Wild KingdomThe city of Detroit has a very strange, wild appearance, in some parts like a city of ruins many years older than it actually is, where nature reasserts itself in vegetation that spreads over the city’s crumbling structures. Whole neighborhood blocks cleared of their houses by arson and then bulldozers have reverted to urban prairies.
Throughout Detroit, as half the population fled in the last half-century outward towards the suburbs and later towards more rural areas, the city itself has, ironically, become more rural, with wild animals and lush green plants coexisting with an industrial, modern metropolis. Nature, driven back by progress during the city’s 300 years, has aggressively reasserted itself in recent years, reclaiming land that people have given up on.
Even downtown, abandoned skyscrapers, with windows left open to the elements, become giant pigeon coops, their upper floors covered in inches of pigeon droppings, as generation after generation of pigeons live uninterrupted by humans in the middle of a major downtown. Buildings like the Wurlitzer, the Lafer and the Broderick house hundreds of pigeons between them.
Probably the most visible wildlife in the city are the roving packs of wild dogs in Detroit neighborhoods. Groups of four to seven dogs, each litter progressively wilder and stranger-looking than their predecessors, roam through even well-kept neighborhoods, occasionally making the news when they attack someone, usually children or mail carriers. Feral cats don’t just thrive by stalking mice through fields of wildflower and grass; sometimes take over entire buildings downtown.
Dogs and cats aren’t the only animals roaming the city; true wildlife has made its way back into Detroit after being pushed to the edges of the suburbs years ago. Pheasants have become commonplace in areas like Brush Park and Woodbridge, along the East riverfront, and in grassy parts of Highland Park. Even foxes, opossums, turkeys, roosters and raccoons have been spotted deep inside the city, some animals even roaming downtown where very little street-level brush exists as places to hide. Opossums occasionally are spotted wandering alongside buildings in the Central Business District. In the Detroit Building on Park, I once found raccoon tracks on floors that also contained foot-high vegetation growing in floor mush. Impressions of raccoon paws were along windowsills and the edges of doors.
20 years after meltdown, life returns to ChernobylNobody thought it possible at the time but 20 years after the reactor exploded on 26 April 1986, during an ill-conceived "routine" Soviet experiment, Chernobyl's radiation-soaked "dead zone" is not looking so dead after all. The almost complete absence of human activity in large swaths of the zone during the past two decades has given the area's flora and fauna a chance to first recover and then - against all the odds - to flourish.
Astonishingly, most of the animals appear to have returned to the zone of their own accord. The most recent count by the authorities showed that the zone (including a larger contaminated area in neighbouring Belarus) is home to 66 different species of mammals, including 7,000 wild boar, 600 wolves, 3,000 deer, 1,500 beavers, 1,200 foxes, 15 lynx and several thousand elks. The area was also estimated to be home to 280 species of birds, many of them rare and endangered. Breeding birds include the rare green crane, black stork, white-tailed sea eagle and fish hawk. Wild dogs are also in evidence, though they are prime targets for wolves.
Ibon wrote:
The heroic efforts made today to preserve small islands of biodiversity in all major ecosystems, some large enough to maintain top predators, is key. These life rafts will quickly re colonize the planet post crash. Preserving these island refuges, particularly in biodiversity hot spots like the small national park in central Borneo, which today is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of oil palms, is the key.
The Practician wrote:Ibon wrote:
The heroic efforts made today to preserve small islands of biodiversity in all major ecosystems, some large enough to maintain top predators, is key. These life rafts will quickly re colonize the planet post crash. Preserving these island refuges, particularly in biodiversity hot spots like the small national park in central Borneo, which today is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of oil palms, is the key.
More like re colonize the dinner plate. Hungry people don't just lay down and die as soon as the established food systems cease to function properly, and they certainly don't respect park boundaries.
Sys1 wrote:test
pstarr wrote: Typical republican creationist attitude. You people know nothing about natural capital and human carrying capacity. Learn some Darwin.
You need to understand that you don't live in the internet. It is only a fun place. Really.
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