Island Endemics and Tourism Development

What do a catfish and a tropical vacation on a remote island have in common? Most people might guess that a fancy fish dinner is the answer. From my experiences, those people would be wrong.

I spent this past summer traveling abroad to Singapore and Malaysia where I took part in a senior honor's course in Biodiversity. This course focused on a week of field work we completed on an island off the coast of Malaysia.While taking in all the cultural diversity and beauty of the garden city of Singapore, my fellow classmates from around the world and I devised a research project to discover more about the distribution, abundance, and habitat preferences of a species of catfish, Clarias batu, found only on our island destination of Pulau Tioman.

Clarius batu, also known as the Walking Catfish.

Pulau Tioman, courtesy of Google Maps.

C. batu  is a relatively new species, discovered in 1999, that can only be found in the low-land drainages in fast-flowing, rocky mesohabitats. A rare species with limited available habitat is one that may become extinct at the smallest environmental change. And unluckily for these fish and other rare species, P. Tioman-- with its tropical reefs and dense rainforest-- is quickly becoming an island destination for vacationing.

While the official website for the island (www.tioman.org) states that development is relatively low, I know from a second hand account that ten years ago, the island was almost completely unoccupied by humans. However, on my recent visit I found that resorts, taxis, and tourists abounded. I even saw construction taking place!

Active construction of a building only approximately fifteen minutes from the C. batu habitat.

Could this eminent development, however slow, spell trouble for C. batu and all the other island endemic species?

During my week of research, my research team and I examined two streams in a drainage on the west side of the island. We needed only to exit the resort walk for about fifteen minutes through the jungle to get to one of the streams that the catfish calls home. The other stream where the fish populations were more dense actually had a foot path that ran along it, which often brought us face-to-face with hiking tourists during our field work.

Images from the two streams sampled in the Sungei Paya Drainage on the west side of P. Tioman.

This species of fish, so precariously holding on to it's place in this world, could so easily lose its grip with the addition of a few larger hotels, an extension to the current resort, or even a much needed public service, like a water filtration plant that could raise the native's standard of living. What a conundrum for the rare species, found no where else on earth.

Some might argue that the amount of development needed to completely obliterate C. batu will never come to be. Others might say that this species is so similar to other Clarius species that it is of no significance anyway, or that human quality of life comes first.

I feel that the discovery of this new species is an exciting opportunity to learn more about evolution, biodiversity, and the prevention of extinction. I feel that everything possible should be done to protect this species (while still allowing the native occupation of the island and some ecotourism) and further research should be done to map out its habitat more clearly. However, I am sure that Malaysia does not have the strict environmental impact policies and protections that we have in California, and so the fate of this species and others like it may be entirely up to tourism and the free market.

Human Health Impacted by Surroundings: Why the Obvious Bears Repeating

Human health is profoundly impacted by where and how people live. Seems like I've just stated the blatantly obvious,right? Yet, for Planning and Development professionals, this is a relatively new idea and one that could greatly enhance social equality and environmental justice.

Allow me to backtrack: As a freshman, I took an Intro to Geography class. One of the main ideas that has stuck with me to this day (besides the interesting concept of three-dimensional time-space mapping) is that people tend to only travel minimal distances in day-to-day life. Imagine a circumference set in your community with your home at the origin. Now imagine the end destinations of your daily travel on the circumference of this circle. The diameter of such a circle might be twenty miles or less on an average day, with work and shopping and all other errands contained neatly in the circle.

This idea extends to city planning, where it can create some undesirable consequences:  If healthy options are farther than unhealthy ones, people will opt for the unhealthy ones simply because they require less effort to obtain. For example, stores that provide healthy food options may be outside the reach of the urban poor in so called "food deserts". Children without readily accessible or safe parks and open spaces will opt to stay inside or else risk danger or injury. Communities without access to reliable transportation to centers of employment have higher levels of poverty and disease then those with access. The list goes on and on.

Katharine Logan notes in her article "Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You" that public health can be positively impacted by planning efforts from grassroots to regional plans, as long as common sense is applied. Logan outlines some paradigms that are already embracing the duality of place and well-being; LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) promotes environmental and public health, and Health-Impact Assessments (HIA)--much like EIA of the CEQA-- works towards the same goal.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that community design has a significant impact on the following aspects of public health:

• Physical activity
• Injury
• Access to healthy food
• Air and water quality
• The effects of climate change
• Mental health
• Strength of social fabric
• Equity of access to livelihood
• Education
• Resources

While some of these topics are better understood than the others, Logan illustrates that as long as they are all considered in planning and development practices, that is good enough for now-- measuring them is not strictly necessary at this point.While Logan also shows that an interdisciplinary team of designers and planners is the ideal, a less diverse team could make the grade just by using common sense.

LEED-ND was designed with public-health in mind at the neighborhood scale. Simply by completing projects with a LEED-ND certification, raised levels of public-health and social equality follow suit. This is  especially true since improving neighborhood design benefits those who cannot provide for themselves most, including the elderly, children, the disabled, and the impoverised.

Case Study: Near Westside Neighborhood, Syracuse, New York
Near Westside was once the third-poorest neighborhood in New York, but coupled environmental and health sustainability restoration by Near Westside Initiative (a local nonprofit) earned it gold-level LEED-ND certification. The goals for Near Westside were to make it safer, more walkable, and engaging. These goals were met by boosting investment in Mainstreet: funds were given to instate a clinic and independent grocery store, playground, bikepaths, and a rewards programs for healthy eating (redeemable for recreation or exercise equipment). By increasing the livability of the urban design in this neighborhood, health, communication, and other social capital were increased (Logan 2).

Similar cases from around the country prove that environment and health go hand-in-hand:

A rapid HIA prompted the Denver Housing Authority to compose the Mariposa Healthy Living Toolkit, which uses six sectors (housing, transportation, stewardship, social cohesion, services and amenities, and economy) to document current health and assess impacts of development. This toolkit is state-of-the-art: it creates new jobs, provides environmentally friendly options for all incomes levels, and ensures "walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented development" (Logan 3).

Seattle's Healthy Living Assessment (HLA) is another noteworthy planning toolkit and one that investigates how people live in their environments. The HLA not only broadens the mind of the average planner,
taking human preference and interest into account, but opens the channels of communication between designers and the people they design for, making public and environmental health on the community scale achievable (Logan 4).

Finally, the grassroots effort that began to change the Watts neighborhood of LA from a dangerous and impoverished area to one of sustainable, safe, and community oriented design (Logan 5).

So what?

Logan's article is especially interesting to me as someone who has advocated for both environmental and human health. It has always seemed that the two are inseparable; a person cannot be healthy unless the environment (in every spacial scale) is healthy. If her article is an indication of anything, it is that all these LEED-ND's and HIA's and HLA's will lead us to a healthier future, one in which all planning and design is environmentally based and concerned with the well-being of all.

As I stated in the beginning, humans tend to settle and stay relatively put in their daily lives. It is therefore vital that these small spacial areas be able to meet the needs of the human and support healthy lifestyles. In this vein, a typical neighborhood would need to be mixed-use (good riddance to strip-malls and sub-divisions and an auto-dominant society) with clinics, stores selling local produce, bike paths and walk ways, parks and play areas away from any roads yet near to housing, local employment below high-rise multifamily homes, and good public transportation. This is my extremely abridged notion of the perfect place to live. Everything one needs should be close enough at hand that one never feels deprived of healthy choices while staying inside the daily circle (which may even shrink in such an extreme case of new urbanism), yet one is presented with more options to get out, stay fit, and enjoy community connections that would otherwise not be fostered in an environment that is significantly less stressful.

Yet I must ask, why has it taken so long for designers and planners to realize this vital and glaringly evident fact? With such major crises in our past like Love Canal, how could it take so long for this notion to take hold? Whatever the reason, at least concerned citizens such as myself can take comfort in the fact that change is happening; planners and developers are realizing that health and environment must be regarded together and are forging the tools to do so.

 Reference:
 Logan, Katharine. GreenSource, Aug/July 2013. Web. 25 September 2013. http://ce.construction.com/article.php?L=5&C=1118&P=3