[getsmart-l] Urban Ecology Centre, Centre D'Ecologie Urbaine, Montreal

[Gloria Boxen]

http://www.urbanecology.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=54〈=en

The goal of the Urban Ecology Centre is to build and
share expertise concerning the most viable approaches
to sustainable urban development and how they may best
be implemented in our neighbourhoods and city.

...The prestigious magazine, New Scientist, recently
published a very alarming report of a new discovery by
two scientists, Judith Marquand at Oxford University
and Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University . A vast
expanse of western Siberia is undergoing an
unprecedent thaw that could dramatically increase the
rate of global warming, these climate scientists
warned. These researchers  recently returned from the
region found that an area of permafrost spanning a
million square kilometers – the size of France and
Germany combined – has started to melt for the first
time since it was formed 11,000 years ago at the end
of the last ice age.

The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of
western Siberia,in the world’s largest frozen peat bog
has alarmed scientists who fear that as it thaws,it
will release billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse
gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide into the
atomsphere.

Our planet faces a fundamental dichotomy, which
reveals an unprecedented conflict. Nature is organised
in the form of a number of ecosystems which is being
assaulted by human society which is organized into a
series of nation-states and regional associations of
States based on a globalized market economy  which
take little account of the ecosystems in which they
function.

Evidence is now adding up that the ecosystems battered
by the abuse and overuse that our kind of world
economy heaps on them, contribute a disintegrating
relentless pressure. As the US Academy of Sciences put
it three years ago, the global economy now consumes in
a year what it will take Nature 15 months to replace.
Over exploitation, in other words, has become endemic.

Water withdrawals from rivers and lakes from
irrigation, industrial and households use have doubled
in the last 40 years, reducing the flow of several
major rivers, including the Nile, Yellow and Colorado
rivers. The construction of dams along rivers has
greatly restricted their flows. In some regions, such
as the Middle East and North Africa, human use 120% of
renewable water supplies due to their reliance on
groundwater that is not replenished. 

In addition the falling water tables and rising
temperatures are making it more difficult for the
world’s farmers to adequately feed the 76 million
people added to our numbers each year. Humans drink
nearly 4 quarts of water a day in one form or another,
but the food we consume each day requires 2000 quarts
of water to produce, or 500 times as much. 

Agriculture is the most water-intensive sector of an
economy; 70% of all water pumped from underground or
diverted from rivers is used for irrigation, 20% is
used by industry, and 10% goes to residences. Of even
more concern, the vast majority of the nearly 3
billion people projected to be added to the world’s
population by mid-century will come in countries where
water tables are falling and well are going dry. 

Historically, it was the supply of land that
constrained the growth in food production, but today
the shortage of water is the most formidable barrier.

Climate change threatens farming, which is dependent
on climate stability. Scientists in Asia fear that
rising temperatures will reduce grain yields in the
tropics by as much as 30% by mid-century. Nearly a
quarter of Earth’s terrestrial surface has been
converted to cropland to feed the growing human
population, so the expected drastic change in climate
threatens to make an already unacceptable rate of
global hunger even worse.


Urbanization : A Major Environmental Factor and the
Place of Cities

...
These and other negative trends have never proceeded
faster. Over and above this UN report we can add the
fact that in expected expansion of the world’s
population to 8 billion in the next 25 years, 90% of
that increase will occur in the urban areas of the
Third World. At that rate within the next few years at
least 23 cities are expected to have more than 10
million inhabitants and several, including Mumbai,
Lagos, Sao Paolo and Karachi, may be on the way to
joining Tokyo with its 26 million inhabitants.

Within the next two decades over 12 million migrants
from rural areas are likely to move to urban centers
every year, which would require the building of
another 400 new cities with populations averaging
600,000 people. We must realize that already at least
50% of India’s (is) urban.

We must realize that from the ecological point of view
a modern city is a huge tumour which absorbs vast
quantities of resources from the surrounding
countryside, turning out in their stead vast
quantities of increasingly more toxic waste products.

“A city is like some vast beast with a very specific
metabolism. Every day it must take in some 9000 tons
of fossil fuels, 2000 tons of food, 6000-25,000 of
water, 31,500 tons of oxygen, plus unknown quantities
of various minerals. It must also emit in the same
period something like 28,500 tons of CO2, 12,000 tons
of H20, 150 tons of particles, 500,000 tons of sewage,
together with vast quantities of garbage, sulphur, and
nitrogen oxides, and various other heterogeneous
materials.” [The Metabolism of Cities by Abel Wolman,
Scientific American, September 1965]

Cities seriously contribute to global warming.
Satellite studies have shown that mega-cities create
large zones of heat that encourage smog and give rise
to thunderstorms. Worse still, according to a report
from John Hopkins University, they produce about 80%
of the carbon dioxide emissions that are largely
responsible for global warming, and in addition take
up more and more of the land, that, as population
increases, is urgently required for producing food.

This summary outlines why the social ecologists
working through the Urban Ecology Centre focus on the
city and its disproportionate, unbalanced exploitation
of Nature. Our aim is to establish equilibrium between
cities and the environment, which also requires a new
type of city, democratic and green