Chapter 3
Historical Ecology of Societal Nucleation
and Collapse
William Balée
3.1 Introduction
From the perspective of historical ecology, cities are physical, social, and economic
examples of highly anthropically modified terrain, including its vegetation cover,
faunal abundance, drainage features, soil composition, and microbial diversity. I
have called this an example of primary landscape transformation, when the whole is
taken into view; there are also numerous examples within the city of secondary
landscape transformations, such as urban gardens. The historical ecology of megacities could be considered “baroque” (Ong 2006), an appropriate epithet for the
complexity involved in its understanding and its ontology. If a city is a minimum of
10,000 people per square kilometer (Wilkinson 2016),
1 a megacity of today, in
principle, is an agglomeration—in a cubic sense, of course—of at least 1,000
minimal cities. Although megacities are recent phenomena, dating only from the
mid-twentieth century (Schubel and Levi 2000), the types of societal nucleation and
landscape transformation associated with them are not unprecedented; for several
reasons I will discuss here, they are not necessarily unsustainable.
W. Balée (*)
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA
e-mail: wbalee@tulane.edu
1 Cities have been called fourth magnitude settlements, using base 10, where 10
4 ¼ 10,000;
similarly, towns are third magnitude settlements (with c. 1000 people) and villages are second
magnitude settlements (with c. 100 people) (Wilkinson [2016], Appendix A).
© Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2021
S. Muramatsu et al. (eds.), Living in the Megacity: Towards Sustainable Urban
Environments, Global Environmental Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56901-5_3
35
Historical Ecology of Societal Nucleation
and Collapse
William Balée
3.1 Introduction
From the perspective of historical ecology, cities are physical, social, and economic
examples of highly anthropically modified terrain, including its vegetation cover,
faunal abundance, drainage features, soil composition, and microbial diversity. I
have called this an example of primary landscape transformation, when the whole is
taken into view; there are also numerous examples within the city of secondary
landscape transformations, such as urban gardens. The historical ecology of megacities could be considered “baroque” (Ong 2006), an appropriate epithet for the
complexity involved in its understanding and its ontology. If a city is a minimum of
10,000 people per square kilometer (Wilkinson 2016),
1 a megacity of today, in
principle, is an agglomeration—in a cubic sense, of course—of at least 1,000
minimal cities. Although megacities are recent phenomena, dating only from the
mid-twentieth century (Schubel and Levi 2000), the types of societal nucleation and
landscape transformation associated with them are not unprecedented; for several
reasons I will discuss here, they are not necessarily unsustainable.
W. Balée (*)
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA
e-mail: wbalee@tulane.edu
1 Cities have been called fourth magnitude settlements, using base 10, where 10
4 ¼ 10,000;
similarly, towns are third magnitude settlements (with c. 1000 people) and villages are second
magnitude settlements (with c. 100 people) (Wilkinson [2016], Appendix A).
© Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2021
S. Muramatsu et al. (eds.), Living in the Megacity: Towards Sustainable Urban
Environments, Global Environmental Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56901-5_3
35