Sparing vs Sharing: The Great Debate Over How to Protect Nature

What is the best way to save nature – to cordon off areas for parks and open space or to integrate conservation measures on working lands? Recent research makes a case for each of these approaches and has reignited a long-standing debate among scientists and conservationists.

By Fred Pearce

Sparing vs Sharing: The Great Debate Over How to Protect Nature

A biologist believes that trees speak a language we can learn

Photo by Jeffrey L. Bruce

Written by
Ephrat Livni

 I’m in a redwood forest in Santa Cruz, California, taking dictation for the trees outside my cabin. They speak constantly, even if quietly, communicating above- and underground using sound, scents, signals, and vibes. They’re naturally networking, connected with everything that exists, including you.

Biologists, ecologists, foresters, and naturalists increasingly argue that trees speak, and that humans can learn to hear this language.

Many people struggle with this concept because they can’t perceive that trees are interconnected, argues biologist George David Haskell in his 2017 book The Songs of Trees. Connection in a network, Haskell says, necessitates communication and breeds languages; understanding that nature is a network is the first step in hearing trees talk.

For the average global citizen, living far from the forest, that probably seems abstract to the point of absurdity. Haskell points readers to the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador for practical guidance. To the Waorani people living there, nature’s networked character and the idea of communication among all living things seems obvious. In fact, the relationships between trees and other lifeforms are reflected in Waorani language.

In Waorani, things are described not only by their general type, but also by the other beings surrounding them. So, for example, any one ceibo tree isn’t a “ceibo tree” but is “the ivy-wrapped ceibo,” and another is “the mossy ceibo with black mushrooms.” In fact, anthropologists trying to classify and translate Waorani words into English struggle because, Haskell writes, “when pressed by interviewers, Waorani ‘could not bring themselves’ to give individual names for what Westerners call ‘tree species’ without describing ecological context such as the composition of the surrounding vegetation.”

Because they relate to the trees as live beings with intimate ties to surrounding people and other creatures, the Waorani aren’t alarmed by the notion that a tree might scream when cut, or surprised that harming a tree should cause trouble for humans. The lesson city-dwellers should take from the Waorani, Haskell says, is that “dogmas of separation fragment the community of life; they wall humans in a lonely room. We must ask the question: ‘can we find an ethic of full earthly belonging?’”

Haskell points out that throughout literary and musical history there are references to the songs of trees, and the way they speak: whispering pines, falling branches, crackling leaves, the steady hum buzzing through the forest. Human artists have always known on a fundamental level that trees talk, even if they don’t quite say they have a “language.”

Photo by Jeffrey L. Bruce

Redefining communication

Tree language is a totally obvious concept to ecologist Suzanne Simard, who has spent 30 years studying forests. In June 2016, she gave a Ted Talk (which now has nearly 2.5 million views), called “How Trees Talk to Each Other.”

Simard grew up in the forests of British Columbia in Canada, studied forestry, and worked in the logging industry. She felt conflicted about cutting down trees, and decided to return to school to study the science of tree communication. Now, Simard teaches ecology at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver and researches “below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction,” she says. As she explained to her Ted Talk audience:

I want to change the way you think about forests. You see, underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence.

Trees exchange chemicals with fungus, and send seeds—essentially information packets—with wind, birds, bats, and other visitors for delivery around the world. Simard specializes in the underground relationships of trees. Her research shows that below the earth are vast networks of roots working with fungi to move water, carbon, and nutrients among trees of all species. These complex, symbiotic networks mimic human neural and social networks. They even have mother trees at various centers, managing information flow, and the interconnectedness helps a slew of live things fight disease and survive together.

Simard argues that this exchange is communication, albeit in a language alien to us. And there’s a lesson to be learned from how forests relate, she says. There’s a lot of cooperation, rather than just competition among and between species as was previously believed.

Peter Wohlleben came to a similar realization while working his job managing an ancient birch forest in Germany. He told the Guardian he started noticing trees had complex social lives after stumbling upon an old stump still living after about 500 years, with no leaves. “Every living being needs nutrition,” Wohlleben said. “The only explanation was that it was supported by the neighbor trees via the roots with a sugar solution. As a forester, I learned that trees are competitors that struggle against each other, for light, for space, and there I saw that it’s just [the opposite]. Trees are very interested in keeping every member of this community alive.” He believes that they, like humans, have family lives in addition to relationships with other species. The discovery led him to write a book, The Hidden Life of Trees.

By being aware of all living things’ inter-reliance, Simard argues, humans can be wiser about maintaining mother trees who pass on wisdom from one tree generation to the next. She believes it could lead to a more sustainable commercial-wood industry: in a forest, a mother tree is connected to hundreds of other trees, sending excess carbon through delicate networks to seeds below ground, ensuring much greater seedling survival rates.

Foreign language studies

Seedling survival is important to human beings because we need trees. “The contributions of forests to the well-being of humankind are extraordinarily vast and far-reaching,” according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 2016 report on world forests (pdf).

Forests are key to combating rural poverty, ensuring food security, providing livelihoods, supplying clean air and water, maintaining biodiversity, and mitigating climate change, the FAO says. The agency reports that progress is being made toward better worldwide forest conservation but more must be done, given the importance of forests to human survival.

Most scientists—and trees—would no doubt agree that conservation is key. Haskell believes that ecologically friendly policies would naturally become a priority for people if we’d recognize that trees are masters of connection and communication, managing complex networks that include us. He calls trees “biology’s philosophers,” dialoguing over the ages, and offering up a quiet wisdom. We should listen, the biologist says, because they know what they’re talking about. Haskell writes, “Because they are not mobile, to thrive they must know their particular locus on the Earth far better than any wandering animal.”

https://qz.com/1116991/a-biologist-believes-that-trees-speak-a-language-we-can-learn/

How Ice Storms May Shape the Future of Forests

In order to study the effects of an ice storm on tree growth, susceptibility to pests and pathogens, changes in habitat for wildlife, a team of researchers created an ice storm at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire.

By the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

A team of scientists in New Hampshire recently succeeded in capturing one of nature's most destructive forces - ice - and corralling it in two large research plots on the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.
 
Scientists from the USDA Forest Service, Syracuse University, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Cornell University, University of Vermont, and the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation created an experimental ice storm that will improve understanding of short- and long-term effects of ice on northern forests.

Ice storms are a big deal in a changing world. Ice storms are expected to become more frequent and severe in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada as long term climate continues to warm while short term weather patterns still bring blasts of arctic air into the region.

Large Ice storms disrupt lives and damage infrastructure in towns and cities in northern New England, resulting in billions of dollars in damage. Ice storms also literally reshape forests. Heavy ice loads break branches and topple whole trees, resulting in reduced tree growth in ensuing years, increased susceptibility to pests and pathogens, changes in habitat for wildlife, and alterations in how nutrients like carbon and nitrogen cycle in the forest.

"Science is critical to our understanding of how climate change may shape forests in the future," said Tony Ferguson, acting director of the Northern Research Station and the Forest Products Laboratory. "Creating an ice storm is a very unique experiment that would not be possible without all of our partners and funding from the National Science Foundation."

While ice storms are a powerful force in forests, they are also inherently difficult to study because scientists, like citizens, have little lead time on when and where these storms are going to occur. Scientists at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest are changing that equation, and instead of waiting for the next big storm to hit, they are creating their own artificial ice storms using high-pressure firefighting pumps and hoses to spray water high up into the forest canopy during a cold snap. They are measuring the obvious and immediate downing of limbs and trees, as well as subtler longer term growth responses, interactions with invasive species, and impacts on forest nutrient cycling.

"This research will provide the scientific community, land managers and the concerned public greater insight on the impacts of these powerful, frightening, and curiously aesthetic extreme winter weather events on ecosystem dynamics in northern hardwood forests," said Lindsey Rustad, team leader at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest and an investigator on the ice storm experiment.

"Ice storms are a great example of extreme weather events with complex outcomes. The experimental ice storm is part of a comprehensive study of ice storms and their effects at Hubbard Brook, which also includes examining forest recovery from a severe ice storm in 1998, developing and applying models to depict the climate conditions that result in ice storms and forest ecosystem effects, and associated outreach and education," said Charles Driscoll, a professor at Syracuse University and investigator for the Hubbard Brook ice storm experiment.

In addition to Rustad and Driscoll, investigators in the experiment include John Campbell and Paul Schaberg of the USDA Forest Service; Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, and Sarah Garlick of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation. Partners include Peter Groffman of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Timothy Fahey of Cornell University, and Robert Sanford and Joe Staples of the University of Southern Maine.

The Hubbard Brook Ice Storm Experiment is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB-1457675 - Collaborative Research: Understanding the Impacts of Ice Storms on Forest Ecosystems of the Northeastern United States).

The mission of the Forest Service's Northern Research Station is to improve people's lives and help sustain the natural resources in the Northeast and Midwest through leading-edge science and effective information delivery.

The mission of the Forest Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. The agency manages 193 million acres of public land, provides assistance to state and private landowners, and maintains the largest forestry research organization in the world.

Public lands the Forest Service manages contribute more than $13 billion to the economy each year through visitor spending alone. Those same lands provide 20 percent of the nation's clean water supply, a value estimated at $7.2 billion per year. The agency has either a direct or indirect role in stewardship of about 80 percent of the 850 million forested acres within the U.S., of which 100 million acres are urban forests where most Americans live.

How Ice Storms May Shape the Future of Forests

Biophilic Cities: What Are They?

Central Park in New York City, a world landmark of biophilia and nature preservation.   Biophilia is a term popularized by Harvard University myrmecologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson to describe the extent to which humans are hard-wired to need connection with nature and other forms of life. More specifically, Wilson describes it this way: “Biophilia…is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.” (Wilson, 1993, p.31). To Wilson biophia is really a “complex of learning rules” developed over thousands of years of evolution and human-environment interaction.

Evidence of the emotional and psychological benefits of nature is mounting and impressive (research shows its ability to reduce stress, to aid recovery from illness, to enhance cognitive skills and academic performance, to aid in moderating the effects of ADHD, autism and other child illnesses). Recent research suggests even that we are more generous in the presence of nature; all these values are in addition to the immense economic value of the ecological services provided by natural systems. Support for the practice of biophilic design has been growing and there are now many exemplary examples of buildings that seek to integrate natural features and qualities. We recognize the need for biophilic workplaces, for healing gardens and spaces in hospitals, and for homes and apartments that provide abundant daylight, natural ventilation, plants and greenery. Less attention, however, has been focused on the city or urban scale, despite the fact that the planet continues an inexorable trend in the direction of urbanization. Urban residents need nature more than ever, and much work is needed to find creative and effective means for incorporating it into urban environments. It is likely that the benefits of close contact with nature are deeper and even more profound, and the potential to make a difference by integrating nature directly into our lives, even greater than we realize. Nature ought not to be an afterthought, and ought not to only be viewed in terms of the (considerable to be sure) functional benefits typically provided (benefits of trees, green rooftops, wetlands for managing stormwater, for mediating air and water pollutants, for addressing urban heat island effects, and so on). The elements of a deeper concept of integrating nature into everyday living include a recognition of some of the following:

Important Ties to Place. There are considerable place-strengthening benefits and place-commitments that derive from knowledge of local nature; from direct personal contact; enhanced knowledge, and deeper connections = greater stewardship, and willingness to take personal actions on behalf of place and home; Connections and Connectedness. Caring for place and environment, essential for human wellbeing and in turn essential ingredient in caring for each other; A Need for Wonder and Awe in Our Lives. Nature has the potential to amaze us, stimulate us, propel us forward to want to learn more and understand more fully our world; Nature adds a kind of wonder value to our lives unlike almost anything else; Meaningful Lives Require Nature. The qualities of wonder and fascination, the ability to nurture deep personal connection and involvement, visceral engagement in something larger than and outside oneself, offer the potential for meaning in life few other things can provide;

Urbanists and city planners have special opportunities and unique obligations to advance biophilic city design, utilizing a variety of strategies and tools, applied on a number of geographical and governmental scales. The agenda is one that must extend beyond conventional urban parks, and beyond building-centric green design. It is about redefining the very essence of cities as places of wild and restorative nature, from rooftops to roadways to riverfronts. It is about understanding cities as places that already harbor much nature and places that can become, through bold vision and persistent practice, even greener and richer in the nature they contain.   What a biophilic city is or could be is an open question, and it is hoped that this website will help to stimulate discussion of this. As a tentative starting point I offer some of the following as key qualities of biophilic cities:           Biophilic cities are cities of abundant nature in close proximity to large numbers of urbanites; biophilic cities are biodiverse cities, that value, protect and actively restore this biodiversity; biophilic cities are green and growing cities, organic and natureful; In biophilic cities, residents feel a deep affinity with the unique flora, fauna and fungi found there, and with the climate, topography, and other special qualities of place and environment that serve to define the urban home; In biophilic cities citizens can easily recognize common species of trees, flowers, insects and birds (and in turn care deeply about them); Biophilic cities are cities that provide abundant opportunities to be outside and to enjoy nature through strolling, hiking, bicycling, exploring; biophilic cities nudge us to spend more time amongst the trees, birds and sunlight. Biophilic cities are rich multisensory environments, the where the sounds of nature (and other sensory experiences) are as appreciated as much as the visual or ocular experience; biophilic cities celebrate natural forms, shapes, and materials; Biophilic cities place importance on education about nature and biodiversity, and on providing many and varied opportunities to learn about and directly experience nature; In biophilic cities there are many opportunities to join with others in learning about, enjoying, deeply connecting with, and helping to steward over nature, whether though a nature club, organized hikes, camping in city parks, or volunteering for nature restoration projects. Biophilic cities invest in the social and physical infrastructure that helps to bring urbanites in closer connection and understanding of nature, whether through natural history museums, wildlife centers, school-based nature initiatives, or parks and recreation programs and projects, among many others; Biophilic cities are globally responsible cities that recognize the importance of actions to limit the impact of resource use on nature and biodiversity beyond their urban borders; biophilic cities take steps to actively support the conservation global nature; These are but a few of the ways a city might be seen as biophilic. What do you think? Are there other ways, and other important qualities or dimensions not listed above? http://biophiliccities.org/biophiliccities.html

Invasive Plants Are More Likely to Be Replaced by Other 'Invasives'

This photo shows the African invader Melinis minutiflora in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park when first studied (left) and 20 years later. (Credit: UCSB)

Among the most impressive ecological findings of the past 25 years is the ability of invasive plants to radically change ecosystem function. Yet few if any studies have examined whether ecosystem impacts of invasions persist over time, and what that means for plant communities and ecosystem restoration.

UC Santa Barbara's Carla D'Antonio, Schuyler Professor of Environmental Studies, has conducted one of the only long-term studies of plant invader impacts that spans two decades. Returning to the same grass-invaded field sites in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park that she used in her 1990-1995 studies, D'Antonio, along with postdoctoral scholar Stephanie Yelenik, gathered new data that shed light on mechanisms regulating exotic plant dominance and community change through invasion. The findings are published online today in Nature.

"We were able to take advantage of detailed studies I and others had conducted in the 1990s. We permanently marked sites we had set up and were able to go back and gain insight into how plant invasions changed over time without management," said D'Antonio, who also is a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. "Such studies are important because managers have little money to control invasive species or to study how impacts might change without management."

"Non-native plants can have very large impacts on ecosystem functioning -- including altering groundwater, soil salinity or pH and pollination syndromes," said lead author Yelenik, who earned her doctorate from UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology and now works for the U.S. Geological Survey's Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center on the island of Hawaii.

When D'Antonio and Yelenik revisited the study sites, they noticed that the invasive exotic perennial grasses (primarily an African invader called Melinis minutiflora) were dying, so they decided to repeat measures of nutrient cycling and plant community change. They found that the grasses' self-reinforcing effects on soil nutrients had disappeared and the percentage of invader coverage had declined.

Data showed that in the past 17 years, nitrogen mineralization rates at the sites dominated by the exotic grasses declined by half, returning them to pre-invasion levels. Nitrogen mineralization is the process by which organic nitrogen is converted to plant-available inorganic forms.

"Measuring mineralization the way we do is extremely time-consuming and expensive, so we did it in snapshots of time (mid-1990s versus 2010-2012)," Yelenik explained. "This is less than ideal because differences between the two study periods could be due to differences in rainfall."

To eliminate rainfall as a factor, the researchers examined long-term rainfall data for the region to determine if a relationship exists between nitrogen mineralization and rainfall during the study years. The data showed that rainfall during the two study periods was similar. In addition, rainfall did not correlate with differences in mineralization between time points. A mineralization assay in the lab, where moisture was kept constant, showed similar patterns to the researchers' most recent field data, gathered in 2011 and 2012. Taken together, these results suggest that nitrogen mineralization variations between the 1990s and recent years were not due to differences in rainfall.

While the study demonstrates that ecosystem impacts and feedbacks shift over time, it also indicates that this may not necessarily help native species' recovery. Yelenik and D'Antonio conducted a large outplanting experiment to test how a suite of native and exotic woody species responded to shifting ecosystem impacts. They added nitrogen fertilizer to mimic earlier stages of Melinis invasion and reduced Melinis competition to mimic patches during late invasion.

Similar responses occurred in five of the seven outplanted species: Growth rates and survivorship increased due to reduced competition from the exotic grasses as well as nitrogen additions. This indicates that the changing impacts of the grass over time do not alter the seedlings' ability to grow in the ecosystem.

Two nitrogen-fixing trees were exceptions: the native Hawaiian tree Acacia koa and the exotic tree Morella faya (from the Canary Islands but invading Hawaii today). These species did much better in later Melinis invasion conditions, and Morella faya did particularly well.

"The non-native Morella faya did a lot better for various reasons, but primarily because it has a faster growth rate," Yelenik said. "Plus in our sites it is bird-dispersed, which means it gets around and is, in fact, moving into the sites at a frightening rate. By contrast, the native Acacia did reasonably well in the experiment, but it just does not have as robust a growth rate as Morella. It is a very slow disperser and sparse in the region so we are not seeing it entering the sites on its own."

An important lesson here is that even if plant invasions can slow down on their own given enough time, native species may need further assistance in order to make a comeback, the researchers said. Other invaders may be poised to take advantage of reduced competition from the original invader.

"Knowing the mechanisms of how and why invasions alter ecosystems is insightful for predicting what will happen, but without further management we may not get native species back," Yelenik said. "When we see non-native species dying back and getting patchy, that may be the time to plant native species. It might turn out to be the most cost-effective way to get an ecosystem back to a more desirable state."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131120143756.htm

Rich Biodiversity Can Exist in Cities

Biodiversity Hotspots The biodiversity hotspots hold especially high numbers of endemic species, yet their combined area of remaining habitat covers only 2.3 percent of the Earth's land surface. Each hotspot faces extreme threats and has already lost at least 70 percent of its original natural vegetation. Over 50 percent of the world's plant species and 42 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate species are endemic to the 34 biodiversity hotspots.

With proper planning and management, cities can retain substantial components of native biodiversity
  
Despite what is often commonly believed, fact is that many cities have high species richness. Several are even located within globally recognized "biodiversity hotspots"—areas with exceptionally high biodiversity (at least 1,500 endemic plant species) that have lost at least 70% of their original habitat area.

Some notable examples of cities with rich biodiversity are found on nearly all continents and latitudes - Berlin, Chicago, Curitiba, Kolkata, Mexico City, Montreal, Nagoya, New York City, São Paulo, and Singapore, to name but a few.

Many cities also contain protected areas within or just outside their borders that provide important contributions to biodiversity. In Cape Town, Table Mountain National Park, an iconic landmark extraordinarily rich in endemic plants and animals, is entirely surrounded by the municipality. In Mumbai, Sanjay Gandhi National Park—known for its dense semi-evergreen forests, 280-plus species of birds, 150 species of butterflies, and 40 species of mammals, including a small population of leopards—protects 104 square kilometers entirely within a megacity. In Stockholm, the National Urban Park comprises 2,700 hectares with high biodiversity, right in the city center.

 Global Species Richness Centers of richness for mammals, amphibians and birds listed with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Connecting fragmented ecosystems is also likely to increase ecological functionality as a whole and therefore to maximize the ecosystem services offered. There are diverse and innovative ways to connect natural ecosystems. Planting trees with overarching canopies can help small mammals, birds, and insects cross roads and highways. Roadside planting that mimics the multilayering of forests—for example, composite of tall trees, medium-sized trees, shrubs, and understory vegetation—can cater to a diversity of animal users. Ecolinks such as underground tunnels and vegetated overhead bridges can help connect natural areas. All of these efforts can complement the important roles played by protected areas in cities.

Many tools exist to help cities manage their biodiversity. One such tool is the City Biodiversity Index (or CBI, also known as the Singapore Index). This and many other initiatives can help cities conserve and manage their biodiversity.

AICHI TARGET 5: By 2020, the rate of loss of all natural habitats, including forests, is at least halved and where feasible brought close to zero, and degradation and fragmentation is significantly reduced.

Cities can help preserve forests and wetlands of critical biodiversity by ensuring the connectivity of existing and future protected areas. Managing footprints (best done at the provincial, state, or regional level) can also make a difference.

AICHI TARGET 12: By 2020 the extinction of known threatened species has been prevented and their conservation status, particularly of those most in decline, has been improved and sustained.
Campaigns by scientific institutions, zoos, museums, and aquaria— where city and regional authorities often have a managing interest—can raise critical attention and funds and provide technical assistance for the conservation of threatened species, even across the globe.
 

 World Protected Areas Protected areas or natural parks are locations which receive protection because of their recognized natural, ecological and/or cultural values.

Cape Town
  
With a population of just under 3.7 million people and a land area of 2,500 square kilometers (0.2 percent of South Africa's total land area), Cape Town supports 50 percent of South Africa's critically endangered vegetation types and about 3,000 indigenous vascular plant species. Cape Town falls within the globally recognized biodiversity hotspot known as the Cape Floristic Region; of the 18 vegetation types in the city, 11 are critically endangered and 3 are endangered. Although this statistic in part reflects severe land-use pressure, it also disproves the common assumption that cities cannot have high levels of biodiversity. What's more, many of the plant species found in metropolitan Cape Town are endemic—found nowhere else on Earth.

São Paulo
  
São Paulo, Brazil, is the most populous city in the Southern Hemisphere and the third largest city in the world, with more than 11 million inhabitants. This megacity contains biodiversity from the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest, a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot. Twenty-one percent of the city is covered by dense forest in various stages of ecological succession, but these remnants are under severe threat from the unrestrained occupation of both low-income housing and luxury condominiums. An impressive 1,909 plant species and 435 animal species have been recorded in the city, with 73 of the animal species endemic to the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest. The city's Green Belt Biosphere Reserve, part of UNESCO's Mata Atlantic Biosphere Reserve, protects remnants of this rainforest as well as associated ecosystems.

City Biodiversity Index
 
The City Biodiversity Index, or CBI, also known as the Singapore Index on Cities' Biodiversity, is a self-assessment tool that encourages cities to monitor and evaluate their progress in conserving and enhancing biodiversity. More than 50 cities around the world are in various stages of testing the CBI and providing data for it. It currently comprises 23 indicators in three components: native biodiversity, ecosystem services provided by biodiversity, and governance and management of biodiversity. Stakeholders such as universities and civil society can assist in providing data. A platform for cities to share their experiences in applying the index has been particularly useful to cities considering using the CBI.

Other applications for the CBI have also surfaced. For example, information from it can be used in the decision-making and master planning of cities; it can assist policy- and decision-makers in allocating resources and prioritizing projects; good practices can be made into case studies for sustainable development; and some of the indicators can form the basis for calculating the economic value of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The CBI is also a useful public communication tool for city authorities. With ongoing refinement and improvement, it is continually becoming more valuable.

Singapore
 
By virtue of its geographical location, Singapore has a rich natural heritage. More than 10 ecosystems are found in this highly urbanized city— state of 5 million people. Although much of its biodiversity disappeared during the British colonization, Singapore still has a wealth of flora and fauna. Among the native species recorded are 2,145 vascular plants, 52 mammals, 364 birds, 301 butterflies, 127 dragonflies, 103 reptiles, 400 spiders, 66 freshwater fishes, and 255 hard corals. Between 2000 and 2010, intensive surveys found more than 500 species of plants and animals new to Singapore, of which more than 100 were new to science. Nestled in the heart of Singapore and not more than 15 kilometers from the busiest shopping areas are the Central Catchment Nature Reserve and Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. A network of parks and park connectors permeate the island, allowing easy access to varied habitats rich in plant and animal life.

http://cbobook.org/key-messages-2.php?r=1&width=1440&utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=

Unregulated, Agricultural Ammonia Threatens U.S. National Parks' Ecology

Foggy Tremont River, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the deposition of nitrogen compounds from pollution far exceeds a critical threshold for ecological damage.

(Credit: © Dave Allen / Fotolia)

Thirty-eight U.S. national parks are experiencing "accidental fertilization" at or above a critical threshold for ecological damage, according to a study published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and led by Harvard University researchers. Unless significant controls on ammonia emissions are introduced at a national level, they say, little improvement is likely between now and 2050.
    

The environmental scientists, experts in air quality, atmospheric chemistry, and ecology, have been studying the fate of nitrogen-based compounds that are blown into natural areas from power plants, automobile exhaust, and -- increasingly -- industrial agriculture. Nitrogen that finds its way into natural ecosystems can disrupt the cycling of nutrients in soil, promote algal overgrowth and lower the pH of water in aquatic environments, and ultimately decrease the number of species that can survive.

"The vast majority, 85 percent, of nitrogen deposition originates with human activities," explains principal investigator Daniel J. Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). "It is fully within our power as a nation to reduce our impact."

Existing air quality regulations and trends in clean energy technology are expected to reduce the amount of harmful nitrogen oxides (NO_x) emitted by coal plants and cars over time. However, no government regulations currently limit the amount of ammonia (NH₃) that enters the atmosphere through agricultural fertilization or manure from animal husbandry, which are now responsible for one-third of the anthropogenic nitrogen carried on air currents and deposited on land.

"Ammonia's pretty volatile," says Jacob. "When we apply fertilizer in the United States, only about 10 percent of the nitrogen makes it into the food. All the rest escapes, and most of it escapes through the atmosphere." The team of scientists -- comprising researchers from Harvard SEAS, the National Park Service, the USDA Forest Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the University of California, Irvine -- presents evidence that unchecked increases in nitrogen deposition are already threatening the ecology of federally protected natural areas.

In many previous studies, environmental scientists have identified the nitrogen levels that would be ecologically harmful in various settings. The new Harvard-led study uses a high-resolution atmospheric model called GEOS-Chem to calculate nitrogen deposition rates across the contiguous United States, and compares those rates to the critical loads.

The findings suggest that many parks may already be suffering. In Eastern temperate forests, like those in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most sensitive elements of the ecosystem are the hardwood trees, which start to suffer when nitrogen deposition reaches approximately 3 to 8 kilograms per hectare, per year. According to the new study, the actual rate of deposition -- 13.6 kg/ha/yr -- far exceeds that threshold. In the forests of Mount Rainier National Park, it's the lichens that suffer first; their critical load is between 2.5 and 7.1 kg/ha/yr, and the deposition rate there is at a troubling 6.7 kg/ha/yr.

"The lichens might not be noticed or particularly valued by someone walking around a national park, but they're integral for everything else that's dependent on them," explains lead author Raluca A. Ellis, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard SEAS. She now directs the Climate and Urban Systems Partnership at the Franklin Institute.

Jacob, Ellis, and their collaborators predict that NO_x emissions from the United States will decrease significantly by 2050 (globally, those decreases may be offset to some extent by increases in industrialization overseas). But for ammonia, the story is different. The team predicts significant increases in the amount and density of agricultural land in the Midwest and the West -- to feed a growing population and to meet an anticipated demand for biofuels -- requiring more and more fertilizer.

"Even if anthropogenic NO_x emissions were globally zero, avoiding [critical load] exceedance at all national parks would require a 55% reduction of anthropogenic NH₃ emissions," their report states. How such a reduction would be achieved is a matter for further study. "Air quality regulations in the United States have always focused on public health, because air pollution leads to premature deaths, and that's something you can quantify very well. When you try to write regulations to protect ecosystems, however, the damage is much harder to quantify," says Jacob. "At least in the national parks you can say, 'There's a legal obligation here.'"

The project was funded by the NASA Applied Sciences Program through the Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, which is led by Jacob at Harvard and includes 23 researchers from numerous institutions. The National Park Service has been studying nitrogen deposition for some time now, typically in focused studies such as those at Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Teton National Park. The new collaboration has enabled many different research teams to unify their efforts and benefit from shared resources like the GEOS-Chem model, which was first developed at Harvard and has become an international standard for modeling atmospheric chemistry over time. Actual levels of future nitrogen deposition will depend on a complex interplay of economic, legal, and environmental factors.

"The point is, in the decades ahead, the problem in our national parks is not going to be solved by the reduction of NO_x emissions alone," explains Ellis. "It will require a targeted effort to control ammonia."

"It's a national issue, and I think that's why having the national perspective was so important," Jacob adds. "We've shown that most of the nitrogen deposition to parks in the United States is coming from domestic sources. It's not coming from China; it's not coming from Canada -- it's something we can deal with, but we need to deal with it at the national level."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131010205144.htm

Unified Architectural Theory

The Farnsworth House, by Mies van der Rohe, has influenced generations of architects — but is it really the best paragon for architecture?. Image © Greg Robbins

Architecture is a human act that invades and displaces the natural ecosystem. Biological order is destroyed every time we clear native plant growth and erect buildings and infrastructure. The goal of architecture is to create structures to house humans and their activities. Humans are parts of the earth’s ecosystem, even though we tend to forget that.

Logically, architecture has to have a theoretical basis that begins with the natural ecosystem. The act of building orders materials in very specific ways, and humans generate an artificial ordering out of materials they have extracted from nature and transformed to various degrees. Some of today’s most widely-used materials, such as plate glass and steel, require energy-intensive processes, and thus contain high embodied energy costs. Those cannot be the basis for any sustainable solution, despite all the industry hype.

Resource depletion and a looming ecological catastrophe are consequences of detachment from nature, and a blind faith in technology to solve the problems it creates.

Architectural theory, in the sense understood in this course, is a framework that studies architectural phenomena using scientific logic and methods of experimentation. Many experiments have been done by others, and we are going to apply them to architecture. Theory provides a model that explains investigations and observations about form and structure.

A successful theory will help us interpret what an architect does, even though each architect will likely have his/her own motivation and explanation. Nevertheless, the theory will allow us to compare among different types of buildings, and to evaluate how well those connect to users and with nature. We can understand how a building came about, and how it connects and interacts with its surroundings.

It will also be good if common people, not just architects, can understand architectural theory, and thus it should be formulated with that goal in mind. The advantages are that it is ordinary people who are going to inhabit those buildings, whereas architects can choose to live and work wherever they like. Another crucial point is that the majority of building activity is, and has always been, the erection of self-built informal settlements. People, not architects, build these structures.

Christopher Alexander has pioneered a theory of human-made order. It is based directly upon natural order, so there is neither contradiction nor confusion between the two types.
Alexander made five key assumptions that permitted him to pursue his work.

(1) Natural and artificial order rely upon the same mechanisms for their working.

(2) Natural order is self-organizing and self-correcting. What we observe is there because it works.

(3) Artificial order is not necessarily self-correcting, or maybe it is on a generational timescale so individuals are not going to notice it. As a result, human beings can do things to the natural environment and build buildings and structures that damage the world. It is not easy to diagnose what is good and distinguish it from what is bad.

(4) It is possible to use science to create diagnostic tools for what is good and bad in human creations — in how they affect the natural environment, including us humans.

(5) We can use the human body as a sensing instrument for what is good and bad in architecture. Basic assumption: human feeling is universal, and people share 90% of their responses, even if individuals come from different cultures or backgrounds.

To make good buildings, we need a worldview, a conception of the world that is healthy and that enables us to understand things deeply. A healthy worldview is based upon connectivity to the world: direct connection to the order of the universe and to natural processes as they are continuously occurring.

Transformations of the PIazza San Marco in Venice that preserve structural wholeness over about 200 years, part of a larger series over 1,000 years as shown by Christopher Alexander in his book, “The Nature of Order”. Image Courtesy of Nikos Salingaros

The opposite — detachment — leads to a dangerous condition where people analyze a situation as a mechanism isolated from the world. This is the model of a building or a city as a machine. Modern science is guilty of contributing to this disconnection from nature, since scientific models are necessarily self-contained and limited in scope — otherwise they would be useless.

Science gives us an excellent model of how something works as a mechanical system. Nevertheless, this is not a complete description even of the cases we do understand well. And there are a vast number of instances where we ignore any mechanical description at all of an observed phenomenon. What is completely missing from a strictly mechanistic worldview is human consciousness, our personal and emotional connection to the universe. This might not matter when investigating some technical problems, but it’s all-important for things that affect us, like architecture. Another significant consequence is the lack of value in a mechanistic worldview. A human connected to the universe knows the distinction between good and bad, true and false, beautiful and ugly. These qualities are not relative, and are not matters of opinion. A consumer disconnected from natural values, by contrast, can be fed toxic products and be made to believe they are good.

The way out of the present, highly restricted view of the universe is to develop an immensely more connected state between humans and their environment. Attention is given to what affects us reciprocally with the world, when we are tightly connected.

Following this reasoning, people have a shared basis for judgment, and can intuitively judge whether something has order or life, and expect their gut reaction to be 90% shared across cultures and distances. In this new worldview, ornament plays a critical role to connect humans with the order of the world. Ornament is thus intimately related to function in the non-mechanistic sense.

We wish to consider architecture and the production of human artifacts also as essential components of natural ecosystems. Order and life are related. Natural things have an intrinsic order, and life as we usually know it and understand it is simply an extension of that order. For this reason, human constructions should not damage or contradict natural order.

The earth’s ecosystems (many of which are connected to each other) contain, and are contained by other components that neither metabolize, nor replicate. But every layer of the system is interdependent. This property of life in inanimate objects and situations arises out of their degree of natural order, and the human body has evolved mechanisms to sense that order. Thus, it is not surprising to feel that something is “alive”, because of its geometrical properties, even though that object is not biological.

Biological organisms have the additional features of metabolism and replication. A very simple consequence of thinking of a building as a “living” entity is that it requires repair and restoration. This analogy with metabolism takes us away from a central tenet of 20th Century industrial architecture: the quest for absolutely permanent and weather-resisting materials. This search has become very expensive. But worse of all, it denies living qualities. Materials that do weather in fact produce buildings that are more in keeping with biological organisms. For example, the Ise Shrine Complex in Japan is re-built every 20 years.

The Ise Shrine: Deconstruction. Sketch by Miller Yee Fong, Architect. Image Courtesy of The Huffington Post

Buildings also engage in replication: if a form language is adopted by other builders, then the original prototype building is replicated in more copies, not exactly the same, but containing the same “genetic” information.

Since the perception of something as being “alive” is due to a very strong connection with our mind and body, there is a reciprocal effect: that object, place, or configuration makes us feel more alive. It is possible to find myriads of artifacts, buildings, urban spaces that feel “alive” and that in turn make us feel “alive”. They invariably come from vernacular traditions and hardly ever from design. The perceived living quality comes from specific geometrical configurations, and it is possible to discover the rules that generate a living quality. Even in non-traditional 20th-century examples of objects and places having perceived “life”, the life comes from their geometry. It is not based on concepts, or images, or fashions. By connecting to the thing, we feel that we are connecting directly with its maker, who therefore doesn’t hide behind any notions or ideas that contaminate its genuine character.

To get at a genuine understanding of architecture, it is useful to use the approach that scientists employ to discover nature’s secrets.

Edward Wilson outlines what science achieves:

(1) Systematic gathering of knowledge about the world, which is organized and condensed into basic principles as far as possible.
(2) Results must pass the test of independent and repeated verification.
(3) It helps to quantify information, for then, principles can use mathematical models.
(4) Condensation of information via systematization and classification helps in storage.
(5) A safeguard for truth comes from consilience: the horizontal links across diverse disciplines.

Consilience acts as a test for the soundness of a theory. Within itself, a theory might look good even when it contains fundamental flaws. Internal consistency can be misleading, since it could relate several false assumptions, but in a very convincing manner. We normally should be able to transition from one sound theory into another one that acts on a distinct domain. If there is a contradiction, then something is wrong. It could be that there is no barrier but a large gap, in which case that needs to be filled in.

Architectural theory can be formulated and verified by employing two mechanisms: internal hypotheses that are repeatedly verified, and external consilient links to other disciplines that have a verifiable basis. These include the hard sciences.

Good architecture is less of a reductionist discipline and must necessarily be a synthetic discipline. If it is applied in a reductionist manner, then it probably contains serious errors that damage the environment. To be adaptive means to synthesize many distinct responses to human needs and natural order.

Most important is for architecture to be directly linked to human evolution, the physical needs of the organism, and to use information according to evolved culture. Neglecting the biological origins of human needs and behavior detaches architecture from the world and from humanity. The architect should design a building that makes common people feel comfortable, and not to be liked just by architects. It should also adapt to its locality, not designed for somewhere else, or for no place in particular.

 The fractal pattern of self-organizing urbanism. Image Courtesy of Nikos Salingaros

Further Reading:


Christopher Alexander, The Phenomenon of Life, Prologue & Chapter 1, “The Phenomenon of Life” (Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, 2001).

Nikos Salingaros, “Architectural Theory”, extracts from Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction (Umbau-Verlag, Solingen, 2008).

Edward O. Wilson, “Integrated Science and the Coming Century of the Environment”, Science, Volume 279, No. 5359 (March 27, 1998), pages 2048-2049.

Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes

 

Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, by Louise A. Mozingo, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011. Hardback, 315 pages.

 
Frank Edgerton Martin

 An earlier version of this book review appeared in Landscape Architecture magazine in 2012.

 Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes explores the orgins of today’s corporate enclaves through three alluring Anglo-American landscape ideals: the “estate,” the “campus” and the “park.” In writing this new chapter in landscape history, Louise Mozingo, a professor in landscape architecture at Berkeley, offers fascinating insights into overlapping stories of technical research, the military-industrial complex, gender roles in the workplace, fear of the city during the 1960s, and fragmenting effect of the automobile.

 Landscape architects and planners should read this book for many reasons, not the least of which is that leaders of the profession—ranging from the Olmsted Brothers office to Peter Walker—played important roles in designing virtually every project discussed over six chapters. Suburban history is a relatively new field for research, but much has already been written on the rise of housing, manufacturing, and retail commerce outside the urban core. Mozingo tells the less known story of the rise of corporate workplaces outside traditional downtowns and in separation from the infrastructure of factories where many of today’s global corporations such as GE began. She argues that “pastoral capitalism” is a uniquely American invention that came into full force in the 1940s after years of suppressed investment in new building.

The Rise of Managerial Capitalism and the Corporate Campus

 One spark for this move to the countryside can be traced to the rise of managerial capitalism beginning in the 1920s. “Rather than conferring position based on ownership or nepotism,” Mozingo claims a the outset, “corporations awarded management authority to a meritocracy of salaried, professional managers.” Thus, talent attraction and retention mattered. Corporate leaders came to believe that with increasing traffic and pollution in core cities, white-collar workers, scientists, and executives might be happier in greener pastures. Yet there were deeper fears that drove leaders of such companies as General Foods and Connecticut General Life to the suburbs—including a desire to separate office workers from unionized locations, a sometimes not so subtle desire to exclude minorities from the mainline workforce, and even fear of nuclear attack focused on city cores.

 The corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park are three built responses that Mozingo investigates. The corporate campus was largely invented at the Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Designed by the Olmsted Brothers in the 1930s and early 1940s, the project evoked a fairly traditional campus model of connecting buildings surrounding a central open space. In terms of sheer numbers of discoveries, we might consider Bell Labs one of the most historically significant corporate landscapes of the twentieth century. “By 1948,” Mozingo explains, “Bell Labs produced discoveries that sealed the interlinked reputations of its management, scientists, and site. Its scientists invented the transistor and the bit (the basic mathematical unit of electronic information) and fundamentally revolutionized electronic technology and, arguably, human existence.” Not bad for just a few years of operation.

 Pastoral Modernism: The Illusion of Aradia and Natural Systems

 In terms of corporate design audacity, the real leap into the future came to fruition in 1956 when General Motors opened its new Technical Center near Detroit to centralize numerous advanced operations on one campus. Eero Saarinen developed five complexes of buildings housing styling, engineering, process development and research along with the Technical Center’s administrative offices. Landscape architect Thomas Church sited four weeping willow islands in a 22-acre lake at the center of the campus. He also set out a restrained palette of linear bosques, rectangular lawns, and a forest of trees encircling the site.

 Mozingo provides a fine description of how the landscape complemented the buildings with contrapuntal vegetative patterns and reflective water. In one of her best passages, she writes that the “design result was cinematic, more art direction than urban design, exhibiting a supremely dynamic sense of space. In the huge site, dramatic vistas were oblique and did not oriented to culminating axial viewpoints.” This was a new kind of campus meant to be seen from the window of a car (preferably a GM car), a new kind of research city with soaring fountains and a metallic exhibit pavilion dome serving, perhaps, as a new kind of temple. 

 From here, the story moves to the great “corporate estates” of the Connecticut General Life campus designed by SOM and the later John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois—a collaboration of Saarinen and Hideo Sasaki. Spanning a gentle ravine, the Deere headquarters completely hides surface parking and makes the landscape itself the star of the experience. Initially, Deere’s leaders feared that their farmer customers would see the new setting as overly opulent. But, as visitorship to the model exhibit center grew, it was obvious that Saarinen’s pioneering use of Cor-Ten steel in the buildings and Sasaki’s integration of building and site sent the perfect message: Deere is a growing, high-tech international company that has not forgotten its grounding in midwestern agriculture.

 Revisiting the Googleplex

Corporate office parks grew out of early experiments by Stanford and other universities to develop sites for research partnerships near their campuses. By the 1970s, Atlanta was ringed by 39 of them and, as with many regions, they were the sites of the greatest growth in white-collar employment. Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, began in an office park that it ultimately took over. The mighty Google’s “Googleplex” is also set in an office park in Mountain Lake California.

 Life and death come fast to today’s technology companies; and many new facilities are designed with “exit strategies” in mind. The oldest of Google’s buildings date to 1997 when they were built as research and development facilities for the late SGI (Silicon Graphics Incorporated). As I read this background and viewed the Terraserver photo in chapter 6, a flash of recognition struck me. I visited this former SGI campus with its sharp angled plazas designed by SWA shortly after it opened order to write a feature story for Landscape Architecture magazine. SGI was thriving then and “Google” was not even a popular word, let alone a verb.

 Mozingo’s lasting message is that even as corporations are merging, vanishing, and evolving ever more quickly, our paradigms for corporate site plans are largely unchanged over the last sixty years. From Sprint near Kansas City to Pepsico in Purchase, New York, both of which I have also covered for Landscape Architecture, buildings are sited around courts, ringed by parking, and set off from the thin suburban growth by open lawns and berms of trees.

 

Corporate Solipsism

 Most headquarters today are entirely closed to the public yet provide a tranquilizing sense of peace for their employees even as they sometimes manage environmentally-destructive operations around the world. Almost fully-reliant on car commuting and set in campuses the size of small colleges, they are also highly resource-consumptive. Mozingo believes that we have descended from the pastoral landscapes for community betterment proposed by Olmsted to a new kind of quiet illusion that she calls “corporate solipsism.” She argues that corporations might “ask themselves whether an unquestioned nineteen-century taste for retreat and verdant isolation applied to the workplace is the way forward on a planet of perilously compromised resources.”

 But, this sounds more like a landscape architect’s sensible plea for reason than one that makes bottom-line sense to stockholders. Pastoral Capitalism could be much more forceful in its conclusions and provocations. The forces of secrecy and isolation that drive corporations behind green lawns are also those that inflamed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lack of transparency and glaring social inequity cannot be concealed forever behind a nice façade, even if it is LEED certified.

 It has always been fairly easy to disparage suburban workplaces as “unsustainable” or “homogenous.” But a real critique can only happen when we begin to understand the interwoven stories of business and design innovation that created the pastoral capitalism we know today. Though far from complete, this book marks a beginning of such historic understanding.

 

 

Science for Designers: The Meaning of Complexity

By Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros

Today’s designers seem to love using new ideas coming from science. They embrace them as analogies, metaphors, and in a few cases, tools to generate startling new designs. (Computer algorithms and spline shapes are a good recent example of the latter.) But metaphors about the complexity of the city and its adaptive structures are not the same thing as the actual complexity of the city. The trouble is, this confusion can produce disastrous results. It can even contribute to the slow collapse of an entire civilization. We might think that the difference between metaphor and reality is so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning. And yet, such confusion pervades the design world today, and spreads from there into the general culture. It plays a key role in the delusional expectation that metaphors will create reality.

Psychiatrists speak of this as an actual disorder known as “magical thinking”: if our symbols are good enough, then reality will follow. In the hands of designers, this is very dangerous stuff. We see it at work in the failed iconic buildings that were sure to create economic development, or urban vitality, or greater quality of life purely because of a futuristic image. We see it also in the many “tokenistic” sustainability features (wind turbines, etc.) of other iconic new buildings whose actual performance in post-evaluation studies is woefully poor. From the perspective of design methodology, this phenomenon is an interesting and important design problem in its own right. We recognize it as a fundamental weakness of human thought, and need to adjust our design methodologies accordingly. In this process, the methodologies and insights of a humane science, applied by literate designers, can be invaluable.

Distinguishing physical from metaphorical complexity clarifies a presently confused and unsustainable situation, and can help us out of it (the ultimate aim of any science, and any philosophy). The topics of urbanism, architecture, product design, environmental design, sustainability, and complexity in science are all tightly interrelated. Humans “design” with much the same aim toward which nature “designs” — both aim to increase the complexity of a system so that it works “better”. “Better” in this sense means more stable, more diverse, and more capable of maintaining an organized state — like the health of an organism. We learn from the structures and processes by which nature designs, so that we can also create and sustain these more organized states. Some scientists shy away from the notion that nature “aims” for anything. But this begs the question: are we not part of nature, and do we not “aim” for something in our own designs, and in the other parts of our life (e.g. seeking our own health and wellbeing)? Then we must accept “aim” as a characteristic of at least some part of nature. Otherwise, we severely hobble the usefulness of the scientific tradition as a relevant tool for designers. (Indeed, we would set ourselves on a very dangerous philosophical path: in effect, rendering the very idea of intelligence — human or otherwise — as meaningless!)

Traditional city fabric evolved over generations as an extension of our own biology, thus representing an application of a kind of “collective intelligence” due to the system, not of any individual. Traditional Islamic urbanism, by Mustapha Ben Hamouche.

Let’s start instead from the premise that we are here, and need to make sense of our own situation and determine our aims. Then we can begin to ask, given this intentionality, what is the most intelligent approach we can take? How can we learn from the intelligence — the “intentionality” in that sense — of natural systems? This is now an urgent question because much of human production — especially since modern industrialization enabled us to do things with really big footprints — is intentional in the wrong sense. Instead of building up complex systems that work better within the natural systems that support them, they acquire a fragile, non-resilient complexity that works against nature. In this way, human systems of life, movement, production, and economies depend on ever more energy consumption just to keep running at the same pace, setting us up for an inevitable catastrophic scenario. At the same time, the design of our environment seems to be driven not so much by any intelligent intentionality as by images that are stubbornly, even religiously, adhered to, even as mounting evidence shows that those typologies are inappropriate for complex adaptive systems. How can we fix this extremely precarious situation?

What’s required is a paradigm shift in the way we perceive and act upon the systems that make our world function. Those systems are complex and adaptive — that is, their elements are mutually co-adapting and co-evolving, thereby forming an exceedingly complex pattern. Even so, such a pattern can be understood scientifically, and exploited by designers, following a new understanding of the phenomenon of complexity. This effort is part of the burgeoning, but historically recent, discipline of “complexity science” — the set of astonishing findings into topics like fractals, strange attractors, emergence, and algorithmic patterns. What these fields of investigation all have in common is the curious property of systems when a lot of elements are interacting. Complex systems take on entirely new characteristics that are very different from those with only a few elements — and usually impossible to predict. They have properties that are remarkably similar to living systems (which is no coincidence). For environmental designers and planners, knowing this phenomenon of “emergence” is the key to getting things right.

Cities, for example, are certainly complex adaptive systems, and so are most other kinds of human environments. If we are trying to solve the problems of cities, then we need to know the kind of problem we are dealing with. If we treat this as a search for simplicity, or perhaps, an artistic challenge of visual design, when it is really a problem of organized complexity obeying its own rules of evolutionary intelligence, then we are likely to make a mess of things. And yet, that is exactly what architects and planners have done in the past several decades. Complexity science was at its dawn when, in the middle 20th Century, the adaptive living fabric of our cities was gutted and replaced by a much more elementary, mechanical model of design. The result is a simplistic machine, intentionally far from natural complexity. This drastically reductive process was draped with more complex poetic analogies, which convinced society to implement crude models that substituted for a richly complex reality. Since then, the scientific discipline has advanced farther than anyone hoped, and has begun to tease out formerly inscrutable secrets of nature — the marvels of evolution, the behavior of Earth systems, even the workings of genetic processes. For geographers and planners, the phenomena of cities became more comprehensible too.

Self-generated city — disrespected by those designers who wish to impose their own will on cities, and by governments who want total control — yet representing a natural phenomenon as basic as life itself. Dharavi, India, by YGLvoices.

Many designers are still unaware of these developments. For them, design is essentially about conveying expressive meaning, symbolism, and metaphor. Others pretend to keep up with the times but don’t bother with generating adaptive structural complexity — they continue to use fashionable metaphors to build non-adaptive, dysfunctional architectural and urban forms. This is a distorted artistic heritage of design, not at all about understanding systems and their emergent properties, which has come to a frontal collision with its scientific heritage. Artists at some point became specialized cogs in the same commodified industrial machine. Their job was now to sprinkle “meaning” (metaphor, analogy, expressive character) onto top-down industrial structures, and give them an acceptable, or better yet marketably desirable, aesthetic character. Things really took off when this project came to be associated with the allure of fine art. You may want to protest here, and ask: isn’t it our job to symbolize the scientific spirit of our age, and the new cosmological view of nature? Yes, but not as a mere sugar coating, a razzle-dazzle product “theming” — the meaning should be embodied in the objectives we achieve with our designs, and the way they accommodate and improve human life.

The best architecture does not confuse these two aspects of life and art in a mutually destructive manner, but uses them to serve one another. When we paste a metaphoric “theme” over the design, after a few years, it begins to look ridiculous. That’s because the thing on the outside has no inherent relation to the thing on the inside — it’s little more than a veneer. And it works rather poorly. So the once-futuristic cases for old personal computers, the expression of another age’s romance with technology, now look absurd. The futuristic skins of famous art museums and concert halls are already stale and dated, so that now the only remaining customers for such a style are third-world countries playing catch up with Western architectural fashions. If, instead, we let the expression of the object grow from its complex relationship to its environment, and to the job it has to do for human beings, something remarkable happens: it takes on a kind of “classic” quality. The design seems almost to have “grown” that way, or to be inevitable — and then we say: “it’s a classic”. It is timeless. It will be valued by future generations just as we value (or ought to value) the greatest design achievements of previous generations. Alas, most design firms today don’t work towards this goal at all. Instead, they seek to attract attention through novelty and “theming”. They may give lip service to the approaches we discuss here, but without understanding the deeper methodological change those require. Though they are experts at glossy marketing in competing for major new projects and the practice of smooth talking to impress clients, they continue to do business as usual. A good designer is responsible for both implementation and adaptation. Do not confuse “intentionality” in a system changing itself so as to adapt — a sign of intelligence — with the intentions of a designer who ignores adaptation. The latter is a sign of unintelligent action. We see this over and over in products based strictly upon visual images. Dysfunctional satellite cities and suburbs were built in this manner.

Design “intentionality” increases complexity so as to make the system work in the best way possible, not only for its explicit function, but especially as it is embedded both within its context and its environment. The job weaves together many things — like a city does — thus the design has to embrace and encourage connectivity within diversity. The chore of design, in such a complex environment, is not to impose an overly simple order from above, but to help to orchestrate the diversity, using its own latent dynamics, into a more spontaneous kind of patterned order. When it succeeds, we recognize it as a beloved city that nourishes us in more ways than one. A model of organized complexity proposed by one of us in 1997 (and reprinted as Chapter 5 of our book A Theory of Architecture) finds a striking parallel in the “Integrated Information Model for Consciousness” later developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. Its essence is that complex systems evolve an integrated connectivity among their components so their information output is high, yet coherent. This coherence is often mistaken for simplicity, and this is the source of much of the confusion we address in this essay.

Human life on earth is creating signs of informational intelligence: an earth that is conscious because it is intimately interconnected. We can save civilization from self-destruction by understanding the underlying mechanisms. Egypt at night, by NASA.

Note that “complexity” is very different from “complicatedness”. Some postmodernist urbanists seem eager to conflate these two very different ideas. You don’t get a system when you pile up disjointed fragments, because there is no integration. Instead, a complex system arises through a process working to organize different and often conflicting elements in some way, in spite of their differences. Intentionality in building complexity sheds all “complicatedness” that is irrelevant and unconnected, just like in natural systems. It does not “streamline” processes to a single aim, but simply evolves the system to include those multiple connected cycles, however large or small, that interact in some essential way. That process is often a subtle dynamic, such as a set of apparently simple adaptive rules that each element follows. Why do people walking through a park all move along one line and not others? Why does one store get lots of pedestrian customers and another, just as good, fail? We can discover and document the socio-geometric patterns that people are following, as they make the simple human calculations that we all do: head in the direction of your destination, avoid obstructions, stop only if you see something interesting, and so on.

If we understand these patterns, we can place our pavement more effectively, or place our store in a more successful location. Other patterns of complex organization can be documented and put to work for us in our designs. The human inhabitants of even the most diverse city are, and remain, part of a complex emergent whole. Their complex behaviors and interactions must not be reduced for the city to work like some crude yet giant machine, for that would (and does) severely damage living systems. So, too, the elements of an ecosystem have a history, as do other natural systems. This is the nature of complexity — it has an inherent wholeness or whole-systems quality to it. The elements we are considering possess what the physicist David Bohm called an “implicate order” — they have a much deeper relationship within a whole system that predates our observation. We face a perceptual problem, however. The reason most people think of complexity as being more like “complicatedness” — a messy collection of unrelated parts — is that we are very good at seeing particular fragments of the world.

This view has its evolutionary benefits — we can see just a snapshot of what happens at a certain point and at a particular time, and omit all the interactions that brought those parts together in the first place. While this ability gave early humans an advantage in quick decision-making, it handicaps us when confronting the complex systems that we are now capable of building. We tend to forget that this way of looking at the world and its complex interactions is merely an abstraction, helpful for some purposes, but not for design. This is because in design, we are working with complex, implicate-ordered systems. Earth and life systems manifest design intentionality (in the sense of organizing their complexity) and intrinsic intelligence. When we treat these systems as problems of simplicity, we fail to understand the actual complex systems that we are creating, disturbing, and often destroying — a neighborhood, a city, an ecology, a human economy, or a living planet. And so, today, we find ourselves in a great deal of trouble.