Wednesday, July 28, 2021

A NEW ECOLOGY

The roof of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is a garden that looks odd but merges naturally with the park surrounding it. Having a wide variety of plants, the roof attracts pollinators and provides insulation for the building beneath it.

 

https://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/living-roof

When we drove along a large highway in Canada several years ago we were surprised by passing beneath a huge overpass with plants growing on it. It turned out to be a corridor for wildlife, which had been constructed so that moose, deer, and other animals could cross the highway safely. Like the CAS roof, the overpass was a human-made structure that contributed to the natural biome rather than interfering with it.

The Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizen has pointed out that evolution is occurring quickly all around us. For instance, some spiders have evolved to be attracted to the lights where insects gather, and starlings have even changed their wing shape in a way that allows them to flee from some urban dangers. As every high school biology student knows, peppered moths rapidly evolved in the nineteenth century, becoming dark to match the sooty backgrounds in their industrialized English environments. Parakeets in Paris are of two distinct genetic types that could mix but do not; like many other animals, they have evolved to remain in slightly different habitats.

Many of Schilthuizen’s examples sound more like variations in species than true evolution, but his point that changes are occurring swiftly within organisms in urban and natural environments cannot be denied. Surprisingly, he is hopeful that we can work with many of the changes rather than resisting them.

Ever since the sixties, I have agonized over human alterations to our natural environment. Even our wonderful national parks and wilderness areas have suffered from pollution, urban sprawl, mining, and other obscenities. In traveling in a motorhome throughout North America I have watched the crumbling of many ecosystems. Conservation of current natural resources has seemed like environmentalists’ only worthwhile goal. Perhaps Schilthuizen has the right idea. If some organisms evolve in a way that benefits them and their surroundings, we can encourage them. If some become extinct, their replacements may be worth preserving. Those of us who mourn the loss of familiar plants and animals can try to imagine future ecosystems and design appealing cities for them. We cannot stop evolution, but we can search for new ways to live with it.

 

Copyright © July 25, 2021 by Carol Leth Stone (a.k.a. RovinCrone)