Our obligation to reimagine cities as fauna refuges
Submitted by Chickowee on 22 Nov 2019.
While catastrophic fires eradicate habitats, it's important to think of ways to integrate nature into our city environments, writes Dr Peter Fisher.
LATE LAST MONTH, Melburnians awoke to the news that their plane trees were facing a death warrant — the city council was planning to euthanise their like in the CBD. They were causing allergenic responses from shedding leaf and shoot hairs, guilty for those sneezes, wheezes and streaming eyes despite expert opinion to the contrary.
How did we get to this overtly anthropocentric position? It's a sort of halfway house where greenery/trees are promoted as serving human needs like mitigating heat island effects, calming the psyche (amenity/liveability) but little to show by the way of specifics as to how this public intervention might influence different strands of urban wildlife and birds in particular.
Well, we’re only now beginning to peel back the layers as to the complexities of rewilding, including the Darwinian ramifications where new species look to be evolving.
Interested? Read the full story at the Independent Australia website.
