Professor University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland
Often traits are the handles and cues people use to register and make sense of biodiversity. Traits such as flower colour, leaf shape, and canopy density, which may not necessarily be considered central functional traits, are important drivers of people’s preferences. We argue that traits are a formative force influencing human wellbeing and world views, giving shape to ecological systems and linked human affordances (through, e.g. shade and sensory stimuli), and social systems by shaping the context of human activities and experiences. When rich experiences of nature are dwindling along with ecological literacy, biodiversity needs a stronger voice. Amplifying the arrays of legible traits that can convey different meanings to people, from values to nature to the reality of climate change, may serve as more fertile ground for reconnecting people to the biosphere. How can this be done?
First, there are already numerous initiatives where traits are actively used in management of urban green spaces. We combine inherent traits in sensory gardens, and we impose or modify traits through pruning, thinning, mowing and other management activities. Still, the primary target tends to be vegetation, but there are opportunities to indirectly promote biodiversity and its legibility by creating or supporting habitats that attract and support visible and relational biodiversity (not necessarily only charismatic species). Building on a long tradition of using flagship species in management and biodiversity conservation, traits information could inform new frameworks of social-ecological, or cultural flagship or keystone species. This would be particularly relevant in human dominated environments like cities.
Second, symbolic and non-symbolic signs – traits (?) – are particularly important when thinking of design and human-made artifacts. In a combined arts, humanities, and science project we intend to develop artefacts for shared environments. Through design and relational traits thinking (as understood by different disciplines), the artefacts intend to displace anthropocentrism by affirming all life-forms and bring out the more-than-human also in urban design. The theoretical articulation of human and other-than-human entanglements manifest in a wide array of theories that confluence in the so-called “posthumanities” and “environmental humanities”, “social-ecological systems”, which we will try to bring together and use to make the city both more attractive to biodiversity and making biodiversity itself more visible and prominent in people’s everyday lives.
