The Human Ecosystem: What's Missing?

The human ecosystem concept is one of the most common tools used in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER.  Adopted from a team of social ecologists and sociologists who were involved in community forestry in the Himalayas, the application of such approaches to underserved areas in American cities, and the conservation and management of US National Parks, the concept is remarkably broad and adaptive.  The human ecosystem is not necessarily tuned to emphasizing the intellectual flavor of the week or most current headline issue for cities, urbanization, sustainability, or development.  However, its inclusiveness, nested hierarchical nature, and adaptability makes it well suited to dealing with shifting or even new emphases in social-ecological systems research and application (Figure 1). 

Figure 1.  The Human Ecosystem Framework
(Adapted from Machlis et al. 1997)

What are some of the hot topics that might seem to be missed in our discussions or presentations, but which in fact have a home in the human ecosystem framework?

Political ecology.  

This is at once a scholarly area and a subject of activist attention.  As a scholarly field, it examines the relationships of politics, economics, and environment.  As a social movement, it focuses on the inequitable distribution of benefits and costs of environmental decisions.  The social movement can be seen as a part of a larger social or environmental justice agenda. 

The multidimensional relationships with which political economy is concerned exercise several components of the human ecosystem framework.  Among the bioecological features, catalogued in the “ecosystems pattern and process foundations” component of the framework, many are relevant, including the distribution of energy, water, nutrient, and biomass resources, the kinds and levels of contaminants and pollution of air, water, and soil, and the heterogeneous or mosaic distribution of all of these factors.  Heterogeneity is important because control of access to resources, exposure to hazards, or distribution of benefits is subject to social – that is power and political – control.  Not all persons, groups, or institutions may be uniformly represented across a spatial mosaic.  The social control of access, exposure, and benefit engages many of the components of the human ecosystem framework.  The social ordering by factors of identity, rank hierarchies, and norms are key to the differential power relationships in human ecosystems.  Social rank hierarchy can further be broken down into ranks based on wealth, control of territory, social status, knowledge as a kind of capital, and, tellingly, power.  Among the social and cultural foundations, the distribution of populations, including by race, class, gender, or ethnicity, and the distribution of information by various institutions may reflect power relationships.  Of course the access to or participation in the institutions of sustenance, health, justice, education, etc. are also dependent on power relationships.  Other aspects of the human ecosystem framework (Figure 1) can also be used to investigate and explain, and therefore intervene in, power relationships in the urban social-ecological systems. 

Technology.  

Recently, our colleague N.B. Grimm has emphasized the fact that social-ecological systems have significant technological content.  Grimm at the 2013 Congress of Urban Ecology, the first such international meeting of the Society of Urban Ecology (SURE), introduced the term Social-Ecological Technical System, or SETS to emphasize the role of technology in how people think about urban ecosystems. 

This healthy reminder and highlight does no violence to the human ecosystem framework.  A classical representation of the significance of technology in human environment relationships is the POET model.  Under this general model, environmental change is said to be a function of human population, the way that humans are organized, and the technology available.  Explicit recognition of the role of technology in urban systems appears in the classical work of Borchert (1967), who notes that urban form in the United States shifted with the introduction of new technologies.  

Emphasizing transportation technology, Borchert proposed five epochs of American urban change: 1) sail and wagon (1790-1830), 2) steam powered ships and initial rail roads (1830-1870), 3) national steam rail network (1870-1920), 4) interstates and propeller air transport, and finally 5) satellites and jet propulsion.  American urban transformation continues, with other epochs hypothesized to represent the “slow growth” proposed in the 1970s of the oil embargo (Phillips and Brun 1978), or perhaps an epoch defined by the technology integrating global finance, manufacturing, and consumption.  In any event, the significance of technological innovation, change, and even retrenchment are clearly major components and drivers of urban change.  These latter technologies have a great deal to do with the current global teleconnections of urban systems with each other and with more rural and wild lands (Boone et al 2014).

Baltimore is a prime example of the role of shifting technologies.  For instance, the urban fabric of Baltimore, as described in Hayward and Belfoure (1999), shifted markedly with each transition -- from the walking city, through the city of horsedrawn trolleys, through the electric commuter rail, through the automobile era.  The industrial power of Baltimore similarly reflects major technological shifts, from the water power of the “fall line” through wood fueled steam, through coal powered manufacturing and steel production.  Other overlapping shifts, such as the opening up of the American South and Southwest with the availability of air conditioning technology there, and government policy for the location of defense industries away from the vulnerability of the east coast so feared during World War II, played a role in Baltimore’s post-industrial shift to a joint service, tourism, and knowledge footing.

In the Human Ecosystem Framework, technology appears foundationally in such things as the source of energy (e.g. water power, vs. wood, vs. coal), or the path of water flow (the location at the fall line between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain).  Technology also is reflected in the amassing and deployment of labor, as in the contrast between slavery and voluntary immigration as sources, and the shift in capital investment in water-mill industry and canals versus the creation of America’s first long haul railroad – the Baltimore and Ohio.  

The technologies available and the pursuits different technologies make available have powerful influence on social identity, demographic structure, community and neighborhood cohesion and the like.  For example Baltimore still embraces a historical identity as a seafaring town.  This is shown by the fact that a waterfront neighborhood is still referred to as Canton, in honor of Baltimore’s fast clipper ships that cemented trade between China and the U.S. East Coast.  Or the fact that Fells Point, the location of Baltimore’s first deep water port, still retains the ameities and reputation as a freewheeling entertainment district reflecting its early tradition of hosting sailors on leave.  The coal-fired industrial era is honored in the Middle Class Mythology of Baltimore and its blue collar ethos.  These things are all features that find a home in the human ecosystem framework, for example in cultural myths, social identity, and temporal cycles of change in demography and institutional and organizational structures.

Infrastructure.  

Another hot topic these days is infrastructure.  Strictly speaking, infrastructure is what undergirds the various components of a system.  Infra means below.  It is the supporting structure, linkages, flows in any system.  The human ecosystem may seem to be blind to the built and engineered components of urban ecosystems.  This is because the human ecosystem framework assumes those physical foundations.  In 1997, we worked to refine understanding of the bioecological foundations of the human ecosystem.  The original discussions by Machlis and colleagues certainly included the bioecological and biophysical aspects of human ecosystems in the “resource system” component.  Perhaps because buildings, streets, supply pipes, electrical wires, railroads, sewers, storm drains, and so on are such conspicuous parts of urban ecosystems, we hardly felt the need to call attention to them.  Cities are so often defined based on density of built structures and of human inhabitants that pointing toward buildings and infrastructure could be tacitly assumed.

However, a later description of the human ecosystem as a model template showing major kinds of components and their connections attempted to make this assumption clear.  Cadenasso et al. (2006) is a good example of this integration of built – and hence infrastructural – components into general interactive and classificatory models of urban ecosystems (Figure 2).  There is nothing wrong with pointing to the various components of systems as infrastructure, but in a sense, that seems redundant with saying that an urban place is a human ecosystem comprising social, biotic, built, and physical (e.g. soil, topography, climate) components.  Infrastructure is just another word for components, really.  The big idea is that cities, suburbs, and exurbs are systems that contain many specific features and connections, and that those span and connect biology, physical environment, buildings, social processes and the myriad feedbacks among components.

Figure 2. A process model template of the human ecosystem.

A healthy outcome of the infrastructure label may be helping people to remember the often invisible biological components of cities, suburbs, and towns.  Infrastructure is now often spoken of as gray, blue, and green.  This division suggests that the complex system of the city or more broadly, the urban region, depends on services and structures provided by plants, animals, and microbes, and that these services emerge not only from partly or (almost) entirely engineered features, but also from parks, yards, street plantings, derelict field and lots, open streams, wetlands, and freeflowing atmosphere.  Planning, design, management, policy, and education will be better served, and will better serve the human population when the contributions of biological infrastructures and their components are understood and effectively employed.

Conclusion

The message here is that the human ecosystem framework (Figure 1), a hierarchical enumeration of the kinds of biophysical and social structures, resources, processes, and outcomes that make up not only cities and towns, but also wilderness and production landscapes, is adequate to include contemporary and important concerns of power, justice, technology, and infrastructure.  The human ecosystem framework can be considered a causal hierarchy, in which general causes or factors are broken down into more specific mechanisms and interactions.  Specific models of human (in general) and urban (in particular) ecosystem structure, function, and dynamics will draw upon several to many of the ideas and features included in the human ecosystem framework. 

The framework is complemented by a process model template (Figure 2).  This process model template emphasizes that urban systems are composed of biological components and their interactions, physical environments and their links, social structures and interactions, and built components and the interactions among them.  This model template emphasizes the comprehensiveness of kinds of components of cities, suburbs, and exurbs, as well as the interactions among the various components.

Thus, rather than neglecting important contemporary topics in social, engineering, historical, and political realms, urban ecology has frameworks and model templates that in fact can easily accommodate these features.  Technology is a part of the built environment, Power is an aspect of the social structures, and infrastructure is a way to group various built components, networks, and interactions.

References

Boone, C. G., C. L. Redman, H. Blanco, D. Haase, J. Koch, S. Lwasa, H. Nagendra, S. Pauleit, S. T. A. Pickett, K. C. Seto, and M. Yokohari. 2014. Reconceptualizing land for sustainable urbanity. Pages 313–330 in K. C. Seto and A. Reenberg, editors. Rethinking urban land use in a global era. MIT Press, Cambridge.

Borchert, J. R. 1967. American metropolitan evolution. Geographical Review 57:301-332.

Cadenasso, M. L., S. T. A. Pickett, and J. M. Grove. 2006. Dimensions of ecosystem complexity: heterogeneity, connectivity, and history. Ecological Complexity 3:1-12.

Hayward, M. E. and C. Belfoure. 1999. The Baltimore rowhouse. Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Machlis, G. E., J. E. Force, and W. R. Burch. 1997. The human ecosystem. 1. The human ecosystem as an organizing concept in ecosystem manageme

Phillips, P. D., and S. D. Brunn. 1978. Slow Growth: A New Epoch of American Metropolitan Evolution. Geographical Review 68:274–292.

The Kind of Solution A City Is

A while ago I wrote about Jane Jacobs’ insight that cities were complex systems[i].  The stone that she dropped in the urban pond in 1961 has rippled widely, and the ideas of cities as complex adaptive systems, with emergent properties, good and bad resilience, and non-linear dynamics now guide much cutting edge urban research.

Of course, when Jacobs used the word problem, she meant an intellectual problem to be solved, and her answer suggested complex systems theory as an approach to understanding cities.  But the word “problem” also calls to mind an antonym.  To every problem there might be considered to be a solution.  In this spirit, with apologies to Jane Jacobs, I ask what kind of a solution a city is.

To get to my answer, I do have to admit that some urbanists have interpreted cities as literal problems, in the negative sense.  For example, members of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology in the 1920s emphasized urban pathologies.  They contrasted the issues that existed in cities with the ideal of village and rural life as they experienced it in turn of the 20th century America.  They studied such things as competition among immigrant communities and the distribution and behavior of gangs.  Of course, there are real negatives associated with cities, including pollution, disease contagion, crowding and stress, for example.  Recent research by Bettencourt and West (2010) has pointed out several negative factors, such as crime, that increase at greater than linear rates with city size.

The Lure of the City

A design for urban farming in vacant lands in West Baltimore.
From an urban design studio supervised by Brian McGrath
and Victoria Marshall.

In spite of the negatives of urban living, cities continue to draw humanity to them.  Urban areas are seen as a solution by societies, governments, individuals, and households who vote with their feet or with their policies.  Edward Glaeser (2011) has discussed at length the draws that urban areas clearly hold for people and institutions.  For instance, cities in the broadest sense, are a prime locus of innovation.  The serendipitous interactions of knowledge workers in cafes, bars, restaurants, and informal gatherings are important sources of new ideas and approaches.  Interestingly, the well known power of social media, which can theoretically operate at a global scale in service of creativity, have not replaced the sparks of face-to-face interaction among diverse people.  Institutions such as businesses and universities clearly recognize the power of the city as a source of creative interaction. 

But individuals also yearn for the city for their own reasons.  People seek access to health care, education, jobs, consumer goods, and excitement.  In particular, some urban migrants seek release from the strictures of tradition, the anonymity to pursue a lifestyle not sanctioned in a less urban setting, or to replace a livelihood taken away by industrial agriculture or resource exhaustion in the countryside.  These lures, presented briefly in narrative form can be considered the services or opportunities provided by urban areas. 

Economies of scale are another way to address the lures of the city.  Again, Bettencourt and West (2010) provide statistical meat on the narrative bones.  They show over a range of city sizes a clear savings in terms of per capita infrastructure, resource use, creative products, and so on.  There is roughly a 15% savings in many areas of urban structure and process compared to urban population size.  In a sense, cities and larger urban areas exist to provide these solutions, these lures.

The Contexts for Solutions: Four Dimensions

“The” city is not just one kind of solution, however.  McHale and colleagues (submitted) identify four dimensions of contemporary urbanization: Diversity, Complexity, Diffuseness, and Connectivity.  These four characteristics are intertwined and interacting.  Together they describe what is new and exciting about cities for an urban ecologist.  The conceptual space identifies the realms in which new solutions for sustainability and resilience can be sought in urban social-ecological systems.

Diversity.  Looking at urbanization and urban change around the world reveals a vast diversity of forms.  The wealthy urban cores of Europe surrounded by less well off or segregated suburbs; the Post-World War II sprawl of the United States with thinning and sometimes even shrinking cores; the megacities or Asia; the metropolises of India and Latin America dotted with favelas and shantytowns; the urbanizing former rural “homelands” of South Africa are a part of the great global diversity of urban settlements.  No single simple model describes all the urban systems around the world, or even in a single country any more.

Complexity.  The early history of cities was marked by compactness and often clear differentiation of districts of cosmological significance, trade, residence, and so on.  Cities have always been characterized by heterogeneity of social groups and social standing.  Today, urban areas are marked by great heterogeneity within their perceptual or legal boundaries.  Neighborhoods occupied by different ethnic groups are cheek by jowl, formal and informal institutions divide up the space of service or influence, networks of transportation span walking, public modalities, private vehicles, and opportunistic sharing.  Such networks are layered and changing, and intersect with the patchiness of economic, social, biological, political, and governance features.  Urbanists continue to remark on the stark heterogeneity of urban areas – cities, suburbs, and exurbs – even as the grain size and patch configuration shift with time and use.

Diffuseness.  Hand in hand with complexity is diffuseness.  The boundaries within urban areas are often porous and functionally indistinct in contemporary urban mosaics.  Commuters move great distances, and the direction of travel is often not in a peripheral to central direction.  Many places that had been considered peripheral under older conceptions of single metropolitan cores are now destinations for travel that avoids such cores.  Diffuseness also extends to governance and institutional arrangements.  The issues and solutions for environmental and social problems are managed by collections of governments, non-governmental organizations that operate at various scales, and linked civil society activities.  Likewise investments and disinvestment span neighborhoods, districts, municipalities, and different kinds of lands in extensive urban-rural agglomerations. 

Connectivity.  Closely linked to diffuseness is connectivity.  The porosity of official and vernacular boundaries within urban regions means that connections between the different areas and included ecosystem types can be extensive.  But this connectivity now goes well and commonly beyond any particular urban node or region.  Global connections of finance, resources, wastes, cultural influences, talent, and livelihood are rife.  Consequently, teleconnections or connections at a distance are now contribute much to the form and functioning of urban regional landscapes.  These connections affect farms, rangelands, forest lands, marine and coastal fisheries, for example, as well as more obviously urban places.

Implications for City as Solutions

A typology of water management designs based on how
they use vegetated and non-vegetated components.
Figure by Brian McGrath, Urban Interface.

The global and regional “facts on the ground” of diversity of type, spatial complexity of mosaics, diffuseness of various boundaries in urban territories, and the connectivity at local, regional, and global scales, must be accounted for in solving urban problems.  Indeed, how to exploit these facts is an open question for improving urban sustainability. 

The diversity of urban forms means that there is the opportunity for trying different solutions in different kinds and contexts of urban systems.  It also means that solutions must be locally tuned and evaluated. 

Complexity means that solutions are likely to be heterogeneous even in a single urban region.  Adaptive approaches to governance, including that by formal and by informal institutions, are likely to be required across complex urban regions. 

Diffuseness means that solutions – and problems – will sometimes not respect formal boundaries.  Highly localized control and decision making cannot succeed without at least accounting for the positive and negative effects on adjoining patches or ecosystem types, neighborhoods and districts.  In fact, governance in both its formal and informal manifestations can take advantage of positive outcomes of diffuseness of solutions.

Finally, connectedness means that problems and processes at great distances may have profound effects on any given urban ecosystem.  The accessibility of global markets to global factories and the length of global supply chains means that cities are at the whim of corporate decisions and lifestyle changes in countries and continents distant from their local control.  Solutions must be sensitive to such global connectivity.  Chasing investment that may itself be ephemeral in its geographic focus is a significant challenge.  Environmentally sensitive attempts to buffer a system from capricious decisions elsewhere are certainly called for, but planning for adaptive resilience rather than relying only on the rigidity of hard buffers is a major opportunity.

The Inclusive Sustainability of the Urban

A final opportunity for solution exists.  As the world population becomes increasingly urban, there may be a tendency to forget about the needs, wellbeing, and influences of those who still live in areas designated as rural.  Some nation’s policies are intensely urban focused, such as in China.  Other countries, such as those in Africa, face projected increases in populations such that the urban tide cannot help but rise.  Rural invisibility is a danger in such situations.  Not only must new and existing urban residents be protected from the vulnerabilities of rapid or ill-placed urban development, and exclusion from decision making processes about social and environmental services, but rural residents are at risk as well in this transition.  The connectivity of the urban and the rural in rapidly urbanizing countries is extraordinary.  In Asia and in Africa, for example, “circular migration” for work and in cities and the resultant disruptions of social capital in both city and countryside are existing or emerging issues.  In China, for example, the problem is recognized in policies of “urban-rural integration” which aim to narrow the gap in wealth and services between village and city residents. 

The diversity, complexity, diffuseness, and connectivity of urban settlements and rural and wild lands around the world, in specific municipalities, and in urban megaregions means that sustainability itself becomes a spatially and conceptually complicated set of goals and trajectories.  The kind of solution a city is likewise becomes a multi-dimensional, spatially extensive approach to sustainability.

Bibliography

Bettencourt, L. and G. West. 2010. A unified theory of urban living. Nature 467:912-913. 

Glaeser, E. 2011. Triumph of the city: how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier. Penguin Press, New York.

McHale, Melissa R., STA Pickett, Olga Barbosa, David N Bunn, Mary L Cadenasso, Dan L Childers, Meredith Gartin, George Hess, David M  Iwaniec, Timon McPhearson, M Nils Peterson, Alexandria K Poole, Louie  Rivers III, Shade T Shutters, and Weiqi Zhou.  A New Global Urban Realm:  Complex, Connected, Diffuse, and Diverse Socio-Ecological Systems. Sustainability, submitted.

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[i] http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2011/06/complexity-hidden-nugget-in-jane-jacobs.html

Why Come to Africa to Fully Understand Urbanization?

The transformation of the Earth’s human population to a predominantly urban home is one of the major milestones of the 21st century.  While urbanization in industrialized regions such as the United States and northern Europe has been intense for more than a century, understanding global urbanization requires that we look beyond the cities of those regions. 

Baltimore tells an ecological story that is shaped by the shift from an industrial economy to a service and knowledge economy, and now hopefully toward a sustainable trajectory.  Thinning in the core, shifts in density toward the suburban and exurban fringe are some of the physical features of that story, which are shared by many U.S. cities.  There are many social and ecological effects of these changes, and the Baltimore Ecosystem Study has discovered new features of urban biogeochemistry, physical environment, biodiversity, economic, and policy interactions among them.  However, there is still a need to put our intense focus on the Baltimore region into a broader context.  Where do the urban transformations that Baltimore is experiencing fit within the diverse trajectories and patterns that urbanization represents around the world?  How do we contribute to and fit within a broader theory of urban ecosystems and urban change?

To help answer this question, I have been interacting with colleagues in various countries.  A while ago, I wrote about my experiences in learning about urbanization in China (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2014/10/baltimore-and-beijing-learning.html).  This year’s urban intellectual adventure has taken me to South Africa.

                               

What do I expect to learn about urbanization at the southern tip of Africa?  This visit follows on intense interactions with Melissa McHale of North Carolina State University and David Bunn, Director of the Knowledge Hub (http://www.knowledgehub.wits.ac.za/) at the University of the Witwatersrand Rural Facility near Bushbuck Ridge, South Africa.  These interactions have resulted in discussions and field trips that have identified features of urbanization that are not part of the standard American patterns of urban change (cf. McHale et al. 2013).

One reason that Africa is an important venue for understanding urbanization is that it is the next and last great frontier for urban intensification on the globe.  Everybody knows that the shifts from traditional, rural residence and lifestyle, agrarian livelihoods and consumption patterns to those that are shaped by urban attitudes, equity, economies, and information flows, are proceeding apace in China and India.  China has a purposeful policy of converting its vast population to the urban realm.  New city building, engulfing of villages in urban megaregions, and replacement of farming livelihoods with industrial employment are hallmarks of this transformation.  The diverse nations of sub-Saharan Africa exhibit an array of urbanization patterns and transformations from which the world might learn.

Africa is still predominantly a rural continent, in spite of hosting some truly huge cities like Lagos.  United Nations has estimated that the population of Africa may quadruple from its 1.1 billion by 2100 (http://worldpopulationreview.com/continents/africa-population/).  Population projections over the course of a century are admittedly subject to some uncertainty, but even if it is off some, the changes promised for Africa are immense.  The growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to be especially large. 

This remarkable population growth has profound implications for urbanization in Africa.  Some urban population growth will be the result of people moving to established cities and towns.  Informal settlements and shanty towns are already a part of this trend, and will very likely continue to be.  In other cases, urbanization will involve the conversion of already dense rural areas into new form of settlement in which aspects of rural life ways and urban patterns of culture and consumption mix.  Already a great deal of African urbanization is occurring without the industrial-to-sanitary city conversion that is familiar in North America and Europe.  It is also proceeding with broad connectivity, but with little hard-wired infrastructure.  For example, cell phones link people and provide banking without bricks and mortar, along with new opportunities for scamming the unwary.  African urbanization also exhibits much more spatial and temporal flexibility than we are used to in the Global North.  Commercial and social uses of particular places shift over the course of a day in ways that are virtually unheard of in the highly zoned sanitary city. 

As I begin a month in northeastern South Africa to explore and discuss with colleagues the striking features of urbanization, here are some initial thoughts.  Some are captured in the literature already, and some are points of discussion and curiosity. 

• Africa will be the final frontier of global transformation from rural to urban, but the nature of the resulting patchworks will be different from those in the Global North.
• Urban areas and rural areas are parts of interconnected, patchy regions.
• The linkages between cities and rural areas in Africa flow both ways.  People move back and forth depending on jobs, informal employment, and government grants to the aged and for children.
• Rural and urban lifestyles mix and match with families and “households” spread across regional extents.
• Infrastructure for communication and electrical power may not always follow the gridded model with centralized supply and distribution.
• Consumption may be a more compelling model for urban migrants than the benefits of the industrial or sanitary city.
• Perhaps the biggest general idea, very relevant to Baltimore, is that what looks distinctly urban or distinctly rural may in fact be hybrid systems. 

These points, many of which are the topics of new or needed research, suggest a very different set of models for urbanization and indeed the continued change of urban regions than exist in North America.  In essence they bound a conceptual space in which the structure, function, and change in Baltimore are a subset.  Urban is no longer just about the city.

Acknowledgements.  In addition to host Prof David Bunn, Director of the University of the Witwatersrand Knowledge Hub for Rural Development at the Wits Rural Facility, I have been fortunate to share this visit with Prof Dan Childers from Arizona State University.  Financial support provided by a Fullbright Specialist Program grant, and the Urban Sustainability Research Coordination Network.

Bibliography

Boone, C. G., C. L. Redman, H. Blanco, D. Haase, J. Koch, S. Lwasa, H. Nagendra, S. Pauleit, S. T. A. Pickett, K. C. Seto, and M. Yokohari. 2014. Reconceptualizing land for sustainable urbanity. Pages 313-330 in K. C. Seto and A. Reenberg, editors. Rethinking urban land use in a global era. MIT Press, Cambridge.

Knox, P., editor. 2014. Atlas of cities. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

McHale, M. R., D. N. Bunn, S. T. A. Pickett, and W. Twine. 2013. Urban ecology in a developing world: how advanced socio-ecological theory needs Africa. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 11:556-564.

Pickett, S. T. A., M. L. Cadenasso, J. M. Grove, P. M. Groffman, L. E. Band, C. G. Boone, W. R. Burch, Jr., C. S. B. Grimmond, J. Hom, J. C. Jenkins, N. L. Law, C. H. Nilon, R. V. Pouyat, K. Szlavecz, P. H. Warren, and M. A. Wilson. 2008. Beyond urban legends: an emerging framework of urban ecology, as illustrated by the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. BioScience 58:139-150.

Simone, A. 2010. City life from Jakarta to Dakar: movements at the crossroads. Routledge, New York.

UN Habitat. 2014. The state of African cities 2014. United Nations, New York.

BES Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Policy

The posts here often discuss conceptual issues, ideas and empirical insights, and opportunities for learning and communication that can promote the science, education, and community engagement of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study.  This post is a little different, but it points to an equally important ingredient for success of a collaborative, productive, and engaged project: the avoidance of sexual harassment and discrimination.  Given that diversity of various sorts, including the kinds mentioned in the policy, is important for the success of science, education, and application, a policy that is aimed at protecting the participants in BES from sexual harassment is also important.

Why are we promulgating a policy now?  A growing body of research has documented that sexual harassment, assault, and rape are unfortunately a part of the field research experience.  Action is necessary on the part of individuals and institutions to change the culture and the reality behind this sad situation.  Here's a news article that gives some background: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140716141308.htm

The Project Management Committee was stimulated to go on record with an anti-harassment policy for BES.  All participants in BES, from young students to senior leaders deserve a comfortable, open, and non-discriminatory work environment -- whether it's in the classroom, the lab, the field, or the office.  This means that everybody involved BES --whether officially paid by BES funds or not --must understand what sexual harassment is in order to avoid engaging in harassing behaviors, and to be able to seek recourse if it does occur.

It is important for all to understand that intent is not the definition of harassing behavior -- effect is.  Unintentional harassment is still harassment.  The policy gives examples of things that can be perceived as harassment, and which must therefore be avoided.

Here is the entire text of the policy:

SEXUAL AND OTHER UNLAWFUL HARASSMENT OR

DISCRIMINATION

The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) LTER is committed to providing a constructive research environment that is free of harassment and that supports individual dignity and respect.

Accordingly, BES advocates a strict policy prohibiting sexual harassment and discrimination because of race, color, creed, gender, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, military service, or any other classification protected by Federal, State or local law. Such conduct will not be tolerated and is prohibited.

Sexual harassment includes, but is not limited to, the following:

1.   Unwelcome sexual advances; requests for sexual favors; and all other verbal, visual or physical conduct of a sexual nature based on gender, especially where:

a.   submission to such conduct is made explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of involvement in BES;

b.   submission to or rejection of such conduct is used as the basis for decisions affecting an individual’s involvement in BES; or

c.    such conduct has the purpose or effect of interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive research environment.

2.   Offensive comments, jokes, drawings, pictures or cartoons, innuendoes, and other sexually oriented statements, whether verbal or written.

Similarly, any of the following conduct may involve unlawful harassment or discrimination because of race, color, creed, gender, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, military service or any other classification protected by Federal, State or local law:

1.   Verbal conduct such as epithets, derogatory comments, slurs, jokes or comments;

2.   Visual conduct such as derogatory poster, photography , cartoons, drawing or gestures,

3.   Physical conduct such as unwanted touching, blocking normal movement, or inappropriate physical gestures;

4.   Retaliation for having objected to reported or threatened to report harassing conduct.

If a person believes that he or she is being harassed or discriminated against because of his or her sex, race, disability, ancestry or other protected classification, such person should follow the policy of their home institution for reporting such conduct. 

--------End of Policy--------------------

This policy will be posted in the BES office and lab, and on the website.  Participants in BES should also consult the anti-harassment policies of each of their employers, and further details may appear there.  In addition, specific institutions provide channels for grievance and recourse.

Please take the need to understand and avoid sexual harassment seriously.  Also take seriously the desire of the leadership of BES to be helpful in facilitating appropriate recourse by the legally responsible institutions if any harassment does occur as a part of BES activities and work. 

Theory of Urban Heterogeneity

In order to plan for the next phase of BES, we are beginning to consider theoretical frameworks.  Here is the current status of that search.

A Multitude of Urban Theories.  There are many theories relevant to urban ecosystems.  These theories differ in their focus on specific facets of urban structure, function, or dynamics, and in their focus on one or several scales.  Broad urban theories address topics as diverse as the ancient development of cities, the scaling law of benefits and burdens of urban size, urban gradients in megaregional context, urban metabolism and footprint, urban biodiversity, species homogenization and adaptation, political ecology, industrial modernization, and many others.  Urban theories have emerged from disciplines as diverse as sociology, architecture, urban planning, and economics.  This document introduces a candidate theory for BES: a theory of urban heterogeneity.

Jobs of Theory.  There are two main jobs for BES theory: 1) Motivating the hypotheses behind specific research projects within BES; and 2) Clearly linking the diverse specialized activities in BES to a multidisciplinary framework.  In addition, our theory should help organize research and education in the context of Baltimore’s metropolitan shift from a sanitary to a sustainable city and help meet the challenges of climate change.  What theory might the Baltimore Ecosystem Study use to move forward? 

A Candidate Framework.  BES has helped pioneer the social-ecological approach to metropolitan ecosystems and of urban regions consisting of cities, suburbs, exurbs, and rural lands.  This approach recognizes spatial heterogeneity at various scales, ranging from individual parcels to the entire urban region.  Although we have used this perspective, in the form of patch dynamics, from the beginning of BES, important improvements in the understanding of urban systems suggest that we should attempt to articulate a new, inclusive theory of urban spatial heterogeneity.  Advances in understanding the spatial dimensions of biogeophysical and social sciences must be accommodated.  

A newly articulated theory for BES could emerge from an overarching hypothesis: spatial heterogeneity at various scales, and reflecting the key structures and processes in the metropolis, drives social-ecological interactions and dynamics. 

Nested within the overarching hypothesis would be specific subtheories or model domains that specify the different, key structures and processes we deem important in the Baltimore ecosystem.  The choice of the subtheories should build on empirical experience in Baltimore as well as on the broader social and biogeophysical theories our team brings to the table.

The subtheories of urban heterogeneity match the fundamental structure of ecosystems.  We focus on 1) the flux of materials across heterogeneous space, 2) the biotic potential of different patches, with its implications for nutrient retention and ecosystem production in the urban mosaic, and 3) the design and management decisions by human institutional.  These three subtheories can help connect the overarching hypothesis to our specific long-term data, experiments, and syntheses.

The discussions at the steering committee meeting on September 21 should identify key model types, data streams, and the organizing hypotheses in each of these three major urban ecosystem realms.

Baltimore and Beijing: A Learning Expedition to China

Famously Rampant Urbanization

This last summer, I had the pleasure of being hosted as a Visiting International Professor by the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences in Beijing.  This center is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is the home of the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology.  My goal in spending three months in China was to learn about its form, magnitude, and rate of urbanization. The speed and novelty of urban growth in China are exceptional.  Although some countries have faster annual percent rates of conversion of population from rural to urban, none has a greater absolute number of participants in the process.  Nor do other countries rival China in the extent of the creation of new cities virtually from scratch across broad regions.  It is a perfect place to help put our work in Baltimore in a larger perspective.  In addition, researchers in China are excited and very well prepared to share their new knowledge about urbanization with the rest of the world.

China has for thousands of years been a largely agricultural

country.  The establishment of the People’s Republic saw the proportion of rural residents in the solid majority.  Although Chinese cities boast histories reaching back thousands of years, they were mostly distinct settlements, often retaining ancient defensive walls and sharing key aspects of their city plans.  However, starting from the late 1970s, with the establishment of new policies, the growth of its cities, and the transformation of its population from predominantly rural to mainly city-dwelling, took off.

Chinese urbanization is more than simply the growth of established cities, however.  The idea of urban agglomerations, more recently conceptually deepened in terms of urban megaregions, was one that originated to capture the extraordinary spatial scope of urban change in China and elsewhere in Asia.  There are 23 planned megaregions or urban agglomerations in China (Fang 2011).

Twenty-three existing and planned urban megaregions in China (Fang 2011)

Urban megaregions require understanding urban change in an inclusive way, as something that embraces old city cores, new neighborhoods, novel extensions within large urban administrative units, the engulfing of ancient villages by dense and often high-rise urban fabric, the replacement of agricultural villages by mixed industrial settlements, the demolition of villages and their replacement by superblocks of gated high-rise condos or apartment buildings, and even some modest development of villas, or what we in the U.S. would call single-family houses with yards. 

The richness of the kinds of change and the spatial mosaics produced are novel and not well researched at this time.  Chinese urban ecologists recognize a pressing need to understand the environmental implications of this long list of transformations.

Shifting Policy Landscape

Coming from the United States, I had the impression that China’s strong central government would make urban policy easy to understand, and would also make rational urban plans the norm.  What I learned however, was the existence of a complex, multi-level and multi-sector process of urban change.  In addition, I learned of a fluid policy landscape.  For example, until late July of this year, urban residents had to be registered.  This excluded many people who wished to migrate from the countryside from full participation in urban life and its amenities.  Children of unregistered residents were not permitted to attend public schools. Furthermore, unregistered rural migrants were often crowded into less-than ideal rental units. 

In July 2014 the central government announcemed that this policy, labeled hukou, would apply differently depending on the size cities.  Although the intent is to more evenly spread urbanization across the spectrum of cities, there may well be an pulse in migration to cities as a result.  The social and ecological consequences will be not only interesting, but very likely potent.

The revision of the hukou policy is situated within a larger trajectory of policy evolution in China.  The previous central government policy prioritized industrial development.  The term “development” is used all over the world and is the stuff of headlines and political slogans.  However, it strikes me that most uses in the public discourse in China and elsewhere are rather vague and loaded.  In the past, given the evidence on the ground (and in the heavy, polluted air!) development in China suggested an industrial pathway, and China’s prowess as a maker for the world has been rightly recognized as a result.  But the term development, again based on my personal observations of the culture of consumption that has saturated the big cities with global brands, automobiles with foreign name plates, familiar fast food restaurants, and multi-story shopping malls, also implies a growing emphasis on the provision and acquisition of luxury goods.  The urbanization policy now driving demographic and spatial change in cities, suburbs, with its implications for villages and rural life, shifts emphasis to domestic consumption as a driver for development.

Of course industrially based economic activities and infrastructure will continue to be built and operated in China.  But the new emphasis on urbanization intertwines with a new national policy on the environment.  How these two strands will be reconciled and whether there are the desired environmental – and human well being – outcomes, remains to be seen. 

Chinese urban ecologists are concerned to be part of the dialogue, and many ecological leaders are well placed to help urban planners and municipal authorities to improve the ecological processes and services within their jurisdictions.  I did, however, see evidence of some shortfalls in linking ecological and urbanization processes.

Shortcomings in Contemporary Urbanization

One problem is the sheer speed of urban development.  An interesting and salubrious institution in many large Chinese cities is the city planning museum or planning exhibition hall.  I visited three of these: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai.  In some cases, a glance at the current iteration of the city regional plan was jarring in its dissonance with the facts on the ground.  Much of the greenspace promised by the current plan for Beijing had already disappeared under roads and buildings.  An aspect of the plan that was clearly successful was the protection of the mountain districts in the extensive megacity administrative boundaries of Beijing. These lands were well preserved under the rubric of protecting the air and watersheds on which the city depends, although as a plant ecologist I was interested to know how much impact the transplantation of large, mature trees from the forests into new city and urban developments affected the source stands. 

Tianjin’s urban plan seemed to have clearer bioecological content, and establishing boundaries to protect sensitive forests, lakes, seacoast, and rivers was a part of the plan.  Lands were set aside for parks for urban residents as well, and restoration of wetlands formerly devoted to agriculture in the city boundaries was called for.  The ecological rationale for such conservation and restoration was well laid out in Tianjin’s exhibition hall.

Another issue is the predominance of an economically driven real estate industry, a social institution not unknown in the capitalist west, of course.  My naïve view of the communitarian nature of the Chinese state did not prepare me for the news about the power and efficiency of the private real estate juggernaut in China.

The final shortcoming was the nature of many eco-cities.  As an ecologist and an urbanist who thinks that sustainability is a reasonable strategy for visualizing multi-dimensional improvements in urban social-ecological systems, I had high hopes for the eco-city idea.  However, eco-city developments seem to emphasize a rather narrow suite of strategies, such as engineering efficiencies, multimodal transportation and density, improved onsite stormwater management structures, supplementation of energy sources with renewables, such as wind.  They also have generous street tree plantings and green courtyards in the high-rise residential blocks.  However, the eco-city developments, which were conspicuous in the impressive city models in the planning exhibitions, and evident on the ground in many places, had significant lapses in my view.  I highlight several below.

The rich diversity of commercial opportunities scattered throughout the older urban neighborhoods and even in larger villages, were relegated to centralized shopping malls in the eco-cities.  Three was little to invite residents to interact on the street, and although the individual residential clusters apparently provide recreational amenities behinds their gates, the life on the street seemed depauperate.  This seems to violate one of the tenets of functional urbanism, and was a great disappointment to see so often.  Altogether, the utility of the sustainability concept, which calls for the joint attention to ecological integrity, social functionality and equity, and economic vitality, seems to be poorly realized in much of the urban growth that I saw in China.

Visualizing Urbanization: Opportunities for Enhancement

China also offers insights into the visualization of urban change, a problem that is widely shared.  The process of land conversion and of remaking existing cities is so striking that it is frequently and compellingly represented by a few contrasting colors on GIS maps.  Derived from aerial imagery, such maps represent core urban zones in red, agricultural areas in yellow, and forest and grassland in shades of green.  Because the shifts over five or ten years are so great, such color contrasts over time tell a powerful story.  

Change of land covers in Beijing from 1984 through 2010. Red is
developed urban land.  Copyright
Prof. Weiqi Zhou.  Do not duplicate without permission. 

  

But such coarse classification of urban lands – red blob mapping -- neglects much of the subtlety of urban form.  This is due to both the frequent use of coarse spatial resolutions on the order of 10s of meters, as well as to the fact that these classifications are blind to the rich array of ways in which people actually use different patches.  And here I do not mean use in the sense of simple zones like commercial, industrial, or transportation areas.  Nor does even recognizing the height of buildings reveal key social and ecological relationships that different spatially recognized patches might possess.  There is a great opportunity in China to break down the land covers within urban and urbanizing areas into more specific categories, while recognizing the three dimensional structures of patches.  This approach is one that was pioneered in Baltimore, and I look forward to exploring it with Prof. Weiqi Zhou and other colleagues in China.  The detailed spatial heterogeneity of city regions is a key dimension along which ecological and social understanding have been demonstrated to advance. 

This sort of theoretical perspective on cities also matches very well with the concerns and practices of urban designers, including architects, landscape architects, planners, as well as sociologists concerned with the patchiness of human institutions and social arrangements.  Once more subtle land cover maps are available for Chinese urban regions, the opportunity will arise to understand the social structures, norms and policies, governance arrangements, and of course, the bioecological patterns and processes that exist in those heterogeneous structural mosaics.  The power of fine scale, highly conceptually resolved land classifications in Chinese cities and their rampantly changing urban regions has hardly been tapped.

The Reach of Urbanization

The impact of urbanization in China – or anywhere for that matter -- is not something that is confined to cities and their expanding fringes.  Rather, the growth of cities in China touches even distant villages and rural areas.  Indeed, the national urbanization policies mentioned earlier in this essay guarantee that the link between urban and rural changes will be strong. 

One thing that I explored with Prof Weiqi Zhou and members of his laboratory, was how the continuum of urbanity can be used to advance the understanding of the regional nature of China’s urbanization. 

The continuum of urbanity identifies four dimensions along which the structures and processes of urban change play out: Livelihood, lifestyle, spatial connections including local, regional, and global, and the social and biophysical nature of specific places.  The continuum of urbanity is a conceptual ordering of the shift between urban and rural influences and processes (Boone et al. 2014).  It is not necessarily a literal transect on the ground, but rather the idea applies to various scales and can be used to understand the effects of urbanization at local, regional, and global spatial scales.

The four components of the continuum of urbanity examine 1) how people support themselves and whether and how they participate in formal and informal economies, 2) the nature and expression of their social identities and the implications of social identity for consumption and symbolic decisions, 3) the spatial scope of influences and material connections, including long-distance linkages or tele-connections, and finally 4) the interaction of the other three dimensions with the biological, physical, cultural, and social environments of specific places.  Such specificity of place can apply to very local or to broader areas.  In describing the interaction with place, it is important that sometimes features of the bio-geo-cultural environment act as constraints on the other three dimensions of the continuum of urbanity, and sometimes the environment is in fact changed by the processes represented by the other dimensions.

Urban district rising on recently converted agricultural land
between Beijing and Tianjin.

It is clear that the continuum of urbanity plays out in China in many ways.  The connections between cities and villages are diverse and impactful.  Some villages are swallowed up into expanding cities, with consequent changes in livelihood and lifestyle.  Some villages continue to exist, but become sites of industrial production as factories excluded from polluted cities relocate to rural areas, while some are converted to tourist economies, for example.  In other cases, villages are bought out and the land converted to high-rise, gated apartment blocks with the associated transportation infrastructure.  

And the continuum of urbanity does not stop at China’s borders.  As the official policies to generate a more urban, domestic consumer-based society move forward, a rising middle class demands more meat, for example, which alters land use and livelihoods as far away as Australia and the Americas.  Pig farming, migration of fruit bats to cities, and shifts in bat-borne disease risk are outcomes of the continuum of urbanity that spans from China to Australia. 

The continuum of urbanity represents a useful way to organize research on the extensive effects of urban development in China.  It can focus on fine scale heterogeneity within cities, as called for above, or it can expose the continental and global effects of urbanization.  The mutual relationships of urban regions linked in a global system are eliciting greater attention in the world of economics, and ecology will change at both ends of any urban teleconnections.

An Urban Ecological Future

The changes in China’s urban realm, and its megaregional, continental, and global reach are vast research frontiers.  To summarize what I learned in China:

1. There is great need for describing, modeling, and working with spatial heterogeneity at refined conceptual resolutions and at various spatial grains.

2. Social phenomena and dynamics need to be better connected with ecological and physical data and representations of urban change.

3. The connections between both former and persistent-but-altered rural zones and villages with cities are an open research task.

4. Addressing the shortcomings of some “eco-city” approaches, and applying sustainability as a linked set of social, environmental, and economic goals are important challenges.

The richness, speed, and nature of Chinese urbanization are a useful intellectual foil to the specific history and trajectory of urban change in Baltimore.  China defines at least one extreme of the conceptual space that all urban social-ecological research and application occupy.  Opportunities for comparison and for collaboration are great.

Acknowledgments.

My trip to China was supported by an International Visiting

Professorship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  My hosts were Prof. Weiqi Zhou and Prof. Zhiyun Ouyang of the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology of the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences.  The graduate students and faculty in Prof. Zhou’s lab were indispensable guides and warm friends, and I am indebted to them all for many kindnesses, including compensating for my attempts to apply New York rules for jaywalking in an inappropriate cultural context.  I know a lot more about urbanism and urban ecology now than I did when I landed in Beijing.  They also taught me how to make dumplings.

Bibliography

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Boone, C. G., C. L. Redman, H. Blanco, D. Haase, J. Koch, S. Lwasa, H. Nagendra, S. Pauleit, S. T. A. Pickett, K. C. Seto, and M. Yokohari. 2014. Reconceptualizing land for sustainable urbanity. Pages 313-330 in K. C. Seto and A. Reenberg, editors. Rethinking urban land use in a global era. MIT Press, Cambridge.

Fang C. 2011. New structure and new trend of formation and development of urban agglomeration in China, Scientia Geographica Sinica, 31, 1025-1034 (In Chinese with abstract in English).

Hall, P. 2009. Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The City Region of the Mid-21st Century. Regional Studies 43:803-817.

Plowright, R. K., H. E. Field, C. Smith, A. Divljan, C. Palmer, G. Tabor, P. Daszak, and J. E. Foley. 2008. Reproduction and nutritional stress are risk factors for Hendra virus infection in little red flying foxes (Pteropus scapulatus). Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 275:861-869.

Plowright, R. K., P. Foley, H. E. Field, A. P. Dobson, J. E. Foley, P. Eby, and P. Daszak. 2011. Urban habituation, ecological connectivity and epidemic dampening: the emergence of Hendra virus from flying foxes (Pteropus spp.). Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 278:3703-3712.

BES Book of the Year, 2014-2015: Gottdiener and Hutchinson, The New Urban Sociology

The previous Book of the Year focused on bio-ecological theory.  Because BES is a social-ecological research and education endeavor, the Project Management Committee agreed that this year our book should focus on social theory.  An ideal book to help all of us in the project who are not social scientsts is Mark Gottdiener and Ray Hutchinson's book, The New Urban Sociology, 4^th Edition, published in 2010.  Some of us have profited by reading earlier editions of this book, which combines social processes and social heterogeneity thinking.  Hence, it is an excellent social mirror for our originally biological and geophysical spatial approach summarized by patch dynamics and the nested watershed concept.  They label their approach, “socio-spatial,” but those of you in the social sciences should not jump to the conclusion that this book is a resurrection of the discredited aspects of the Chicago School, or that it is an exercise in environmental determinism. 

Because BES is a social-ecological research and education project, the Project Management Committee agreed that this year should focus on social theory.

The book is written as a text book and therefore will be an accessible (but not condescending) introduction for biophysical scientists and educators in BES.  Hopefully, it will also provide fodder for our social science members to weigh in with their own insights and experience on the concepts, cases, and controversies the book discusses. 

The book comprises 14 Chapters that address the foundational theories in urban sociology and the contemporary issues and controversies about the topic.  The chapter titles are as follows:

1. The New Urban Sociology.  Including topics such as urban regions, megacities, and articulation of the socio-spatial approach.

2. The Origins of Urban Life.  The long history of urbanization through capitalist industrialization.

3. The Rise of Urban Sociology.  Here are the field’s founding giants, whose  theories continue to echo in current controversies and applications: Simmel, Wirth, the Chicago School and the rise of human ecology.

4. Contemporary Urban Sociology.  Theories and applications of political ecology, class conflict, capital accumulation, real estate, and urban culture.

5. Urbanization in the United States.  Our national urban history, through the rise of the post-war metropolis.

6. Suburbanization, Globalization, and the Emergence of the Urban Region.  This chapter includes deindustrialization, uneven development, suburbs and beyond, multi-nucleated regions.

7. People and Lifestyles in the Metropolis: Urban and Suburban Culture.  Class differentiation and space, gender, revitalization, and migration are topics.

8. Minority Settlement Patterns, Neighborhoods, and Communities.  Neighborhood dynamics, new forms of community, and interaction without proximity.

9. Metropolitan Problems: Racism, Poverty, Crime, Housing, and Fiscal Crisis.  The socio-spatial approach to social problems, income inequality, affordable housing, and service problems are additional topics beyond those in the subtitle of the chapter.

10. Urbanization in the Developed Nations.  This chapter compares and contrasts urban processes in Western and Eastern Europe and Japan vis a vis the US.

11. Globalization and Urbanization in the Developing World.  Changing perspectives on urbanization, the demographic transition, primate cities, shantytowns, and informal economies are discussed here.

12. Metropolitan Planning and Environmental Issues.  Sprawl, the sociology of land use planning, trends in planning are covered.

13. Metropolitan Social Policy.  Topics include the “tragedy of the commons,” uneven development, privitism, and social justice.

14. The Future of Urban Sociology.  Understanding the new urban world features here.

These topics are all helpful in understanding the social side of the Baltimore equation, as well as for understanding the national and international context in which Baltimore fits.  The changing nature of the global network of urban areas is a crucial ingredient in this understanding.

Each chapter ends with a list of key concepts, important names, and discussion questions.

The book is published in paperback by Westview Press.  The authors chose this publisher to be able to produce a book that was more affordable than the average university textbook.  You can order it from your local bookstore, or your favorite online source.  Used ones go for the mid 20 USD, and new for a little less than 50 USD.  It is also available as an e-book from some sources.  Those of you at colleges and universities might request that your library obtain a copy and put it on reserve.  The OCLC website – worldcat.org – can tell you whether local libraries have the book.

We will be planning a series of webinars to discuss various chapters or topics in the book.  If you want to be alerted to these, contact the BES Project Facilitator, Holly Beyar at beyarh at caryinstitute dot org.