While most of the readings we have read have focused on New York City, specifically in terms of its ecological history from the Native Americans to the European colonists to the present times, this journal discussed civilizations and groups of people from thousands of years ago to mindsets that the authors hope will be adopted by future generations. This hope for change stems from the fact that cities use resources at monumental rates, but they have caused drastic changes in their surrounding environments. For example, New York City may have a land area of just over 300 square miles, but it has approximately 8.5 million people, and a lot of its water supply comes from the Catskills, part of which are not even in the metropolitan area. From a global perspective, the human population is growing exponentially, reaching seven billion just a few years ago, and it shows no signs of slowing down. We will torture nature to reveal its secrets just to support us and our insatiable needs, but we only look at short-term solutions and ways that we can personally benefit rather than how we have affected the natural cycles of organisms and non-living portions of ecosystems. Our resources are finite, and at this point, it looks like only a catastrophe of epic proportions will change our behaviors, even if it may be too late to reverse the damage that we have done.
The authors are a bit more optimistic than this, striving for the implementation of greater resource management into urban planning. Urban planning nowadays is only done for people, not the environment. We focus on building cities that are efficient for commuting, commerce, and social functions, and try to tackle issues such as racism, poverty, and gender inequality, but this is only one slice of the pie. We must include environmental factors as well for the sake of the organisms that we have symbiotic relationships with, since their extinction will ultimately lead to our own downfall as well. Interestingly, our distant ancestors were looked at in the most positive light, being described as “hunters and gatherers … [who] collected resources in different places, migrating when resources became scarce. The energetic metabolism of hunters and gatherers has been described as an ‘uncontrolled solar energy system’.” (2297). Now, with the advent of agriculture and industrialization, people have chosen to stay put and expect resources to come to them, and use them at faster rates than at any other time in the past; the inventions of the automobile, plane, and other forms of transportation may be the primary reasons behind this.
The journal is very well-organized, given the two diagrams describing the holistic relationship between urban planning, resource management, and sustainable development, and how all of them have changed dramatically over the past millennia. The recycling of waste and nutrients is alluded to, and a real-life example, even if it is a bit gruesome, is Bill Gate’s Omni Processor, which converts fecal matter and sewage into drinking water. However, environmentalists, businessmen, and politicians can only do so much to encourage change by giving thoughtful directions; people themselves have to take the wheel and drive.
