Valuing wildlife populations in urban environments

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 79-90

  Michelfelder, Diane P ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0141478726     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9833.00166     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (18)

1. Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 31-36.
2. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 52ff.
3. For additional information, see the working group's Web page at 〈www.rw.ttu.edu/urbwlf〉.
4. David L. Sperling, "Making Peace with Geese," Wisconsin Natural Resources (December 1998): 5-9.
5. Another expression that brings home the ambiguous status of urban wildlife is to think of it as manifesting a "third nature": neither fully wild nor fully domesticated, but rather a nature that reflects the elements of "contradiction and survival through mutation and adaptation" to the urban environment. See Vinayak Bharne, "Bungle in the Jungle: Nature Returns despite Our Urban Botch," Urban Ecology (Winter 2000-01): 23-26. I am grateful to Jim Sheppard for calling my attention to this article.
6. Rudy Zamora, "The Moose (No Longer) on the Loose," Salt Lake Tribune, July 6, 1998, p. D1.
7. David M. Bird, "City Critters: A Cast of Millions," in Integrating Man and Nature in the Metropolitan Environment: Proceedings of a National Symposium on Urban Wildlife, ed. Lowell W. Adams and Daniel L. Leedy (Columbia, Md.: National Institute for Urban Wildlife, 1987), 23.
8. Peter Huber and Mark Mills, "How Cities Green the Planet, "City Journal 10 (2000), 1. Beyond American urban territoriality, there are the great dense, urban terrains of Seoul, Bombay, Hong Kong, Lagos, Tokyo, Sao Paulo. and the list goes on. Reflections on the urban wildlife issues involved with these cities is beyond the scope of this article.
9. Paul Medeiros discusses this in the context of Aldo Leopold's "aesthetic exercises" and "land aesthetics," in "The Aesthetic Value of Wilderness," in The Beauty around Us: Environmental Aesthetics in the Scenic Landscape and Beyond, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and William Wilcox (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming).
10. Holmes Rolston III, Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 118-20.
11. Eugene Hargrove, "The Aesthetics of Wilderness Preservation," Inquiry 30 (1987), 18-25;
12. reprinted in Earth Ethics: Environmental Ethics, Animal Rights, and Practical Applications, ed. James Sterba (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 138-44.
13. It is possible, for example, to use the Internet for watching urban moose in Alaska simply by accessing one of several "moosecam" Web sites. See, for instance, 〈www.moosecam.com〉.
14. See Arnold Berleant, Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), particularly chapter 2, "An Emerging Aesthetics of Environment," 25-39. Although Berleant is justifiably suspicious of an environmental aesthetic that does not give justice to both natural and urban environments, the urban for him here at least is primarily a matter of cultural, built form. While Berleant stresses the similarities between the city and wilderness regions, noting that cities are intimately linked to their geographical setting, the presence of wildlife in the urban landscape does not surface as an aesthetic issue.
15. Stress hormones measured from moose droppings in Alaska indicate that moose residing in a certain part of Anchorage suffer particularly high stress levels, while the stress levels of moose in Denali National Park are much lower. Studies have also shown that reproductive activity is accelerated among some urban wildlife species when compared to similar species living in nonurban environments. See Rob Maurizi and Tamar Friedner, "The Effect of City Living on Urban Wildlife," ASCI 122, May 5, 1997, at 〈www.uvm.edu/ ~rmaurizi/urban.html〉.
16. James A. Cooper, "Canada Goose Management at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport," in Wildlife Conservation in Metropolitan Environments, ed. Lowell W. Adams (Columbia, Md: National Institute for Urban Wildlife, 1991), 175-83.
17. These figures are cited at 〈www.io.com/house/batstory.html〉.
18. See Michael A. Burayidi, ed., Urban Planning in a Multicultural Society (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000).