Treesearch

Urban environmental stewardship (UES) is the act of caring for the environment to enhance the quality of life for the greater public good (Burch et al. 1993) "with the underlying assumption that doing so will improve the social– ecological functioning of specific urban areas" (Connolly 2013, p. 76). Indeed, a critical motivation for urban environmental stewards is to nurture places that are valuable for social as well as ecological reasons (Krasny et al. 2014, Tidball 2014). Though important, the contributions of UES to ecological resilience (e.g., promoting biodiversity) are under-recogniz...

Our aloha nui (profound affection) to you, dear readers! We are part of Hālau 'Ōhi'a, an intensive native Hawaiian stewardship and lifeways training program created to enhance the capacity of natural resources and conservation professionals to engage self, others, and place. The goal of this chapter is to share our collective professional and personal experiences in Hālau 'Ōhi'a from the perspective of both kumu (program developer and master instructor; Kekuhi) and haumāna (students; Heather, Christian, Kainana). We describe the pedagogy and epistemology of Hālau 'Ōhi'a and we share...

In the early 1990s land grant universities worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to develop a disaster education program to be coordinated via collaborations among U.S. state cooperative extension systems. Given that this Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) is funded directly and indirectly via USDA funding, and given that the Green Readiness, Response, and Recovery idea is an outgrowth of USDA Forest Service collaborations, there are numerous possibilities for green readiness, response, and recovery resources to be collaboratively developed with land grant partners...

Considerable research demonstrates the broad range of ecosystem services (i.e., benefits) attributed to urban trees either individually or in groups as part of parks, natural areas, riparian buffers, in green stormwater infrastructure, along streets, and in other urban public landscapes. Environmental services contributed by urban trees include stormwater management, carbon sequestration, and impacts on human health that include air quality and lower urban temperatures (urban heat island mitigation). Communities that adopt arboricultural standards and practices and implement comprehensive...

Urban areas are complex, multilayered systems that must carefully balance social and economic interests with built infrastructure, resource flows (energy, water, food, etc.), nonprofit and industry networks, and various levels of government. Each system is part of an overarching sector, which are interconnected and interdependent. Some may be in direct competition due to limited resources (municipal agency budgets), others may have competing goals (property developers versus preservationists) (Meerow 2016). It is the push and pull between diverse sectors that make cities incubators of...

On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall and caused extraordinary devastation across the northeastern United States (Figure 1). It was the second costliest disaster in the United States at the time and damaged some of the most densely populated areas of the country. The impacted area spanned county, regional, and state boundaries, encompassed entities that did not normally collaborate, and brought issues to light that were typically addressed independently by a variety of government authorities. With the complexity of the disaster and extent of damage, individuals that were...

The last 4 years have been the warmest years on Earth, since reliable recordkeeping began in 1880 (NASA 2018, NOAA 2018). Climate scientists project Earth will continue warming at an increasing rate through the 21st century due to the increasing abundance of human-produced heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane. Both long-term global climate change and short-term natural variability patterns (e.g., El Niño-Southern Oscillation) are causing extreme regional weather and climate events with increasing frequency and severity. An extreme event can be any phenomenon that falls...

We are all potentially connected to an unwanted disaster situation since no region is immune from some adverse risk. Most Americans live in areas that are exposed to hazards whether naturally occurring or through involvement with humankind. Natural hazards may be in the form of wild fires, heat waves, volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or hurricanes, while human intervention awakens hazards such as oil rig accidents, the physical neglect of buildings and infrastructure, or acts of terrorism. A disaster occurs when a hazard has a high degree of harm to human life, its shelter, or to...

Rather than being abandoned, a waterfront garden was upgraded and expanded after Hurricane Sandy damaged much of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, New York City in 2012. While the garden transformation was undertaken by the landscape architecture practice Till Design, and coordinated by a larger team called Landscapes of Resilience, the role of the gardeners is equally important to bring forward. We are a landscape architect and educator (Marshall, principal of Till Design) and a project coordinator and urbanist (Reynolds) and we participated with gardeners during a recovery process...

Over the past several decades, wildfire has become an increasingly costly and destructive natural hazard as a result of a combination of ecological and social factors, including climate change, decades of wildfire suppression on the landscape, and residential expansion into fire-prone vegetation (Fischer et al. 2016, Flannigan et al. 2013, Moritz et al. 2014). From 1999 to 2016, an average 1,449 residences were destroyed annually by wildland fire and billions of dollars spent on fire suppression. In response to the challenges of wildfire management, the National Cohesive Wildland Fire...