Orphan Spaces

We Islanders live amid what environmental scholars call orphan spaces.  Examples of these spaces might be the land inside a power-line easement, a neglected field growing invasive plants, or the strip alongside your parking place when you go uptown.

To be clear, orphan spaces aren’t necessarily abandoned.  Businesses, governments, and people (maybe including you) own them.  Many are “managed,” though what that means in their case beggars the term.  Mostly, orphan spaces are just overlooked and hold no perceived value, though some may serve a basic function—say, a roadside ditch that channels runoff.

It turns out we need these neglected spaces for their potential environmental value.  Over the last decade, some environmental thinkers have been pointing out that, even if we retain and increase all possible large-scale conservation spaces—wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, nature preserves, national parks—we still won’t have conserved space enough to offset the damage to native species, habitat, and ecosystems caused by human action.  Preserve as many of the grand and pristine places as are left (yes, please!), and you still won’t have preserved enough for this purpose.

So experts have started considering other places where we might create less grand but equally necessary ecosystem preserves.  One category of such places?  Yep, orphan spaces.  Maybe that lowly parking strip mentioned earlier can, with restoration, start contributing to climate-change abatement.  Or maybe the shoreline at a county road-end, now cluttered with junk and invasives, can become a thriving mini-marsh.  The idea is that all these small, neglected spaces, once restored and working ecologically, can add up to something powerfully beneficial.

Some critics say this is ridiculous thinking for being so small-scale and so naively upbeat.  Nature everywhere and in tiny pockets!  Aw, how cute.  This criticism misses the point.  Orphan-space conservationists aren’t opposing large-scale conservation or mid-scale conservation of the type the Land Trust undertakes.  They’re merely saying that small-scale conservation is an indispensable part of the whole conservation picture.

The best benefit of orphan-space restoration might simply be that it re-introduces natural spaces to where we actually live.  Many Americans are led to believe by our cultural narrative that “real” nature exists only in pure and picturesque places, often far away, monumental in scale, and devoid of people.  They’re told to go there for recreation, get their fix of nature, then return to where they live, which is inside physical spaces designed primarily for human function and little else.  (Some of us are lucky and live on an island with mid-scale natural spaces close to home and easy to visit.)  But why not cultivate some natural spaces that are ultra-local, such that you’re micro-dosing on nature every time you go out your door, benefiting from what’s provided by restored orphan spaces just by living your everyday life?

This line of thinking should encourage landowners to address the orphan spaces on their own property. Restoring them to a healthy natural state means you’re doing quite a bit for the Island and yourself, as insignificant as your work may seem in isolation.