 Welcome to Rouser College's Horace M. Albright Lecture in Conservation in collaboration with the College of Environmental Design's Katherine Bauer Worster Memorial Lecture Series. I'm David Ackerly, Dean of Rouser College of Natural Resources. I'm joined by my colleague Dean Renee Chow of the College of Environmental Design, and it is our pleasure to welcome our esteemed guest, Stuart Pickett, to UC Berkeley. Before I welcome Dr. Pickett to the stage, I'd like to share a bit of background on the lectures. The Horace Albright Lecture Series at Rouser College has been going strong for over 50 years. The lectures are a tribute to the achievements of Horace Albright, born in Bishop, California in 1890, a graduate of UC Berkeley in 1912, and second director of the National Park Service and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by Jimmy Carter. We're honored to have the opportunity to use the Horace Albright Endowed Lecture Series for the public good, fostering a dialogue on the critical issues facing our society. The Albright Lecture Series has brought to Berkeley a who's who of the world's most thought-provoking and innovative leaders in conservation and public service, and I will direct you to the website, and you can see previous speakers and previous talks recorded, not from 50 years ago, but from recent years. This year for the first time, we're partnering with the College of Environmental Design to co-host this lecture. The Katherine Bauer Worster Memorial Lecture Series honors Katherine Bauer Worster, who was one of the founders of American public housing policy. As the first female faculty member of the Department of City and Regional Planning, she helped push to combine the departments of architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture to create the CED program. A trailblazer ahead of her time, Katherine's pivotal work titled Modern Housing, is a synthesis of social, economic, political, technological, and architectural insights, which established her as an authority in housing and a leader in New Deal housing policy. The lecture you're about to hear aligns perfectly with the spirit and traditions of these two lecture series, and what we hope are increased opportunities for ongoing collaborations between Rouser College and CED. So Dean Chow will host the post lecture, Q&A, and for those attending virtually, you can add questions in the comments section of YouTube live, and we will bring those in and bring them in for the Q&A afterwards. And as I said, there'll be a full recording available after the talk. So I'd like to turn and introduce our speaker. Dr. Stuart Pickett is an ecologist and distinguished senior scientist at the Kerry Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Milbrook, New York. Stuart was awarded his PhD from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1977. He specializes in urban and landscape ecology and was the founding director of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study Long-Term Ecological Research Project. He employs a social ecological research approach to the structure and dynamics of urban areas and complex regional landscapes. Recent urban ecology research focuses on the equity of green stormwater infrastructure and the ecology of segregation, which as you'll see is the actual title of today's talk, unlike the one you were invited to, which now we all want to hear as well, Stuart, but that. He has worked in diverse systems ranging from primary forests and post-agricultural old fields in the eastern United States, riparian woodlands in South Africa, and the changing peri-urban zone in China. He has produced books on natural disturbance, ecological heterogeneity, humans as components of ecosystems, conservation, bridging ecology and urban design, philosophy of ecology and linking ecology and ethics. Stuart is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America. In 2011, he was elected to serve as president of the Ecological Society of America, notably as its first black president and its first openly gay president. In 2021, he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2022, he was the recipient of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation and the Ecological Society's Eminent Ecologist Award. I want to add a personal note that Stuart and I were trained by the same PhD advisor, the late Fakri Bazaas. And today is not the day to share more about our deeply respected mentor. But what I will say is when I joined Bazaas's lab, and that was some time ago, Stuart was already a legendary figure from the early years of his career, as we did not overlap in graduate school. So, Stuart was PhD student number nine, and I am number 32, from the legacy of that lab. And I've admired Stuart for many, many years, but mostly from afar. Our paths have not crossed frequently, and it has given me deep, deep personal pleasure to both bring him to Berkeley, but also we have spent some really extraordinary time together in the last two days, leading up to today's lecture. And with that, I will turn it over to Stuart Pickett. Thank you, David, for that very kind introduction. Thank you, Renee, for being a part of a bi-umvirate that has brought me here. I'm immensely proud to be, I guess, your first sort of joint, joint invitee between the two colleges. And that's something that I was, when David called me and made the invitation, I thought, how could I say no to helping signify the linkage between urban design or design in general? I will use that to encompass all of the sorts of things that go on in the College of Environmental Design, if I may, and the ecological conservation impetus of the College of Natural Resources. I apologize for not having the Worcester name up there. That's an error that I should not have made. I'm going to give a little, I'm going to start with giving a homage to the ancestors. People have started giving land-accommodation knowledgements, and I'm a little hesitant to do that, because it seems a little bit, just a little too easy, and so I'm not doing that. I'm going to use my own ancestors. And you see, by doing that, I'm going to also use a little bit of my family history to illustrate some of these issues of the ecology of segregation. So, here are, here's the faculty of Simmons College of Kentucky, the first college in Kentucky founded by African-Americans, founded in 1879. And I'm related to two people on that picture, and there they are, William H. Steward, who was born into slavery in 1847 in Brandenburg, Kentucky, and his wife, Mamie Elizabeth Steward. He was interim president of this college for one year before the gentleman in the middle of the front row became permanent president. And Mamie Steward was a music teacher at the college and organized at the church that they attended. My great-grandfather, William H. Steward, was a publisher of the American Baptist, which was the newspaper of the Black Baptist Church in the south. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, I'm saying that here's a bunch of people who gave me permission three generations later to be a scholar and told me it was okay to be a scholar. I didn't know these people, obviously, from their dates of disease, but they're in my head, all right. And let me further, ancestors. This is my father, born in 1903. This family sort of marries late, I guess. And he was among the first black Boy Scout executives in the country. There was an experiment done in the late 30s, and there were three or four. The sources are not clear. And they brought in people to help. They brought in men to help establish troops in black communities. And he was assigned to what was called then the colored division of the Boy Scout Council in Louisville. And he helped establish camps for black Boy Scouts, and that was new stuff. The other, my mother, was a librarian. This is the western branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. Originally, it was called the western colored branch of that library. And she was part of the Great Migration from Georgia. Came up in 1949 and was librarian at this library. This library was staffed by African American librarians. So there's my pointing to the ancestors. They'll come back a little bit later with some cases from Louisville. A few chapters I'm going to divide this in. First, I'm going to talk about heterogeneity in ecology and environmental justice. One of the reasons that I think it's appropriate for me to be your first experimental cross college guy is that design is about heterogeneity. Ecology is about heterogeneity. They are both about space. Very deeply fundamentally. And environmental justice is definitely about space. Heterogeneity is a core of ecology. Here's some principles from Sam Shiner and Mike Willig's book in 2011. Organisms are heterogeneously distributed. Abiotic and biotic interactions drive ecology. Organism variation generates heterogeneity. Distribution and interactions are contingent. Environment is perceived as heterogeneous by organisms. Resources are finite and heterogeneous. Environmental constrains birth and death rates. And organismal properties result from evolution. What do you notice about this list? Heterogeneity is all over it. And contingency is a kind of heterogeneity in time. So this is one of the things that ties us together in design and ecology. Now let's relate this to environmental justice. It is well known. It is widely accepted that degraded environments or hazardous environments are associated with injustice or inequitable exposure and vulnerability to hazard. That's environmental justice since bullied right from the start. And here's the question that I'm going to try to deal with here. Does this also hold? Does the reverse also hold? Does a lack of justice, does inequity, is that associated with environmental detriment? So that's the question. Here's another way to look at that. Environmental justice says there's an error that goes from heterogeneous environments in which some of that heterogeneity is hazardous to the condition of justice or injustice in populations. The ecology of segregation, which is the new thing that I'm trying to promote and there are some people in this room who are in this struggle as well, asks about the return error. So we're thinking about this as a system of interactions. And here are the questions. The questions guiding concerns with environmental justice are, how do spatially differentiated hazards and burdens or lack of access to amenities result in social injustice? That's the top box. The lower box, the return error, ecology of segregation, asks how does spatial segregation by race, class, or other socially determined groupings affect ecological structures, functions, and relationships? So this is a potential feedback loop that repeats through time. Now that looks like circular logic, so you break it down into dynamic heterogeneity, looking at spatial patches in mosaics that may interact and change, and these mosaics can interact through time in series. Here's another way to look at that. Dynamic heterogeneity. If you look at start over on this side, heterogeneity at time sub zero is a driver that is modified by biophysical processes jointly with human perception and interventions that generates an outcome that becomes the next generation of heterogeneity, heterogeneity at time T1, and so on. One of the important things about this diagram is it says that the social and perceptions and interventions, the biophysical processes happen at the same time. They are entangled, they are entwined. It's not a stepwise thing. So this is what I mean when I talk about social ecological processes. These are not social systems and biological systems interacting. They are a system. They are a thing together. Here's an example of that. Emerald ash borer, Fraxanus. It's a little introduced beetle that eats or can kill all ash trees in North America. This is 2006 in Toledo, Ohio. Three years later, this is what the emerald ash borer has done to the ash trees. So I'm going to show this as a case of dynamic heterogeneity. You start out over here with patchy distribution of ash trees, and I say in urban forests, but in forests in general. And people are aware that it's coming, so they take action. In my city of Poughkeepsie, New York, they just basically cut all the ash trees. That's one way to do it. It is possible to save ash trees with Herculean efforts, but not very many people choose to do that because of the expense. So the result of both of those kinds of choices is a patchy mortality of ash trees. So there's a spatial pattern. There are some choices that you can make. You can leave it alone. If it's a forest, if it's a place that you don't want to manage, you can have unassisted succession. You can plant replacement species, or you can install alternative covers. That then leads to new patterns of shade and surface temperature, and then you see how that can feed back into people's perceptions and what they choose to do, or how they are threatened by, say, heat extremes in different environments where ash mortality has been patchy. So put that aside, that's our first sort of foundation. Now what is systemic about? What's this thing that, so when I talk about ecology of segregation, I could have said ecology of systemic racism or institutional racism. And a system in the ecological sense is the series of components, living and non-living components, networked together, interacting. And of course there are outcomes of this. I'm not saying it's in balance or equilibrium or anything, but there are outcomes. Things happen as a result of these networks. If you add social dimensions, if you add consideration of social dimensions to it, because I've already said you can't take them apart, so you're not actually adding them. If you add consideration together with this, you have to consider goals, you have to consider institutions and norms, plus a lot of other things that I don't have time to go into. This is what this looks like in a diagram. The top line, biota interacting with physical environment, is what we've taken in ecology to be the ecosystem since 1935 with Arthur Tansley. Simple, right? There's only one arrow. If you do urban ecology, if you do social ecological things, look at what you have to add. You have to add social structures, which includes things like political politics, greed, economics, design choices, things like that. Then you also look at the constructed environment. Notice I don't say the built environment. I don't want you to think I'm just talking about buildings, because a lot of what we do to construct environments is moving streams around, damning streams, changing the face of the land. That's a much broader case than just building buildings, which is a big enough deal in itself. Notice how many more arrows there are? This is why I'm so tired. Now, there's tools of systemic racism, or tools that support and generate ecology of segregation. Jim Crow, which of course is kind of a general term for what has happened in the United States actually since the middle of the 19th century. Redlining, which we'll talk a little bit more about. Urban renewal is a tool of systemic racism. Highway siting is a tool. Housing policy, where you put public housing. How you zone. We're a single family zoning. Where is multi-family zoning? Why do we call it families anyway? And there's a whole list of things that I could add here, but I won't. Now, a few years ago when I was running the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Rod Barnett brought his studio down from St. Louis, and we had a field trip. And while the students are out doing what design students do, that is videoing everything in sight. I'm kind of joking here a little bit, but you do have to watch out for them because they're not watching out for what they're doing because they're so busy with their phones videoing. Rod asked me this question. Why does this neighborhood look like this? And he knew the answer, but it basically allowed me to detail the tools of systemic racism. That's why this neighborhood looks like this, all right? When I got back home to Poughkeepsie, I woke up in the middle of the night, the next night, and said, you could ask the same question about this neighborhood, and the answer is precisely the same. Okay, now we're going to look a little bit at redlining. This is one of the tools, which I've mentioned, and the answer to explain why any given neighborhood in 239 cities in the United States look the way they do. And when I say cities, I mean the cities, the downtown, the suburbs, the inner-ring suburbs, the ex-urbs, it's all part of the same explanation, okay? Redlining was an enforcement of segregation, and I suspect that most people know what that means, but so during the Depression, the government was anxious to help people to afford and buy homes, and so they thought that one of the things they needed to do was to say, where would it be safe for financial institutions? Where would it be reliable for their return to let mortgages? And where would it be less reliable, less more risky to do that? And the red areas, or the areas, the degraded areas, they said, don't do it. Don't do it. Yellow is, you know, I kind of don't do it. Blue is, well, probably okay. And green is, give these people money. All right, sorry, I'm being a little glib. But this was done in 239 cities around the United States. It was a federal government program, but it was assisted when the feds came in to help with this, that the adjusters or the enumerators were local people. They were people in the local banks. They were people in the local real estate agency. They were the local elites. What that means is that they were applying their views of race and quality of people's financial reliability through a federal program. And now I'm going to, this is what this looks like for a particular neighborhood in Baltimore, and it's hard to read that, so I'm going to blow it up a little bit. And I'm going to read it, and it's going to make me mad when I do. So this is an area near a really famous city park in Baltimore, north of downtown, a little on the edge of the Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, which was sort of the main street of Black Baltimore. So Ubi Blake, and what's my favorite singer for the era? Billie Holiday. I mean, this was the place to be. So I'm going to stoop down here so I can read this. The portion of the ward lying south of Druiddle Park, and that's how you say it in Baltimore, Druiddle, bounded on the east by Mount Royal Terrace, south, north avenue, west, and Reisterstown Road. Description. An old residential section seriously threatened with Negro encroachments. A small section along Reisterstown Road consists of fairly modern two-story brick rows, mixed some Negroes with owners of long-standing, still occupying old residences, converted apartments containing white-collar, class-skilled mechanics, et cetera. Population 1930 whole ward, 38,000 some, 10.5% Negro, 8.7% foreign-born, which was another strike against neighborhoods. Population increase since 1940 was 14.75%. You can go on the University of Richmond website and they have digitized a lot of these maps. I think they've digitized about 130 maps. You can click on each of the areas and you'll get that little description and don't read too many of them because you'll just lose your mind. So, segregation is a process of long-standing and redlining is merely a slice through this ongoing process and I think that's important to emphasize. It's an index of conditions and decisions and enforcement from the mid to late 1930s. Now I'm going to go back to my ancestors. This is the redlining map for Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up, you all. And this is the 1937 map and the same thing, red is, don't give them money. Yellow is, you'd be maybe not wisest to give money there. Blue, yeah, they're probably all right and green is no problem. I'm going to show you a street map. That's the Ohio River. I don't get me going on Louisville history. I love it too much. What do you notice about this? What does this street grid tell you? Should I let you answer that? The street grid tells you where the floodplain is and where the bluffs are, the highland is. The square grid, the rectilinear grid is in the floodplain where it's easy to make a rectilinear grid except the curve of the river sort of messes that up. And then the highlands, which is hilly and a little bit more deceptive, the street grid is much more sort of diffuse. It's also a little bit the case that that grid reflects the American suburban ideal of curviness and not long sight lines and things like that. I'm going to slap the redlining map under this. Look at this, look at this. Okay, there's one blue area down in the west end facing one of the Olmstead parks. This is the house that I grew up in in this particular nice Italianate mid-19th century thing, two and a half stories. This is where that house was located. In the mid-1960s, urban renewal took this neighborhood for things like expanding the hospitals. Okay, that's, you know, putting some interstates through there too. And so when we had to just get rid of that house, had to sell that house to the city, we said, well, we're going to live. So my father went looking. He was the one who had kind of flexible time schedule. And he said, let me look up here in the highlands. Nice little house, a little sort of, let's look at something interesting. So this was the kind of house we looked at, not exactly the house we looked at. This is the kind of house we looked at. And my father, who as you probably saw from the black and white photo that I showed of him, had about the same complexion that I did. The realtor didn't know he was dealing with a black man. And so when he discovered that he was about to do business with a black family, he cried and said that if I had sold you this house, I'd have lost my license. So that's part of the system of segregation, the system of institutional racism. So that didn't happen. All right. This was the house that we did buy. It's in the blue area down in the west end. It was block busting. It was a white neighborhood, white neighborhood. When the neighbors figured out we were black, they forbade their two little boys from playing with my brother. I was a little too old to play with them. And so we watched the neighborhood switch from white to all black. And there's another thing I should tell you, that this house, no long since, not in my family. About the summer before last, I looked it up on Zillow, that very house, that address worth $130,000. This house, or this neighborhood, trying to find equivalent houses, number of bedrooms, and all that kind of number of stories, $460,000. That's institutional racism. I'm not asking for a check from anybody, but that's institutional racism. So this is a system that's hiding in plain sight. It's a system that's hiding in plain sight. It's still expressed in predatory lending. This has been documented in Baltimore, not by our group, by another group. Think about this as the cumulative effects of compound disinterest. And I don't mean disinterest in the sort of intellectual fairness view. All kinds of political connections and influence are being expressed in that system. And growing up in the Jim Crow Upper South, I was taught that racism was individual bad behavior. Individual bad behavior. And that's a lot different than being taught about a system. So it took me a long time to be educated about what was really going on. What does race mean? I got to really point to the idea that race is not a biological thing. It is not a biological thing, in spite of the fact that everybody talks about it as though it was biology. Now, it's ancestry. There's ancestry and heritability involved, but race is not fundamentally biology, as well demonstrated by genetic similarities amongst all humans. It's a matter of establishing groups to enforce hierarchy and generate differential social status. It emerged from settler colonialism, which of course this country is an example of slavery and racism. Racism was invented to justify slavery. Racism didn't exist before colonial imperial expansion and figuring ways to just place people or steal their labor or steal their land. Linnaeus, the famous generator inventor of the binomial system of classification in 1735, included four... He talked about subspecies for things that were not people. For people, he talked about varieties. Okay, so clearly he's thinking about one species, but he describes the quote varieties of man in terms of their continental origin and their general complexions. Now, by the 10th edition in 1758, he had added to this sort of description by color and geography of origin characteristics, which were clearly... which established or reinforced the idea that what was the ranking? So white Europeans on top. What a surprise. I don't know. I think Asians, Americans, which meant Native Americans, and black folks, Africans. And the way that he described each of these groups in terms of intelligence, reliability, was there any data behind that? It was just assertion. It was just assertion. But it's the assertion that governed so much of what people did relative to racialized groups throughout the world. Examples of segregation patterns. Segregation is really common in the United States. Red is disproportionately more black. Blue is disproportionately more white. You see Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, so on. Here's another way that there are many ways to categorize or to quantify segregation. The white axis, the vertical axis, is the diversity of people in by-neighborhood. The x-axis is the diversity of people throughout the whole city. If it's a one-to-one line, that means your city isn't segregated. Where do all the points fall? All of the points, almost all of the points except Laredo, Texas, which means there aren't enough black people there to be discriminated against. Well, I don't know. But everywhere else, the points are below the line. And some of the cities are way far below the line, just Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and so on. Ah. What are the consequences of this? Here's our fifth chapter. And here, I'm going to use the word ecologies to indicate different sorts of views of how the networks of advantage, hazard, disadvantage, and vulnerability operate. I'm going to show you these kinds of examples. Here's polluting industries in Baltimore. This is work by Chris Boone. The dark purple is proportion of black population. The lighter colors are less, lower percentages of black population. The little circles are buffers around toxic release inventory sites, which are now called something else. But these are basically the shadow of polluting industries throughout Baltimore City. And what you find is different than what Bullard found. The white folks in especially South Baltimore are living closer to the toxic release inventory sites than black folks. And that little graph on the other side of the slide shows that if you want data. And what's going on here? That's not the pattern that you expect. But it is systemic racism because when Baltimore was a hot spot of industry, the fourth largest city in the United States, white people were allowed to live near the factories where they worked, and black people had to live farther away. So it's a different pattern. It's the same cause. Red lining and tree canopy cover. This is a few cities just showing you and the colors green, blue, yellow, and red are the standard colors. And so you see that there are statistically significantly fewer trees in the red lined areas. And that's true of 30-some cities except for Seattle for reasons that we don't know. So that is a shadow. That's a legacy of segregation from the past. It's a legacy for red lining. So yeah, it's the map from 1937 or the middle 1930s, but the process really continues. Stay tuned. Here's what the canopy cover looks like in Baltimore relative to lifestyle. This is when you buy something at X, Y, and Z store, they record where that's happening, and so you can really use those data. This is a kind of big data, but it happens to be kind of insulting because the classification is meant for the elites who are making decisions about where to put big box stores and things like that, and so the names of these categories are really awful. Segregation and vacancy. You can see the black dots or vacant properties in Baltimore a few years ago. There are tens of thousands of vacant properties in Baltimore. These are legacies and feedbacks of diseminities and amenities. Environmental injustice persists. There is an adaptive cycle of resilience that explains this. Now, I'm going to show you here a sequence of maybe about five slides. If you forget everything else, that's fine. Pay attention to these next handful of slides. The adaptive cycle of resilience deals with the capacity of some system, some place to experience disturbances and to retain its structure and function. What that means is that resilience focuses on flexibility and adaptability. It does embody mechanisms, and I'll show you a little bit, resilience is not normative. As a mechanistic structure, resilience is not normative. Resilience is neither good nor bad in and of itself, which is contrary to how people are talking about. When you read a newspaper article, oh, we want great resilience. I'm talking about a sort of a technical theory here. What's that theory based on? It's based on sort of the, I'm going to call it the wisdom or the generalizations from succession. If you look from the R to the K, that's how you expect ecological communities to develop. As they develop, as they change through time, you get capital, biomass, or nutrients accumulating. That's that curve going up to a bit of an asymptote. Also, you get increased connectivity, increased networking. Those are expectations from succession theory. These are the idealizations, which is what theory does for you. Now, if you put these things together, the big blue arrow in the middle says that the capital starts out in the system being available. It's unencumbered. It's uncaptured. Whereas later in development, it is allocated. The capital is held within the system. The same thing with connectedness. You start out with low connectivity or connectedness, and you end with high connectedness. Now, if you look at the system, allocated capital and high connectedness, if there is a disturbance, what might happen? You would expect the resources to be released to become available again. That would fuel the growth, which would lead to the increasing internalization of capital, and so on. This, as the little thing down in the corner says, is a zero-force law. That means that a system that does not lose resources after disturbance, or a system that can release resources after a disturbance can keep going. It's a zero-force law. It's an idealization. It's pretty successful with that strategy. Now, if you have loss and lock-in, then you're not dealing with a zero-force law. You have to now explain what drives the loss, what drives the lock-in, what ways are there to overcome that if you're dealing with a practical system that you want to maintain resilience in the sense that I've explained it. All right. Pay particular attention. This is a map of a neighborhood in West Baltimore. It's kind of interesting that you can see things like there's the church, the Mount Zion Methodist Episcopal church, which they label as Negro. There's a public school. I've outlined the little tiny houses along the small streets and alleys. We call those alleyhouses in Baltimore. You see the houses on the main streets are considerably grander. This is maybe a little bit of an unfair example. These houses face one of the 19th century squares, so these are pretty grand. So that's what the bosses' houses would look like. The servants' houses, the slaves' houses, the immigrants' houses are on the inside of the block facing the alleys, and this is what they look like. Now, in case you're wondering whose fault it is, that the people living there live in nasty houses, it's the people who built the nasty houses to support the workers that could walk to the factories or walk around the corner and be the domestic workers in the bosses' houses. I'm putting two final points. So the early pattern in Baltimore was fine-scale segregation. It's segregation by street versus alley. The same thing happened in Louisville. The neighborhood I grew up in had alleyhouses in the back. Fine-scale segregation. So we'll call that the conservative condition. What disturbed that? So this is like the 1880s, 1910s. What disturbed that? Anybody got a guess? The Great Migration disturbed that. As reconstruction was dismantled, and blacks and poor whites fled the south, and you think, well, Baltimore's still the south, but it wasn't the south. There are more and more black people coming to Baltimore. You can't fit them all in those alleyhouses, so they start moving to other neighborhoods, and the elites, and you can attach a color to that if you want because it would be correct, the elites say, we don't want that. So what they did in reorganizing the system, the social ecological system dealing with segregation, was they reacted to African-American diffusion throughout the city by generating the country's first blockwise segregation ordinance that said that black people and white people have to live on different blocks. So that's a cycle of resilience. A disturbance, a reaction, a recovery. Next cycle. Let's start with the blockwise segregation ordinance. That's the conservative state that we start with for this cycle. What disturbed that? The Supreme Court in 1917 said, you can't restrict to whom a person can sell a house. It is their right to sell their house to whomever they want. So they invalidated the Baltimore, they invalidated all ordinances like that. The ordinance that was brought before the court was the ordinance from Louisville, which the NAACP and Louisville brought, they brought that suit, and my ancestors were part of that organization doing that. So that's cool. So what then happens? What do the elites do now? Oh, darn, you know, foiled again, curses foiled again. They established neighborhood improvement associations and generated deed covenants. That said, you could not sell this house to a black person or a Jewish person. And those covenants are still on the deeds in Baltimore, although they were ultimately invalidated. So they're still on the paperwork. So that led to neighborhood-wise and district-wise segregation. So what do you notice there? There's a change in scale of segregation. And you take that out to 2020, and it's a little hard to see. I don't have the city boundary on here, but you see the green represents black folks, the blue represents white folks, and you see that butterfly pattern, which you saw in downtown Baltimore. That black butterfly just extends, the white L keeps its place so resilience of segregation is insured. Now, this means that you've got a system that is deeply enshrined in how American cities work. I haven't done this sort of diagram for other cities, but looking at the patterns and knowing how the ordinances were laid out and the deed covenants spread throughout the country. Baltimore, when it established its racial segregation ordinance, was congratulated. Oh, brilliant, Baltimore. You're the first. Brilliant. You figured out how to do this. And so lots of cities mimicked that. And the homeowner association, the community development associations are things that have spread very widely. One of the important things about this is that segregation is something that is a regional phenomenon and really infects not just our cities. So the thing about redlining, it's only in the city boundaries generally. There's some of the words overlap the city boundaries. So you're not going to be able to do that analysis for larger areas in the country. But cities, it's pretty clear. And you see these kinds of patterns of segregation. You remember that one-to-one line that I showed you so many cities and so many metro areas continue to have those kinds of patterns. So that's a kind of resilience. Another thing to say about this is that segregation of this sort and systemic racism, systemic colorism, systemic classism, discrimination on the basis of gender and sex in how resources are distributed in cities and how vulnerabilities are managed in cities is not something that only occurs in the 239 cities that were redlined in the United States. South Africa has an incredibly enshrined spatial segregation pattern and apartheid as a system of moving people, black people out of cities into crazy, crazy places where there was no water and not much way to grow anything. That was useful. So that system was established to prevent black and white people from living together in cities in South Africa. So there's something. If you look at many colonial cities around the world, there's a segregation between the European overlords, the local administrators, and everybody else and very often in some cases, especially in Latin America, that's a color differential. So these kinds of things are, when you think about urban ecology around the world, this is something that needs to be considered, not just in the United States, not just in the old industrial cities. So here's a way to look at this. In this context, segregation is defined as systemic, institutional, and individual actions. I'm not letting the individual bigotry off the hook, but that's not the whole story. My mom and dad sort of didn't let me know the whole thing. That isolate racial or ethnic groups into spatially distinct locations, de jure or de facto, that segregation. That is a pattern. That is a matter of spatial heterogeneity. Ecology is also a highly spatially structured kind of approach to the world. Structure and function of the biophysical components of urban social ecological systems, this can represent benefits and burdens to people. And ecological heterogeneity to follow that loop on your right can be used to support differential apportionment of environmental benefits and burdens based on race. That's not the flood plain versus high ones that I showed you in Louisville. And segregation in turn can result in spatially differentiated environmental structures, fluxes, and dynamics associated with race. And so we ecologists, and Professor Schell has and his group and colleagues have been major proponents of this kind of idea. We need as ecologists to take into account racialized status and segregation as part of the drivers of urban systems. So ecologists look for soils or air or temperature or rainfall. We need to look for racialized status and segregation as well. Segregation, what are my big points? Segregation is an urban universal there are places where it's not based on race there are places where it's a little bit less conspicuous there are places where it's largely class based. And segregation has these various dimensions racialization, ethnicity, wealth, gender, and others. Race is socially and economically created. Some of my older biological colleagues when you tell them that they kind of twitch what does that do for evolution? Well it doesn't change anything about evolution but it just tells you that race is not entirely an evolutionary phenomenon. Segregation is a process. Segregation comes from Latin meaning separate from the flock. It happens to people generally. That doesn't mean that there can't be affinity groups and people can't. It doesn't mean that people shouldn't just determine who they want to associate with at various times and places. But segregation in the sense that I've been using it is something that a system imposes. The role of the world of the elites says who is out and who is in. And the ecological implications of this are understudied. So I hope you remember the resilience thing. Segregation and racial disadvantage and the aspects of vulnerability that are associated with it. The denial of access to amenities that is associated with that is part of a very resilient social process that has yet to be discovered series of ecological implications. That is what I wanted to tell you this evening. So thank you for your attention. There's a glass of water there. I'm going to try and call up some questions that are coming in off of my computer. Thank you so much. That was just an amazing talk. I'm going to think of the word resilience in a very different way from now on. All my work here is done. And I'm going to see if I can find the question. I want to start by opening it up to those who are here. And then I'll be looking for the online questions in a moment. Don't be shy. I'm going to have you move into the spotlight. That's all right. Over here. I wonder, do you know of any examples where cities or governments have taken steps that effectively change that? That system is bigger than city governments. And I mean, you can point to things like better or more equitable location of affordable housing as a way to do that. You can think about improved transportation between residential areas and areas where work is concentrated. Think about what's trying to be overcome there. The whole post-war evacuation of jobs and industry from the city into the suburbs where it was cheaper to buy land and where the political structures were eager to have anything built on it. How do you compensate for that? And the cities aren't in charge of that, right? So I think we need to be aware of the richness of this perverse system and poke it wherever we can. One of the reasons that I showed this ecology of segregation as kind of a system is to say maybe a racist system requires an anti-racist response. And as a theoretician, that's my contribution, to say here's a structure to think about this that might help you to poke at the things you can poke at. Do you think legislation, so in California we have SB9 that's showing up which is trying to change single-family zoning to four lots? What is your thought about? Zoning is... Where that sits within your cycles. It's an anti-racist intervention, potentially. So maybe an anti-classist intervention as well. I haven't thought about how to take the model and show how something bumps out into another cycle, right? We might establish new kind of positive resilience cycles. And so the changing zoning, zoning seems very innocent, right? It seems very innocent, it's not. And so I think that initiative, that sounds really pretty useful. And again, maybe California is an example for the rest of the country. I think the microphone's headed your way. Thank you for your presentation. For me it was very, very thought-provoking. I happen to be a forester by training, but I was born and I've spent my entire life in urban areas, but professionally I've always been just focused on non-urban areas until very recently. And I'm wondering if you could speak or elaborate a little bit on institutional racism when it comes to access to green space, to shade from trees, tree shade from hot sun, etc. Maybe elaborate a bit on the urban area and trees, forests, urban forests, and institutional racism. So it's a tricky business because so often, and Baltimore's a really great example, the places where there are trees are wealthy and often white or upper class of various kinds and the places where there are few trees or no trees tend to be populated by black and brown folks and people who have less power and less connection with power structures and less wealth. And you want to make available to people the tools to have a pleasant environment, a safer environment, a less heat-stressed environment. But it's a kind of thing that has to be done in collaboration with people. One of our historical geographers did a history of forestry in Maryland and how it connected with the city. Baltimore is Maryland's only official city, by the way. And one of the things that he found is that there's deep-seated dislike of trees in some communities. And like the Eastern European neighborhoods in East Baltimore, the city forester went in to help people with trees, and there's a quote in this man's book, Jeff Buckley, that says that the city forester said, I would have thought that giving people trees or having trees planted in various neighborhoods was just the easiest thing to do until I tried to plant trees in front of people's houses. And people would say, if I wanted a tree, I'd live in the country. And one woman from Eastern Europe said, I want pure and adorned concrete. So there are different viewpoints. I love trees. I walk around the city of Poughkeepsie, and I say, God, why aren't there trees here? Why is it so hot? I want trees on my walk. But there's a real need to have conversations and to understand where people are coming from. Maybe some of the people will end up being convinced that trees are a good thing. There's a lot of fear of trees, especially underserved neighborhoods, that they're beacons for crime. And how do we deal with, as people who've studied this, look at the city as a whole, and the places where there are more trees, regardless of income or racialized category, are places where there's less property and violent crime. So there's a real need to have discussions, to sort of talk with people, to find out what their fears are, and maybe help understand some other ways to think about trees. When the city of Baltimore, when the tree Baltimore gives away trees, the rich white people come and get them. Nobody else comes and gets the free trees. So there's a culture of trees, and there's a culture of something else, and we need to know better how to deal with that. Great talk, I really enjoyed it. I've always been curious by the fact that in the states you tend to have the more affluent people on the higher hills, like here in Berkeley and Louisville, and the poor in the city centers and the flatlands. If you go to Europe, and Latin America, it's kind of flip-flopped, that the richer on the flat and city centers and the poorer up on the hills. I'm curious, is it a factor of investment in infrastructure, or accessibility to power, or what are some of the factors? Why are we so different from the rest of the world, and how we segregate? You look at European cities, in the middle and the poverty is on the fringes as well. I think a lot of it is that other cultures around the world don't hate cities. Since Thomas Jefferson, at least, the United States has hated cities, and there's scholarship that documents that. And so people flee the cities. People flee the cities. The hill business is, again, if the desired land is on the flat and the rich people are living there, where does everybody else get? And very often, those places, the dangerous slide prone slopes are unregulated. Or the government says, no, you may not build there, and there's just such pressure for people moving into the city for the perceived benefits, education, medicine, jobs, in many places around the world that they end up on these horrible places. Or in sometimes the horrible places are flood plains. Sometimes the horrible places are the slopes. But I think we just have a different view of how a city is put together in the United States, or what cities are for, or who they're for. I'm letting you call for the questions, because I can't really see. Yeah. Sitting right here. Thank you for such a great talk. In your cycles of resilience, you mentioned that the things disturbing that cycle, they seem to come also from the very same power structure. Yes! Bingo! The question is, are there any examples of like grassroots social movements or other types of disturbances that may come from a different place, not the same power structure? Yeah. There are some, and I could model those. I haven't done them yet. Some of the histories of highway construction or stopping highway construction in Baltimore is a good example of that. What else? That's a really good example. What else is a good example in Baltimore? That's an example of grassroots. Some effort is being paid by community groups on how to manage local vacant lands, how to manage vacant lots, how to care for vacant lots. Obviously, land trusts have a role to play there. That's another example. Sorry, I'm being a little slow tonight. I may give you a slightly hard one here. You had mentioned how we have a cycle. This resilient cycle, essentially, is propagating segregation in multiple generations. It stands to reason that some type of anti-racist strategy with the same amount of energy is needed to be able to disrupt the cycle. But it seems like some metaphysical, multiverse theory where we have to be able to have enough energy to disrupt that system. So, is that even possible in a system of capitalism that was built on the very basis of segregating peoples? I hope the answer is yes, but it's just a hope. I mean, what I'm capable of doing is pointing to a structure and hopefully people who are better at thinking about social movements or fomening social movements than I am can say, alright, here's how we as experts in organizing and energizing populations and trying to manipulate where possible power structures. That's what seems to me to be possible. Yeah, but how do we live in capitalism and mess it up at the same time? Thank you. Great talk. How do we think about urban renewal? How do we think about gentrification in these processes that you've been thinking about from a system perspective? Gentrification is often spoken of as a natural phenomenon. It's just what we have a market and that market, if you improve the environmental quality in a neighborhood, the market will drive up the prices and that means that people who are of limited means will not be able to continue to pay the rents or buy houses there. That's a matter of policy. That governments, policies, policymakers, activists can work to put in place constraints. Yeah, I'm going to say it, constraints on the market. That's one of the jobs of government is to manage markets. But we have a myth in this country that the market is managing everything else. Oh, God, urban renewal. I mean, James Baldwin called that Negro removal. It's another tool of... I mean, okay, in my history, my family history, we were pawns in the real estate industry generating more profit by scaring white people. With me! So urban renewal is kind of a mess and you think about those little houses, the alleyhouses in Baltimore, those were some of the main targets. There's still a few standing as you saw because I took those pictures. These alleyhouses were major targets for urban renewal. A lot of them didn't even have sort of a connection to the sewer system. And so, yeah, was that a good thing? Because they were kind of... They were built to be crap, right? And they were crap and they hadn't been maintained. So what's the option? But how do you manage to improve people's housing without leaving them in the lurch? Urban renewal is... I don't have a... This is my personal bias. I think that urban renewal is a highly misused, has been a highly misused tool. Yeah, thank you again. A really, really lovely talk. And my question is just sort of about dealing with the inherent wicked complexity of urban segregation in the United States. Even I as a bright-eyed undergraduate, I don't know what to do. Are there any... What countries or cities around the world are doing it right? And do you realistically think that it's possible to implement any of those in the U.S. considering the complex history and also things like the abysmal public transit and things like that? Who's doing it right and do you think it's possible in the U.S.? Okay, that's a really good question. I think there's some nice examples like in Concepción Chile, for example. I don't have the details, but that's... So I think there is possibility, but I think a lot of us are just going to have to get angry and kick social movements into action. Because, yeah. Thank you for your lectures. One question I had was around what you mentioned earlier about poking holes as a form of... What would be the means of reparations? How would you go about fixing the issue? So one thing would be to identify who's exactly been a disadvantage historically and throughout over time in the cycles that you've mentioned. Is there a framework for understanding what is a better solution? Is it poking holes and figuring out solutions that can be enacted upon, regardless of them affecting the worst affected over time? Or is there some need to actually be good at identifying who's been most affected so far across state lines because policy affects different tourist restrictions and then kind of like building a plan around that. So, A, is there a framework for such sort of thinking around policy-based reparation? And then B, how would you actually, yeah, prioritize people or communities? This may not be the most... This may not be the best response, but one of the things that I think is really important is to have us all have society understand that the conditions in segregated places are the result in large part of something beyond what the people in those places do or have the capacity to do. There is way too much blaming the people who are in vulnerable and hazardous positions and unempowered positions blaming them for that. And I think we need just to... One of the reasons that I think that this kind of framing or this kind of model, this kind of conceptual model is important is that, yes, it's a wicked problem, but I can point to some high points that help you understand the negative resilience of this. And once you understand the negative resilience of this, you can begin to say what kinds of places, what kinds of interactions might be something that you can approach. It would be nice to say, well, let's just start all over. Let's just start all over. So I think that's why I stopped blaming people for living in slums. Slums were created. And we need people to understand, we need society as a whole to understand that this is something we've all created and it's wrong. And how do we get some moral courage to attack the parts of it we can? Resilience and moral courage in my takeaways really steered on behalf of the College of Environmental Design and the rest are College of Natural Resources. You've spent two beautiful days with our college, our students and our faculty. We can't thank you enough for sharing that and perhaps sending us all out to Marsh to make a difference. David and I would both like to thank some folks who have been really helpful in setting up the past couple of days. Cassie and Catherine, Sam, Joe, ADL and Dow. I don't think they're all still here right now but thank you so much for your hard work in having this organized. Those of you that missed it live, we wish you were here, but it was great. Thank you so much, Stuart. Thank you.