Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In fact, my own paper enunciated all the themes of the biopark idea, at least
a year before I remember having such ideas, and also stated:“We are plant-
ing a wide variety of flowers . . . to bring back into the park all kinds of
animals . . . that may have disappeared during urbanization.” There was even
a paper titled “Amphibious Assault on the Suburbs Successful.”
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Parks help
enrich wildlife, but any kind of park is a built and in some sense artificial
environment. Parks are, to repeat, artificial assemblages containing many
“natural elements.” When stating this as a negative we must remember
that we ourselves live in totally artificial built environments, in villages,
towns, cities, and conurbations amounting to megalopolises. We have
replaced the kinds of habitations used by pre-civilized humans with func-
tional substitutions instead of natural elements. In the terminology of clas-
sical ethology, such substitutions are “supernormal.” (Think of Astroturf
versus grass.) The steps that led to unnatural concentrations of human liv-
ing units and populations are worthy of major educational exhibits in the
biopark. The starting point, which was not really a point but a process
spread over time, is easy to establish: it was the profound shift from our
ancestors' being food gatherers to their becoming food producers. This is
what V. Gordon Childe called the “Neolithic Revolution.” Agriculture
transformed us from being ecologically indistinguishable from any other
large primate, depending on the natural carrying capacity of the environ-
ment, into an agent of change, producing new and higher carrying capaci-
ties. Cultivation, domestication, the consequent anthropogenic alteration of
huge areas of the Earth's surface, and the origin of civilization are all inter-
connected. History began with agriculture's triumph; everything before
that was prehistory.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE BIOPARK IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
THE BIOPARK AS AN URBAN OASIS
The parks, gardens, and outdoor bioexhibits that present-day cities enclose
are islands or peninsulas of a semi-natural world.They may only be scaled-
up versions of domestic gardens and city allotments, but their scale can and
usually does affect the richness of their natural history. Small open spaces
may lack the ambiance and/or the resources that are needed by wild ani-
mals. Two groups of organisms may be found in such urban settings. The
first group comprises animals and plants that exploit urban environments
