Opinion: Habitat for all — how housing and biodiversity can coexist even in a crowded future

Walking along the Colorado River behind the old factories on the east side of Austin, Texas, you might forget that you are in one of the fastest-growing cities in America. It’s embedded in language, in the way we refer to undeveloped lands as “empty,” “vacant” or even “waste.” It’s also baked into our legal and economic systems, which have few tools to value nature except as something humans own or consume. The emerging field of ecosystem services looks at the contributions of wild nature to human welfare through an economic prism, showing how, for example, the loss of predators, such as wolves, and scavengers, such as vultures, can be directly tied to a corresponding loss of human life and property those animals would have prevented by depleting the population of deer and cattle that might otherwise meet their deaths in automobile accidents or spread disease from their uneaten carcasses. After the pandemic lockdown’s “nature is healing” reawakening, cities like Austin began taking steps to harness economic growth as an engine for rewilding the future. The balance may still be off, as with green urban creeks canyoned by new luxury high-rises that pay for them, or the restored riparian zone tucked behind the monolithic Tesla plant, but it’s a promising start that gives us a glimpse of the more profound results mandated biodiversity goals like England’s could deliver.