Understanding Urban Ecosystems

We have presented examples from the Central Arizona-Phoenix urban ecosystem, promoting the view that we can apply familiar techniques of ecosystem ecology to cities, just as we would to any ecosystem. Given our charge to explore the intellectual frontiers of urban ecosystem understanding, it may be useful to consider whether our initial approach to mass balance should be modified. In particular, do we need to incorporate models of human behavior or economic drivers? The answer here is probably yes because the largest inputs are a consequence of human behaviors (e.g., driving patterns, fixation via combustion) and economics (e.g., imports of food, animal feed, and fuels). Would a different view of ecosystem structure improve our ability to put the mass balance to use in informing policy that will promote environmental protection? More fundamentally, would it improve our ability to predict the major points of production, accumulation, and transformation of nitrogen in the ecosystem? Again, we answer in the affirmative: Understanding how humans have manipulated paths of water flow within cities may be key to unlocking the dynamics of transport and transformation of materials.

We have tried to sketch some contours of possibility for the new frontier of education and science suggested by the book title, providing some lessons that might help us to better map where we might go forth humbly yet boldly. We have traveled to many exotic venues where seldom has an environmental educator ventured. Unlike Lewis and Clark, however, we think that the learning will not be found only in the wisdom that is brought in by outside experts, but rather will be mutual discoveries best found within the rich cultural and biophysical environments occupied by these communities. We scientists and educators have much to learn from these overlooked frontiers and their resident experts—seniors, children, and youth. It is best if we get on with it, that we have the “nerve of failure,” that we learn from our failures and never doubt our optimism. Most of all we must trust the people—adults and children, rich as well as poor—to have the ability to apply the methods of scientific learning to their own problems, even if such learning may lead them to challenge the established order of government and science.

Williams and Agyeman (1999, p. 463) argue that “effective urban environmental education involves listening closely to the perceptions and priorities of urban residents, and creating programs that are relevant and sustainable over the longer term ⋯ it must be rooted in local communities in order to take up the challenge of making the urban environment a more livable and sustainable system.” There will be dilemmas, conflicting agendas, and ill-defined and often contradictory goals, but dealing with resonant issues first—such as security in the example of Pistons Middle School in Detroit, or health issues, as in the Bradford example—will more likely develop people’s transferable skills, understanding, knowledge, values, and confidence, such that they might be able to apply them in different situations. This will, ultimately, lead to a broader partnership toward achieving the kinds of environmental, social, and economic security that are characteristic of sustainable communities.

Urban ecosystem education, like the cities it focuses on, represents a coming together of tremendous riches, a proliferation of tremendous challenges, and an optimism that springs forth from and celebrates their collective creativity and synergies. Where else on earth can we see so many examples of the emergent properties of human inventiveness, of culture and concept, of artifice and the ethereal, better than in our cities and in our attempts to teach and learn about them? In a future where billions of people strive for a better life, one that can be sustained into their future, one that embraces their needs and builds on their wants for the nonhuman parts of the globe, cities will play a vital role. The choice is not whether to have cities or not, nor even whether to understand them or not. The choice is more about of the texture of our understanding—how rich, system-based, multidimensional will it be?— and about the breadth of its empowering sweep through our society—how democratically and deeply it will be imbued in all people.