COS 294-2 - Biodiversity is not a Luxury: unpacking wealth and power to complicate our understanding of urban biodiversity

Abstract: A positive correlation between wealth and biodiversity within cities is a commonly documented phenomenon in urban ecology that has come to be labeled as the “luxury effect”. We contend that both this language and this framing restrict our understanding of how sociopolitical power dynamics influence biodiversity within and across cities. Pulling from the economic, sociological, and anthropological fields, we show how the term “luxury” is not appropriately applied to describe biodiversity, especially for worldviews where people have close cultural and interpersonal relationships with particular species or with nature more holistically. We also describe numerous examples where the “luxury effect” is not seen and instead either opposite patterns or no clear relationship between wealth and biodiversity is found. We propose an alternate two-part framework to examine the relationship between power (which can correlate to wealth) and biodiversity. We base our alternate framework on first an acknowledgment of the geophysical boundaries of what levels of biodiversity are even possible within an urban space and the nonlinear way that policy, behavioral, and cultural changes can shift biodiversity levels based on those geophysical limitations. We then build on this to argue that whether and how a neighborhood's (or city’s) biodiversity levels shift depends on both the power and vision of those making land-use and management decisions. Power is dependent upon a range of variables (including money but also history, race/ethnicity/caste of people, their social connections, time, and knowledge), and vision is dependent upon culture, value systems, preferences, and priorities. Using the frame of the “luxury effect” to examine patterns of biodiversity in cities limits our ability to understand power dynamics within cities and even fully explain the influence of those with wealth within the neighborhoods and cities in which they reside. We contend that complicating our analysis to focus more on power in general as well as the specific vision those with power have offers a more flexible approach that can be applied in a wider range of contexts and allow for more directed policy interventions.