Nature is alive in the city, despite human influence

As the human influence on the environment grows ever greater, it’s not surprising that we also control the forms nature takes.

Thestar.com
Aug. 23, 2015
By Christopher Hume

The corner of King and Yonge is no place for a yellow warbler. Pigeons you expect, and sparrows, gulls and starlings, thuggish street-smart avians well adapted to city life, but not a songbird on its way back to Central America for the winter. Still, there it was, dead of course, lying on the sidewalk on a busy weekday morning. People walked around it, careful not to step on it, clearly uncomfortable and unsure what to do.

Chances are the warbler met its death flying into a window of one of the towers clustered around the intersection. Though numbers are hard to find, the figures are staggering. Estimates for the number of birds killed this way in North America range from 100 million to one billion annually. Volunteers with Toronto’s indefatigable Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP), once collected 500 dead and injured birds in a single morning.

Disoriented by artificial light and unable to “read” glass, birds are lucky to make it through Toronto, a major stop on their migratory route. Avian deaths occur every day, but peak during the spring and fall migrations.

Though FLAP has managed to make the annual slaughter a matter of public concern - the city even has bird-friendly development guidelines - the deaths continue. To make matters worse, the architectural fashion of the day favours tall glass towers, the more transparent, the better. This, combined with habitat loss and climate change, have made life difficult, if not impossible, for countless avian species.

This great die-off will leave the planet, let alone cities like Toronto, much diminished. That process is well underway; the survivors are those life forms best able to cope with man-made environments. That’s why warblers’ days are numbered, but starlings face a brighter future, if that’s the right word. From a distance, things can seem unchanged. For many, a bird is a bird is a bird. Indeed, wildlife proliferates in Toronto. A drive up the Don Valley Parkway, for example, leaves the impression of a city in a forest; the highway is lined with greenery. Nature is everywhere around us. Look closely, however, it turns out that most of the vegetation comprises dog strangling vine, phragmites, garlic mustard and other invasive species that crowd out everything else.

Meanwhile, the Great Lakes face an onslaught of Asian carp, voracious bottom-feeders that will leave waterways devastated.

Mammalian urbanites - rats, raccoons, coyotes - are clever adaptable creatures that thrive in the city’s garbage-strewn landscape. For these animals, opportunities abound on every side. They prefer to avoid human contact, yet depend on us for survival. We may not be willing partners, but we’re reliable and generous in our offerings.

Though cities and “nature” are often seen as opposites, even contradictory, there’s no lack of nature in urban centres. But as the human influence on the environment grows ever greater, it’s not surprising that we also control, consciously or not, the forms nature takes. As diversity decreases, the plants and animals that thrive in what’s now called the Anthropocene epoch will be those that most resemble us. They are smart, ruthless, and able to go with the flow.

It’s still the survival of the fittest, but conditions have changed and with it what it means to be the fittest. Though we might not always recognize - or like - it, nature is alive and well, even in the heart of the city.

Except, that is, for the warbler, which couldn’t navigate the human terrain. Once that didn’t matter. Now it does. And as the planet is citified - more than half of humanity now lives in cities - it matters more than ever.