Walking along the Colorado River behind the old factories on the east side of Austin, Texas, you might forget that you are in one of the fastest-growing cities in America. The riparian corridor below downtown is a rare zone of urban biodiversity. Herons and egrets fish the spillway.
Owls, coyotes, hawks, deer and even ringtail cats thrive in the surrounding woods, within earshot of the tollway and the airport flight path. As Texas' long hot summers cool into fall, the ospreys begin to arrive, and come winter there are bald eagles. It’s reassuring to witness so much wild nature inside a major city.
But it also fills you with a sense of anticipatory loss, if you know how threatened it is by development pressure — from the nearby pecan groves being cleared out to make room for new apartments and offices to the massive Tesla gigafactory recently built downriver. When the choice is between more housing and jobs for humans and space for other species, the humans always win. Maybe that’s as it should be.
But what if it didn’t have to be a zero-sum game? On a shrinking planet, habitat has become increasingly scarce for us and our nonhuman neighbors. In the U.S.
, affordable housing has escalated from a local problem to a major national one, as median prices have , rising twice as fast as wages, and homelessness has reached record levels. Political leaders public lands for new housing. Less airtime is given to the stark tally of the biodiversity crisis: The World Wildlife Fund .
