How Pando Supports LA’s Biodiversity

When I studied urban and regional planning in graduate school during the early 1980s, I never learned about “biodiversity.” But neither did anyone else at that time because the word didn’t exist then. Now, forty years later, there are a multitude of major studies, plans, policies, and programs addressing issues of biodiversity. California and Los Angeles are places with exceptional levels of biodiversity and exceptional efforts to retain those levels. One of the most important such efforts is currently in the works, a set of policies being created for the City of Los Angeles City as the first “local biodiversity strategy and action plan” in the United States.

Throughout this year, I’ll be contributing blogs regarding the history of work on biodiversity and the role that Pando Populus will be playing to advance biodiversity. In this first biodiversity blog, it’s appropriate to honor the role that John B. Cobb, Jr., the Founding Board Chair of Pando Populus, played in initiating global interest and support for biodiversity work. 

1986 was the year in which the word “biodiversity” was introduced to the public. In that year, the National Academy of Sciences and Smithsonian Institution hosted a “National Forum on BioDiversity,” held in Washington D.C. for four days in September. Two years later in 1988, the papers delivered at that forum were published in a book edited by the noted biologist E.O. Wilson. Not only did this forum and book contribute a new word to our vocabulary, but they represented a genuine paradigm shift in the way the world would approach large-scale, ecological issues. Put simply, the shift was away from a primary focus on how to protect individual threatened species to a focus on how to maintain and cultivate healthy ecosystems.

One of the contributors to the forum and book was our own Professor Cobb. He was featured with a group of speakers addressing “Ways of Seeing the Biosphere.” These speakers contributed a humanities perspective to the scientific work reflected in the other presentations. Writing as a theologian, Cobb acknowledged the problematic ways in which the Christian faith had in the past too easily supported human efforts to dominate and exploit nature and how it needed to be reformed to be supportive of biodiversity. His concluding remarks provided a strong alternative to past practices of domination and exploitation:

This book’s content expresses a profoundly biblical view of the relation of human beings to the other species who with us constitute the biodiversity of the world. It recognizes that we human beings do exercise a determinative power over other creatures. Whether hundreds of thousands of species survive depends on the decisions of humans. It would be pointless to deny that we exercise dominion. But unlike so many who have asserted their dominion, we are acknowledging that with power comes responsibility – specifically to God. To wipe out unnecessarily whole species of those creatures over whom we exercise stewardship is to deny that stewardship and to impoverish the experience of God. It is a crime against our Creator.   

 E.O. Wilson (ed.), BIODIVERSITY (National Academy of Sciences, 1988), pp. 484, 485.

Although Cobb was a Christian theologian, his expansive and profound ideas regarding environmental issues were embraced by countless numbers of people throughout the world devoted to the effort to create an “ecological civilization.” My blogs this year will chronicle how Pando Populus will be contributing to this endeavor in several ways:

• Representing Pando Populus, I have been appointed to the Biodiversity Expert Council for the City of Los Angeles. Working with their Department of Sanitation and Environment (LASAN), I will be helping to craft the City’s local biodiversity strategy and action plan.

• I am writing a new e-book to be entitled Biodiversity Planning in Metropolitan Los Angeles. This will be a sequel to my 2024 e-book, Sustainability Planning in Metropolitan Los Angeles. In a way analogous to the previous e-book, the new one will highlight and connect the myriad major studies, plans, and programs that can inform biodiversity work in the Los Angeles Area. Those topics will be considered at six different geographic levels: international, national, state, regional, county, and city.

• The Pando Days educational program for 2025-26 will feature a spotlight on biodiversity issues and student/faculty projects to strengthen biodiversity, especially using guidance from the City’s new Local Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan.

Biodiversity is one of those issues that can provoke a glass half-empty or half-full response. On the empty side, the challenges and threats are enormous; but on the full side, the energy and insights into biodiversity over the span of forty years are also enormous. Los Angeles is privileged to be at the epicenter of creative ways to address both the challenges and the threats, many of which are woven into the other major issues that the city and region of LA are currently facing.

Wildfires? We now have a good idea of what kinds of plants are more likely to be flammable, and how more mindful landscaping and landscape management can reduce fire risk. Water management? We now know that cultivation of biodiverse natural systems can often reduce flooding more cost-effectively than expensive infrastructure projects of concrete and steel. Environmental justice? We now can measure how improved vegetation patterns can reduce heat island effects in previously underserved neighborhoods. These are among the biodiversity issues we’ll be exploring in the year to come and beyond.