UEP graduates David Morgan and Lily Ko were recently honored with the department’s first thesis awards. Below, David provides an overview of his research into multi-species planning for restoring habitats and ultimately, building climate resiliency.
A distinguished urban ec
UEP graduates David Morgan and Lily Ko were recently honored with the department’s first thesis awards. Below, David provides an overview of his research into multi-species planning for restoring habitats and ultimately, building climate resiliency.
A distinguished urban ecologist and professor once told me that to understand ecology one must learn to see the world from the point of view of a plant. Another told me that grasping hydrology depended on one’s ability to approach the issue like a raindrop. The renowned 20th century conservationist Aldo Leopold urged us to think like a mountain. Aphorisms like these abound in environmental thought, and they become more than mere metaphor in the contexts of nature-based infrastructure and climate adaptation planning.
One local case is exemplary. The Massachusetts Oyster Project (Mass Oyster) conducts oyster restoration as a climate adaptation measure, and ecological restoration efforts like theirs demonstrate the gap between such practices and current environmental policy. Multispecies planning is an effort to bridge that gap, to develop methods for planning that accord with the needs of the landscapes in which climate adaptation and similar projects take place. Informed by recent developments in science, anthropology, and political theory, these methods push boundaries, requiring planners not only to involve a site’s ecology in the development of infrastructures but to reason through problems ecologically.
The convention in environmental conservation is to preserve wilderness from human activity, but in recent years this has been changing. Concepts like multi-use landscapes and cohabitation are indicative and are supported by organizations as large as The Nature Conservancy and United Nations. Such approaches are seen to integrate human land use within ecologies.
“One impetus for this shift is the recognition that no part of Nature is uninfluenced by human activity.”
Climate change is an often-cited example of our global reach, as is carbon-14, the widespread radioactive residue from atom bomb explosions. Nature with a capital N—the pure, untouched territory apart from humans—no longer exists, and has been demonstrated to have always been a hybrid space (Latour 1993; Haraway 2007). An important corollary to this insight is that humans are not Nature’s opposite, but ecologica