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| Mehahlaula Choir members, Melville Koppies. Photo: Wendy Carstens. |
The Veld & Flora centrefold
factsheet by Wendy Carstens in the June 2014 issue covers the topics The Science of
Nature, Natural therapy, A diversity of users,
Community spirit and School of the wild. With more than half the world’s
population living in cities, it is important to make cities more attractive,
more liveable for all communities and more sustainable. Everyone needs to have
a relationship with nature! We need to re-claim nature from dusty shelves in
ivory towers and shake off the belief that it only occurs in faraway
human-excluded game reserves and forests. Nature occurs in cities too – on pavements,
vegetable gardens and open spaces. Having a large natural area within a city,
open to all citizens, like the beautiful urban nature reserve of Melville
Koppies in Johannesburg, ticks all the right boxes.
Download the factsheet here.
Read more about urban nature areas in these articles. Click on the title to download.
The appeal of proteas by Wendy Carstens, Veld & Flora 99 (4), p. 198, Dec. 2013.
“The nature of man”: a history of MelvilleKoppies in Veld
& Flora 98 (2), p. 76, 2012.
More
essential reading:
Rambunctious garden: Saving nature in a post-wild world by Emma Marris, (Bloomsbury, New York)
and the online journal by Joshua Tewksbury et
al Natural history’s place in science and society Bioscience.
Interesting
websites are www.jhbcityparks.com and
www.mk.org.za.
An
increasing number of digital platforms encourage participation in the exchange
of natural history information, a welcome move towards a more collaborative
approach to observing and understanding our world. See iSpot and the Animal Demography Unit’s Virtual Museums at http:// vmus.adu.org.za.
