How to Spot Ecosystem Collapse, Three Signs

(Source: Unsplash/Jarrett Tan.)

A few weeks ago, my husband and I pulled away from our driveway in Waco, Texas, and pointed the car north, toward I-35. It was around 10:00 a.m. and we had several hours of driving ahead of us. My final destination was Huntsville, Alabama, where I’d spend the week with a childhood best friend. After dropping me off in Nashville to meet her, Rob would continue on to Ohio for a philosophy seminar. 

It would be a long drive, but as someone who grew up on the road, I didn’t mind too much. As a child, I loved staring out the window, journaling and reading, sharing peanut butter sandwiches with my siblings, and listening to the same gospel music CDs on repeat. I could be content just watching the world fly by my window. I was fascinated by the seeming infinitude of the interstate, the changing patterns of road design, and the grittiness of the downtowns we drove through. I liked tracking changes in the natural terrain, too, but it wasn’t until a road trip to Pensacola with Rob last summer that I learned how to really interpret what I was seeing. 

I had just settled in for a nap when he tapped my arm. I reluctantly opened my eyes and followed his pointing hand out the window to the clouds and began to explain the meaning behind their shape and size. A few moments later, he tapped again, this time to explain the species of trees we were passing. Again as we entered the gulf, he nudged me awake, not wanting me to miss the unique marshes we were driving across. 

Once I got over my initial annoyance at losing naps, it actually became kind of fun. I can’t call out cloud patterns or tree names as well as he can, but this habit of his has trained my eye to look more carefully at the natural landscape and to respect it as the complex ecosystem that it is. Sadly, we often come across ecosystems that have been destroyed. Recently, while making a U-turn in Arkansas, I commented on what, to me, looked like a pretty shade of red earth. “That earth is stripped,” Rob clarified. “It’s been over-processed.”  

Cities as Ecosystems

Between the two of us, the conversation on these long trips ebbs and flows between various topics, including commentary on the built environments we’re driving through and the natural landscape surrounding them. In some ways, both of these conversations are on the same topic: the flourishing or decline of an ecosystem.

Ecosystems are collections of systems that work together to sustain life. It’s a way of categorizing and understanding the natural world and can also be a helpful way of thinking about cities. Our life in any community, whether a city, suburb, or small town, depends on the functioning of various social, political, economic, and cultural systems. Everything, from ordering a coffee to running for office, requires the coordination of various players and systems. 

A flourishing ecosystem is one that can adapt to new changes and pressures, but this is not always guaranteed: ecosystems can and often do fail if the right preconditions are not met or if the change confronting them is too cataclysmic for their adaptive processes to keep up. This framework of ecosystem collapse is something we can spot in the natural world and it’s also helpful for interpreting and measuring the health of our towns. Once we’ve identified the different systems our communities depend upon to function, we can ask if the ecosystem as a whole has what it takes to adapt to change, or if it's at risk of collapsing. 

Here are three warning signs to look for.  

1. Loss of Diversity

Ecosystems at risk of collapsing are marked by a loss of diversity. In the natural world, this shows up as a loss of plant or animal diversity. In cities, we can look for this when considering the types of businesses that are able to open (chains vs. small businesses), the types of housing styles that are allowed to be built, and the modes of transit that make it possible for people to get around no matter their age or socioeconomic status.

Diversity in these arenas is a proxy for responsiveness: when a city boasts a variety of options in these categories, that reveals a city that’s observant and responsive to the needs of the people who live there. Diversity is also a proxy for resilience: losing diversity means a reduced capacity to observe changes and come up with innovative solutions. It means a reduced capacity to keep up with the one constant every city must prepare for: the constant of change. This diminished ability to respond to changing needs and realities increases a city’s overall fragility. 

2. Inability to Adapt

A second sign of ecological frailty is a systemic inability to adapt. Change is the only constant and to succeed at the infinite game, cities need to be able to respond to change by constantly reevaluating and adapting their policies and practices in ways that support and improve the flow of life. This kind of mindset starts by taking time to pay attention to the community: to the local context, needs, and challenges. It means being humble enough to realize what worked at one point in time might not be the best-fitting approach now. 

City leaders that can’t recognize this put their communities at risk of not being able to respond to serious challenges, stagnating, or worse, breaking under pressure. These are places crippled by an inappropriate emphasis on preserving processes and bureaucracy for the sake of continuity or consistency, rather than adapting the kinds of processes that sustain economic and social vitality. Innovation in such places is often seen as a threat to the status quo (and job stability) rather than as an essential part of what it takes to maintain health. 

3. Overdependence on Costly Inputs

Finally, fragile ecosystems are those that outsource too much of their vitality on a few costly inputs rather than distributing it across a wide collection of players. Think about a city with just a handful of big box stores… What happens when global economic factors create an incentive for those stores to close shop and move on? History shows what happens to cities that base their entire economic life on a single employer.

Presently, we can see a similar pattern at play with how most cities approach transit: car-based culture assumes stable oil prices and infrastructure funding will last in perpetuity. What happens if driving no longer becomes the most affordable option, and suddenly folks won’t be able to get around town? 

Looking at the present model of public finance with its reliance on debt and federal infusions of cash, we can quickly come to the same conclusion. Resilient cities like resilient ecosystems distribute their mechanisms of vitality across a variety of players. For cities, embracing an abundance of small businesses, housing types, and transit options would be good places to start. 

Having these three “warning signs” in mind can help us to see where our towns are at risk of collapsing, but also to spot opportunities to bolster resilience and make them stronger. 

Start With the End in Mind

Let’s look at the definition of an ecosystem again: “a collection of systems that work together to sustain life.” My favorite part of this definition is the phrase: “to sustain life.” If we were to think of this as a measure of success for our towns, it would challenge many of the end goals that have governed our cities for nearly the past century: to make money, to out-compete other cities, to attract development.

These goals have some value to them, but they only work if they fit into the bigger picture of sustaining life. What that looks like for each community will vary, but I suspect that if we look at our towns with this ecological framework and with this goal in mind, we might start to see opportunities for more creativity, less regulation, more experimentation. We might start to see places where life is happening already or where it could happen and begin to challenge the status quo. 

Ultimately, thinking of our cities as ecosystems that should sustain life is an invitation to rethink the end game. What does it mean for our respective towns to “sustain life?” What might this look like where you live?

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