Conservation Concept: The City Paradox

January 2025

There's nothing I hate more than the traffic log jam trying to leave town for an epic fishing outing. I can't count the number of times I've enviously prowled Zillow daydreaming about nabbing property, especially near my favorite rivers. But you might be surprised to hear that you're doing more to support conservation by living in a densely populated city than by living on the edge of the grid. This is the city paradox: concentrated human development reduces the ecological footprint of individuals, while human sprawl exacerbates environmental degradation. This is due to the differences in land use, resource consumption, and energy efficiency of urban vs. suburban or rural lifestyles.

Land Use

A compact city preserves more natural landscapes and biodiversity hotspots because less land is needed for housing, transportation, and infrastructure. As populations expand and sprawl, ecosystems fragment, chopping up continuous wilderness into smaller pieces. We explore the issues related to habitat fragmentation in this article, if you want to dive into that with more detail. This process disproportionately creates edge habitat, often favoring invasive species. Plus, interior habitat (the opposite of edge habitat) loss is one of the primary drivers of species extinction.

Seto et al. (2012) estimated that urban expansion could triple the amount of land consumed to cities by 2030. Prioritizing vertical growth could curb development over forest, wetlands, or other previously undisturbed lands.

Meanwhile, a new house built deep in the woods may only need a limited pad to set up the house, but it also requires infrastructure like road access, electricity, water, gas, and waste removal. Each service with their own footprint. Not to mention hidden costs to wilderness, like light, noise pollution, and effects on local ecosystem like fertilizers, or pesticides.

Resource Consumption and Efficiency

Dense cities are often more energy-efficient than sprawling areas. Obviously, urban residents typically have easier access to public transportation, with nearby options to walk, or cycle. More importantly, cities better use resources efficiently, thanks to economies of scale. When people live closer together, it's easier to provide services like water, electricity, and waste removal. Meanwhile that new house built deep in the woods may require special trips traveling long distances all to set up and service one house. But the same can be true for vast suburbs too. When development sprawls, infrastructure must reach further, and distribution becomes less efficient.

Cities Are Far From Perfect

Keep in mind the real world is messy, and cities bring new problems... Pollution, heat islands, and waste are all exacerbated by dense development. There are visions of smart cities aiming to improve city planning to reduce these negatives, but require investment and a considerable overhaul. Either way, there is a carrying capacity for all systems. How many people can a city support? How many people can a landscape support?

Perceptions of Urban vs Rural

Another interesting wrinkle to fold into the complex interplay of people in urban vs rural settings is how people perceive their surroundings. Most surprisingly, many individuals who live within metro areas, or dwell within reasonable commuting distances to metro areas still identify themselves as rural (Krutsinger et al, 2024). Make no mistake, the urban vs rural identification has taken on a larger role, now as a political identity, only complicating any underlying efforts to protect undeveloped lands. Rural identity has also been tied to a gaining anti-intellectual movement downplaying scientific thinking (Trujillo, 2018) like the importance of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and land conservation. This suggests rural occupants who embrace this ideology (not all do) may passively, or actively degrade their surrounding landscape through negligence or even malice.

Other Contradictions

What about the push to get outdoors that received attention during COVID? Humans do better near green spaces and water. If everyone is found in dense cities that means further travel time to places like pristine rivers. It means a greater disconnection between us and the wild places. But to keep us away from the wild places also ensures that they stay wild, which is something we value as anglers, right?

The modern world offers no easy answers anymore.

Sources

1. Seto, K. C., Güneralp, B., & Hutyra, L. R. (2012). Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(40), 16083-16088. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211658109
2. Newman, P., & Kenworthy, J. (1999). Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence. Island Press.
3. UN-Habitat. (2020). World Cities Report 2020: The Value of Sustainable Urbanization. United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Available at: https://unhabitat.org/wcr2020
4. Rosenzweig, C., Solecki, W., Hammer, S. A., & Mehrotra, S. (2011). Climate Change and Cities: First Assessment Report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network. Cambridge University Press.
5. Beatley, T. (2011). Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning. Island Press.
6. CONTRAhabit. 2011. Landscape Ecology Within an Urban Context. https://contrahabit.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/landscape-ecology-within-an-urban-context/
7. Krutsinger, D., Yadav. K., Hart J. 2024. Self-identified rurality in a nationally representative population in the US. Rural and Remote Health.https://www.rrh.org.au/journal/article/8483/
8. Trujillo, K. 2022. Rural Identity as a Contributing Factor to Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09770-w
9. Britton, E. et al. 2018. Blue care: a systematic review of blue space interventions for health and wellbeing. https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/35/1/50/5252008?login=false
10. Delahanty, R. Rural Cosplay is, Unfortunately, A Thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18&ab_channel=RayDelahanty%7CCityNerd