Cities Are Ecosystems Too

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Living in the days of climate change means we are living in the era of ecological grief. The emotional phenomenon has inspired funerals for glaciers in Iceland, Oregon, and Switzerland. Scientists have reported feeling shock and loss with each consecutive return to the Great Barrier Reef, as new expanses of coral bleach and desiccate. All across the mining country of Central Appalachia, where mountains have been halved and forests are felled to extract coal, the grief appears in the form of diagnosable mental-health conditions.

You would be less likely to see the term ecological grief applied to a flooded New York City subway station or a heat wave forcing Philadelphia public schools to close early or dangerously scorching playground asphalt in Los Angeles. And yet for most city dwellers, the way we experience climate change comes not from the collapse of natural formations but through damage to the man-made infrastructure that makes up our urban spaces and our daily lives. When that infrastructure is harmed or destroyed, be it by wind or fire or flood, it alters our habitats—and that, too, elicits an intense sense of emotional loss and instability.

The philosopher Glenn Albrecht has developed a vocabulary to describe the emotional experience of living through climate change: Solastalgia, for example, describes a homesickness born out of the observation of chronic environmental degradation of one’s home; tierratrauma refers to the acute pain of witnessing ruined environs such as a logged forest or trash-filled creek. The basis of Albrecht’s work is that humans are fundamentally connected to our natural environments, and we experience pain when they are damaged. To that end, his research tends to focus on rural areas, where the barrier between humans and nature usually feels more porous.

Although we’ve built our cities as fortresses against the forces of nature surrounding them, we are learning the hard way that concrete makes for a far more delicate habitat than trees and grass and soil. Vulnerable to the wrath wrought by a warming atmosphere, it augments heat, struggles to absorb excess water, cracks and crumbles. “We don’t actually fundamentally understand that the cities that we build are also part of nature,” Adrian McGregor, an Australian architect, told me. “We operate them, we manage them, and they rely upon us for the imports to keep them alive. But also, they’re our largest habitat that we exist in.” In the United States, roughly 80 percent of the country’s population lives in urban areas.

McGregor promotes the theory of “biourbanism,” which views cities as a form of nature in their own right. This framework is influenced by the geographers Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, who developed the concept of “anthromes,” or anthropogenic biomes, which are human-shaped ecosystems. (At this point in history, anthromes cover more than 80 percent of the planet.)

“All in all, cities are more extreme environments than rural areas in the context of climate change,” says Brian Stone Jr., a professor of urban environmental planning and design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. According to his research, city dwellers tend to come face-to-face with climate change through more and more common episodes: Strong rain brings regular floods to a particular street corner; the light rail goes out of service because high temperatures strain power lines; a summer drought kills the trees shading a local playground. For those who rely on all of these quotidian components of city life, each of those episodes “is far more activating of climate awareness and potentially grief than a large ice shelf breaking off from Greenland.”

That’s because those small breakages reveal the fragility of our home environs, portending a major climate-driven collapse. In arguably the most prominent example of urban climate disaster, rising sea levels and wetland erosion contributed to the unprecedented destruction of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Floodwaters from the Gulf and the Mississippi poured over roughly 80 percent of New Orleans, crippling major highways and bridges and damaging hundreds of thousands of homes. More than 1,300 people died, and an estimated 400,000 residents were displaced for days or years from the place they’d called home—many of them for generations.

And what happens in the aftermath? The urban-systems researcher Fushcia-Ann Hoover notes that while a lot of the inundated neighborhoods did rebuild, a number of historically Black communities were permanently changed. A 2019 study found a trend of gentrification in neighborhoods that were most damaged by the hurricane, which led the urbanist Richard Florida to observe that “devastating physical damage pushes existing populations out. This makes it easier for developers to assemble large tracts of land that can be rebuilt, not just to higher standards, but for far more advantaged groups, paving the way for a kind of mass gentrification.”

“The loss of the residents who were unable to return also includes things like social cohesion, a sense of community, and a sense of identity—all of the things that a neighborhood means and represents from a human connection standpoint,” Hoover told me. These less tangible elements are key to our survival as humans and inextricable features of a healthy, functioning habitat.

Unsurprisingly, widespread, long-lasting mental-health fallout occurs after a city suffers a transformative disaster like Katrina. One report indicated that in the months following the hurricane, crisis helpline calls increased by 61 percent, though more than half of the city’s population had fled.

But the less severe disasters leave an emotional mark on communities as well. After a 2015 landslide killed three people in Sitka, Alaska, residents reported being afraid to send their children to school, newly aware that those buildings could be in landslide zones. The tenants of a low-lying public-housing complex in Norfolk, Virginia, described rainstorms that regularly spurred knee-high floods as dread- and anxiety-inducing. When the water filtration system in the town of Detroit, Oregon, was destroyed by the Santiam Canyon wildfires in 2020, locals struggled to trust reports that drinking water was safe. Electric grid disruption from the 2021 winter storms in Central Texas left at least one Austin resident with a “feeling of foreboding” for winters that followed.

There’s a valid argument that urbanization has insulated us, mentally and emotionally, from much of the damage that humans have inflicted upon the Earth. The climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek attributes our largely stunted emotional response to mass ecological disaster to, essentially, the society we’ve built. The idea is that many of us have become divorced from nature by the forces of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. And as a result, she argues, we’re too removed to feel kinship with the great diversity of life on Earth, much of which has been quietly enduring the effects of climate change for decades now.

It’s certainly a fair critique of the modern condition. But our cities are living things, too, and they are also fracturing from the instability of an altered climate. Though a flooded sewer is certainly less dramatic than a lush forest reduced to skeletal trunks and branches or a wave of dead fish washing ashore, it actually reminds us that we’re closer to nature than we think.