Madeline Scannell

Madeline Scannell

March 21, 2016

Environmental Ethics

Midterm Paper

The Centrality of Cities

By all accounts, human beings appear to be special. Whether it’s our capacity for reason, or self-reflection, or moral deliberation, or scientific discovery, humans can do things on this planet (and beyond) that literally no other species can. One of man’s most obvious creations – the one which perhaps most clearly embodies the human thirst for technology, advancement, improvement, and control, and a shiny metaphor for the modern world – is the city.

According to the World Health Organization, 54% of the total global population were living in urban areas as of 2014; based on their projections, this urban population is expected to grow approximately 1.84% per year until 2020, 1.63% per year between 2020 and 2025, and 1.44% per year between 2025 and 2030. By these numbers, the human population, particularly in developing nations, is facing increasingly dramatic global urbanization, with upwards of 66% of humans expected to make up urban populations by 2050 (United Nations, 7).

With that many people living in cities now, and that many more people projected to live in cities in just the next few decades, the desperate need to determine how to reconcile urban growth with environmental protection is a clear and pressing concern. A litany of writers and thinkers over the course of human history have condemned cities as ugly, depraved, destructive; and many people, if asked to think about the human destructive impact on the earth, might point to the smokestacks of Pittsburgh or the smog blanketing Los Angeles as obvious images of our malignant impact on the planet.

But while people haven’t had much trouble placing cities at the center of humans’ environmental problems, not nearly enough energy has been devoted towards our understanding of cities’ roles in the solution to these concerns. On that matter, environmental ethics ought to have quite a lot to say, and it certainly does if one takes the time to look for it. We ought to be able to look to environmental ethics for answers, or at least moral guidance, as to how cities can and should fit into a moral framework regarding care for the earth. Can humans morally justify urban living? Or, in a twist of popular logic, do we have an obligation to being living in cities? And if so, what kinds of cities are we talking about, and from where does that obligation come?

These are the questions that I hope to begin the process of answering in this paper. To do this, I will first lay out the current problems with cities as they generally exist now, followed by a discussion of the ways that cities have unique potential to enact solutions to those problems. I will then explore the different ethical approaches in favor of a widespread human retreat into cities, and finally argue that a biocentric ethic proposing such a grand retreat is the best option and the one that ought to be widely adopted.

The Problems with Cities

It is perhaps hard to imagine cities as they currently exist having much of a part to play in saving our environment. What so many people say is largely true: cities are dirty, unsafe, impersonal, and lacking in green space. As Ian McHarg colorfully wrote in his seminal book Design with Nature,

Call them no-place, although they have many names. Race and hate, disease, poverty, rancor and despair, urine and spit live here in the shadows. United in poverty and ugliness, their symbol is the abandoned carcasses of automobiles, broken glass, alleys of rubbish and garbage. Crime consorts with disease, group fights group, the only emancipation is the parked car (McHarg, 40).

It is a harsh and unforgiving picture, and one could be forgiven for their surprise at learning McHarg was quite optimistic about the unfulfilled potential of urban planning. But anyone who has lived in or been to a city cannot help but acknowledge the ring of truth to his words. Many cities are in many places the home of rampant crime, overcrowding, rude people, noise, and enormous wealth disparities. As Alastair Gunn concisely writes, “They are not communities that are conductive to human flourishing” (Gunn, 345).

But cities are a problem beyond their social deficits and poor health conditions. Their environmental impacts are enormous. For one, man-made environments suffer from a major loss of biodiversity as humans modify or destroy natural habitats. Preservation of biodiversity is a foremost concern of environmental ethics, and biodiversity is crucial to a sustainable future, if nothing else. Cities also have major environmental effects in terms of producing proportionally large amounts of air and water pollution, waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and resource depletion. In fact, urban development actively decreases the life-sustaining capacity of resources such as air, water, soil, and ecosystems (Gunn, 346).

This is especially problematic because cities and their metropolitan areas are not self-sustaining, and therefore require a much larger resource base than their own physical footprint in order to support their populations (London, for example, requires a resource area 120 times the size of the city itself) (Gunn, 357). With that said, cities as they currently exist have already exceeded the earth’s “ecological carrying capacity,” never mind the fact that urban populations are rapidly growing (Birkeland, 163). This leads to another major problem with cities: urban spread. Recognizing cities as problematic is by no means a new phenomenon, and many people, in the move from rural to urban living, sought suburbs as some sort of tempered, pseudo-urban compromise. But how successful were they? Not, according to McHarg, who writes,

You leave the city and turn towards the countryside. But can you find it? To do so you will follow the paths of those who tried before you. Many stayed to build. But those who did so first are now deeply embedded in the fabric of the city. So as you go you transect the rings of the thwarted and disillusioned who are encapsulated in the city as nature endlessly eludes pursuit (McHarg, 41).

Not only that, but sprawling metropolitan areas arguably have a much larger impact on the environment than do compact, high-density cities (Ewing, 19). Some of the results include an increased number of motor vehicles, longer commutes, and in general the occupation and development – and thus degradation – of the fertile land surrounding the city that initially attracted people to the area as a rich resource base (Gunn, 358). Urban sprawl is thus a side effect of current cities that may very well be creating an even more proportionally significant environmental footprint than the city alone.

In addition to the things stated above, there is a latent, internal, and potentially more insidious problem with our current cities that may be having far-reaching, immeasurable, and unchecked effects on our environment. In Roger J. H. King’s argument for why environmental ethics is so important for built communities, he writes,

When we build, then, we assemble elements of nature, mold and shape them, and arrange them to fulfill certain intentions. In so doing, we pick out only some elements as relevant or significant; others are unknown or neglected...Cities that are polluted, wasteful of energy, ugly, dangerous, parasitic on their surrounding regions, or biologically oversimplified, function as exhibitive judgments that articulate the directionality of human individuals and communities. They tell us where we stand, what we have wrought (King, 122).

Most interactions between humans and nature requires some sort of managerial role on the human’s part, and this is especially true in cities, where rivers are dammed or straightened or rerouted, mountains are carved into, and trees are planted or parks are constructed. King calls upon this idea of exhibitive judgement to highlight the way in which the constructive, destructive, or alternative decisions we make in regards to nature in our cities reflects our current moral framework. How we treat nature in cities is both descriptive and prescriptive of how humans perceive the natural world, how we understand ourselves, and therefore of our environmental conscience (King, 116).

The issue of green space fits squarely into this discussion, and someone like King would argue that the lack of greenery in cities is not only an issue of health, aesthetic, and environment, but of morals as well. So what does the overall state of our cities, even with just the issues briefly touched upon above in mind, tell us about humans’ collective moral conception of the earth? It certainly isn’t clear that we value it, whether intrinsically or instrumentally; and if that is the case, we are going to have a huge problem if, in the next few decades, over two thirds of the global population is living that way.

The Unfulfilled Potential

Having said all of that, there is obviously plenty of room for improvement in cities; but lessening a problem is not the same as being part of a solution. Despite all that’s been said, there are in fact very real ways that cities, matured perhaps from their adolescent state, might become not only acceptable but optimal human communities.

Traditionally, urban communities were designed to provide for the needs of their citizens above and beyond what is possible in suburban areas or isolated rural pockets. The density implicit in an urban community means that a wide range of amenities and resources are close by or easily accessible to many people; the greater focus on pedestrian traffic and efficient public transportation reduces the total number of cars on the road; and if well-managed, services such as heating, water, sanitation, transportation, education, and health and emergency care can be more efficiently and cost-effectively provided to these high-density areas than to their low density counterparts (Gunn, 349-350). Moreover, as Gunn points out, “if inner cities were more pleasant places to live (which they would be if they were more natural), many more people would choose to live in them, thus reversing suburban and exurban drift” (Gunn, 358).

There are also huge benefits to be had in terms of human social behavior and attitudes. High-density living provides opportunities for face-to-face contact with your neighbors on a regular basis and smaller living spaces prompt people to spend more time in public spaces, which all promotes a community of kinship between nonrelated neighbors (Gunn, 349). Humans are social creatures, and all of these things represent more than just improvements on an old model – they are real ways in which a city, in all its cramped glory, creates a set of physical circumstances which might in fact facilitate the flourishing of humans within communities.

In terms of protecting and promoting environmental flourishing, cities may also have a yet untapped role to play. For one thing, shifting the focus to high-density living literally means that there more undeveloped land available, either because more people have vacated the sparsely populated areas outside cities or because the cities themselves have become more condensed. The caveat of course is that cities need to become more appealing places to live for more people, but this is an important area of potential in terms of giving nature a little room to stretch. The question of what is then to be done with that land is wide open, but it may mean more green space and parks within the city itself, it might be made available for new or expanding nature preserves, it might be set aside for agricultural use or ranching. The key, of course, is that these uses be in promotion or environmental sustainability. McHarg speaks to this directly, specifically mapping optimal development strategies for eight different types of natural-process lands. Generally speaking, what McHarg suggests is that we listen to the land, that we recognize how naturally occurring features such as aquifers and marshes function on their own, and then harness that potential without disrupting that very function on which our cities are so reliant. Broadly speaking, though, it is precisely in these opportunities that environmental ethics ought to step in alongside ecology and economics in order to decide what optimization of this now free land should look like.

To reiterate, however, doing less bad is not at all the same thing as doing good. Janis Birkeland points out that sustainable urbanism even as it exists today is insufficient insofar as it focuses on doing “less harm” and repairing what humans have broken in their ecosystems. She calls for a new paradigm of design and sustainable development, one based on an “open system” of “positive development” which has a net positive impact on the environment. In her words, “[Sustainable design] still aims only to heal nature, restore ecosystems, and enhance social resilience…it is now necessary to design for nature as well as ‘with’ and/or ‘like’ nature” (Birkeland, 171); after all, “’Continuous improvement’ on a failed paradigm is not genuine progress” (Birkeland, 165). Urban areas are centers of technology and should be the primary focus of sustainable development efforts, and the implication of Birkeland’s call is clear: if redesigned with metrics of a net positive impact relative to indigenous conditions and total floor area, cities have the potential to be the center of a movement that reincorporates humanity into the flourishing of nature in an entirely new way.

Proposing a Grand Retreat

There is no denying the current relationship between humans and nature is unsustainable. Something has to change, and given the rate of human population growth and development plus the rapid decline of biodiversity and our ever warming climate, something needs to be done soon. Clearly cities are going to be at the center of this conversation, and as we’ve seen, there is a lot of potential there to actively address some of our environmental concerns. With that said, a number of people have proposed what I will generally call a “grand retreat” of human populations into cities and urban areas as the best answer to our environmental woes (the term itself was coined regarding E.O. Wilson’s plan regarding this matter, but I believe it is more broadly applicable). Scientific, philosophic, and economic thinkers have supported such an action in their own ways and to various degrees of explicitness, including E.O. Wilson, Alastair Gunn, J. Baird Callicott, and Ian McHarg. The ethical arguments on this issue fall broadly into two categories – humanistic and biocentric – arguments to which a number of authors contribute ideas, and whose merits we ought to consider.