Scraping through rubble-fields and road cuts for ecology surely doesn't produce pretty pictures, but it has all of the original naturalist's charm of fascination with living things for their own sakes. This is an English book, and I, in a city not two hundred years old, in a house considered oldish for having made it through one century, am fascinated by how urbanization eventually falls into patterns to which creatures (humans too) can adapt. Between toxins and introductions, there's been plenty of pressure. (Evening primrose may have ?speciated? developed races? since its naturalization from New World imports.)
Plaggen soils are soils made by more than a hundred years of living and manuring, which appear in cities with gardens or allotments (or livery stables, I should think); I'm delighted with the new word 'pararendzina', which seems to be what rubble becomes as it turns back into soil. Maybe only brick rubble, I don't know because most of the uses on the Web aren't in English, and it isn't in the index of either Soil Genesis and Classification or the Keys to Soil Taxonomy; both of those are US-centric, of course. We might have plenty of anthropic soils, but until we normally reuse them instead of moving to greenfield sites I guess we won't bother with fine distinctions among the rubble.
Although, mm, the Hood Canal Bridge is having to move its reconstruction staging because of the enormous graveyard found next to the existing bridge. Fourteen hundred years of known human habitation there might have changed the soil type; I wouldn't even assume it was a small habitation, since the Hood Canal without industrial inflow was so benign, so flourishing, so productive that (as my other half remarked) even we might have survived there. Was it foolish for that culture to develop art and leisure and IP law instead of industrializing to be ready for the West when it arrived? We should hope not; neither writing nor reading this is likely to defend us from aliens, should they suddenly appear in orbit, or even from epidemics, much likelier to appear with one urbanizing world.
ISBN: 0412282704
So wrote clew in Cities. | TrackBack