The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land
Session One: Nature and the City
Panel Discussion
Recorded September 26, 2014
The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land was a symposium on rethinking land and its value in light of climate change organized by The Architectural League and co-sponsored by The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design in September 2014.
The Nature and the City panel brought together two experts in ecological history to present New York City’s natural history and development and debate how we value — or don’t value — nature today.
In conversation with Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director of The Architectural League, Eric Sanderson and Ted Steinberg discuss the role of politics and economics in the transformation of the natural environment, debating how to take ecological decisions out of the hands of class interests and into the public realm. Concerned about the lack of creative ecological thinking and the outsized role of the real estate industry in determining the shape of the city, Sanderson seeks to reform the regulatory and tax measures that govern development while Steinberg focuses on the danger of sea level rise and the sizable amount of development within hurricane evacuation zones.
Eric Sanderson is an expert in the ecology of New York City, a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and the best-selling author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (2009) and Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs (2013).
Ted Steinberg is Professor of History and Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University. His new book Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York (2014) examines the ecological changes that have resulted in the reality of present-day New York City.
The Five Thousand Pound Life (5KL) is an initiative of The Architectural League on new ways of thinking, talking, and acting on architecture, climate change, and our economic future.
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