Urban Wildlife

The July 2022 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC includes an article titled "Why Cities Are Going Wild." It's about wild animals who've adjusted to living in urban areas, often by feeding on the stuff human residents discard. For instance, numerous black bears hang around in Asheville, NC, with a human population of about 95,000. I was surprised to read that coyotes have established themselves in most major cities and in all states except Hawaii. Chicago, for instance, hosts about 4,000 coyotes. Many omnivorous mammals are "changing their behaviors as they learn urban survival skills." Bears learn when it's trash pickup day. Coyotes look before crossing the street. Nobody who lives in a neighborhood with raccoons would be surprised at their talent for breaking into closed containers. Skunks also display cleverness in adapting to urban environments.

Studies have found that not only do city-dwelling wild animals behave differently from their rural and wilderness cousins, such as becoming more nocturnal to avoid people, often they also prosper in terms of gaining weight and producing more offspring. The latter phenomenon doesn't always grant long-term advantages, though; in some populations of urban bears, fewer cubs survive to maturity than in the wild.

Animals can hardly be blamed for "invading" our spaces. In many areas they were there first, and our cities and suburbs have spread to encroach on their territories. Here's an article focusing particularly on big felines in two "megacities," Los Angeles and Mumbai, where mountain lions and leopards (respectively) have learned to coexist with people:

Big Cats, Big Cities

Authorities in those cities have experimented with ways to share space with the big cats, such as building bridges for them to overcome the problem of habitat fragmentation. (I can't help visualizing a leopard reading a "Leopard Crossing" sign at the end of a bridge, even though that's obviously not how the system works.) Public education reduces human-animal clashes and promotes a live-and-let-live policy. "Both cities have learned that trying to capture, kill or relocate the cats isn’t the answer." Moving the creatures away from the urban centers doesn't help prevent conflicts, because they or others like them just move back in. One California wildlife expert points out, “It’s better to have a stable population, than one where hierarchies and territories are disrupted.”

For me, the most intriguing information in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article is that raccoons seem to be evolving greater intelligence as they're challenged by increasingly complex human efforts to deter them. People's attempts to thwart trespassing raccoons have led to an "innovation arms race." If we're "actually creating smarter animals" by giving them "increasingly difficult problems to solve," could raccoons be poised to take over the "intelligence" niche if we ever go extinct? Or maybe to share that role with us in some future post-apocalyptic reversion to a preindustrial world? After all, they already have a head start with hand-like paws. In the novel WICKED and its sequels, sapient animals live alongside the human residents of Oz (although as second-class citizens). Imagine a sapient raccoon delegation calling on a city or state government to demand equal rights.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Urban Flight, Epidemics, and Demographic Change

In recent weeks, many people who can afford to do so have fled the congestion of cities for suburban, rural, or resort areas. Some such prized destinations have taken aggressive action to exclude non-residents:

Second Homes

It's being speculated that the flight from cities may lead to a permanent shift from urban to suburban living, for those who have the luxury of choice. The work-at-home trend may continue and accelerate after the present crisis ends. One commentator (see "Great American Migration" below) says, “You’ll still have urban centers. But they’ll be less intense and more dispersed. You’ll no longer have to choose between unaffordable, overcrowded cities and incredibly boring countryside. There will be a more attractive middle ground.”

Great American Migration

Other observers point out that the 1918 flu pandemic didn't cause the downfall of cities, and predictions that people would retreat from large urban centers after 9-11 didn't materialize. In fact, most cities have continued to gain population regardless of these and similar crises. Cities may have to adapt, but they aren't likely to empty:

Will the Pandemic Empty the Cities?

During the plagues of the past, people frightened of disease have often tried to escape the lethal overcrowding of cities. Boccaccio's 14th-century DECAMERON introduces a group of young, wealthy gentlemen and ladies who flee from the Black Death to a villa outside Florence. In antebellum New Orleans, upper-class families annually retreated from the city to country homes during "fever season." Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" portrays the gruesome fate of a prince who barricades himself and his cronies in his palace for a nonstop orgy while taking refuge from the titular epidemic.

As Arno Karlen explains in MAN AND MICROBES, his book on the evolution of infectious diseases from prehistory to the era of AIDS and Ebola, the phenomenon of epidemics began with the invention of agriculture and cities. Agriculture allowed the same land to support a much higher population than in hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies, but with negative trade-offs. People eating a monotonous diet of mostly grain tend to be less healthy than hunter-gatherers (as archaeology confirms). The resultant overall decline in health impairs the immune system. Moreover, by living in close quarters with domestic animals, they fall victim to animal diseases that mutate to prey on human hosts. With the growth of cities, for the first time in human history enough people lived together in a congested environment for epidemic diseases to flourish. Before modern sanitation and medicine, cities were deathtraps compared to the countryside (for the poor and working class at least).

We think of our contemporary world as being dominated by urbanization. Yet rural, agricultural communities still flourish, too. Herding and hunter-gatherer societies still exist, even if pushed to the margins by industrialization. Some people enjoy cutting-edge, high-tech conveniences and comforts, including smart houses, while others don't yet have indoor plumbing. This subject reminds me of a weakness in much SF that depicts contact with extrasolar planets. Too often, the alien world seems to have only one level of cultural and technological development that's uniform all over the planet, as well as one religion, a universal language, and, sometimes, a single ecology (the ice world, the desert world, the jungle world, etc.). Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover offers an example of doing it right; we see a variety of languages, climates, landscapes, and cultural customs on Darkover. Think of what different impressions of Earth extraterrestrial explorers would get if they landed in New York, Tokyo, Yellowstone Park, central Africa, the Australian outback, or northern Alaska and didn't bother to look any farther than their initial touchdown point.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt