One Earth

One Earth Director William Rees takes a provocative look at the city as the primary habitat for humans. The book chapter (65kb) is the only one that takes an explicitly bio-ecological approach to defining urban ecosystems: “Despite the fact that human beings are clearly the dominant species in the urban environment [most]…focus on non-human plants and animals or on remnant ‘natural’ ecosystems within the city… People are implicitly involved but merely as…the doers of the damage or the creators of the habitat to which the other species are adapting.”