Repairing Ecology in a Concrete Jungle: What Has the Studio Called "Urban Wilderness" Been Doing in Shanghai? | 100 People With Ideas

They are a group of people racing against time and urbanization.

In Shanghai's Pudong district there is a 3,000-square-meter ecological conservation area. Next to the sweep of national parks and nature reserves, this one — smaller than half a soccer field — looks cramped, wedged between an elevated highway and a housing estate. Yet it holds 260 native plant species and 180 native animal species, with Indian fritillaries, red ring skirt butterflies, flat stag beetles, and money frogs coming and going.

Urban Wilderness Studio built it. In 2015, working with the Pudong Greening Bureau, they created the Yijiayuan Ecological Conservation Area: they stripped out the existing lawn, then designed, managed, and stocked the site from scratch. Unlike conventional landscapers, they had no "plant shopping list" to tick off. As urbanization and human activity have spread, native species have kept disappearing.

Inside the reserve, the bamboo-leaf pepper planted to bring butterflies back came from an island in Lake Tai; its leaves feed the caterpillars of many species. "You can't find it in Shanghai anymore," says Guo Taoran, 30, one of the studio's founders. In an interview with QDaily, he described how they track down native species at the edges and in the corners of a modern city.

It sounds like a modern version of the plant hunter story: centuries ago, botanists with a taste for adventure sailed to unknown lands aboard the Endeavour and carried seeds home to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where botanists still collect seed systematically today.

For Guo Taoran and his colleagues, the unknown land is Shanghai itself.

I

Cenbu Village sits on the shore of Dianshan Lake in Shanghai's western suburbs, one of Urban Wilderness Studio's survey sites. In recent years the village has grown busy because of its fireflies, and the crowds have sent firefly numbers plunging.

Here Guo Taoran and his colleagues found water fern (Ceratopteris thalictroides), a class-II nationally protected plant, and the aquatic dwarf arrowhead (Sagittaria pygmaea). In one stretch of ditch they also found duck-lettuce (Ottelia alismoides), an annual of the frogbit family. According to the "Shanghai Digital Flora," published in 2016, duck-lettuce, once native to Shanghai, is now extremely rare.

The field notes they post on their official account make for good reading. The duck-lettuce at Cenbu Village showed a fierce will to live: its roots had rotted and the plant floated free in the water, a single lonely flower "struggling on" in a press of hornwort. A trip to Bailonggang was more of a slog and turned up one species only, a grass called rat-tail dropseed (Sporobolus fertilis) — not every scouting trip pays off. Guo Taoran, who studied philosophy, digresses for a few lines to describe the "other" Shanghai: tidal flats, reed beds, and Asia's largest sewage plant, which treats the wastewater of 3.56 million people a day.

In early 2018 they moved their plant base to Minhang District on the city's outskirts, a 4-mu greenhouse of about 2,700 square meters where the plants and seeds from field surveys are gathered to breed and set seed. The seeds are cleaned, sorted, and dried, then sealed in a refrigerator with desiccant and oxygen absorbers. The studio now has its own seed bank, with more than 120 species so far. Many of them exist in small numbers, and some have already been selected and planted in the Yijiayuan reserve.

At Yijiayuan every plant on the original lawn was dug out. The point of this heavy intervention was to wipe out invasive species. A survey of Shanghai's plants by the Chenshan Plant Science Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai found that about 290 native species with very small ranges and low numbers have probably vanished already, while the number of invasive species has risen from 279 to 367.

"A few years ago there was a news story about people who bought a plot of land and did nothing with it, just let it grow wild. It sounds romantic, but look at the photos and everything growing freely is an invasive like Canada goldenrod." Guo now regrets that the early intervention was not heavy enough — they never applied a soil sealant — because clearing newly sprouted invasives is one of the reserve's routine chores.

Repairing ecology in a concrete jungle sounds like a romantic slogan, but the problems Guo Taoran and his colleagues face go well beyond that. Existing municipal works are one. The Yijiayuan reserve used to be a lawn, and a military cable ran under one of its ponds, so they had to dig a new pond elsewhere to avoid it.

Bringing in insects is no simpler. Reviving butterflies is not technically hard: Tim Wong, an aquatic biologist in California, spent three years bringing back the rare California pipevine swallowtail. He borrowed the butterfly's food plant, California pipevine, from a botanical garden in another city, found caterpillars outside town, and built a simulated habitat in his own backyard, out of reach of predators such as spiders and earwigs. The backyard experiment went smoothly, and he now sends out the swallowtails he has bred.

The Pudong reserve is a more complicated place. Insects drawn to light, such as the Chinese moon moth, fly at the streetlights on the elevated highway alongside it, and artificial light also disturbs insects that mate at night.

On the other side of the reserve is a housing estate. Someone secretly set cage traps — homemade gear for catching crayfish — in the ponds. Last year, when staff changed the water in a pond, they found the fish fry they had released almost all gone; Guo Taoran suspects electrofishing, which does far more damage.

After more than two years of work, this miniature reserve has taken shape. By the standards of conventional landscaping it is not pretty: no trimmed lawn, no clipped shrubs. What pleases Guo Taoran and his colleagues is the growing number of butterflies, beetles, and frogs, and the aquatic plants that now rise and fall in turn.

II

Jin Xingbao is a former director of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. She once hosted a German specialist from Singapore's National Parks Board who said he had no interest in "anything man-made." Rather than the piecemeal displays inside a museum, he wanted to find something genuinely wild in Shanghai. The Yijiayuan reserve became one stop of wildness within the city.

In an interview with Urban China magazine, Jin Xingbao talked about the difference. Museum displays, she said, lean more and more on sound, light, and other technical effects — dazzling on the surface, thin underneath. She pointed to the Schulbiologiezentrum Hannover, a school biology center in Germany, where guides show visitors the death of a piece of deadwood, peel back the bark to explain the insects inside, hunt for living things in fallen leaves, or watch birds build nests among bare branches. The food chain there is vivid and concrete.

At Yijiayuan, deadwood is likewise never carted away. Guo Taoran even hauls in willow branches snapped off by wind outside the park, drills holes in them, and seeds them with fungus; as the rotting wood breaks down it becomes a home for stag beetle larvae and other insects. "Shanghai used to have plenty of rhinoceros beetles and flower chafers, but leaf litter was cleared too often and their larvae couldn't survive. Over time the soil lost its organic matter too, and got poorer and poorer." The reserve's rule, Guo Taoran says, is that anything that enters it decomposes there — "even in death, it stays inside."

In recent years natural history has become something of a fashionable field, and the number of groups running nature-education programs has slowly grown. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Alxa SEE Foundation have funded organizations like Urban Wilderness Studio, which hold forums and events and have become agenda-setters.

The city's interest in natural history goes back much further. In 1906 Tang Qiwang, a native of Fujian, was hired by the Shanghai Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Zikawei Museum (later renamed the Aurora Museum); five generations of the Tang family worked full time making specimens. To make fish specimens they staked out the wet markets, and some fishmongers would even bring them odd catches unprompted.

A journalist once looked back at the aura of the old Shanghai Natural History Museum: the guides who stood in front of the public also did the work behind it — collecting, researching, and studying species — so that when they faced visitors they could offer plenty of seemingly useless information that was nonetheless enough to spark curiosity. Even the way the cases were arranged and the labels written had a human touch rather than a chill. That is rare in today's museums, where the division of labor keeps getting finer.

Official and grassroots groups doing natural-history education are both on the rise in Shanghai. Unlike the low-threshold tours built on games and experiences, the birdwatching society, the firefly conservation volunteer group, and Urban Wilderness Studio have drawn in people of every age.

At the new Shanghai Natural History Museum, Urban Wilderness Studio designed a series of guided courses for the "Shanghai Story" hall. Next to the museum's crowd-pulling halls, "Shanghai Story" is quiet; many people assume Shanghai has no good natural environment and no animals or plants worth noticing. Zhou Yin, a full-time instructor at the studio, uses this hall to explain the wildlife hidden in Shanghai, how it breeds and survives, and the countless threads that tie it to human life.

Schoolchildren and their parents are Urban Wilderness Studio's regulars, and its events usually fill up fast. Zhou Yin has a doctorate in botany from Fudan University and studies the reproductive ecology and evolutionary biology of aquatic plants; to the children he is "Brother Frog." Guo Taoran, a philosophy graduate of Shanghai University, was handed an equally childish name for his love of insects: "Brother Bug."

In 2017 they worked with a primary school in Putuo District on a course about the link between Shanghai's native species and city life — from food, clothing, shelter, and transport to the timber used to build houses. The camphor chest made for a bride's dowry came from the native camphor tree; reeds could be woven into toys. The stuff of everyday work and life carries a city's history in it.

Spices are another small opening into daily life that they have found, a way into the ties between the spice trade and the history of colonialism. Magellan clashed with Indigenous Filipinos over cloves and nutmeg and died from a poisoned arrow, but his fleet carried the spices back to Spain. What Zhang Qian brought back from the Western Regions is now ordinary on Chinese tables: garlic, then called "barbarian garlic."

A passage they wrote about spices gives a sense of how they tell the story of nature:

"Spices have traits in common: they are small, hard to keep, and hard to get. The English word 'spice' carries a sense of being unique and irreplaceable, and shares a root with 'special.' What makes a spice a spice is, in the end, its chemical compounds. Plants use them against pests, yet they proved powerfully alluring to humans. People used spices not only in religious rites and sacrifices but also to preserve food. Because they were rare and precious, they became a status symbol for the upper classes. The black pepper Columbus set out to find was known at the time as black gold."

III

Urban Wilderness Studio once produced A Field Guide to Shanghai's Nocturnal Wildlife and gave away 4,000 copies. Tracking and photographing the city's night creatures took them three years. The guide also recommends several places around Shanghai to watch them. This year Shanghai Educational Publishing House will publish it, but before that, the studio set out in detail what equipment night observation takes and how to do it properly, without disturbing the insects' lives.

Nature observation is the studio's most popular course. Last May they invited 12 primary school pupils and their parents to look for fireflies in a wood in Fengxian. Jiang Long, founder of the Firefly Conservation Group, found this wood, and it is the largest natural firefly habitat known in Shanghai.

In the age of social media, word of a firefly habitat spreads fast online. City dwellers are hungry to get close to nature, but the sudden crowds put the fireflies in danger.

In June 2017 one of Guo Taoran's colleagues was scouting a stand of southern magnolia in Fengxian, little touched by people, and found a mating pair of fireflies in the leaf litter — later confirmed as a male and female glow-worm firefly. Shanghai had a record of the glow-worm firefly in 1982; besides the yellow-veined firefly and the banded-back firefly, it is the third native firefly species found in the city. Its females cannot fly and range very little. "Maybe they have lived here a very long time. Perhaps glow-worm fireflies once lived in many parts of Shanghai and vanished with the changing environment before anyone found them."

In a WeChat post, Guo Taoran explained their hesitation: they worried that once news of the discovery got out, "insect enthusiasts" would descend on the place.

"But on the other hand, we want more of the public to know, because this site is zoned as future parkland, and once construction starts it will inevitably destroy the habitat. Maybe the day the park opens will be the moment the glow-worm firefly disappears from Shanghai."

Shanghai has begun building suburban country parks in an effort to protect its natural landscape, but many scholars complain that because such projects involve contracts, nursery stock, and many interests, parks meant to limit construction and human activity end up as construction projects themselves.

Next to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in Pudong lies a patch of secondary wetland that urban development forgot for more than a decade. It has no street number; people simply call it "the little wetland by the science museum." For a while it was a favorite site for nature-observation programs run by official and grassroots groups across the city. Last year the planning notice went public: the site will become the Shanghai Museum (East), paired with three commercial towers.

The fate of the little wetland has drawn in urban-planning scholars, architects, natural scientists, and nature-education groups. Some scholars have proposed, in design terms, raising the whole building on piers to keep the wetland underneath; others object that this would not really protect it. People have argued over whether urban development and natural wildness can be balanced, but for now the research and feasibility work is thin. Against "high-efficiency" development, the little wetland is already a swan song.

Species conservationists like Guo Taoran seem to be forever racing the clock.

(Except where otherwise credited, all images in this article were provided by Urban Wilderness Studio. Cover image: Takao 599 Museum, Paul Jarvis on Unsplash)