#110: Wild Cities - Lessons from cities where biodiversity thrives

Welcome to the Green Urbanist Podcast, where we explore sustainable place-making, climate action in cities and urban rewilding. I'm your host, Russo Calli, an urban designer, educator and sustainable place-making consultant. Today's episode is a conversation with Chris Fitch, the author of Wild Cities, discovering new ways of living in the modern urban jungle. My name is Chris Fitch, I'm a writer, I'm a geographer, and I've done a decade also as a writer, either freelance or on staff, and now my focus is writing books. The book Wild Cities is a lovely mixture of science writing, with kind of travel writing. Basically, the author takes us on a journey through different cities around the world, which are in some way pioneering in how they're bringing wild nature, and they're allowing biodiversity to thrive within the cities. Some of these will be fairly well-known, places like Singapore, but others I wasn't really aware of, places like Tallinn in Estonia and Flagstaff in the United States. And in this podcast, episode, Chris and I go through a number of these case studies and he tells us how these cities have been so pioneering in terms of bringing wildlife and wild nature into cities, and what we can learn from them. I had a chance to read an advanced copy of the book, which I really enjoyed, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in this topic. It's not available yet, it will be out on April 10th, 2025, but you can preorder it now, so you can get the copy straight away when it is available. A link to the page where you can preorder it is in the episode description. I found this episode really inspiring, I think you'll get a lot out of it, and a lot of follow-up reading to do, looking into the various case studies that are mentioned in the book. You'll get a lot of examples of the way that nature can be brought in cities in different scales, from meadows to forest creation, through to marine habitats, and even architectural greening as well, so enjoy the episode, and I'll see you next time. It's a very long story that I'll try to shorten to a reasonable degree. I think the first part of that is kind of why am I interested in a lot of the same things that you're interested in around green urbanism. Like I said, I traveled a lot as a child, I grew up in the South Pacific, because my family were based there, and coming back to the UK and then kind of living in towns and then living in London, there was always something that I found myself trying to understand what was it that we all have some kind of nostalgia, but for me there was an element of I'm trying to reconnect with something, but I wasn't sure what it was, and over a long period of time I came to understand that there was this sort of missing feeling of nature in my life that this is something I wanted to be connected with in the way that those sort of rose tinted memories I had of as a child, and in a very biodeverse part of the planet. I had a moment where I was thinking, okay, I'm living in London, and this isn't doing it for me in terms of urban nature, but I do want to be in a city, because I enjoy cities a lot. So is there some perfect place that I should be looking for, which is a bit of a full current, but I, with time, started picking up on little stories from different places around the world, and I'm sure you've seen a lot of the same ones that I did, but I was thinking, well, maybe looking for somewhere that's perfect is not going to get me very far, but if I could find, if I could bring together the little stories that I'm getting from different places that they're still providing us with valuable lessons on a kind of theme by theme basis, this is something I could work with. And it was specifically reading about Wellington and their very impressive bird, native bird restoration efforts that got me thinking, okay, there's a specific story here that means I don't have to be holding Wellington up and saying, this is the perfect nature-filled city. It is impressively nature-filled, but I don't have to go around saying this is what all cities in the world should be emulating, simply that from the perspective of native bird restoration, which is something that is relevant to lots of parts of the world, then there's been some very interesting and valuable projects and endeavors that have happened here. And if, I mean, you might not even say you want to do the same thing, but the point is it's something to learn from if that's something you're interested in. And once I began to pull on that thread, it was unraveling very, very quickly in the best possible way where I thought, oh, okay, well, I can also think of this place that I've either visited or I've read about in the past or I watched a documentary or I spoke to somebody who knew something about this. And quite quickly, I'd kind of assembled half the book of, okay, I can see how I can build something here. And then it was really digging into the literature and trying to, and ultimately, building this idea of what I kind of conceived of as a wild city, whatever exactly that means, but the idea of a nature-filled city kind of taking the best from all these different places that I've focused on and using those as the windows through which to look at what can often be really quite different areas of urban greenery, urban rewilding, and use that to kind of not exactly to build a city with all of them, but just to say that these are all valuable ways to begin thinking about our connection for the majority of people on the planet who live in towns and cities, some kind of urban environment, and how do you make nature relevant to them. And I, and it became a book, it became this book, Wild Cities, which I'm extremely excited to be able to finally reveal to the world and as not just a concept in my head, but as an actual thing that's printed on paper. That's great, thanks for that intro, I think I'd love to come back to the title of the book, Wild Cities. And I'm talking a lot about wild and wilding and rewilding in the podcast at the moment. It's a contentious term and some people might say cities are like the opposite of the wild, how can these things come together. So I just love to hear your perspective on why was that a phrase or a concept that you wanted to tie in with the book and make it central to the book? I mean the title was one of the first things that came to me, so in a sense I kind of built around it and I did for a long time during the writing process, trying to detach myself and say it could be something else, here's some other possibilities, if anyone's got any better ideas, I'm very open to it. But I never found anything better and it really kind of expresses I think quite well what I'm trying to say with the book, because like you say, we don't think of cities generally at least in an ideal world, we're not thinking of them as places that are wild, that's kind of an undesirable situation and if you look back at the history of cities and settlements, a lot of it is about taking an environment that is wild in an undesirable way and saying let's calm this down, let's make it more controlled, let's make it a better place to live. For all the reasons we know though, we don't necessarily want to live in something that is perfectly manicured and that includes the nature in it, or maybe some people disagree, but my view is that it is nice to have something that is beyond human control and maybe there is something contentious to this, but for me nature, if you want real nature rather than decorative nature, something that is sculpted, if you want biodiversity, which was another kind of focal point for the book, although I don't want to put people off by talking too much about biodiversity, because as much as I'm sure most people listening to this will be very happy with that wider audience, it's maybe not quite such a household word, but if I wanted to, my belief was that nature should be out of our control to some extent, that's sort of the definition of it, it's something beyond planning a little bit and we can get into that later if you like, but I guys had, I was open to changing the title of something better came to me, but ultimately the idea of talking about wildness and cities in a short snappy name, I found myself going, okay, yep, this is it, let's go with it. It's great, and I think it comes through in the book, why is it wild and not green cities or landscapes, cities or whatever, it's the sense that the case studies in the book are very much about creating or making space for that unmanaged wildness to come into cities in a way that's safe and that works with in a dense environment, that kind of thing. Yeah, and something, talking about green can be, I mean it means a lot of different things and if you are open to all of those things, be it ecology and biodiversity or green energy, looking at sustainability or if you're thinking about a green society, somewhere that's green politically, let's say, I mean there's so many ways to interpret that and I think one of the challenges when you're writing a book, when you've got so many thoughts you want to get out, which is how I was feeling when I was embarking on this project, is actually it's better not to try to talk about everything but to try to be a bit more focused and then that sense, I mean lots of people have written about green cities, something like that, but they're taking a slightly different focus perhaps from what I was and I guess it's trying to say this is sort of the lane that I'm working in and not feeling like I have to talk about everything which actually can be really quite different subjects kind of smushed together. Yeah, yeah, absolutely for sure, we're going to talk about 12 chapters and 12 silly examples in the book. So we'll talk about some of those but I'd like to just as a bit of a structure, be interesting to know from you like what are some of the key themes that emerged out of the book and then we can sort of dip into the case studies from there. Like I said, biodiversity was just a huge, a huge running theme and kind of hand in hand with connectivity and I found myself writing about this a game and a game of it seems like I hesitate to say the best way to do this because I really don't want it to be, oh this is the guide to how to do it but looking at the case studies and the examples that I include in the book, the places that I went to visit and the people that I met there, overwhelmingly the focus of what I was learning about, what people were saying to me, what their priority was with what they were doing with their project was to bring biodiversity into the place, whether you're talking about being on the streets, whether you're talking about little forgotten areas within the urban fabric, little bits of unused land in one form or another, whether you're talking about the buildings themselves or I don't know coastlines, river banks, things like this. It's about prioritising that biodiversity over and above trying to dictate too much what you're actually, what you're saying or should be here. Maybe there's some keystone species, you're saying okay it's quite important to have this specific thing but by and large it's what we want here is that resilience that comes from having lots of different things together, preferably kind of native species that would have been there before humans turned up and started putting concrete down and then that connectivity which people might disagree, you might disagree Ross but I do feel is missing a lot in some of these conversations because having something in one bit of a city on one side and having another something on the other side is great, of course we love having those things there but they become so much more resilient yes but so much stronger if it's possible to connect them so that it's not isolated little bubbles of nature within the city and this is something that was coming up all the time, building corridors and having little reserves whether we're talking about aquatic or marine reserves or let's say little urban forests or wild clamatos but then finding a way to connect them together so they're not, you don't have isolated populations of whatever might live there but actually that freedom to move around and it was something that I found myself, I didn't go into the project thinking I want to write about connectivity yes that's very important to me, it just came up so many times that I found myself writing okay here we go again this is the same thing that I was talking about in the earlier chapter just applied to a totally different environment but it's the same basic principles and I don't know if that's come across to you in the reading of it but that was definitely something that I found myself going okay this is clearly an important theme that I really hope that people, they do get this out of the book yes it is clear and I think there's a nice transition where you start the first chapter talking about Miyawaki mini forests in Tokyo and then you move on to talk about the green corridors in Medellin and you sort of make that transition where you're like it's great to have these pockets of forests but also what we learn from other cities is you have to connect up these habitats as well and it sort of reminds me back to the early definition of rewilding was about core areas of nature connected by natural corridors and the reintroduction of carnivores it was coars corridors and carnivores carnivores are tricky to do in a city but coars and corridors we can definitely do yeah exactly like these are not original thoughts they're not things that I've come up or even the people that I spoke to have come up with it's it's ideas that have been bouncing around for a long time but I think it is useful to take those those rewilding principles and to say by and large we can bring them into the city of course the details are going to change and you talk about carnivores and one of the things that actually surprised me that I came out of the the writing process going oh I actually I almost did a 180 on what I thought I was going to say about that because I started saying I started thinking I was going to be saying how important it is to have animals in the city and I like animals and I like being in the city and I like seeing animals in the city but the more that I was reading about the problems of human wildlife conflict in and outside of urban areas I found myself coming away going well you know they can work but but maybe it's just the the real urban adapters that we can say oh yes they are really happy in the city for the vast majority of of of animals whether it's large or small you know we need to to find a way to help them work in not necessarily the city if we want to think about really built up areas but the point is we have urbanized so much of the world that there isn't you know it's really hard to find bits of the planet for wild animals to live in now where they they aren't going to be interfered by by humans so we expand the concept of of cities of wild cities just to say anywhere that humans have gone and started building urban things whether it's roads or buildings or whatever it might be infrastructure and to say you know how do we how do we minimise this conflict how do we make it possible to have animals in these spaces without all sorts of conflict and that can be you know deadly for the wildlife and for for people and talking about smart corridors in all sorts of forms and I'm sure this is something that you've discussed in depth on the podcast before but recognising that you know we can't just be romantic about this I am such a romantic about this I'd love just to have animals wandering around in the in in the city and we all loved this in the early days of COVID when okay we're stuck at home but look there's animals wandering around on the street that's so unusual but it's just not realistic and to have that smart thinking again connectivity where are the animals coming from where they're trying to get to what you know what's their motivation broadly we're not trying to dictate too much what's going on but to to understand you know what do they want to do how can we facilitate that in the in the sort of smoothest way possible so that they can go about their business and the humans can go we can go about our business and we're not getting in the way all the time and causing you know genuine actual danger let's talk a little bit about some of the case studies of the looking at connectivity so let me know where you want to start with that and it'd be great to hear some some examples well yes I mean the the main city for this is when I went to Columbia to Medein which I'm sure people may know about the green corridors there which have been I mean one of the main focuses has been on kind of cooling the urban environment and yeah that's obviously a hugely important factor we all know about the fact that cities are hot places and they're getting hotter and you know that won't be news to anyone listening to this that having greenery on on on our streets and in our cities it helps call them down but to to have the connect that connectivity as well even if it's just between small small little urban forests like Milwaukee forests like you discussed which can be packed into very very small bits of of the city but you know it's hard for a lot of creatures to live in those small cities so small cities small forests so so having sort of high quality greening of of streets like they've done there in Medein it gives you the opportunity to to kind of link them up and again kind of adds so much more resilience to what you're creating there because it's it's possible for for all the wildlife whether you're talking about the flora or fauna to to be kind of not not to be trapped to basically and then but then like I said it kind of comes up time and time again in the book because I was looking so I went to Tallinn in Estonia to kind of think about pollinators and wildflowers and wildflower meadows because Tallinn stopped or not entirely stopped but they massively reduced cutting the kind of public land the grass on the public land they started in 2019 kind of beginning the reduction and as I understand it's kind of a steady reduction in the years since and the idea is to encourage the native wildflowers native plant life and with that the native pollinators that are attracted to that and of course then you get birds attracted because of the pollinators and you know you're building an ecosystem within within the city and again it's done they don't have a lot of space but it's done using these little abandoned bits between streets and and walkways and there's an older band and railway line that kind of fell out of use and so it was kind of appropriated by the city okay we're going to have what they call the the pollinator highway which is great because it has its stretches right across the city so it's kind of got that accessibility to people in all areas and having having all these different spaces but having them not you know a pocket here a pocket there a pocket on the other side but but like little threads that run right through the city it makes it a lot stronger and it reduces the need to be kind of going in and kind of constantly maintaining or what's going on here they do come out and and mo these meadows kind of once a year because they don't wanted to turn into a full forest it's kind of trying to keep a lid on it in that sense but in every other way it's kind of hands off let it do what it wants we've created the the capacity for kind of nature to do its thing and for biodiversity to kind of thrive yeah I was really interested to hear the Talon Estonia examples it wasn't a city that was really on my radar I hadn't really heard about it before and it gives so I love the reduction in management because it's such a simple thing that pretty much any city could think about doing in in their parks or in the verges along roadways and just saying actually it's just doing less you don't have to go in and plant things although I think they did some seeding of wildflowers as well which is you know very cheap and easy to do so yeah it's a it's a really good example and I think I've experienced a few places in when I lived in East London my local area one year for some reason they didn't sort of the local council didn't sort of make a fuss about it or even like sort of warn us it was going to happen but they just stop mowing everything for the whole summer and it was absolutely amazing you know I've been there for a couple years before I'd always seen it you know very all the lawns on all these states and in the parks all very very manicured and then one year they just left it and it was just like wildflowers everywhere insects everywhere I was like this is so easy why don't we just do this everywhere and I mean of course you don't want to you don't want to do it everywhere everywhere because you still want some some grass that you know for example people like to have a picnic on the grass that's fine people like to have a little football pitch and kick a ball around that's also good we like people getting outside and doing that it's just finding the proportions and that's going to be a kind of case by case you know local environment by local environment decision of what exactly is the the balance we want here but I can speak to my experience of of being in growing up in parts of kind of London in the UK where there's nothing like that there was nothing like that it was all just just flat grass and of course I wasn't aware of this at the time I wasn't thinking about biodiversity but you can be sure that it's you know a fraction of what it could be with these examples that you're talking about and there have been so many examples I mean in the book I write about there's a part of Melbourne where it's been done where I was reading very recently about an experiment in Warsaw in Poland where they were they have they there's some kind of natural if you will wildlife meadows that are just grown organically and then plots of land that were seeded and kind of given a year to go through the cycle and then and then comparing the two types of meadows if you will kind of with the natural one and the quote unquote artificial one and and by and large you know you get the same degree of of pollination I think they did say that there were less butterflies that appeared in the the sort of hand and created human stone one but if you're talking about bees and hoverflies and these other types of pollinators then you know it works totally as well as something that's grown organically and that for me is just the perfect example of something where you you're putting in the efforts to create the situation where nature can do its own thing and we're not having to constantly go in and into fear you've done the initial work upfront just to make sure it kind of gets through those those early phases and then you buy in large can step back and say okay you know what whatever wants to grow here can grow here and whatever wants to come and feed on that nectar and so on go for it yeah yeah that's great I mean I think you're pointing towards something that is a big theme in in rewilding which is letting go of control and you know I think that's come up in the book as well hasn't it yes and not really again with too much intent the kind of thing that people have have said to me afterwards like oh you have some really strong opinions about this I wasn't aware that I had some strong it's it's kind of something that I I guess kind of came out subconsciously but yeah you said the perfect word there which is control and that that letting go of control I think is so intimidating it's not something that that is natural for for the way that so many people think it's it runs counter to the instincts of no it should be like this and especially when you're thinking about cities and these spaces which you know are so heavily planned and organized and we're talking about infrastructure and layers of things upon things and you know obviously people are thinking about these spaces to such incredibly detailed degrees and then you get us rewilding folk showing up and saying no no no just let it go and I totally understand why there's there's pushback on that but I do think that having the bravery in whatever form we're talking about whether it is kind of urban forests or wildflower meadows if we're talking about wildlife reserves or you know have rewilding our rivers whatever it might be having the courage to say okay to some degree we want to be letting go of that control and it's not going to be the same in every city in every culture in every country but put to not pulling so tightly to that principle of no we must control what goes here we must dictate what species can be found here and exactly how it appears you know the aesthetics how it's manicured that's where I'm putting my flag in the ground that no we need to be willing to just step back a little bit did you get a sense from all the people you you spoke to when you're when you're writing the book and you're visiting these places did you get a sense of how they successfully you know navigated through that I presume they have to do a lot of convincing of local communities and politicians and all that kind of thing I think I mean this goes this goes back to kind of the threads through the whole book but one thing that really came out of it was how there were almost no cases where you had either a complete top down or kind of bottom up approach to anything pretty pretty much all of it had some combination of okay kind of the council are doing something but there's a volunteer group that are doing something or there's a there's a there's a national effort to do something or other and and and there's a movement maybe that's sort of doing something similar along the the same lines it's hard to kind of pull this apart and understand exactly who's leading who and maybe this is something the ingredients of of something that is successful where you have those two elements working together where it's not just a politician has decided that that something must happen like this and and then you get community pushback I mean we know examples like this right where the community might say well actually maybe we would like somebody welding who knows but we weren't involved in this in this process it we know that it can't be done like that and equally it's very difficult for just a community to decide to do something if you've got leaders in whatever form who say no actually it's not going to be like that we're not we're not supporting that and so I think I think it's a good approach to recognize that maybe these are just self-selecting but based on the projects that that I did kind of discover and I went to visit in the book it was always combinations of you've got that top down support providing kind of financing and the kind of legislation to make things happen but you also have community leaders and you have kind of inspiring figures who can go out and deliver the message and help people understand you know this is why we want to encourage whatever the project might be and to actually engage with people and we know the examples right going into schools and explaining to the kids because they get it and then getting them excited about it and involved and it can kind of things can snowball from there rather than being something that I mean I know how much you can probably tell because I've written a book about it I'm really really fond of the idea of making cities kind of more biodiverse and ecological spaces and places but but if I was in charge that doesn't mean I'm going to go around and just making things be how I want them to be because you need to bring people along for the ride and yeah the people that I met I would say that that by and large they've been smart in understanding how to do that and overwhelmingly it's people who are off from the places that they're talking about so they know how to they know why it matters to people there I know there's an extremely vague way to talk about lots of different different movements and different kind of processes happening at the same time but it was it definitely came out of the book that yeah this is this is a common factor across all of those cities that's super interesting yeah I'm really interested in this this discussion of why some why something happens in one place and not necessarily in another and I think one of the things I picked up from the book and something I appreciated about your writing was that you talked also a lot about the culture and the history of the place which sort of gave a hint of why you know why a Singapore the city in the garden why did me a wacky forest come out of Tokyo you know and it's sort of there's sort of local responses to a very local local issues and and mix in the local culture and whatever part of their history and yeah it was it was very interesting and it sort of gave me an insight that we we can't really just go and pluck a solution from a city and bring it to the other side of the world and expect it to work but we need to sort of come up with something that makes sense locally for us I mean I don't know how much we can be directly drawing lines between those things I mean there definitely are like those examples you gave of you know why did the Japanese government want to push forest bathing it was a response to you know a specific social problem around you know overwork and and burnout and unfortunately cases of suicide that this was one of many ways in which to try to to reduce that of saying people should be going to nature and this will be this will be good for your kind of physical and mental health and and yeah Singapore was in a situation where they were they sort of found themselves independent and in the middle of the 20th century in a way that perhaps wasn't planned for and and kind of latched on to nature as one way to kind of build build a new nation which is quite an incredible thought and kind of incredible endeavor to be taking on and so those those examples I would say fit fairly well there's other ones where I don't know if you would immediately if you would immediately say that there's a reason related to the history of the place why nature projects or rewilding became something that was relevant to to that city certainly I find it very enjoyable to learn about different parts of the planet and to understand you know what is the history of this city because they're all different they have such fantastic different personalities and when do these projects fit into another city like when can you pick one up and just put it somewhere else is a fascinating topic in itself because you take a meowaki forest example I mean that's meowaki forests all over the place and and it is a model that is I mean of course it's completely different everywhere you go because you're looking at what is the then what is the kind of natural biome the sort of the natural vegetation of which ever part of the planet we're looking at but the concept can be applied pretty much everywhere and people seem to get excited about it and I don't think they all have to know the story of Dr. Meowaki and and his experiences in Japan and in Germany and how he personally came up on that you know it's not particularly relevant in the way people just kind of understand oh right we can quickly grow a little forest in the city well that's very exciting let's do that yeah so I don't know I would be it would be fascinating to get into the psychology of exactly how some of these projects came to be successful kind of what's the secret source to different places but I am not the person to take on that endeavor I think just explaining what happened and what the consequences were is probably enough for this particular project that's great one of the other key themes I think I think sort of came out was this the role of communities you mentioned a little bit about it but how local communities have been quite you know critical and very involved in the sort of projects you talk about in the book you give us a couple of examples of that I think it's an important point to make because so often this topic and almost I mean so many environmental efforts are kind of presented at least the way that I look at the media presented as being done to people and you either are supportive of it being done to you or you don't want it to be done to you and that's where the the argument and the debate happens but understanding that a lot of people really like having nature around them a lot of people living in urban places would like a lot more nature and if you have a garden well that's great you can do all sorts of things with that and that connects again to what we were saying about about the connectivity that you know there's so much evidence talking about the importance of of gardens that's a whole I mean way more than I would have expected so that's a separate but very important point but but under what I saw in so many parts of the world was people who really want nature in the place that they live and either as individuals or more commonly as groups saying okay let's get together and and do what we can to make that happen and this again it kind of goes hand in hand with the grassroots and the top-down thing I mean I'll give you an example I visited Nairobi the capital of Kenya which it loves to talk about being you know the only city in the world the wildlife capital of the world because they have a national park within the city I mean it's not there's a lot of wildlife parks in Kenya and Nairobi National Park is a very little one but they're incredibly proud of it and they should be because it's it's a large part of the city that has been set aside for for native wildlife and we really are talking you know giraffe and zebra and lions I mean big sort of classic Lion King type type wildlife and this is something that is you know you can't do it without the support of the of the government and down right it just wouldn't work no one can decide to to create this but I spent a lot of time while I was there meeting people from this organized amazing organization fun app which is the Friends of Nairobi National Park and the fact that they have you know a huge community of people who are working together to basically advocate on behalf of the park because the park doesn't have a voice the animals don't have a voice but these people do and they are constantly going out going into the the local media sometimes you get protests if they feel like oh no someone's trying to encroach too much on the park which is a constant problem you know Nairobi is an expanding city there's a lot of people who would like to take that land for development but for people who are who can go out and and speak up for the park and for the wildlife that lives there and brings so many benefits in terms of connecting people who live in Nairobi and especially kids growing up in Nairobi with that kind of native Kenyan wildlife you know not to make it be something that they they see on TV like the rest of the world and every two months they get together and we'll go around one kind of morning drive around the park do surveys it's all very like top qualities citizen science so they can keep showing oh here's the data here's what here's what's in the park and and constantly constantly saying you know this is this is something we want and and don't you dare think about taking this away from us it's just one example and it's a very specific specific example that's not going to apply everywhere but again it's the concept it's the saying that this is important to us and we're very willing to work to to demonstrate that and not you know again it's it's not you don't want to sort of tragedy of the commons type thing or you go well it's not my responsibility you know I pay my taxes and someone else should be taking care of this but saying people people go saying no we really care about this and we want to go and and and make sure that it's protected and do whatever is necessary to to maintain that urban nature they have and you know the same thing exists around the world I mean I went to Sydney to look at the marine environment I mean it's just incredible like Sydney Harbour has more species just one one little harbour right there's more um species marine life in that harbour then you find around the entirety of the British Isles or within the entirety of the Mediterranean I mean that's pretty gulp smacking saying it and you feel like that can't be true the numbers don't lie anyway um there's there's kind of movement questions over the years or maybe we should what to what degree should we be protecting there's there is no universal citywide marine park but there are lit there are pockets that are protected and there's one bit that I that I kind of went back to a few times because people kept people I was meeting there and Sydney kept saying all this is you know a great example of kind of urban marine life uh it's called Cabbage Tree Bay and it's a very small very very tiny little bit of the harbour but because it's it's very strongly protected and um and and the point is it's we don't normally think about humans and nature and humans and and biodiversity going together very well but because the community are so involved in this particular bit of the harbour there's so much um uh so many passionate passionate people who are kind of watching over it if you will and again like like the wildlife park in Nairobi they're they're advocating on behalf of it they're saying no don't you dare think about doing anything to this because we know how valuable it is and that you know it's got you're not allowed to do any fishing or anything it's like super super highly protected incredible biodiversity for such a very small bit of the harbour um and and again this is not a a top-down thing and i'm not going to speculate on what the governments would be doing if they had their own way but the point is it's it's it's almost in a relevance because you've got the the people who live there the community saying yes we live in a city but we really like nature we really like this specific nature that lives here now and and we're not we're going to band together and uh make sure that that that what we have is protected um and possibly even expanded if that's you know we can imagine such a luxury so i mean it's it was incredibly inspiring to meet to meet people who um are really pushing this uh you know we hear it so much but this kind of thinking global and acting local uh mindset of you know i'm not we're not saving the world but we are saving this bit around where we live and we can do everything we can to look after this and it's just amazing how it flies in the face of the way that uh thinking about the environment protecting the environment is so often like a trade-off or what are you willing to sacrifice for nature it just it just isn't that the in these particular cases yeah and it's a huge it can be such a huge source of meaning and uh enjoy for people as well to be involved to have nature around them and be involved in some sort of stewardship and protection of it yeah i mean there's i i i found my i wrote so so many pages about um everything everything we know about the mental health and the physical health and all the benefits of um well i mean i was just repeating myself over and again kind of saying like trees are great for us and birds are great for us and um and you know wild swimming is great for us so i just have to cut it back cut it back because i think by the end people get it exactly exactly we're coming up uh sort of last 10 minutes or so um i'd be interested maybe just getting a little bit of an insight if i just for people who are listening they can get a little bit more of uh you know an insight scoop on what's in the book um if i could read out uh the names of a couple of the case studies and you just give us like the little short summary of what that chapter is about um it sounds like fun game yeah don't memory test for you i'm sure it's still fresh in your memory um munic germany the city with the free flowing river yeah the easer river um which i mean it is a sorry snappy um so basically uh a hundred years ago it was it was uh channeled the easer river and in munic it floods a lot uh people in the 19th century said no that's bad turned it into a concrete channel and then a hundred years later people said actually um we think that maybe that was a mistake and seems like we're still having floods um and so now it's much more holistic because they pulled over concrete out and it and it meanders and it's got little bays and there are bits we can swim and um they cleaned up the water as well so there's a lot more biodiversity and there's even beavers like huge numbers very large beavers right in the city center city center of munic um and it's quite incredible and very inspiring oh love that okay well munic is on my travel list now um fantastic and and also i guess just to say as well not a unique situation because all over europe and the uk rivers have been altered you know massively so massive re-naturalization and return of of beavers and that kind of thing is yeah definitely something that's also happening in different places um yes i was quite interested in flag staff uh flag staff in the us uh the city were nice yeah it really goes in a very different direction um but i was really interested sorry light pollution that's the focus of this and um i mean this is one with a very unique history because um you had this guy per civil law who at the the end of the 19th century um he had he had money and he had a passion for uh what he thought was going to be his life's goal which was finding life on Mars um who hasn't had that particular ambition um and so he used his money to go out west because at the time the east coast of the u.s. was getting electric electric fight that's the right word right electrified um because street lighting had just become a thing and so he found a remote bit of Arizona uh in a settlement that had a hundred people and said okay i'm gonna build an observatory here i'm gonna get a giant telescope and i'm gonna find life on Mars and uh he did not find life on that unfortunately um but the observatory is still there and now they do some fantastic uh work uh they found Pluto um some decades later uh but the point is it's right outside the city of flag staff which has grown to be from a hundred people to something short of a hundred thousand people um they also have electricity now along with all of the normal um things that make uh cities i mean we know about the issues with cities and nature but their specific thing was we would really like to be able to see the night sky because of this observatory and actually there's other observatories that moved into the to the area it's just because of the low humidity and so on it's just a great place to be stargazing um and so starting in uh the 1950s they began introducing various rules around uh the use of kind of outdoor lighting and these have been getting kind of in waves kind of updated over the years as as more and more as the city grew and there's been more and more light um kind of projected into the night sky you know most of us living in cities can't really see stars yeah it's it's something that's been taken away from us um i think something like 60% of people in europe um can't see i think it's the milky way um was that statistic and there was something like 80% in in North America i mean it's just not part of people's life but somewhere like flag staff um there are limitations they use a particular metric which is lumens per acre and um and you have to look at your plot of land and work out you know how much light am i allowed to emit wow and again fantastic community connection because people who have grown up there they understand why they know this story they understand why it matters they care they are very proud that they live in a part of the world that they can look up at night and they can just see the milky way they can see all these constellations there is still that connection to the to the night sky um and uh and that's something that um i mean light pollution is a problem everywhere you know in a sense it can be you can just sort of turn the lights off and the problem goes away but of course you know people don't have that in in other cities don't have that heritage so there's a lot of education in it and flag staff business it is a really an example of how uh that can be done differently and there's presumably lots of benefits for wildlife with having dark skies as well isn't there oh yeah i mean there's there's there's a huge um i mean the number of uh where do you where do you begin there's birds who um uh try to navigate by um who who navigate through uh the the using their circadian rhythms in the same day way that we have circadian rhythms i mean something like a billion birds are killed in cities every year and i think that's just a North America figure so that's you know talking specifically about windows strikes because um birds often can't see glass i'm sure again your your uh listens kind of know about this problem um and all these lights off initiatives to kind of stop migrating birds from being distracted by all the completely unnecessary uh light coming out of cities at night um you know it's an incredible loss of life um that can be made better um we're talking about uh moths which are sort of underrated pollinators but oh completely get bamboozled by artificial lighting and become much less you know much harder for them to find food to breed um the amount of light in the in marine environments there was a study of uh the marine environment around Plymouth in the UK and i think something like three quarters of of the coastline was considered you know like unhealthy levels of of artificial lighting at night which you know Plymouth is a city which likes to shout about itself as kind of the ocean city of of the of the UK um and it's just very hard for uh marine life to to to survive in that environment especially if let's say you're a coral reef who is um programmed to kind of sink your your spawning sessions with the lunar cycle and if you can't detect light from the moon then you're not going to sink up at the right time and you know i mean the the biodiversity loss is huge um and those it's just a handful of examples but you're right it's not just humans it's the ecological world as well that's really interesting i didn't i didn't know that about marine life that's really interesting to know i mean obviously only relevant where the city is next to the coast but uh in those places and we do tend to really enjoy living yeah around the coast um these these issues kind of smashed together you're thinking about marine conservation in an urban environment you're thinking about light pollution uh in an urban environment and then you know they they kind of compound yeah all right fascinating i think we'll wrap things up there um i want to say a huge thanks for just sharing all the all your stories and all the information from the book um i'll put a link to where people can go and uh and bias or pre-order it in the episode description but is there anything else anywhere else you want to send people to or any sort of final shout you want to make um shout out to lots of support i have received um i have to say um both us the Society of Authors and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation in the US um both gave support to to undertake this project which is um you know obviously not an easy undertaking um and i i hope that the book does find its way to people who would be uh interested in this topic um and like you said that i'm sure the links will do the work but uh thank you to anyone who um who who does buy it and thank you rots for this time