Urban Ecology Quotes

New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.

Just like New Yorkers themselves, the trees in New York [city] work harder than any others in the world.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, where I was born, you are in the middle of nature surrounded by mountains and ocean. But you are still in a capital in Europe. So I have never understood why I have to choose between nature or urban.

Based on German prototypes, green walls and roofs are a natural idea in Singapore's tropical environment, where mosses, ferns, philodendrons, orchids and other epiphytes literally grow on trees.

Most big cities like London and Glasgow have great big rivers that are unmissable. What's brilliant about the Water of Leith is that it's so hidden. It's a secret.

In New York City, the common bats fly only at twilight. Brick-bats fly at all hours.

When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability.

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

There must be a way to combine the high rise and high-density environment with nature. Maybe we can have our gardens in the sky.

We need to enter a new era to make nature and humans more emotionally connected in modern cities.

Trees will improve property values, take pollutants out of the air, help with water runoff.

One of the best things I found out about Detroit is that bears have started returning to the city. When bears are gentrifying your neighborhood and opening Thai restaurants, that's a poor neighborhood.

I'm trying to express nature in big cities.

I love Chicago for several reasons, but one of the best is that I was so intrigued that you have wild rabbits running around in the city. I never had seen bunnies in such a large urban environment before.

In my home city of Vancouver, most people put out their recycling boxes. The organic grocery and cafe on Fourth Avenue is flourishing. Bikes are popular, and there are a few gas-electric hybrid cars gliding around. But as this new century begins, my twentysomething generation is becoming increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

Street and park trees provide tremendous benefits to cities.

Cities should function more like ecosystems, or even metabolisms. When we build, we should be thinking about how we can integrate into the ecosystems around us, but without sacrificing all the niceties of civilization like good restaurants, concert halls, and high-speed Internet access. I'm saying that partly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm also deadly serious. The future of technology is sustainable ecology.

I live in New York, and the only live animals you see are cockroaches, rats and pigeons, which I admire immensely. When I see an animal that thrives in the garbage, I feel relief; in our urban environment, other animals are dying out.

A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.

Bears don't live on Park Avenue.

I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.

We can see the weather change, that the birds don't come to the city anymore... we seriously have to think about preserving nature.

Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it.