🌎Making Room for Everyone & Book Update
World Habitat Day reminds us that people need places to live. So does nature.
Habitat is where life happens.
For wildlife, it provides the food, water, shelter, and space species need to survive.
For people, habitat means something equally fundamental: a safe and adequate place to call home.
That human need is the focus of World Habitat Day, observed today, October 5. This year's theme is “Adequate Housing for All.” And the scale of the challenge is enormous.
UN-Habitat estimates that 2.8 billion people worldwide experience some form of housing inadequacy, including nearly 1.1 billion people living in slums and informal settlements.
Those numbers aren't simply about buildings.
Adequate housing means security, basic services, access to opportunity, and communities where people can live with dignity.
People need habitat too.
Meeting that need requires space.
So does conserving biodiversity.
And there is only one landscape.
One Finite Landscape
Last week I wrote that you can't conserve wildlife without conserving habitat. That remains true.
But conservation cannot respond to the loss of nature by pretending legitimate human needs don't exist.
Telling a family without adequate shelter that nature needs the land isn't going to be a successful conservation strategy.
Neither is solving the housing crisis by allowing development to consume whatever functioning ecosystems remain.
Both are failures of design.
My soon-to-be released book, Designing Nature's Half, begins from a simple premise: every social-ecological system occupies one finite landscape, within which ecological and human needs must be reconciled.
Despite the book’s title, that doesn't mean drawing a line across a map and giving half to people and half to nature.
Picture instead a connected patchwork across the landscape.
Some places may require strong protection because their ecological values are particularly sensitive to disturbance. Working lands and waters can sustain ecological functions alongside human uses. Degraded places can be restored and reconnected. Communities can grow, people can make their livelihoods, and infrastructure can serve human needs.
The goal is a landscape in which enough functioning natural areas remain connected across that patchwork for biodiversity and ecological processes to persist.
The challenge is figuring out how those pieces fit together.
One Landscape, Many Needs
That challenge is at the heart of 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People, an international initiative working toward landscapes where people, economies, and nature can thrive together.
Its shared vision brings together natural habitats, regenerative production and land use, and sustainable settlements, infrastructure, and industry. Landscape partnerships pursue those different uses while seeking benefits for human well-being, healthy nature, regenerative economies, and future generations.
Natural habitat.
Productive land.
Human settlements.
Not three different landscapes. One.
That's particularly worth remembering on World Habitat Day.
People need places to live. Nature needs places to live. Both depend on how we use the same finite landscape.
Making Room for Everyone
The conservation challenge becomes clearer when we recognize both needs honestly.
And we aren't starting with a blank map.
NatureServe's Biodiversity in Focus: The United States Edition found that 41 percent of U.S. ecosystem types are at risk of range-wide collapse. They also reported that 42 percent of land in the contiguous United States had already been converted to development, agriculture, or other human-altered landscapes (NatureServe 2023).
In other words, the challenge isn't simply deciding how to divide up what remains. It is deciding what must be protected, what can continue supporting both people and nature, and where ecological function needs to be restored.
Science increasingly tells us that biodiversity requires conservation at enormous scale. Designing Nature's Half uses 50 percent by 2050 (50x50) as a defensible, precautionary benchmark for ecological sufficiency.
Climate change gives that same ecological space additional work to do.
Connected landscapes must give species and ecological processes room to persist, move, and reorganize as conditions change. Those same functioning landscapes can also contribute to climate action by retaining carbon stores, avoiding emissions from ecosystem conversion and degradation, and continuing to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
One landscape. Multiple needs. Multiple benefits.
But conserving half doesn't mean fencing humanity out of half the planet.
It means designing that patchwork so enough functioning ecological space remains, in the right condition and configuration, for biodiversity and ecological processes to persist while human needs are accommodated across the same landscape.
Housing belongs in that conversation. So does food production. So does energy and transportation.
And so do rivers, wetlands, forests, grasslands, wildlife habitat, ecological connections, and the places nature may need as the climate changes.
The real question is not people or nature.
It is: What should go where?
From Competing Claims to Shared Design
This is where landscape-scale collaboration becomes important.
Instead of allowing thousands of individual decisions to determine the landscape piece by piece, bring together the people who live and work there, own land, exercise authority, run businesses, manage resources, and depend on that landscape.
Start with the whole place.
Where can housing expand while maintaining the ecological systems the larger landscape needs? Where must habitat remain connected? Where can restoration recover ecological function? Where can food production, energy, transportation, and other infrastructure occur with lower ecological cost?
And where are the unavoidable conflicts?
The answers will differ from one landscape to another. They also won't be produced by conservationists alone.
That is part of what makes 1000 Landscapes relevant. Its approach to integrated landscape management (ILM) brings stakeholders together to develop a shared understanding and long-term vision, then identify strategies and actions capable of advancing multiple objectives across the landscape.
Landscape conservation design (LCD) addresses this shared challenge from a conservation-design perspective.
It provides an architecture for making those choices together.
Stakeholders bring different rights, responsibilities, knowledge, and interests to the same landscape. Through an integrated design process, they can assess conditions, explore alternative landscape configurations, and establish shared direction for the landscape they are trying to create.
The approaches are not identical.
But they share an important conviction:
The future of a landscape should not simply be whatever remains after everyone has pursued their interests separately.
Enough Room
World Habitat Day asks us to think about the places people call home.
Conservation asks us to think about the places nature calls home.
Maybe those were never separate questions. We share one finite landscape.
We need homes and communities. Food and livelihoods. Energy and transportation.
And we need enough functioning nature for biodiversity—and ultimately ourselves—to persist.
The challenge isn't deciding whose habitat matters. It all matters.
Our challenge is to design landscapes with enough room for everyone.
Book Update
Designing Nature's Half: An Architecture for Conserving 50% by 2050 is now in production. The completed manuscript is being formatted for development of the proofreading copy, with work also underway on photographs, figures, and other elements of the finished book. Advance Review Copies (ARC) are expected later this month.
This week's essay also reflects an important addition to the finished manuscript: a new chapter examining 50x50 as a committed climate response strategy, and how conserving functioning landscapes at that scale can support climate adaptation and mitigation alongside ecological sufficiency.
Learn more about Designing Nature's Half
