Talk:Urban ecology/Archive 1

Archive 1

Comment

Presently, 58% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas; by 2030 it is estimated that 60% of the global population will live in a metropolitan setting. Interactions between non-living factors, such as sunlight or water, and biological factors, such as plants and microbes, take place in all environments, including cities. By concentrating humans and the resources they consume, metropolitan areas alter soil drainage, water flow, and light availability. Think of how architecture, such as sidewalks and rooftops, impacts the way rainwater is received and transported. Or the way garbage dumps and sewage plants centralize waste products.

Understanding how urban ecosystems function is integral to mitigating their negative effects on ecosystem services, assessing their impact on neighboring environments, and considering them in decision-making dialogue. Engaging urban dwellers is critical; their activities directly impact they way urban ecosystems function and they have a vested interest in maintaining the environmental integrity of the area they live in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.164.96.86 (talk) 06:15, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

an under appreciated field that the mainstream GREEN coalition is as whole-heartedly ignoring as the prior coal, oil and gas or tobacco industry ignored their scientific foreshadowing. Specifically solar and wind industry directly tap into and interact with the current weather patterns. Future solar and wind energy systems may remove large amounts of energy from the planetary weather system in very concentrated areas. Probably inducing more severe weather.

Worse no one is talking about what happens to generation capacity during severe weather. Wind generators do not like lightning, hail, ice storms, heavy snow, or very high thunderstorm winds let alone tornadoes. Currently extreme temperatures hot or cold can also effect their mechanics. Make no mistake wind generators will always be a densely concentrated target that may perhaps be seldom hit but can be totally wiped out by a single tornado. Once true metropolitan arrays (not supplements) are constructed a single tornado will be able to do Billions of USD damage and potentially cause brownouts and blackouts weeks or months long. Guess what solar arrays are also physically damaged by the same types of weather and are further temporarily incapacitated by clouds, rain and snow cover. Even Green fuel plants are weather vulnerable adding in drought as a factor.

Due to inefficiencies introduced by natural (seasonal, cloud, etc), technological limitation and normal maintain economies (probably an average of 40% array failure over lifetime before replacement), each square meter of residential or business constructed will likely require 4-5 times that area in solar arrays or 20-50 times the area in wind generators (after placement issues). Even over optimistic GREEN engineers who assume per electrical energy usage per person drops to what developing countries use (because that is "fair" and obviously sufficient to sustain life) are talking of covering nearly a million square kilometers of land area to supply the US. Thus solar arrays will certainly have vast effects on the watershed and create an new and vast shadow ecology underneath the arrays themselves -- a place where green plants do not grow. OK some GREEN enthusiasts assume that the solar arrays are distributed to each house and that people limit themselves to what their solar roof can yield. But I doubt that works well for small space efficient apartments or multistory structures of any type.

Yes for all their faults the current fossil fuel sources are comparatively highly weather resistant both in terms of delivery and damage to generation capacity. True a tornado can strip a nuclear plant of distribution lines but even a direct hit leaves generation capacity pretty much intact. And normally distribution lines can be rebuild in a few days to a couple of weeks in the case of the once every few year hurricanes or snowstorms.

69.23.124.142 (talk) 06:29, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand the term "urban ecology", although I admit that the article as it currently stands doesn't do a particularly good job of enlightening anyone. Tragically, this is only one article of many on the 'to do' list. AngoraFish 木 07:04, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

I have to agree with the above comment: this article is not at all what Urban Ecology is. Urban Ecology is a theory which straddles urban geography and urban planning, and refers to the evolution and growth of cities and how populations shape their development. A famous sociological theorist, Ernest Burgess developed the building blocks for the urban ecological model in his article "The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project" in 1925. He did so as part of a project while in the sociology department at the University of Chicago, and he is credited for jump-starting the "Chicago School" of urban geography from that aforementioned article. His pupils and contemporaries at University of Chicago carried on his tradition for many years, and it is the basis for some of the most notorious urban geographic scholarly literature that has ever been published. Therefore, this article titled "Urban Ecology" should be named something else, for it is a disingenuous heading and ignores the power that Urban Ecology has espoused in urban planning tradition. Also, this article doesn't add any new knowledge, and it should be merged with another that refers to urban ecosystems or ecology in general. Urban ecology as a theoretic model for explaining city growth should replace what is already here. -Sidney T. Kenyon, Master in Urban Planning and Policy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.222.118.93 (talk) 13:12, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

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