Remnant Hybrids, Hybrid Remnants?
Dawn breaks on the sublime claypans of Perth. This view could be an imaginary past landscape, but we are within the contemporary landscape, inside a vital ‘remnant’ corridor of vegetation, bounded by highways.
These environs are being physically encircled and erased by a careless and heavy urban footprint.
Might thinking in ‘remnants’ reinforce a mentality which sets humans apart from an urban ecology we are part of? Conversely, thinking in human–urban–ecological hybrids implicates ecology and design in processes that are deeply cultural and spatial. Might these lead us toward care, custodianship and true preservation?
The environmental historian Bill Cronon described ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ in his erudite essay of the same name. Cronon traces the emergence of the concept of ‘wilderness’ in the western psyche, the conflation of nature with an imaginary landscape: a sublime nonhuman paradise. This conception of nature as wilderness has distanced humans from the natures of cities and towns – the places in which they live and have agency.
By many, nature is still construed as something separate from and outside of the city. Such is the enduring potency of wilderness. Humans are ‘inside’ the city and nature is a place to escape to, ’outside’ the city, and by implication, outside human awareness and responsibility.
But we know that humans are not outside the environmental tussle, causally or physically. Humans are implicated in acts of destroying and acts of preserving our environments and our remnants.
Humans belong to the city, wilderness and to nature.
The construction of wilderness, as Cronon describes, has shaped modern environmental values profoundly. Wilderness protection is the genesis of modern environmentalism and many conservation movements; asserting with them firm hierarchy of nature: where a mountain was more valuable than a grassland, and a waterfall more worthy of protection, than the wetland into which it flowed.
There are hierarchies of wilderness existing in the urban ecology. Many islands of ‘remnant vegetation’ — natures which are classified as original and unmodified — are buffered and protected, rightly so, from urban forces. While a highly modified and very urban ecology, existing in our open drainage channels, sumps, our railway and road reserves, verges and parks, in our urban tree canopy, are afforded little protection. We can now attribute ‘value’ to landscapes in all kinds of ways: ecosystem services, green infrastructure, land values and urban biodiversity metrics, and many of these are beginning to give weight to urban nature.
The urban, spatial and ecological questions here are pressing. How and where should ecological space be situated, how do we protect highly modified ecosystems, or spaces without present ecological ‘value’ but with potential for ecological recovery, and how it might this be coordinated across a city and region to achieve connectivity and ‘Repair’?
While binaries of urban and sublime, nature and culture, are highly pervasive in the humanities, they have important parallels in science and design. The Perth-based ecologist Richard Hobbs has popularised the idea of ‘novel ecosystems’ as a way of dealing with the hybrid and modified natural landscapes we now find within our cities and throughout the anthropocene. According to Hobbs: ‘We can choose to ignore these systems as being unworthy of conservation concern or we can accept (even if reluctantly) the importance of figuring out what we know about novel ecosystems and what to do about them.’
Novel ecosystems include many of the forgotten natural spaces of our city, our open drainage channels, sumps, our railway and road reserves, verges and parks, in our urban tree canopy. These are vital spaces to protect and repair for resilience, biodiversity, and wellbeing. Though perhaps understandably, they are afforded a far lower status of protection than the remnant, and they are consistently measured and valued against an ideal state of environmental functioning. If these spaces are found to be ‘degraded’ or even ‘completely degraded’ against these ecological criteria, their destruction can be justified. And the remnants will continue to be increasingly encircled as these novel ecological which connect them diminish.
A wholistic conservation scheme that treats remnants, novel ecologies and urban ecosystems as a continuous network is essential. Traditional Owners and humans are at the centre of such a network – their access, respect for and custodianship over these spaces. Their agency and control over the design of the city around, through and at the edges of this network.
For many years ‘ecology’ has been used only in the context of something called the ‘environment’, exclusive of humans, urban forces, even design. With ecology as the lens, James Corner and a whole host of landscape architects and landscape urbanists ask us to “treat all forces in the urban field. . .as continuous networks of inter-relationships. . .”
These are calls for ecological thinking to infiltrate urban thinking. To think in long time-scales, in soft, light and live matter, continuity and interconnection, hybrid and systems thinking. These are the antidotes to the binds: the short-term, structural, isolated, bounded constraints that our economic systems, and by extension our planning systems, have backed the practices of both design and conservation into.
