s Rotopump company (https://rotopumps.com/)  with its superbly designed Progressive Cavity Pumps and their game-changing “durable single helix shaft in a replaceable double helix cavity” designs that reduce energy needs and O&M costs and move heavy sludges from where they are a burden to where they are a valued commodity.  We learned from  Spain’s Ferrobio (https://ferrobiogroup.com/en/home-2/) about their desulfurization and crop-enhancing iron hydroxide solutions, met with Brazil’s Mulheres Do Biogas (https://mulheresdobiogas.org)

, with their gender-empowering policy and education network, and visited hundreds of other solution providers. During those two days of presentations, workshops, and vendor meet-ups, we once again saw that everywhere out there is a vital piece of the paradigm-changing puzzle,  simply waiting for us to connect the dots.

Of course, this is where our NGO, Solar C³ITIES (https://solarcities.solutions/) , has always operated and what my teaching at PCGS (https://www.usf.edu/pcgs/about/th-culhane.aspx ) has always focused on: connect those community catalysts, inspire others to see things through the circular economy and zero-waste lens, and apply hands-on training and life-tested experience to eliminating “waste” wherever we go. 

 It is our dedication to this mission that brought us to the world stage at the ADBA Awards last month.  It is our continued focus on this very realistic goal that will drive our problem-solving work into the future, a future where we know there is only one place for humanity to put and keep its “garbage”: in the past!

_________________________________________________________________________

Photos for illustration can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set?vanity=thculhane&set=a.10167764961185551