Feed aggregator

Greening Manhattan: bringing nature into the city is one thing, making it part of our culture and everyday lives is another. Alyson Hurt/flickr, CC BY

Australian cities are inherently diverse places, but that diversity can lead to conflict between different values about what cities should and can be. Our series, Conflict in the City, brings together urban researchers to examine some of these tensions and consider how cities are governed and for whom.

Enthusiasm for urban greening is at a high point, and rightly so.

Ecological studies highlight the contribution urban nature makes to the conservation of biodiversity. For example, research shows cities support a greater proportion of threatened species than non-urban areas.

Green space is increasingly recognised as useful for moderating the heat island effect. Hence, this helps cities adapt to, and reduce the consequences of, climate change.

Reducing urban heat stress is the main objective behind the federal government’s plan to set tree canopy targets for Australian cities. Trees are cooler than concrete. Trees take the sting out of heatwaves and reduce heat-related deaths.

The “healthy parks healthy people” agenda emphasises the health benefits of trees, parks and gardens. Urban greenery provides a pleasant place for recreation. By enhancing liveability, green spaces make cities more desirable places to live and work.

The increased interest in urban greening presents exciting opportunities for urban communities long starved of green space.

Unpacking the green city agenda

This enthusiasm for “green cities” stands in stark contrast to traditional views about nature as the antithesis of culture, and so having no place in the city. The traditional view was that the only ecosystems worthy of protection were to be found beyond the city, in national parks and wilderness areas.

We embrace the new agenda wholeheartedly, but also believe it’s important not to focus solely on instrumental measures like canopy cover targets to reduce heat stress. We should not forget about experiential encounters.

The risk with instrumental (and arguably exclusionary) approaches is these fail to challenge the divide between people and nature. This limits people’s connection to the places in which they live and to broader ecological processes that are essential for life.

Instrumental targets in isolation also risk presenting urban greening as an “apolitical” endeavour. But we know this is not the case, as we see with the rise of green gentrification associated with iconic greening projects like New York’s High Line. Wealthy suburbs consistently have the most green space in cities.

Bringing nature into the city is one thing. Bringing it into our culture and everyday lives is another.

Understanding ecology in a lived sense

Urban greening provides an opportunity to recast the relationship between people and environment – one of the critical challenges associated with the Anthropocene.

Urban greening is not just for our benefit, but must surely be for our co-habitants too. Matt Cornock/flickr, CC BY-NC

To break down nature-culture divides in our cities, and in ourselves, we argue for the importance of embracing experiential engagements that develop a more deeply felt connection with the city places in which we live, work and play.

We are advocating a focus that does more than just encourage people to interact tangibly in and with urban nature, by drawing attention to the way humans and non-humans (including plants) are active co-habitants of cities.

Such an approach works by recognising that human understanding of the environment is intricately wrapped up in our experiences of that environment.

Put simply, green cities can’t just be about area, tree cover and proximity (though they are important). We need to foster intimate, active and ongoing encounters that position people “in” ecologies. And we need to understand that those ecologies exist beyond the hard boundaries of urban green space.

Without fostering a more holistic relationship with non-humans in cities, we risk an urban greening agenda that misses the chance to unravel some of the nature-culture separation that contributes to our long-term sustainability challenges as a society.

Active interactions with nature in the spaces of everyday life are vital for advancing a form of environmental stewardship that will persist beyond individual (and sometimes short-lived) policy settings.

Green city citizens need to see themselves as part of, not separate from, the ecologies that exist beyond the hard boundaries of urban green space. PINKE/flickr, CC BY-NC No getting away from the politics

It is important to consider the policy and governance dimensions of urban greening.

If the instrumental orientation prevails, our cities might be “more liveable” (at least for some, at particular locations and points in time), but our societies may not be more socially and environmentally just, or more sustainable.

We therefore emphasise the need to understand and critique the dimensions of the renewed interest in urban ecology. We have to consider whether this interest is associated with existing political economies, which embrace technocratic expertise to the exclusion of other voices, or whether urban greening can foster the emergence of a more transformative form of decision-making.

We also ask how we can enhance the prospects for more deliberative and place-based responses. An experiential turn for urban greening may be one way to make green space planning and practice more democratic.

By questioning who we might be greening for and how, we can open the way for the much-needed acknowledgment of Indigenous histories and participation in the making of urban space.

Giving urban greening an experiential focus might also help open our eyes to the needs of the more-than-human. Rather than simply cultivating green spaces for a narrow set of anthropocentric benefits, we pose the question: who are the participants in urban greening? It’s a way of acknowledging that we inhabit cities with plants and other non-human lifeforms.

An interesting area of policy development that may be productive for urban greening is the idea of the playful commons. This is an example of a governance approach that is more open to affective and experiential interaction – the community participates in negotiating, licensing and designing the use of public space.

Applying this approach to urban greening might encourage more deliberative forms of governance that can deliver more environmentally just and sustainable cities for the long term, for both humans and non-humans.

You can read other Conflict in the City articles here.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Spill 46 miles off Shetland is being monitored by air and said to be heading away from land and dispersing

Around 95 tonnes of oil were leaked into the North Sea from a BP platform on Sunday, the company has said.

The leak is around two and a half times smaller than the biggest North Sea spill in recent years, at Shell’s Gannet platform off Aberdeen in 2011.

Continue reading...

Conservationist who was the first national park officer for Dartmoor and the first chief executive of the Countryside Council for Wales

Ian Mercer, who has died aged 83, spent more than half a century in countryside conservation. His work as the first national park officer for Dartmoor (1973-90) and as the first chief executive of the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW, 1990-95) had a lasting impact not only on the landscapes over which he presided but on the management of land for wildlife, amenity and public access throughout Britain.

Ian’s greatest triumph concerning Dartmoor was to initiate the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985, which established a commoners’ council to safeguard the interests of the moor and open it fully to public access. The act had wider significance, for it was the precursor of the nationwide Commons Act 2006, which also provided for commoners’ councils and enabled them to obtain environmental funding.

Continue reading...

Attempts to give the maximum level of international protection to all African elephants have foundered at a key species conference in Johannesburg.

Cites meeting blocks proposal for ban on all trade of ivory from four southern African countries with stable or increasing elephant populations - but passes other vital conservation measures

A bid to give the highest level of international legal protection to all African elephants was defeated on Monday at a global wildlife summit.

The EU played a pivotal role in blocking the proposal, which was fought over by rival groups of African nations.

Continue reading...

Oil on the surface of the water appears to be moving north following a spill west of Shetland on Sunday, energy firm says

An oil spill from a North Sea platform is heading away from land, according to BP.

Its Clair platform was shut down on Sunday following the leak.

Continue reading...

Tests find UK-produced pork products infected with the livestock strain of the superbug, with potentially serious implications for human health

Meat produced from British pigs has been shown to be infected with a livestock strain of MRSA, the Guardian can reveal, raising concerns that the UK is on the brink of another food scandal.

Tests on a sample of 97 UK-produced pork products from supermarkets show that three – sold at Asda and Sainsbury’s – were contaminated with the superbug strain which can cause serious health problems.

Continue reading...

The 2016 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine goes to Yoshinori Ohsumi for discoveries about the secrets of how cells can remain healthy by recycling waste.

Clean tech costs have fallen 41–94% over the past 7 years. Wind and solar accounted for two-thirds of new energy installations in the US in 2015.

A new report from the US Department of Energy paints a bright picture for our prospects to cut carbon pollution and prevent the most dangerous levels of climate change. The report looked at recent changes in costs and deployment of five key clean energy technologies: wind, residential solar, utility-scale solar, batteries, and LED bulbs. For each technology, costs fell between 41% and 94% from 2008 to 2015.

Continue reading...

State pushes for greater integration of Australia’s electricity network – but Josh Frydenberg says the idea will have to wait

The South Australian government expects a special meeting of energy ministers scheduled for Friday to examine the factors behind last week’s power blackouts in the state will also canvas whether there should be a national “emissions intensity” trading scheme for the electricity sector.

South Australia has been pushing for the adoption of a national scheme that would work as a form of emissions trading for the electricity sector. Generators would be penalised for polluting above an emissions-intensity baseline, to help drive an orderly transition to low-emissions energy sources.

Continue reading...

An Asian bird species under threat for it's ivory-like "helmet" has gained extra protection at the Cites conference in Johannesburg.

The CEOs of Australia's four largest banks are heading to Canberra this week to appear before the House of Representatives economics committee.

A woman walking her dog shoos away a saltwater crocodile by clapping her sandal on her hand. The incident happened last month at a famous feeding ground for crocodiles at the Kakadu national park in the Northern Territory

• Woman uses thong to scare off stalking crocodile in Northern Territory

Continue reading...

In the first six months of the 5p charge in England, 6bn fewer bags were handed out. Watch out coffee cups and plastic bottles

Once, my family’s kitchen cupboard would have contained dozens of plastic bags. But today – a year after the introduction of England’s 5p plastic bag charge – I count just six (three secondhand ones, given to us by other people, one corner-shop bag and two small bags supplied with meat and fish).

England’s plastic bag charge was a long time coming – long after Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – and critics predicted its exemptions for small stores and paper bags would diminish its effectiveness. A year ago, Andy Cummins, campaigns director of Surfers Against Sewage, predicted that England’s charge would reduce use of plastic bags, but not as effectively as in Scotland, Wales (down 78%) and Northern Ireland (down 81%).

Continue reading...

A butterfly struck up an unlikely friendship with a koala joey at Symbio Wildlife Park in New South Wales, Australia, with adorable results.

Scientists hope immersive experience, enabling people to experience the world through the eyes of a cow destined for market or a coral on a dying reef, can increase people’s connection with environmental issues

Scientists have taken the notion ‘you are what you eat’ to a new level by using virtual reality to help people see the world through the eyes of a cow – or a piece of coral – to make them feel part of the natural world.

With several consumer virtual reality headsets now on the market, researchers hope experiencing life from an animal’s point of view could change environmental behaviour where other methods have failed.

Continue reading...

Cadair Idris, Gwynedd This diverse aural geography perhaps reflects the transformation of the Welsh hills from a rural landscape into a recreational one

Cadair Idris may not attract the vast crowds of Snowdon, which sees more visitors every year than there are people living in Bristol, but it’s still not a mountain you get to yourself on a sunny September Saturday. In the Minffordd Path car park, scores of people perch on car bumpers pulling on socks and stout footwear. A man with an Estuary English accent is ribbing his companions, who have voices from the Valleys. A jovial but slightly pointed argument over Welsh independence ensues.

My dad and I join the procession, which takes us up through a swath of relict woodland. Summer’s green lustre is going; oak leaves are crisping at the edges. But out on the open hillside, clusters of rowan berries shine lipstick-bright in the light, their ripe autumnal red contrasting with the brooding volcanic sublimity of Craig Cau. Sleep on these slopes, goes the local legend, and you wake up either mad or a poet (it doesn’t specify which is worse).

Continue reading...

Reptile retreats after woman claps rubber shoe against her hand at famous Kakadu national park feeding ground, where rangers are calling for stricter safety controls

Northern Territory rangers and traditional owners are calling for greater safety measures after a woman shooed away a saltwater crocodile with her thong in Kakadu national park last month.

The woman and her small dog had a dangerous confrontation with the nearly four-metre predator while standing at the water’s edge on the East Alligator River at Cahill’s Crossing – a famous feeding ground for crocodiles.

Continue reading...

AAP/David Mariuz

The mid-latitude cyclone with no name that hit South Australia last week, spawning two tornadoes and 80,000 electricity strikes, destroyed 22 massive transmission towers carrying electricity across the state.

The consequences of the superstorm could have been dire – both from the direct effects of the wind and floods but also for the life support systems that depend on electricity. 1.7 million residents lost power as winds reached 120km/hour.

Yet in the midst of South Australia being in a state of emergency, federal Coalition ministers launched what seemed to be a co-ordinated and, for many, outrageous campaign against renewable energy.

It was co-ordinated in that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg all spoke from the same script: that “energy security” is Australia’s number-one priority. Or, as Frydenberg also put it:

We must keep the lights on.

Turnbull spoke of the extremely “aggressive” renewable energy targets the states have put in, which ironically are helping the federal government meet its own targets as part of UN framework agreements. And this in an environment where both major parties have just agreed to cut A$500 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Along with Turnbull, Frydenberg was able to concede that severe weather was the source of the blackout. But the cyclone became a mere footnote to a full-frontal assault against renewables, which was taken up by mainstream media around the country. It sometimes became a bigger story than the storm itself.

Frydenberg continued the crusade over the weekend. He declared:

We’ve got the states pursuing these ridiculously high and unrealistic state-based renewable energy targets.

Joyce’s appearances on radio put the panic over renewables well ahead of the storm’s potential dangers. He compared the one-day blackout to the dark ages and put it down to bad planning, of which wind power was seen to be public enemy number one.

Joyce pointedly refused to acknowledge the storm as the cause of the blackout, and instead regressed to his well-known anti-wind rhetoric:

Of course in the middle of a storm, there are certain areas where wind power works – it works when wind is at a milder style, it doesn’t work when there’s no wind and it doesn’t work when there’s excessive wind – and it obviously wasn’t working too well last night because they had a blackout.

For these ministers, putting out a message that renewables were to blame because, they argued, they could not deliver a stable power system to South Australia, was an urgent priority that could both kill any climate message while denigrating renewables.

In a way what they did was very clever. As I have argued elsewhere, extreme weather presents the best opportunity for communicating climate stories.

That is, people are looking for an explanation as to why catastrophic weather is affecting them, and pointing to the link with between extreme weather and climate change is very persuasive at these times. But the Coalition’s campaign hijacked such messaging by simply swapping climate change with renewables.

The anti-renewable campaign was also outrageous. It was an affront to those who were confronting the storm’s immediate dangers and discomfort. But far more outrageous than this was the hypocrisy of drawing a link between the outage and renewables, rather than to climate change. The latter connection has been so vehemently rebuked by the Coalition during past extreme weather events.

During the NSW bushfires in October 2013, Abbott government ministers declared that talking about climate change during a “natural”/unnatural disaster to be taboo. This was in response to Greens MP Adam Bandt, who had linked the fires to climate change.

At the time, Environment Minister Greg Hunt declared:

There has been a terrible tragedy in NSW and no-one anywhere should seek to politicise any human tragedy, let alone a bushfire of this scale.

Given how progressive Turnbull himself has been on climate change in the past, this co-ordinated attack on renewables only demonstrates how captive he is to the right wing of the party and to the fossil-fuel industry.

Turnbull’s declaration on the day after the blackout was to “end the ideology” of the states pursuing renewables too aggressively. Ironically, what all of the polls around climate change show in the last five years is that enthusiasm for renewables is consistently high across Australia.

Perhaps Turnbull believes that if something is popular it must be ideological by definition. This departs from the idea that ideology is actually a worldview in the service of power – for example, the corporate power of fossil-fuel companies, which stand to lose much by the aggressive pursuit of renewables.

But the Coalition campaign got a huge lift from the ABC in the form of an opinion piece by political editor Chris Uhlmann. He says:

Renewables are the future but, today, they present serious engineering problems. To deny that is to deny the science.

Those problems can be sorted in time, but rushing to a target to parade green credentials exposes the electricity network to a serious security risk and, in the long run, risks permanent reputational damage to the renewable energy cause.

Uhlmann took his piece to national TV with a PowerPoint presentation during the ABC’s evening bulletin the day after the blackout. He claimed that only coal and gas could provide continuous energy or “synchronous supply”, and that renewables fail to do this.

The story really made it look like renewables were to blame. Yet his story in no way reconciled his teacherly diagrams with a soundbite from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) in an earlier story – that:

Energy generation mix was not a factor in the power blackout.

Uhlmann’s story mentioned that the main interconnector with Victoria had failed, but then focused on renewables as a problem, while claiming the AEMO advised him that the causes of the blackout were yet to be identified. He failed to mention what he had in his online article, which was that AEMO also advised:

Initial investigations have identified the root cause of the event is likely to be the multiple loss of 275 kilovolt (kV) power lines during severe storm activity in the state.

Anyone who saw the images of the toppled and mangled transmission towers could easily figure out that if electricity has no way of being transmitted, it really does not matter where it comes from.

This is the point Labor politicians were trying to make. But they did not get a very good run, because the Coalition’s media blitz had been much more planned.

But neither did Labor politicians, including Bill Shorten, make the alternative link to climate change. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill was a little more effective, saying:

This was a weather event, not a renewable energy event.

But he also did not go further.

Uhlmann’s report was preceded by a pre-cyclone story posted on the ABC website last week which claimed renewables had caused an astronomical spike in energy prices in South Australia on a July day when the wind was not blowing. But the headline belies the reality that a privatised system of energy supply enables the kind of price gouging that was seen on that day, especially as the interconnector with Victoria was also down.

The interconnectors across Australia are very important, as Australia actually has one of the largest continuous grids in the world. This means that as long as we manage the grid itself, with “better planning” we will be able to avoid blackouts.

The importance of managing grids, and “distributed energy” that may use home storage as well, is the key to continuity. Otherwise, it is very easy to see outages, as was the case in the US in 2003. Then, long before renewables were significant, a single tree branch touching an overloaded power line turned off the lights for 50 million people in the US and Canada.

Managing a reliable grid is important, but it never seems to have occurred to federal Coaltition politicians that “good planning” is to aggressively cut emissions – which is exactly what many states are trying to do. This reduces the amount of energy in the climate system that ends up as increased water vapour and flooding, increased storm intensity, and many other forms of extreme weather.

Shorten, like Turnbull, knows that recent polls are showing climate change is returning a high level of concern, and has missed an opportunity to link the storm to climate – something the Abbott government had always considered must be avoided at all costs.

Turnbull’s team has managed to divert attention away from climate and go one better than the Abbott government by attacking renewables all in one campaign. For the fossil-fuel industry and the Coalition’s climate deniers alike, this was one perfect storm.

A leading UK-based solar farm developer has received approval for its first 140MW solar farm in Queensland, and intends to bypass Australia's major electricity utilities and sell the output from its growing portfolio of projects to the spot market.