Readings for Tuesday Sept. 21th

Roseland
Chapter 4: Greening the City

I have not seen too much of green and urban ecology projects in my hometown or in Bloomington, but I think that it is a great idea and holds a lot of great possibilities.  I noticed while reading that there were several "greening the city" projects and ideas that the BCOS are trying to implement.  For example the food committee is focusing on promoting community gardens, and Bloomington currently has a thriving farmer's market.  Supporting local famers is essential for a sustainable community, because it saves on packaging and transportation costs and energy use.  Another green space topic that was mentioned at the BCOS meeting was tree shading. I idea is to place trees in specific locations to provide shade, wind-breaks and transpiration.  Roseland says that utilizing location of trees in urban areas can save 20-25% on annual residential energy costs compared to unshaded areas.

It is not very noticeable in a small town like Bloomington, but in major cities such as New York or Los Angeles the heat island effect can be felt and shown.  The heat island effect is where urban areas are significantly hotter then surrounding rural areas due to so many surfaces, such as concrete, asphalt and brink that absorb the sun's heat and radiate it out.  I have had this silly idea for a solution to this problem for a while.  Most of these urban surfaces with concrete and asphalt are black which have a high albedo, absorbing a lot of heat. So my solution was what if we change all of the black concrete and asphalt to be white, which has a low albedo thus absorbing less heat, ideally reducing the heat island effect.

I learned a learn a new term that was in the reading, "bioregionalism" which is an area defined by a human population living that is governed by nature instead of legislature.    

Wheeler: 137-154

All three articles Spirn, Beatley and Riley discuss negative effects of cities. Spirn talks about the discord bitween nature and cities, Beatley talked about how cities have decreased certrain species populations and Riley is discussing how to restore nature that cities have hampered.

The article by Spirn discusses the fallacy of thinking that cities are different from nature. There would be a lot less environmental problems if if nature was in the forefront and given into consideration when building cities and especially infrastructure. We are battling the earth by creating dams and trying to move the direction of rivers, for example with the Mississippi there are some may issue with dikes and flooding because in our US history we have moved the natural run of the river.  I think that there would be less natural disasters and conflicts between nature and cities if the city was considered an entity connected to nature.  If we think like this hopefully we will see how unsustainable we have build cities and try to alter how we build and use resources.

There are several human causes for why species becomes instinct from reforestation of rainforest, clear cutting for timber and fore agricultural land and for the development of cities. Bealtley discussed the responsibility we have to maintain and restore habitats in order to protect and increase populations for endangered species.  It is difficult in policy making and environmental management to make discussions to satisfy both needs for the endangered species and human needs and to assess what is needed for the species to recover.

Riley defines ecological restoration gives examples of what is and isn't restoration.  The definition for ecological restoration that I knew was the process of intentionally altering a site to establish a defined indigenous historical ecosystem that has the goal of emulating a specified ecosystem (149).  Riley also has a another definition adding a human and social component to ecological restoration that I hadn't thought of before.  The other definition was a process of intentionally compensating for damage by humans to the biodiversity and dynamics of ecosystems by working to lead to the reestablishment of sustainable and health relationships between nature and culture (149-150).  It is good to have these two definitions because in a lot of cases ecological restoration is done to rectify humans previous actions.