How Cities Drive Plants Extinct

BBC :

An international team of botanists has compared extinction rates of plants within 22 cities around the world. Both Singapore and New York City in the US now contain less than one-tenth of their original vegetation.

Read the whole story: BBC

Comments

[Valerie Keefe]

Ultimately urban areas are far less damaging to the environment per capita than rural areas. You can feed a city with local produce, put it on non-arable land, and generally increase energy efficiency by building multi-unit housing and mass transit. This might not be enough for the deep ecologist set, but it's the best method available for those who want to preserve the leisure of our way of life while lessening the impact. I put out an estimated 7 tons a year. That's 1/3rd the Canadian Average (we are a cold country) and 2/3rd's the industrial world's average, and I do it without major changes in my lifestyle. Basically it all boils down to no car, no kids, and your neighbours have to share the same walls you do. Everything else can easily be made up with alternative energy, and any attempts to say different are, well, often quite fundamentally classist at heart.

[tabatha]

Los Angeles has certainly lost much of its native flora to development, no question.

The solution is to start planting coast live oaks, laurel sumac, and other native trees and bushes. They're not only drought-tolerant, but they also provide food for wildlife, such as birds.

There was supposedly a tree-planting program with the goal of 1 million trees. Not sure how the program fared but there seems to be little to show for it.

It's not only cities that are suffering.

The U.S.' midwest has lost much of its native prarie grasses.

The loss of native flora is such a tragedy on so many levels. Bird are so dependent on native flora, and bird populations are plummeting.

[jsarets]

Cities can certainly do better to incorporate or preserve green spaces into the built environment, but you can hardly throw a rock at an architecture convention without hitting a passionate advocate of urban flora.

We get it now, finally, it will definitely get better in a reasonable time frame.

But agricultural policy in rural areas is moving in the wrong direction. That's where biodiversity is being destroyed in mass with no end in sight and horrible consequence that are only starting to emerge.

[aliceautumn]

How cities drive plants "to extinction" is correct.

[Thermodynamics]

Bulldozers are the enemy of plant diversity. Consider coastal cities. Most encircle bays with ocean on one end and estuaries on the other.

Many of the estuaries have plant communities that date back to the end of the last ice age, when water levels stabilized. They have a great diversity of water plants, many quite complex and beautiful.

Even back when North America was covered with vegetation that provided propagation routes, it took probably a couple of thousand years for all those different species to find that estuary.

When you bulldoze and fill around those little streams they are flooded with silt. They become channels, ditches with nothing but cattails and alligator weed.