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!
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