Student reflection on urban ecology
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Philosophy has been integrated with climate adaptation and sustainability for generations, but lately has been gaining more popularity as more severe climate events take place. Climate, justice, and philosophy connections can be seen through various ideologies across the philosophical spectrum.
Postcolonial theory analyzes the lasting political, economical, social, and psychological effects of imperialism on indigenous populations. The theory also analyzes how the colonial powers of yesterday are shaping the world stage as powerhouse nations today. Postcolonial theory reflects on how smaller nations are still trying to find their cultural identities decades after establishing formal independence. It’s easy for us to link early colonialism to modern fascism and systemic racism. The forming of caste systems and grouping populations into an “other” category. This transfers to sustainable global policies because powerhouse nations are still making decisions that arguably are not helpful or useful to smaller and/or more isolated nations. Colonialism was never abolished, it’s a virus that mutated into and spread into modern principles.
A largely popular stewardship philosophy is the Sioux Nation’s seven generations principle that forces the public to think about the resources and lands in seven generations from now. The seven generations principle is simple yet powerful in that it forces everyday individuals, like myself, to think of the broader image, to think of the world in decades from now. Philosophy of stewardship forces us to realize that life, and resources to sustain life, are finite and every use and action taken now will have future consequences, both positive and negative. Environmental stewardship opens us up to become more responsible and compassionate than worrying only about immediate gratification.
After WW2, America had a huge production boom. How do you keep production at an all time high? Push for everyday folk to keep spending on products. As the madmen of advertising push for consumers to constantly purchase, it invites in the “shopaholic” habit also known as overconsumption. But why do marketing teams push for purchases? The answer is simple, capitalism doesn’t work if everyone wins. It needs poverty to function. Capitalism only works because the financial flood upwards toward the 1% is bankrolled by the purchases of the 99%. Capitalism is full of paradoxes! Another example is the commercialization of the agricultural sector. Commercializing agriculture has led to excessive food loss, soil degradation, and loss of crop diversity. Civil society challenges the global food system.
Eco-fascism has been the weapon of political powers to deter or limit time, effort, and capital from environmental conservation and remediation as it does not align with the party’s core values. By using the eco-fascism’s grounding philosophy, we can easily see irony. European settlers immigrated to a land, ravaging finite resources, livestock, stealing jobs by establishing the fur trade, and jump starting environmental degradation of the North American continent. SNL once had skit titled ‘the first thanksgiving’ with Will Ferrell pointing out all the aforementioned ironies.
A common Western ideology is that nature is inherently violent. This philosophy is known as the laws of the jungle or survival of the fittest. Its grounding principles are to take resources to put an individual ahead of the needs of the many. Unfortunately, this philosophy directly links to the economic theory of tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the Commons being a concept that shared resources, like international waters and large forests, are depleted much faster because of the ‘Us V. Them mentality. Sufficiency in a sustainable definition is to use resources only that you need to survive, not to gather and hoard. The sufficiency principle can also directly relate to the Tragedy of the Commons. Practicing sufficiency can prevent exploitations like overfishing and prevent total depletion of natural resources like forests and clean air.
While planning and constructing mega cities, we need to keep environmental stewardship and urban ecology at the front of our minds. Primarily how to reduce the degradation of soil from paved roadways. Soil degradation leads to difficulty in agriculture and crop yields, increased nitrogen and carbon dioxide emissions, and generating large amounts of construction and demolition wastes. Urban ecology can be transformative to bring some life back to the concrete jungle. Cities should not be the end of ecological functions and biodiversity, but simply a remodel of the existing space. If you remodel the kitchen in your home, is it still a kitchen or did it somehow change into a completely different room? The same logic applies to urban ecology in cityscapes.
Instead of treating roof tops and parking garages as dead space, they can become rooftop gardens and/or vertical farming. City infrastructure and collect rainwater and reclaim it for irrigation purposes across public green spaces. Urban infrastructure has potential to be carbon-sequesting green infrastructure with a little mental shift within society. The issue isn’t necessarily human presence and anthropogenic activities, its impervious surfaces replacing soils. The drawdown collusion of urban agriculture and green roofs applies greatly to sequester carbon in soil, reduce urban heat islands, increase food security via rooftop and vertical farming, improve stormwater management, and reduce flooding activity.
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