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0:05
- Good afternoon. My name is Alida Hernandez. I am an intended business major with a minor in environmental science and Spanish. Something I love about Cal is the inclusivity and diversity found everywhere around campus. Thank you to all of our generous donors. Without your constant support, we wouldn't be able to call ourselves the number one public university. Dr. Chris Schell is an urban ecologist and assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
0:31
His research combines animal behavior, physiology, and biodiversity science approaches to uncover how mammalian carnivores adapt to life and cities. In addition, his work uses environmental justice lens to help build more justice, biodiverse and resilient cities. Dr. Schell is a National Geographic explorer, a grist fixer, and a Cal Academy research fellow. With his work featured across PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and various other outlets. Please welcome Professor Schell.
1:02
(students applauding)
1:08
- Can y'all hear me okay? Yeah? Solid. Thank you, all for joining for this lecture slash, I know it's probably extraordinarily hot outside, (students laughing) so you wanted to come inside. I don't blame you. That was a boss move. So before I get started on today's topic, cities as a solution to the biodiversity crisis, I first would like to begin with a land acknowledgement. Before we begin this event, we take a moment to recognize that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of the Huichin,
1:37
the ancestral and unseeded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefited and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community,
2:06
inclusion and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples. As members of the Berkeley community, it is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand, but also we recognize that the Muwekma Ohlone people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today.
2:31
Which is certainly apropos because all of today's lecture is going to be us drilling into this one simple question,
2:43
why cities? Right? Why cities? Why should we care about cities? Why should we say cities potentially are a solution rather than a problem to the many crises we face? Certainly, I'm sure y'all have heard of the biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, global capitalism influencing all of that all together, and it makes it feel overwhelming, right? Insurmountable. Like you don't have any power or agency to make any changes. But to break the problem down,
3:16
so then that way, we demystify the process, right? Make it feel like you actually have some agency. We're gonna start with the cute and cuddly.
3:26
Now, our lab studies all manner of organisms, but certainly the flagship, the avatar species for us in my lab are coyotes and urban coyotes in particular. If you're curious, these photos up here that you see, no, they are not photoshopped. Yes, they're a real animal. In 2007, right when I started my graduate career, so you know, a decade and some change ago, the longer I put this up, the older I start to feel even though I'm not that old, right?
3:54
And apparently this coyote in downtown Chicago hopped into Quiznos restaurant. And when I mean hopped, it sort of more like walked in, like it owned the joint. As it was walking in, there were people eating sandwiches, there are folks that are making sandwiches. They all stopped what they're doing. And then they slowly back out of the establishment while this coyote then proceeds to walk into the drink cooler and stay in the drink cooler for 50 full minutes.
4:25
Animal care and control has to come in order to relocate the animal to the nearest nature preserve. And you may be wondering, how on earth did this coyote even get far enough into downtown Chicago? And this is like on State Street, y'all. So for those of you that are familiar with Chicago, right? Below Wacker, this is very, very urban. This question is one that not only are we kind of chasing here at Berkeley, but one that certainly is all over the place.
4:57
Sorry, let me get rid of Spotify here. (chuckles) There we go.
5:09
Not only are there coyotes in drink coolers in Chicago, there are coyotes on trains in Portland up here. There are coyotes that get a slice of pizza every other week at Huntington Beach right here. And you can imagine that all of these interactions with people with built environments, with these constructed areas ultimately lead to people and coyotes coming into conflict, right? As you see here. Now, our region is no different. In fact, we have several videos just to demonstrate
5:43
what that looks like here in the city of San Francisco. So this one video here was taken up near Bernal Heights by one of the students in the lab Tali Caspi when she was doing fecal transect work. So some of the work that we do is trying to understand what the animals are eating. And you'll notice some really kind of striking patterns and behavior here. Coyotes normally if they see you, they like to be at least 20 feet away and they start walking in the other direction, not this individual.
6:14
Pair that with this video as well. Now this video is of a coyote taken in the observatory area
6:23
of Golden Gate Park. Can anybody hazard a guess as to what this animal is doing?
6:29
Stalking? Yes, stalking what? Look at how close those people are. This is ridiculous. Right? They're probably no more than five feet away. Folks probably across the pond think that's a dog.
6:48
So yes, a lot of folks say ducks.
6:53
But it's not the ducks, it's the child.
6:57
Yeah, that small child right there, probably about four years old, this coyote was infamous. He got a nickname. He was so infamous, Carl. And Carl the coyote was so brazen that he would be out at 11:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 1:00 PM. Normally when coyotes are trying to hide or asleep, being incredibly cautious around people. But Carl started stalking children. Eventually, he was put down last year, but when they did an autopsy on the animal, they found that this animal was eating
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a lot of anthropogenic food. Think garbage, food waste. In some instances, we've had videos from residents of San Francisco where they're actively buying food, steaks, at a Safeway or Lucky's and then giving that food directly to the animal. So our relationship with these animals sort of needs to be fixed. Here are one of the big reasons why. Conflict is increasing over time. So a recent paper that my postdoc and I and several others in the lab just put together,
8:02
compiled 10 years of human-coyote conflict data and found that conflict is on the rise for a whole host of reasons. Because of the fact that the climate crisis is reducing the amount of water that's available or the continued urbanization that's constricting the amount of habitat available for these animals or the amount of food that we provide to them. I share this story with you because it highlights some quintessential tenets of urban ecology. One of the biggest ones being that human beings
8:33
are the directors and the audience of this adapted screenplay. I like to joke that we are the Lin-Manuel Miranda of this joint, right? Not only did we cast all the cast members, compose all the songs, we even put together that rotating stage, which is really cool, right? We're also acting in this play. We're also seeing it as it unfolds. And oftentimes, ecology of the past would have us stand outside of that narrative, but we today are gonna break that fourth wall.
9:01
So then that way, I show y'all how critical it is. We understand our place in this narrative, and there is no better way to start that portion of the story than with this handsome Madonnas right here. Now, I know all of y'all have seen "Jurassic Park" at this point. Some of y'all are younger and it came out before you were born, I get it. But you have homework if you haven't done it already, right? First "Jurassic Park." In the movie, Jeff Goldblum's character,
9:28
Ian Malcolm talks about how these dinosaurs will eventually find their way out of these manmade enclosures that we think are ironclad, but really, they're just toothpicks. And one of the most famous lines he says is that life finds a way, right? Well, for sure, life is finding a way like those coyotes you just saw in cities, so much so that the coyotes aren't the only example. We have javelina and phoenix in Tempe, Arizona, raccoons in the Pacific Northwest,
10:01
smooth coated otters in Singapore and everything in between. What's remarkable about these adjustments to urban living is that we're now starting to find signatures of evolution. So these animals are rapidly evolving to cope with the stressors that we have placed up against them. And there are so many examples that it's hard to fit them all into slides. I'll just show you many of the organisms and the most flashy examples to date. Some of which include wall lizards developing more toe pads
10:36
that is linked back to genetic traits showing their ability to climb more smooth surfaces. Or rats in New York City. For those of y'all that have been in Manhattan, you'll know that uptown and downtown are very different from each other. Guess what? The rats think so too. So there are genetic populations that are distinct in the uptown portion and the downtown portion of Manhattan, and they don't cross right at 72nd Street. (students laughing) And then yes, of course,
11:06
there is less genetic diversity for coyotes that exist in cities relative to those that are in non-urban areas. Now, up to this point, I've been giving y'all all of the fields about how glorious it is that these wildlife are developing strategies to persist in environments that we thought were inhospitable to those wildlife species. But it should be noted with these few success stories, the larger narrative often is that we are in a crisis. Global biodiversity is most certainly in a crisis,
11:39
and it helps to tell this story through the numbers. So briefly, the intergovernmental science policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services, or IPBES came out with a report in 2019. And part of that report states of an estimated 8 million animal and plant species, 75% of which are insects, which is really important, right? That insect base helps to really structure the trophic or food webs that exist within our ecosystems. Around 1 million, 1/8 of those species
12:15
are threatened with extinction. And many of these charts, which I won't belabor the point about all of the information
12:23
in each of them just to tell you that we're in trouble.
12:28
For those of you that remember Bill Nye, the Science Guy, I remember growing up watching Bill Nye, and one of the most apropos examples that he used of biodiversity within the ecosystem was this idea of thinking of species as blocks in a Jenga set. Now your Jenga set is pretty structured and foundationally sound when you have all the species inside of that jenga set. But imagine you start to pull one, then two, then three, then more and more and more species,
13:00
you can start to see that this jenga set gets a little bit more shaky. And this analogy is pretty substantial when thinking about where we are right now. Our Jenga set is not where we need it to be. And why is all of that important? Well, as you guys probably can see where I'm going with this, biodiversity is our shield. Selfishly, we want to be able to stay alive and healthy on this planet for as long as possible, right? And in order to do that, we need to lean on all of our non-human brethren
13:33
in the process. So biodiversity helps us to provide what are called these ecosystem services, whether they be cultural, whether they be provisioning, whether they be environmental health that allow us to sustain ourselves, to sustain life.
13:49
Hence the reason that we have now started in the lab to think about the ways in which biodiversity are linked back to public health, are linked back to ecosystem health and how what we do here, not only in the present, but what we've done in the past and what we do in the future is integral for us to continue. So we understand the problem, and this is a global one, which is part of the reason why the Convention on Biological Diversity came together in 2022 to bring together
14:20
this COP 15 Initiative where you would have officials from all over the world convene to think about ways that we can make decrees and targets to get to our biodiversity goals. So we stop losing so many species. So we maintain that ecosystem stability and function. And at the end of 2022, they came up with 23 decrees that were hopefully going to serve as a means for us to get to where we needed to be. Most of these under what's called the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework,
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all talk about ways to reduce or halt how much biodiversity we are losing. Things like reducing land and sea use change or restoration of degraded ecosystems or further down managing invasive alien species and reducing negative impact of pollution on biodiversity. Now, I could read all 23 for you, and that probably would be a bore then all y'all would be asleep. And we don't want that, right? So really, what I want to bring to y'all's attention is in all 23 of these decrees,
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all 23 of these itemized targets, there is only one.
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One on urban blue and green spaces. Some of y'all may be thinking, "All right, so why do we care?" Well, let me give you some numbers. First things first, land use change and direct species exploitation are number one and two in terms of how important and impactful they are in the biodiversity crisis. So a lot of folks seeing results like this would say, "Okay, then definitely urbanization and development has to be figured out. We have to figure out solutions to one of the number one threats
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to all of the biodiversity on the planet." And most folks would then jump to the conclusion that somehow, the assumption is urban areas are evil.
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And because of the way in which we have developed in the past, which, there is a lot of legitimacy to that, right? Our practices of urban development from the past up to the present have resulted in a whole host of negative consequences. Whether it be noise pollution, artificial light at night, air and water pollution, more invasive species, so on and so on and so on.
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But if you were to believe that, then you would fall into what's called the biological deserts fallacy. This idea that somehow these cities are completely devoid of nature. But that's not true at all. Let me show you why.
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First, it's important to situate ourselves in this narrative. More than half. So 55% and climbing of the human population lives in cities. Here, this quick map just briefly shows from 2020, and this is already, again, increased the proportion of folks that live in cities with the majority of people, especially in North America, all living in urban centers, right? So most of the people that we are thinking about when we're thinking about human wildlife interactions live in urban areas.
17:35
Okay, well, that's fact number one. Fact number two, the amount of new urban land cover, so that's spaces that have not been urbanized yet
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are projected to increase by 0.82 to 1.53 million kilometers squared. May be like, "Chris, I don't know what that means at all. Can you please give me some context?" Yeah sure.
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California, the entire state of California is 0.42 million kilometers squared. So the amount of new urbanized land, new urbanized land across the globe is going to be at least two times the size of the state of California. Two times the size of the largest state in the contiguous 48 states. That's a lot.
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Not only that, right? The world's known biodiversity hotspots, the areas that have the greatest abundance of new and diverse species, 422 major cities.
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So having 300,000 people or more are situated in these spaces. We are no different.
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We're right there, right? Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Sacramento, San Diego,
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Santa Barbara, we're all in a biodiversity hotspot.
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And because of the fact that we have so much new urbanization that is likely going to continue to march in these larger cities, one of the recent projections was that 855 species are directly impacted already with more than 30,000 likely to lose critical habitat. And the breakdown for this looks like reptiles are squarely in the, uh-oh, we have a problem area.
19:31
So we do have a problem, right? And yet, cities oftentimes maligned as that problem potentially provide us a solution. Why? Because most of the species we care about are here. And it just so happens that these are the places where we live, where we love, where we breathe, where we work. Why wouldn't we want to have a positive benefit and impact on the places where we do all of the things that essentially constitute our lives?
20:06
So then the question is how do we get here? Right? Many of y'all probably are thinking, "Okay, things seem dire." But I oftentimes tell my students and my classes, it's important to take a little bit of a history lesson to see how we got here. So then that way, when we look towards the past, we help influence our present and our future at the same time.
20:29
Now, one of the meccas of urban ecology and the ways in which people can live in harmony with nature tends to be the city state known as Singapore. For those of you that have not been to Singapore before, it is glorious. You should definitely go. It is beautiful because they see themselves not as a city with nature around them, or as a city that has little plots of nature, but rather a city inside of nature, that the city operates and functions because of nature.
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And that's important because when you share that against the backdrop of just something as simple as creating colored lines, you start to really gather how amidst this problem is. So these two figures are just artistic renditions of climate and biodiversity loss together from 1970 to 2018. So here at the top is where it was cooler, right around 1970, and it obviously is a lot warmer today. Compare that with the amount of species we had around 1970, and how many we've lost.
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With green being more species, and obviously gray hair being the loss of those species. So we got here somehow, and part of the reason that I show this to y'all is because right around the '60s and the '70s is when we as a community, not only of scientists and practitioners, but also the general public, started to understand our larger impact on global climate.
22:03
And that was the catalyst for us to really reintegrating ourselves back into the conversation. Because for some context, up until this period of time in the '60s and the '70s, most ecologists thought that it was not a good idea to be kind, to do work and research inside of spaces where people were, because oftentimes, people were seen as destructive and malignant to many of the species that existed in those areas. And at the same time, climate scientists were starting to gather some data,
22:38
and that data we're showing alarming trends. The trends being that every year, year over year, we would notice more and more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And that that carbon dioxide coincided with human activity. So the conclusion they came to was that there was literally no ecosystem on planet Earth that wasn't either directly or indirectly touched by people.
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That eventually led to UNESCO to create the Man and Biosphere program, right? So the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization created this Man in Biosphere program, which ran from the '70s and the '80s to try and start understanding how human activity is leading to many of the ecosystem consequences that climate scientists had predicted. That then eventually led to the National Science Foundation coming together and creating what's called
23:33
long-term ecological research programs, which in 1998, established the first two urban LTERs. One in Phoenix, Arizona, here, and the other in Baltimore, and one recently in 2021 was funded in Minneapolis. Now, it should be noted that there are hundreds of LTERs that exist in the United States, and there still are only three urban LTERs. Think about that for a second.
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So given all of that, right? We started to fully understand our role in this system. And I like to joke around with many of my students that global climate change essentially gave the biggest alley-oop to urban ecology as a field. So then that way we could start more intentionally and authentically thinking about the ways in which we are integrated in this system. So that was the past, right? And we think, all right, well we've done as much as we possibly can to understand the past,
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and yet, we are going to turn this into a time traveling saga. At this point, you by probably have realized I'm a huge Marvel fan, and I use this a lot in my lectures in order to get my students to be able to create these cognitive heuristics, right? These bridges across what they know and what they're learning. So then, that way they can better understand it and trenches in their brain. So for us, we're gonna use a little bit of a "Avengers: Endgame" reference here
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and do some time traveling again. With the idea being that learning how the past shapes the present is in fact the key to building a more just and biodiverse future. And it should be noted that a concept like this has been in ecology already. It's called legacy effects. This idea that a species impact on an ecosystem can persist on that ecosystem, even when that species is gone, it's excerpted, or the activity ceases altogether. So a good example of this is imagine agricultural fields, right?
25:31
Imagine you are constantly tilling these fields over a few decades and then all of a sudden, agricultural activity completely stops. It still would take anywhere from 50 to a few centuries, right? 50 years to a few centuries for that ecosystem and that biome to recover itself. Now, keeping that in mind, imagine if we were to take this exercise and take this theory of legacy effects and place it right back into the city. And as y'all probably can imagine what the Bay Area
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looked like in the 1950s and the '60s,
26:09
it's not entirely the same today in 2023. So when we start interrogating these human historical legacies in cities, do we see any association between how urban heterogeneity, how variable the city is, is somehow influencing how variable many of the species inside the city are? And this is an important exercise because if we want to leverage cities as a conservation champion, we necessarily need to understand what's influencing biodiversity in the first place in cities.
26:41
So then that way, we can build solutions that help us bring back many of the species that we lost. Okay, now here's an exercise for y'all. I'm gonna have all of you be Groot here for a little bit, right? And the next set of slides, I'm gonna show you a side by side comparison of two different neighborhoods from each other. So your task is to follow the trees, and I'm gonna have you point either to your left or to your right when I ask you a series of questions, okay?
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So y'all are Groot, I am Groot, we are Groot. Let's do this.
27:11
Okay, so I'm gonna describe these two neighborhoods for you. This neighborhood right here on y'all's left, this is of a township to the southwestern part of downtown Tacoma, Washington. For those of you that have been to the Pacific Northwest and been to Tacoma, you know kind of like, how green this place is. It's called University Place, right? The other is Southeastern Tacoma, which coincidentally, is just directly south of the downtown area of Tacoma.
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These two neighborhoods are no more than a half mile apart from each other. They're extraordinarily close. So if I were to ask you the question, which of these two neighborhoods would you expect to have higher vegetation cover? You would point to...
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Almost unanimously, everybody points to the photo on the left. Yes, university place. That one was easy. All right, cool. Second question, if I then ask you of these two neighborhoods, which would you expect to have a higher median household income? You would point to which one?
28:20
Yup, most of y'all still point to the left. That intrinsic knowledge that you have, that wisdom right of somehow green space and canopy cover and vegetation cover also equal median household income. It has a name. It's called the luxury effect. This idea that species richness or the number of species we're able to count in an area and biodiversity the relative weight of those species across different clades are positively associated with wealth.
28:50
Now we're gonna dig into why that's not always the case here in a little bit, but before we do, I think it's important to note that this is not something that's hanging its hat on one or two studies. In fact, there are multiple studies from plants to animals, from those primary producers that create the energy to those tertiary consumers that consume most of the energy, like apex predators and everything in between. Wealth structures communities worldwide. Here are some of the sightings, right?
29:21
Some of the manuscripts that have written about this, and this is already outdated. This year alone, there were five to 10 additional studies showing this luxury effect. But what's really unique about the way that we have approached this is that these other studies, oftentimes as many scientific studies do, will take a look at one city, see an effect, or not see an effect and say, "There's nothing here," or, "Yes, there's definitely something here." And it seems really hard,
29:51
especially for folks that aren't merely as good at communicating the science to try and figure out, what does this all mean? Well, a group of us, and when I say a group of us, I specifically mean the Urban Wildlife Information Network. This coalition of scientists and practitioners across not only the nation, but now the globe, using very simple ecological tools, these camera traps to monitor wildlife across our cities and compare all of the cities at the same time.
30:24
So rather than doing one by one by one in a piecemeal fashion, now we can compare all of the cities together and see if there are any global trends. So we had this really simple question, how does wealth and urbanization affect wildlife across cities? And in order to do this, we set up these camera traps on these urban to rural gradients. Here, you see a few schematics for Seattle, Washington, Chicago Illinois and Wilmington Delaware collecting data from 2013 to 2019.
30:56
In order to measure human footprint or urbanization, we essentially use what's called impervious surface, as well as building densities and vegetation covering, combine all of those into a single metric. Then in order to approximate income, we use the cost of a one-bedroom apartment. And part of the reason we did that was we wanted to be as inclusive as possible. As you can imagine, certain areas of a city don't have single family homes. So how do you account for those areas?
31:27
Well, if we take cost of a one-bedroom apartment, we more or less approximate how expensive it is to live in certain parts of a city. And like I showed y'all earlier, right? We deal a lot in the cute and cuddly and the charismatic megafauna. So I would be remiss if I didn't share any of the photos that we captured in the field. Here are some from the Pacific Northwest and from the Bay Area. We have a deer staring into the camera, a group of raccoons.
31:54
My personal favorite is this one up here in the top right of these raccoons, practicing their parkour. (students laughing) Fantastic. So what did we find? Well, this is a sort of a dumb moment, but it's worth saying that species richness, or again, the number of species, unique species we're able to count in an environment in relation to these income gradients varies across cities. Okay, so what does that mean, Chris?
32:22
Here is a figure from one of the papers we recently had published in 2021 with St. Louis being at the top and Fort Collins, Colorado being at the bottom. Now, if you are to the right of this dash line, like these cities are, then in fact, we are seeing this luxury effect. Meaning that the more species there are, the more likely it is that the environment that that camera is in is wealthier. But it's not the case for all cities, right? So you go from St. Louis down through to Tacoma
32:54
and Chicago and Madison, and here's the thing. Once these blue shaded areas of the normal distribution curve start to overlap that dash line, right, then you start to have a neutral effect, or in some instances, a negative effect if it's all the way on the other side. Now, it should be noted that this is approximating all species together. So it's very possible that if we were to break this down, certain species respond in certain ways relative to others.
33:28
Maybe for instance, coyotes, because coyotes are bougie, are more likely to respond to the luxury effect, but deer and rats could care less, right?
33:39
Which means that we need to dig a little bit deeper. Wealth alone doesn't help us tell the story of the past. So we have to better understand not only how socioeconomics work, but also how systems of oppression work and how those systems then influence non-human organisms as well.
33:59
And perhaps one of the most profound and widespread examples of this systemic oppression is redlining. So for those of y'all that have not heard of redlining, especially in the last few years here, it feels like there's been coverage all over the map about it. Briefly, it was the policy that was adopted and created by the Homeowners Loan Corporation or HOLC, and then sponsored by the US government to create these color-coded maps denoting who could live where based on the color of your skin.
34:31
So if you were black and brown, you were relegated to what were called the C and D areas. Essentially the yellow and the red shaded areas as you see here in the map for the East Bay. So these areas that you know, right? That you probably have driven through, that if you've spent a lot of time here in the Bay Area, think West Oakland, the East Oakland, you see these spaces and you realize there has been chronic levels of disinvestment for decades. That was designed that way on purpose.
35:01
This policy essentially went on from 1930 to 1968
35:08
when it was abolished by the Voting Rights Act in 1968.
35:12
The green and the blue respectively, A and B areas were for wealthy white Americans. Now more than 230 US cities across the nation have redlining maps that look just like this.
35:26
And if you want to know more about the many cities that have these digitized maps, you can go to the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project that lays all of it out. Just to give you an understanding of what this looks like, here are some of the cities that my lab has done work in recently, Tacoma, and Seattle, Washington, San Francisco, and Oakland, California, all of which look very different, but all have neighborhoods from these green to red areas.
35:54
So you now may be asking, "Okay, well residential segregation based off of race and really, residential segregation at any form is a moral injustice. What does that mean for the wildlife species? How on earth are they connected?" Well, let's start building the puzzle.
36:14
First things first. There's greater air pollution in these red line areas compared to the areas that are the green and the blue, the A and the B respectively. Notice the dates on the citations, y'all. Notice the dates on those manuscripts. These papers were published in 2020 and 2022. For reference, redlining was abolished in 1968. That was more than 50 years ago. And we are still seeing the effects of it today on ecosystem functioning.
36:46
Not only is air pollution distributed unevenly as a function of these HOLC grades, we also see that these areas that were redlined previously have greater urban heat island intensity. Means that it's anywhere from three to 10 degrees hotter in those areas. Largely because many of those redline areas do not have nearly as much urban tree canopy cover or vegetation cover. And that's important because the trees, as the Lorax would say, give us life, give us energy,
37:22
and they provide environmental cooling. When they release oxygen and when they're taking up water, they also cool the environment around us. They can't really do that if they're not there. And many of the environments that were redlined essentially created streets that had absolutely no green space at all.
37:43
That concrete retains the heat. So much so that we see greater intensification of many of these ecosystem hazards. And all of that, all of that together influences where we see biodiversity.
38:00
So a recent paper by a colleague of mine, Diego Ellis-Soto and company, created a map of all of the community science data. So for instance, some of y'all may have heard of iNaturalist or Ebert, these community science platforms that allow us to work with members of the community to report what species are where. We then can take and collate all of those observations and see where most of the species are and where most of the reports are.
38:28
And in almost every single city, those A, in those B areas, the green and the blue have greater biodiversity sampling.
38:38
Another paper coming out from one of my students, Cesar Estien is showing that the amount of biodiversity is also significantly reduced in these red line areas. So not only are we not sampling in the areas, we in fact don't even have appropriate amount of species there. And remember what I told y'all at top, I told y'all that biodiversity is our shield, right? Biodiversity helps us maintain our own health. So what are we saying when certain folks
39:06
in our urban communities don't have access to biodiversity in the other ways that some others do?
39:12
That is quintessentially an environmental justice issue.
39:16
Highlighting the fact that past societal legacies do indeed influence the present. So if we ever have a hope of wanting to be able to conserve species, we need to think about how we do that in cities. We need to be more unconventional. We need to think about how society integrated into all of these practices and how we build a better, more just environment, not just for us, but for the animals that we live with. Like this coyote that's just trying to make it work
39:44
that's doing a pretty good job at making it work. And yet, this is one of few examples where these animals are thriving. We can do a whole lot more to build a system through the past, present, and future that helps us build that resilience where our community is not just each other in this room, but also the other non-human organisms we share this planet with.
40:12
And that's what helped us to develop a book, ironically, about this entire talk that just was printed in the UK and should be out here later in December about urban biodiversity and equity. And how we need to think of not only conservation in cities, which is our traditional approach about population genetics and making sure that animals are hardy enough to exist in changing environments, but also conservation of cities, conservation of the function of those cities
40:38
and the ecosystem properties they're in. Conservation for cities where we think about the ways in which we do this for our communities of practice, we do this in service to the environments that we live in as well as conservation with cities. And that one is the most crucial. We cannot do this alone, right? I can do my part with the mini fancy models and the camera traps that we have at our disposal, but I only have a limited skillset, one that is necessarily situated in my own intersectional
41:10
and positional identity. And each of you have your own skills that you could bring to this table, which is part of the reason why you're here today is because I know you believe in that fact. So with that, I'll just conclude to say, thank you, all for your time. Thank you for coming to the talk and obviously, go Bears. (students applauding)
41:41
- Thank you for giving us.
41:44
Hello yes. So just gonna kick off our Q and A session, so if anyone has questions, please just raise your hands and I'll pass the microphone. Yes, first question.
42:02
- [Student] Hi.
42:04
How does creating biodiversity in cities conflict with building more housing? - That's a great question. Oftentimes, many folks will, and I'll repeat the question just for folks on the livestream. The question was how does essentially bolstering biodiversity in cities potentially conflict with creating more housing?
42:24
So oftentimes, the two are put against each other. Where somehow if you have more habitat for more biodiverse species, then you are taking away many of the homes that could be for people. But that sort of is a little bit of a misnomer. And oftentimes when many folks that are urban planters, developers, politicians tell us that, I'm just letting y'all know right now, they're gaslighting us, right? Because there are many, many, many vacant homes and lots that currently sit right now
42:56
that could be housing people. In fact, the problem is not necessarily that biodiversity and housing are antithetical to each other, but in fact that they actually can coexist with each other. Really good example. Because we do a lot of work in urban systems, and specifically here in the Bay Area, I can tell you that we have many encampments in almost every single park that we go to. And many of those encampments have more and more and more folks
43:25
that are unable to survive and live in the Bay Area, right? These are folks that are highly educated and still are unhoused. In fact, a good proportion of the folks that come to Berkeley may themselves be unhoused.
43:41
So thinking about how we build more housing actually is thinking about how we build more sustainable housing, more housing that allows for many of those folks to be able to dwell in homes that are safe, that are clean, while at the same time, allowing for that habitat space to exist. And the amount of money we would actually save by being able to maintain homes for folks that are cost affordable will then free up enough habitat in green space
44:15
for many of the wildlife that already exist in the city to be and stay in those cities. So oftentimes we'll say, "Well, we need to create more homes. That means we need to get rid of more habitat." We actually need to do a better job of just using the habitat that we already have, using the homes that we already have, and creating policies and solutions that help us get there. Versus saying, "Well, we have to do one or the other," which is oftentimes, well,
44:41
if we don't create housing that helps us get money, then we are the ones who are going to lose money. Which ultimately may mean we have to get out of a capitalist system that restricts our ability to do both.
45:03
- [Student] For those of us who live in cities, what are some practical ways that we can promote biodiversity? Aside from not feeding steak to the coyotes, what are some kind of everyday things we could do just to our own lives to help? - Absolutely, yeah. So the question was what are some things you all can do to help kind of promote biodiversity in your systems as an individual? And I love this question because this is the one where I get to give you guys some tangible results from all
45:31
of the empirical work we've been doing. The biggest one, and just as a show of hands, how many of y'all are pet owners? Okay, more than 50%. So if you have a cat, you have to keep your cat indoors. I know you've heard that in the past, but I'll tell you all of the reasons why. Cats, no fault of their own, they are the most efficient predators on the planet. And that is per capita, they cost more than a billion dollars in damages to conservation efforts, whether it be for native birds,
46:07
rodents, herps, so on, so on and so on. Not only that, they carry diseases and not just diseases that can go to other wildlife species, but diseases that go right back into you. And they all heard of toxoplasmosis?
46:22
Yeah, it is a parasite that goes up into your brain and controls you so much so that it will make you want to love cats more. There have done studies. (students laughing) Yes, this is crazy. There have been studies demonstrating that mice that are infected by toxoplasmosis, they like getting closer to cats, so they get eaten by cats.
46:47
Toxo is a thing. So keep your cat indoors. If you have a dog and you're walking in a space that is a nice hiking area, keep your dog on a leash, right? The dog in and of itself also can be a carrier of disease that hops over to wildlife. Say you do all those things, which, if you're interested in what a catio is, it's a cat patio, right? You just create those, it's great for cats. I have a cat.
47:15
But also you can get involved in local organizations that are doing a good chunk of this work. For instance, many of the indigenous groups that are here are working on doing indigenous plantings. If you have a single family home and you have a garden, plant more native seeds, right? And those native seeds help native pollinators rebound. Oftentimes, we think about honeybees as being the biggest thing we need to save, but there really are a ton of other pollinators that are not honeybees
47:43
that are native to here, to California. Honeybees are not native to California, right? That you can start bringing in those animals to create a more vibrant community. And all of that, even being said, just like conserving water, making sure that you are trying to do as much as you possibly can, to keep trash off of the trails. Little things like that go a long way. But yes, keep your cat indoors.
48:11
- [Student] You have a very optimistic and hopeful attitude, and I agree with you and everything makes sense, but for somebody who would say that our real issue is, and this goes kind of the housing population, so we can't really do much about the fact that our population is growing and eventually, our natural resources are gonna be maxed out. So I'm wondering if you could maybe address the perspective or the attitude that it's too late. We can do little things around the margins,
48:50
but unless we do something related to population growth, we're gonna have a really hard time creating a sustainable community. And we already know that we're seeing mass extinctions in other places, hotter, drier areas. But like, just as a practical matter on the ground, what would you say to somebody who says, "We've just got too many people and it's too late?" - Yeah, that's a good question. So just to reiterate the question was, you know, it feels like we sort of are already past a threshold
49:25
where it's too much and the population is too great and we sort of are out of options, right? So what would I say to folks like that?
49:34
Well, there are many threats, and stick with me on this thread, right? The first being what oftentimes is this idea of overpopulation being the biggest threat and that because we've already passed 8 million, we have no hope. It should be noted that the numbers clearly state here that overpopulation is not the problem. It has been deemed the problem for the last 20 to 50 years, but in fact, it's actually over exploitation. And not over exploitation by the many, but by the few. 1% right?
50:11
So the top 1% of earners in the globe use more resources
50:18
than the majority of most countries.
50:22
Think about that for a second, right? The top 1% use more resources than the majority of most countries. The problem is not that we have too many people on the planet, the problem is that the distribution of wealth and resources is incredibly inequitable to the point that we are dying because of that societal and global inequity. So that's number one. Number two, and this is oftentimes me being the black panther and traveling back to the ancestral plane.
50:52
My ancestors were enslaved and many of them did not see the other side of enslavement. They did not see the other side of not being in bondage and they fought anyway, right? I have many folks that are in my lab that are queer, that are from immigrant families, that have themselves, had their own struggles, and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents, they fought because they knew and they understood that they may not reap the benefits
51:24
that they're starting to sow, but later generations will. And I'm a dad. I have a five and a seven-year-old. This hits home really personally. And I know that all of the work that I do, it may not come to fruition. I may not be able to see us get on the other side of this hump, but I wanna make sure I prepare them as much as possible to continue that fight in a way that gives me hope because there is no other option. For those of y'all that are parents, you know,
51:54
there is no other option, you have to fight, right? Whether it's through the pandemic or looming government shutdowns, losing species,
52:05
there is no other option. So for all of those reasons, right? I think it's important to be hopeful because if we all commit ourselves to actually saying, "No, we're gonna do this," we're going to do it, period.
52:22
(student cheering and applauding)
52:33
- [Student] Yeah, thank you so much for your last response. I guess this is more of an objective question, but just in terms of like data and like definitions, when does a dwelling get considered an urban area or a city and how do like nuances in these definitions affect your research? - Yeah, so the question was how,
52:55
I mean to boil it down, how is the city a city? How do we know what is a city and what isn't, right? And when does it transform? The short answer, we still are trying to figure that out. The long answer is that there are a set of quintessential categories that help us understand what is urban and what isn't and there is a gradient of what is urban and what isn't, right? So one of the biggest ones being the amount of landscape that's been transformed, right?
53:24
So we something that would've been soil, that would've been potentially more fertile to impervious surfaces. Like buildings and roads and walkways. There are also differences in the distribution of how many people exist in an area. So if there is a greater density of folks, sometimes, it's 5,000, sometimes, it's 50,000 within a given area, then we start saying, okay, well this is an urban space. And even then when we have all of those definitions, each city is different.
53:57
Even here, just in the Bay Area alone, San Francisco and Oakland are right there and they're so dramatically different. And on the ground perspective, the amount of poison oak you guys probably have noticed has increased a lot recently. When we're going through and setting up these cameras, we notice that there seems to be sometimes five to tenfold more poison oak in the East Bay. But it's not like that in San Francisco at all because the microclimates are so different
54:28
and the distribution of building densities is different that it shapes what's where. So that's again, the long way of me saying that there are certain properties we look at, how many people are in this space, how big the green space is, how complex that green space is, and then what the road densities look like. But even then, we're still trying to figure that out.
55:00
- [Student] Hello.
55:02
I wonder if you'd like to comment at all on the effects of roadways and freeways on the decimation of wildlife and the use or misuse or non-use of overpasses and bridges and tunnels. - Yeah, so the question here is specifically about roads, right? And roadways and how they potentially constrict or separate communities from each other. And as y'all probably can imagine, there is a whole subfield within urban ecology alone that looks at roadways and their impacts on animal movement,
55:35
on the amount of ecosystem disturbances that are created from noise and diesel particulate matter to restricting the population size and the effective population size, or essentially, the genetics of the species. And some of the things that we know are kind of clear as day, and repeated across studies across species that the more roads there are, the bigger those roads are, the harder it is for organisms to go from point A to point B, habitat A to habitat B, especially the ones that can't fly.
56:05
And even the ones that can fly have a hard time doing so. So it restricts the number of individuals that can get to either of those habitats and reduces the amount of genetic diversity. And one of the things that we didn't talk about here in biodiversity, which I share oftentimes in my lectures, is that we oftentimes think of the large macro organism as biodiversity. But genetic diversity is also a level of biodiversity that we oftentimes don't always think about.
56:30
And biodiversity in cities gets constricted. It gets reduced for almost all other species. Now, it should be noted that there are some examples where certain species develop new genes, they have new strategies and they're naturally selected
56:48
or neutrally selected for living in these urban spaces. But yes, one of the ways in which we're hoping to combat that is either by transitioning roads from being these major huge roadways to being smaller roadways with walk paths or bike paths on either side and creating wildlife crossings. So in Los Angeles, where I'm from, the Annenberg Crossing was just created over, I think it was the 101 or the 405, one of those major highways in light of P22, right?
57:21
The mountain lion who is extraordinarily famous for existing up in the Hollywood Hills. So there was a huge amount of campaigning over 22 years by many of my colleagues to get that bridge started. But it's not gonna be built in finished until 2027 and we need a whole lot more of them. Now granted the road conversation is connected to all of these other inequity conversations. We have a lot of roads because it's so expensive for people to live and work in the same spaces.
57:53
So folks have to live really, really far away and then work back in the city, which then requires more highways. If folks were able to have employment opportunities that were much closer to where they live, everybody could bike. Should also be a right, right? A human right. Like I would love to be able to bike and I'm a faculty member here at Berkeley and I still gotta drive my kids to school. That tells you how expensive it is, right? So given that it sort of comes down to a Michael Jackson
58:23
"Man in the Mirror" moment, we sort of need to sit ourselves on the couch and say, "How do we start building better cities for everybody?" Because then that's when we're gonna be able to start saying like, "You know what? If we build greater public transportation, make sure that the BART system is everywhere in Richmond and all goes all the way down to San Leandro and other places that serve all communities, then we start getting somewhere. Then we start building ourselves up enough
58:48
to essentially put our mask on before we put the mask on of the child that is wildlife, right? Put your mask on first as they tell you. So I think the roads, that's super important. And ironically, roads are connected to all other things. And if we build better connectivity with ourselves, we can start building better connectivity within our environment.
59:10
- [Host] We have time for one more question.
59:13
- [Student] Bring it home. Thank you so much. I just love the intersectionality of how this is all connected and how you present it.
59:22
Also, we live in LA and wanna give a shout out to tree people. Which we've been involved with for a long time and I just think this work. Yeah, and I guess we're suburban dwellers, right? And so I'd love for you just to talk a little bit about changing out from solid to impervious ground cover, right? And how that can be. So I've been interested in some of these books about diversity of backyard, you know, just gardens, neighborhood gardens, right? - Yeah, so the question here being about
59:51
how do we start transitioning our cities from being something where it's just hard concrete in these impervious surfaces where nothing gets in to more of these pervious surfaces? These surfaces that breathe, right? And one fun fact for y'all that I often tell my students is that soil is way more important than we give it credit. And this is me being the carnivore biologist saying soil is really important. It is the third largest sink of all carbon on our planet.
1:00:17
So when we create these impervious surfaces, it essentially seals the surface where there is no exchange of carbon dioxide. Meaning there's no possibility for the microorganisms, the small invertebrates, and everything else to live in those soils. So there are many environmental engineers that are creating more permeable surfaces that can start to breathe. And one good example that I know of when I visited with some of my colleagues in Chicago at Lincoln Park Zoo
1:00:45
are engineers that are transforming school yards to being these hard kind of like asphalt things that really, for those of y'all that have small kids, you know, they destroy shoes. I'm like getting my kids' shoes every other month because these hard tops are terrible. But then they've transformed those systems to being more of these permeable surfaces that essentially let water come in through the permeable surface. It's really bouncy, sort of like a play mat,
1:01:11
but it allows for water to come in and then it builds the water table back up. So then there's still some living soil underneath it and then they plant trees throughout the school yard, and then they have their own urban garden, right? Where the kids get a chance to learn about symbiosis and community relationships and how to grow things and water potential, right? And food justice, which is extraordinary for K through 12 programs. So things just as simple as, you know,
1:01:38
what would it look like if we started to reclaim our schools to make them be hubs of kind of like ecological unity? And to that point, one of the programs that was just launched that I'm a part of called Reimagining SF, which has its hub at the Cal Academy of Sciences, is doing just that. So through what's called their 49 squares program, they're thinking about every square of San Francisco to rebuild it back. So then that way, it serves essentially as a beacon for other cities in California.
1:02:09
So there are ways to do it, and they may cost a lot upfront, but then they're gonna save us so much more into the future.
1:02:18
- [Host] This was great. Thank you so much. (students applauding) - Thank you, guys.
1:02:25
Thank you. (students applauding)
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