the fertile paradox

smarterplanet:

Seeing Cities as the Environmental Solution, Not The Problem | Sustainable Cities Collective

For a long time, America’s environmental community celebrated wilderness and the rural landscape while disdaining cities and towns.  Thoreau’s Walden Pond and John Muir’s Yosemite Valley were seen as the ideal, while cities were seen as sources of dirt and pollution, something to get away from.  If environmentalists were involved with cities at all, it was likely to be in efforts to oppose development, with the effect of making our built environment more spread out, and less urban.

We’ve come a long way since then, if still not far enough.  We were and remain right to uphold nature, wildlife and the rural landscape as places critical to celebrate and preserve.  But what we realize now, many of us anyway, is that cities and towns – the communities where for millennia people have aggregated in search of more efficient commerce and sharing of resources and social networks – are really the environmental solution, not the problem:  the best way to save wilderness that are more, not less, urban and do not encroach on places of significant natural value.  As my friend who works long and hard for a wildlife advocacy organization puts it, to save wildlife habitat we need people to stay in “people habitat.” is through strong, compact, beautiful communities

I’ve been thinking this for some time now, especially after reading Brad Allenby. Cities are the oldest human institutions, so we must figure out a way to reconcile their demands with the Earth’s systems.