Ecological Renovation In Communities: Conceptual Underpinnings
University Outreach Publication
The places where we live remain connected to natural life support processes. With land development, safety, and cultural issues, these lifelines become more strained. As we cleanse and sterilize our environment, the connections with other life, and associated sustaining processes, diminish. Our interconnections with the ecological framework around us is supplanted by artificial resource concentration and delivery systems.
xR=x2/I
As resource concentration (R) doubles in our support, our interconnectedness (I) with the surrounding ecosystems diminish by four times. As ecological processes are strained and allowed to become damaged, we grow ever more addicted to the cultural mechanisms that distance ourselves from our ecological base of support. Our connections to supporting processes are becoming more tenuous, and may be overlooked as having any connection at all by citizens and decision-makers.
A growing portion of the urban / suburban population have perceptions of ecosystems as individual parts. Many nature walks, environmental education classes, ecological trainings, and regulatory ordinances view natural systems as many individual, clearly divisible parts contained in a bag called the environment. Within community natural resource management, the important ecological things are not the parts, nor the bag.
(FOR97-20) September 1997
Kim D. Coder
June 2004
University of Georgia School of Forest Resources
Athens, GA
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Abiotic Factors, Appraisal and Valuation, Asset Management, Biodiversity, Buffers, Ecological Linkages, Ecological Restoration, Ecosystem Management, Fragmentation/Parcelization, Infrastructure (green), Landscape Ecology, Site Evaluation/Selection, Watershed Management
National
Ecological renovation, Ecological restoration, Ecology
