Biosphere Earth — 18: Integration Priorities

This blog is a continuation of the previous blog, “Local Priorities.”

Restoring Wilderness (Restoring bio-physical security)

We’re just scratching the surface in terms of what’s possible for rebuilding climate and biospheric security on Earth. This particular piece is very general, but: in addition to prioritizing vital organ ecosystems, we should be integrating wild vegetation into the places we live, work and travel as fast as we possibly can today.

You can play many roles.

Here’s a brief sequence showing how restoring and reconnecting wilderness integrity looks from local to macro spaces. (The previous blog showed micro to local spaces.)

Bringing back Biosphere Earth —

Utilizing locally compostable materials

Bringing more vegetation into public spaces to manage water, heat, pollution, species, carbon, etc. (NACTO)

Vegetation everywhere:

The High Line vegetation project brought $4 Billion of development to Brooklyn. (High Line)

The High Line (NYNJTC)

On our buildings —

Park Royal Hotel

Through our communities —

Over & under roads —

Wildlife bridge in San Antonio, TX.

On our factories, around our farms —

Ford Dearborn Plant (McDonough)

(Schoenberg, et al, 2012)

Reconnecting wildlife migrations —

Integrating wilderness every way possible —

The Future is Mosaics

To meet and reverse today’s planetary life-support system collapse crisis we must reconnect and integrate Earth’s “green infrastructure” into every aspect of our lives. Wilderness collapse is already nearly complete. Wildernesses provide everything for us: life-support services, climate stability, and so on. If wilderness ecosystems continue to contract, the food system will collapse. We need planetary wildernesses as large, rich, and fortified as they can possibly be. All of it working to the best of its ability. Not because we’re nature lovers, but because we like living.

The overall local goal, no matter where you live, should be to make the places we live, work, and travel ecological treasures.

Humanity’s primary asset is bio-rich ecosystems. We need to see today’s segmented ecosystems merge and strengthen. We need to make corridors between personal, local, contiguous, and macro wildernesses that span cities, regions, and nations. We need to regrow destroyed wildernesses. We need to design and build Civlization for wilderness functionality, not just commerce and aesthetics.

Re-establishing ecological connectedness at all scales

Biospherically-speaking, we want our homes to connect to Yellowstone and the Amazon, the rivers and the oceans. We want to restore biospheric integrity, top to bottom, on “the wilderness planet.”

Rapid revegetation happens naturally, too. Rather than cutting back vegetation (and other forms of life) because we don’t like it, we should be managing its natural fluorescence. Life is the greatest resource on Earth. Once you get a re-vegetated ecosystem established, it will do the rest of work as fast as it can, each individual organism seeking abundance. In the process, wild ecosystems build bio-secure communities, constantly increasing climate resilience, moisture stores, carbon stores, moisture sharing, carbon absorption, micro-climate dependability, storm mitigation, food production, pollination, pest control... Things technology can’t do.

Our greatest potential today is not to leave this planet, it is to integrate human inspiration with biospheric reality — nature’s 4 billion years of vitality and innovation, and together build our future on Earth.

More tomorrow!

This blog is #18 in a series on Biosphere Earth.
To review other posts, visit the TOC.
Read the prior post, Local Priorities.

Citations

• Citations for the conclusions stated in this blog can be found in the most recent draft of my forthcoming paper, “Biosphere Earth = all GDPs + all lives.”