Essays Archive

Historically, North American urban environmental and natural resource management was operationalized in a top-down, command-and-control fashion. In general, governments prepared plans and made decisions with some limited input from other stakeholders. Over time, this shifted to a more bottom-up, collaborative approach ― an ecosystem approach. The ecosystem approach is not...

Youth voices advocating for climate justice have emerged as a significant force for shedding light on the escalating challenges that climate change will create in their current and future lives. While adults often assume that young people are not interested in politics and/or are perceived to be less politically engaged,...

In 2010, the UN General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation. Equal access to safe and clean water, however, requires a major change in how decisions over use and rights to water are made and needs appropriate legal frameworks to curb over-extraction and unsustainable behavior. Qanats...

In early September 2019, a plant known as Jimson weed (Datura stramonium) was considered one of the top threats to public safety in New York City. Although fairly common in the region, a Tweet from Adrian Benepe, the former commissioner of NYC Parks & Recreation went viral after he found...

Part I: Falling in Love Part II: A Broken Heart Part III: Finding Joy in the Smallest of Things This is a collection of stories about a disappearing lake. The Great Salt Lake. It is told in three parts through poems, prose, and multi-media artwork. These first excerpts are from...

After more than 15 years of teaching, researching, consulting, and advocating for nature-based solutions (NBS) in Brazil, it’s really fulfilling to see NbS becoming nationally recognized and adopted in several Brazilian cities. In this essay, I present my view of the process that led to this moment. It has had...

A view from the joint meeting of the San Juan ULTRA and the NATURA Early Career Network 1. Nature-based Solutions in the Context of San Juan, Puerto Rico On a sunny day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, life is good. Along the beaches, crabs scuttle in the riprap next to...

Human impacts on the environment are no joke, and climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. So, Environmental Education (EE) is serious business. Given the context, it is understandable that EE is usually communicated to adults through serious methods of communication such as lectures, information sessions, and...

The White City. Thus, Tel Aviv refers to itself, taking its cue from the many buildings built in the International Style in the 1930s by the avant-garde architects who had studied in Europe or come to Palestine to escape Nazi Germany. Some had studied at the Bauhaus, and the term...

Obstacles in nature are quite variable. Some are easy to observe: for example, a tree in the middle of an open area, a rock in the middle of a trail, or a lake in the forest. Others are not that easy to spot or identify as an obstacle. For example,...

Invasive species cause one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and ecosystems worldwide. Many species are introduced into environments different from their place of origin and can quickly proliferate, causing significant harm to the ecosystems, economy, and public health. Invasive species have the capacity to establish, reproduce, and spread uncontrollably,...

[*]I’m on my way home from an errand one early June evening. As I walk, I look down on the granite-slabbed sidewalk. At its margin, a row of slender catsears raise their yellow heads towards the fading sky. They look a bit like skinny dandelions (who they are related to),...

“…they do not belong to our neighbourhood and are located outside the administrative jurisdiction of Bangalore; hence we do not work on those lakes…” This was the comment made by a representative belonging to a prominent lake conservation group in the city, presenting a focused definition of a city as...

A core tenant of the environmental movement is under attack. Planning, and particularly the rational planning model, is seen as something suspect, an enemy of the people. The whole idea of rational, technocratic planning to achieve social goals is being rejected by some, as an elitist pursuit that must be...

I frequently ask students, colleagues, practitioners, and fellow ecologists to consider how a city can become more like a forest. I started to do this in 2019 when I (perhaps belatedly!) came to understand that just reducing our carbon emissions ― even to neutral ― is not enough to prevent...

How can we design urban green spaces that support health and well-being? What are the roles played by users, practitioners, and researchers? These questions guided our virtual seed session “Designing urban green spaces for health and well-being” during the TNOC Festival 2022. Fifteen participants shared their experience as a user...

Biodiversity is receiving much attention at the moment, not least among landscape architects in Australia. In 2018, David Maddox on this website posed the following provocation: “Landscape architects are the practitioners of biodiversity’s meaning through their acts of shaping nature into ‘spaces’. They have their hands on definitions of biodiversity...

There is no dearth of global reports discussing the impacts of global warming and its direct impact on sea level rise, rising temperatures in cities, and irregular and extreme weather events such as cyclones and rainfall combined with severe water shortage and drought. These events are no longer what can...

For SPROUT’s third issue, the editors were inspired by The Nature of Cities’ (TNOC) recent art exhibition, Shade, and invited contributors to draw on the exhibition’s virtual installation as a conceptual springboard to contemplate the theme of shade through a poetic lens. We asked poets to reflect on the role...

Several weeks ago, I was startled when taking a typical morning walk to find that a large and majestic white oak tree had been cut down and lay in the front of a neighbor’s yard. It was a shocking and sad sight, a tree I had admired almost daily, reduced...