Humans Don’t Have to Leave Cities to Have Wildlife in Them

C+S 2020 students are blogging about topics that interest them for Applications in Climate and Society, a core spring class.

“Mom,” a child’s voice nervously whispers off camera. “What are two mountain lions doing up here?”

“There’s no people around,” she responds. In the video shot looking out a front room window, two large cougars walk silently down the middle of a snow covered residential street in Boulder, Colorado. 

As people around the world have gone indoors to flatten the curve of the coronavirus pandemic, wildlife have begun peeking out from their hideouts and venturing into city spaces they previously visited at night—or not at all. It’s a reminder to me of nature’s resilience, and a picture of what our cities could be in the future: spaces serving people and wildlife, that can adapt to the challenges of climate change. 

In New York City, a few masked park goers stumbled upon seven baby raccoons climbing a rock wall in the middle of the day. In the Welsh town of Llandudno, a herd of Great Orme Kashmiri goats has taken to strolling through town, trimming people’s hedges and climbing on buildings.

Animals frolicking through streets during a pandemic brings a smile to my face, but it doesn’t make me wish for a time when humans aren’t around so the Earth can “heal.” I want humanity to continue to exist, but it may not without wildlife. Everything from the food we eat (think pollination), to the air we breathe (think animals spreading tree seeds) depends on wildlife and an intact natural world. Yet human pressure has put a million species at risk of extinction. With 55 percent of the world’s population living in urban spaces, we’re going to have to find a way to have wildlife living in them, too.   

The list of crucial ecosystem services our metropolises have disrupted is long, and many of these disruptions also spur along climate change. For example, cities are huge carbon emitters and yet, they’ve cut off their surrounding environment’s ability to sequester it. Trees have been cleared. Soils paved over. Nutrient cycling hits a dead end in cities, too. Nothing gets into soil that's covered and compacted with asphalt. Rainwater can’t soak into it. Plants can’t grow in it. Ecosystems need these functions running at maximum capacity to adapt to climate change. More wildlife can help shuttle nutrients through the system by feeding on plants, getting fed on themselves and dying.

In spite of this pollution, however, some animals still persist in urban spaces, and disasters like the coronavirus pandemic have shown us that more wildlife are capable of it, too. Thirty-four years ago, Reactor 4 exploded during a test at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine, turning the trees red, and emitting 400 times more radiation than that released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Roughly 350,000 people were evacuated from the nearby city of Pripyat. Scientists thought life there could not recover. Yet today, myriad species—many of them endangered—maintain healthy populations in the area’s now verdant forest. European bison, moose, boreal lynx and brown bears walk through the husks of a ghost city draped in greenery.

The ease with which COVID-19 has cleaved the U.S. healthcare system and toppled the economy is an uncomfortable reminder of how woefully unprepared we are for climate change. Creating urban habitat—ranging from park space to green corridors—for wildlife is a big part of restoring ecosystem services needed to help the natural world (and us) mitigate and adapt to changing conditions. The thing is, we don’t need disasters to rekindle our relationship with wildlife. With actual planning, we can refashion our cities to be welcome habitats for both humans and wildlife. The pandemic shows many species are ready if we are.