Ecology in the Urban Century: Power, Place, and the Abstraction of Nature

Abstract

Humans are now an urbanized species, with over half of the global population living in cities-a proportion forecast by the United Nations to rise to 75 percent by 2050. At the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has claimed with 95 percent certainty that climate change is being driven by human activities, prompting scientists to herald the advent of the Anthropocene, a new era in which humans have become the main drivers of environmental change. The challenge of securing a sustainable global future has become a question of taming the environmental impacts of cities. Within this context, ecology has emerged as a technology of gov-ernance, promising a way to manage human relations with nature in more sustainable ways. As in the nineteenth century, when crusading sanitarians and engineers tamed death and disease with modern infrastructures supplying water and energy, so in the current urban century, urban ecology is being herlded as being capable of arresting environmental destruction with closed loop systems and adaptive management. Ecology is the scientific assumption lying behind every rhetorical "eco" preface, providing a compass to navigate safe passage to the promised land of sustainability. The irony of this redemptive role is that ecology originated as a discipline not primarily concerned with people. Environmental historians have offered compelling accounts of how concepts like succession and ecosystems embody the specific characteristics of the rural and wilderness areas in which early ecologists worked. 1 Sometimes the parallels are literal: the idea of "pioneer" plant communities was derived from research conducted on the vast plains of the Midwest in early twentieth-century America, across which human pioneers had moved barely a century earlier. One particularly stubborn consequence of this has been the hardwiring of cultural preferences for "wild" environments into the scientific models of