Property Ownership and Biodiversity
We Need More Flutter
Over the last several months, as part of my political campaign, I have knocked on over 5,000 private residential doors in my community. This effort to reach voters has given me the chance to make unplanned observations of differences in “flutter activity” from one property to the next. I’m defining flutter activity as the observable movements and sounds of birds, insects and small mammals. I had the experience many times of one property being still while another property just feet away was so busy that I would duck and jerk my way to a door in response to birds and bunnies bursting out of bushes, insects flying about, or spider webs blocking the route. The contrast was often so striking that I started to note the relationship between landscaping and flutter activity and think about the impact each individual homeowner can have on the ecosystem of their property and the greater community.
The visible difference in biodiversity that corresponds to property lines, echoes the impacts of redlining where human decisions cause different outcomes in spaces that should be the same. In the case of individual private property, the difference can be as stark as lush life on one side of a visible line and concrete on the other. Scaling this up, the outsized power some people (e.g., rich people or governments) have over the environment leads to significantly degraded opportunities and outcomes for both nature and people.
The Role of Public Schools in Sustainability
Tying this back to the position I am running for (school board) and reason I was on these properties…I have been thinking about the role of public school districts in environmental sustainability.
School districts can impact sustainability in two ways: the sustainability of the properties they own and operate, and the sustainable practices they build into the next generation through education. Focusing on the former, the school district where I live has about fifty properties and the district has authority to develop, maintain and operate these properties, including landscape and building design and maintenance to energy use, waste production, and waste management. While some aspects are subject to legal requirements, the majority of decisions are at the discretion of the district, and therefore can be influenced by the policies, operational expectations and budget authority of the school board.
Public School Campuses are Biodiversity Vacuums
When you look at a typical school campus in our district, it’s typically a 1-2 story building surrounded by many acres of flat land covered in concrete, sport courts/fields or mowed grass. Sometimes there are ornamental shrubs, but they are typically of limited variety and regularly pruned (preventing flowering). Our campuses are biodiversity vacuums. No flutter activity.
Can School Policies Bring Back Flutter?
I am curious to look more closely at the relationship between the biodiversity of the physical space my school district occupies, and the policies and decisions the school makes with respect to land use and operations.
Such an interesting observation Janel. I was very lucky to go to a school that had been firstly, a mansion home of Queen Anne and then secondly a private girls boarding school so it had such luxuries as a lake and gardens despite being a state school (though with some funding boosts from the Catholic Church). I didn’t realise how lucky I was with the setting until we started travelling to other schools for competitions and collaborations. It did strike me that the private schools had much more greenery than the state schools in lower economic areas, which often just had a concrete playground. I often thought how horrid it would have been to have to sit on that in the summer or how dreary in the winter and how much ‘nicer’ my learning environment was. My nieces now go to some of these city schools and one of them has a small food garden in raised beds that they use to teach children about the growing cycle. They also keep chickens – each year the reception class gets to hatch them as a project and they are used as pest control in the garden. I think the parents can buy the eggs and the money goes into buying the feed if I remember rightly.