The year 2010 has been named the International Year of Biodiversity by the UN. However, New York City, one of the world’s largest cities, and one with the name and where-with-all to set a global standard, still lacks a plan for maintaining and ensuring it’s biodiversity. At a time when we are experiencing growing concerns for the diversity of our diets and its effect on our health, when crop diseases offer threats to our food security and can potentially wipe out entire harvests in our industrial mono-crop fields, and where increasingly heavy urbanization world over threatens to crowd out the natural and therefore threatens our long-term sustainability as a civilization, it seems foolish not to plan for the biodiversity of all large urban areas. While NYC began addressing biodiversity concerns in 2001 with the Freshkills Park Project - with a master plan that supported a richly diverse habitats for wildlife, birds and plant communities and used ecological innovation and creative design to attract new native plant communities – no comprehensive master plan has been made for the city concerning overarching or integrated ways of addressing biodiversity in the future. We are at a time when people are listening and looking for a change and it is important that we push them in the right direction.
In 2007 Mayor Bloomberg released PlaNYC, a comprehensive, long-term, sustainability agenda aimed at building a stronger and greener New York City by 2030. The plan highlighted 6 major areas of concern - Land, Water, Transport, Energy, Air and Climate Change - around which the Mayor’s office planned to developed targeted actions to increase the sustainability of NYC across the board, and introduced GreeNYC, a project to reduce the cities carbon emissions. However, nowhere in the current version of PlaNYC was there mention of addressing, maintaining or fostering NYC’s biodiversity. Biodiversity is important for both plant and animal life to support a healthy ecosystem. Maintaining a systems diversity can be especially difficult in large urban areas and it is therefore of great importance that any plan outlining how to increase an areas sustainability discuss maintaining and encouraging it’s biodiversity.
Greater New York currently supports more forests, marshes and meadows than any other city in the United States, however these features are quickly diminishing in the face of development and habitat degradation. New Yorkers need to begin thinking more about the nature around them, to recognize the role it plays in making the city and the lives of its residents so great. They need to highlight the important of it’s presence in the as revised PlaNYC, and the responsibility of the revised agenda to protect this resource. The revision of the agenda, PlaNYC 2.0, is scheduled for release in April 2011. Community conversations have already been held across the boroughs this October and PlaNYC is currently taking comments from the public. One innovative resident, Mariellé Anzelona (a botanist and the founder of Drosera (http://www.drosera-x.com/) has also created a website where she is encouraging New Yorkers to take the opportunity to express the reasons the city’s biodiversity is important to them by contributing thoughts, photographs, and videos to her blog, which will eventually be sent to the Mayor’s office. Click here to contribute your own ideas.
You can read about the current plan and it’s progress here
You can investigate more about New York City’s biodiversity at the New York Public Libraries Urban Neighbors an online exhibition looking at the historical abundance of wildlife in NYC.
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