Wild Society

Timothy Beatley's Biophilic Cities Project is proof that one word can start a global conversation.

Just six months ago, Beatley, a professor of sustainable communities at the University of Virginia, helped to found a network of cities united through biophilia.

Today, the Project's partner cities stretch from Portland to Singapore, Oslo to Wellington, New Zealand -- each pledging to cultivate an urban nature-loving ethos among their populace.

We caught up with Beatley on Tuesday, the day after his keynote address at Portland’s  12th Annual Urban Ecology and Conservation  Symposium, to learn more about what makes biophilia a belief, a feeling, and just maybe, the start of a new international language.

The Intertwine Alliance: What is biophilia?

Tim Beatley: Biophilia is the belief that we have this hard-wired need for nature in our life. When we experience nature we have a whole host of positive reactions that to me demonstrate the premise of biophilia. Stephen Kellert talks about it like a muscle that we need to exercise, reinforce in our daily activities.

The biophilic city is the next step: a city that puts connection to nature at the center of its planning and policy.

I've been working on this one way or another for over 30 years, in habitat conservation, resilient cities, etc. But the idea of biophilia is relatively new. I was here in Portland in January 2012 to give a talk, and had a conversation with Linda Dobson and Mike Houck; that was the beginning of the Biophilic Cities Project.

How did you arrive at the term “biophilia”?

TB: When I first started using the term, it grew out of biophilic design. But I'm more of a policy planner and writer. My engineering friends use the term “biophilic” to refer to green elements added to the design of a building. So I'm extending it to the larger city, and in turn trying to reach the larger professional community.

Why “biophilia” and not “green infrastructure”?

TB: A lot of people like the term “green infrastructure,” maybe because it puts investments in nature on par with transportation, gray infrastructure, etc. But to me it's not enough. "Biophilia" emphasizes the innate emotional need we have for nature. Whereas “green infrastructure” is unfeeling, almost technocratic. Biophilia's affect is one of recognition of a deep biological need.

When I launched my book back in 2011, I got funny reactions to the term. People thought biophilia sounded like a disease. Now there's a feeling of “aha.”

Who are you trying to reach with this concept?

TB: So there's a professional audience, a lay audience – individuals out there in the citizenry who are interested in leading a healthier life – and a leadership community, mayors and planners, who can be reached by the research. Planners are increasingly recognizing the value of the terminology.

What is the role of coalitions like The Intertwine Alliance in promoting biophilia?

TB: I talked about Houston Wilderness, Chicago Wilderness. There are a lot of examples here and across the world where groups come together with a common view. When you've got fifty, one hundred, two hundred groups behind a biophilic agenda, that's tremendous power.

There's a vision, and then there are a whole variety of possible implementations. I think the vision, establishing the premise, is almost more important than the specific implementation.

At the UERC Symposium, you talked about establishing a “Nature Pyramid” with recommended daily doses of nature. How do get your daily dose?

TB: Well, so I live in a little city in Virginia called Charlottesville. But for a little city we've done bold things. We have a major stream restoration project called Meadow Creek that is coordinated by the city and the Nature Conservancy. The project is about a mile-and-a-half long and it's just spectacular. And, it also goes back to your question of the power of coalitions.

In terms of connection with nature, this is the type of investment -- in a restoration project -- where the idea of a biophilic city comes in.  You've got to create a city in which nature is embedded. Meadow Creek is a two-minute walk from my front door, and we go just about everyday.

In the debut edition of Our Big Backyard, you can find out why Newell Creek Canyon might be the region’s next great natural area, get the scoop on geocaching and learn how Verde is empowering the Cully neighborhood with help from Metro grants. Enter a nature photo contest or snag a field guide to Smith and Bybee Wetlands. In short, Our Big Backyard gives you the inside scoop on Metro parks, trails and natural areas and inspires you to get outside.

But there’s one important story you won’t find: the tale of how – and why – Metro transformed its quarterly magazine for nature lovers.

We knew it was time to rethink our approach. Much has changed since 1998, when Metro launched a newsletter-style publication called GreenScene to publicize nature classes for the regional government and our partners. So, a year ago, we set out to examine Metro’s role in the region and the role of a magazine in our increasingly digital world.

A small and shrinking number of people read print publications because they can’t get information anywhere else. As a public agency, Metro needs to serve that group. But we also serve a much larger group of people who choose to read magazines, once in a while, because they want the experience of devouring lively, jump-off-the-page stories.

Meanwhile, The Intertwine Alliance blossomed into a vibrant regional network for governments, businesses, nonprofits and community groups that care about the outdoors. Metro’s role as a regional park provider expanded dramatically, fueled by two bond measures and a levy. Today, we’re responsible for engaging the region in the story of 17,000 acres of parks, natural areas and habitat preserves. Voters deserve to know how their money is being spent, and how they can see their investments firsthand – by hiking at Cooper Mountain Nature Park, biking along the Columbia Slough, helping restore Newell Creek Canyon and much more. And they deserve to understand how nature fits into Metro’s broader mission of making a great place.

As we reshaped Metro’s publication, we asked our audience for help. They responded, loud and clear: Survey participants most valued easy-to-find information, with quality storytelling and photography a close second. They clamored for field guides that allow them to explore on their own time. Trails, restoration, walking, biking, natural gardening and other sustainable living tools also ranked high.

Our Big Backyard is designed to give readers what they want. It got bigger. It got striking photography, rich storytelling and bold design. Event listings got a makeover, becoming more visual and fun. And a regular guest page from The Intertwine will serve as a portal into the region’s incredible outdoors.

With proper equipment, winching a few black walnut logs out of a Southeast Portland backyard should take 30 minutes. It took my buddy Daniel and I, new to urban timber harvesting, upwards of 11 hours. Or then there was the time a hidden chunk of metal buried in three deodar cedar logs -- removed from a landscape project near Grant High School -- chewed up another friend’s sawmill blades.

Urban lumber isn’t always easy. So why have my friends and I committed to saving these logs from the fireplace?

Every year in the U.S., an estimated 4 billion board feet of urban trees are cut up for firewood, mulched, or taken to the dump.  Yes, urban trees often have defects: large knots and metal embedded in the wood, for example. But at the end of the day, a lot of existing urban trees DO produce high quality saw logs. To me and my partners at Fiddlehead LLC, it seems immoral to value our urban trees while they’re living but then discard the deadwood so casually.

Across the globe, from Portland to Rio de Janeiro, lumber-producing trees can grow well in urban and semi rural areas.  Through my work, I've seen many valuable older trees destroyed, and new trees improperly pruned and then relegated to the same fate. That's how I became an advocate for holistic urban lumber planning (click here for my podcast) -- so that every tree, when it comes down, plays a new role as a valuable building material, rather than firewood and mulch. 

Planning for urban lumber isn’t simply an extension of current practices: it means planting more trees closer together, and removing the lower branches to prevent knots. And, of course, not sticking metal into the trees would be helpful as well.

In 50 years -- with smart policies in place and a shift in our culture -- I believe we could produce a decent percentage of lumber we use across the world right here, in sustainably managed forests where we live.

New policies and operations emerging from the global greenspaces movement will strongly influence how trees are utilized in the future.  It’s time embrace a holistic and integrated approach to urban lumber. My view is that The Intertwine Alliance and its 100+ partners could play a role in sparking this conversation -- to reforest land and significantly shrink the carbon footprint of our built environment.

This year, Daniel and I have leased land in Charbonneau and are starting to collect logs to mill. Daniel is building a slabbing mill so we can make large diameter tables from the 4' and 5' diameter logs we’ve collected from sites around Northeast Portland.  In the last few weeks I have begun gluing up deodar cedar and black walnut for tables and benches -- furniture made from beautiful, valuable wood with a very personal story.  We need more of these kinds of connections in the world.

Few of us, myself included, have the money to buy everything we want. My choices are usually to save for later, work harder, earn more, want less or forget the object of my desire.

When it comes to park agencies in The Intertwine, we already know that most don’t have the money to buy the land that they want to connect our parks, trails and natural lands, and help establish ideal green infrastructure systems.

So should these agencies simply want less? Forget the object of their desire? Personally, I’d rather see us, the partners of The Intertwine Alliance, working harder to keep our parks agencies hard at work.

How? Well, speaking of things we probably all know, let’s agree that grant funding for parks is both limited and competitive. In my six years as a park planner in Vancouver and Clark County, I’ve gained direct experience cobbling together funding sources for our natural areas and new parks and trails. My typical patchwork of funding options could be some combination of the city/county general fund (property taxes), park impact fees, real estate excise taxes, conservation futures funds, partnering agencies, private donors and community, state and federal grant programs.

Which brings me to a third thing we might intuit: every grant program can prove critical to leveraging a public land purchase, trail connection, or park project.

One of most important funding sources we Intertwiners can access -- the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) -- needs our help. The LWCF, created in 1965 and funded (albeit never fully) through federal royalties from offshore oil and gas development, will be up for reauthorization in 2015.

Over its 50-year history, LWCF -- created to protect America’s natural resources and outdoor recreation assets -- has supported many land acquisition and development projects on my side of the Columbia River. Clark County, Vancouver, Ridgefield, Camas, Battle Ground and Washougal have all received LWCF funding support, capturing over $3 million since 1976.

As a coalition, The Intertwine Alliance can provide visible support as LWCF is evaluated, pushing not only for the fund’s reauthorization, but also for improvements that would give the parks agencies of The Intertwine an extra boost.

Recommended LWCF improvements from the Society of Outdoor Recreation Professionals (SORP), of which I’m a member, would:

• See LWCF fully and permanently funded at $900M annually;
• Specify a percentage of monies to be directed to urban populations;
• Allow monies to be used for restoring and repurposing existing facilities and areas; and
• Add language that makes allocation of monies feasible for larger regional landscapes like the Columbia River watershed (and The Intertwine!)

If we want to keep the parks agencies of The Intertwine hard at work, we can start by looking at the tools we already have in our coalition toolbox: the power to raise the volume on a critical conversation. Let’s ensure that LWCF funding gets fully authorized -- and that urban regions like The Intertwine get the attention we deserve. Visit the SORP website for more info on the need to adapt and reauthorize LWCF.

“Yeah, but who is going to keep this going when you’re dead?”

Now there’s a question you don’t hear every day. But there it was, recently directed at me from a group member during a recent tour of West Linn’s White Oak Savanna -- a natural site my husband and I have been working to restore since 2005.

Blunt but interesting, I thought. Because when think about it, this question is something that all of us in the Intertwine (not just those of us with gray hair), should probably ask ourselves more often.

After all, legacy hits at the core of why we conservationists do what we do. Whether we get paid for our work, or volunteer our time, our shared motive is to leave something worth protecting over centuries. While fundraising, politics, and community organizing are certainly important, the ultimate key to our success (or failure)  is whether we can spark a fire in the bellies of our children to serve as stewards of the land after we’re gone.

Especially if the land you’re protecting offers them something in danger of vanishing forever. For over 10 years, many volunteers have helped our small nonprofit, Neighbors for a Livable West Linn, begin to restore the upper 14 of the 20 acres of a rare and majestic spot called the White Oak Savanna.

Today, only two percent remains of the 600,000 acres of White Oak habitat that once stretched up and down the Willamette Valley. Of those 12,000 acres, just one percent is publicly owned -- like our little patch of Savanna. Conserving this beautiful Savanna has to date entailed over 6,800 hours of restoration work, dozens of fundraisers, and plenty of tours -- like the one I mentioned above -- to get the community excited.

But yes, we’ve also taken care to weave kids into our effort. They have worked with us on school plantings, Scout and NW Youth Corps projects, PSU work parties, SOLVE events. They’ve had first sightings with us of coyotes and blue camas. They’ve hopped on tree swings, and come to love this land with us. They are quick studies.

And lately, they show us how it’s done. Young students at a local after-school Camp Fire program at Trillium Creek Primary are now busy doing their own fundraisers for the protection of the lower six acres of our White Oak Savanna. They call themselves the White Oak Savanna Committee.

As a social worker and teacher for more than 35 years, what gives me hope at the end of the day is the potential of our kids to make things better. In classrooms today, I hear kids who are more liberal in their thinking and more accepting of each other than the students I went to school with dozens of years ago.

So when a young person serving me at the local pizza spot remembers me working with their class two years ago, to plant a thousand blue camas bulbs, I feel reassured that we gray-haired conservationists will be leaving The Intertwine in good hands.

Because as I told the site visitor who asked about legacy that day in the Savanna: “It’s the kids who are going to keep things going.”