September 28, 2015|By Will Allen
When I started my career at The Conservation Fund about 20 years ago, cities and nature were usually seen as two separate things. Many strategic conservation planning efforts focused on finding the best places to protect nature from people. But as Dr. David Maddox, the founder of Nature in Cities accurately proclaims, “Cities are ecosystems of people, nature, and infrastructure.” Thankfully that reality is now being acknowledged and an exciting and expanding movement is emerging to connect people to nature and to invest in green infrastructure that helps make cities sustainable, resilient, and livable.
One strategy to link people and nature is through protection of nature next to cities—creating defined edges or transition zones between developed areas and their surrounding natural areas and working landscapes. Another strategy to link people and nature is through integration of nature into cities—purposefully protecting and restoring green infrastructure inside urban areas, including the reuse of vacant and underutilized lands.

One emerging initiative dedicated to promoting these urban and green design strategies is the Ecological Places in Cities (EPiC) network. The mission of this initiative is “to provide people living in cities with resources to harmonize people, wildlife, natural and working landscapes and to cultivate the love of life and living systems.” Founded in April 2014, EPiC is focused on establishing a common framework for connecting nature and people in cities and to the broader landscape through education, research, wildlife conservation, habitat restoration, green infrastructure planning, and community revitalization.

I am currently serving on the EPiC “Core Team” that is in the midst of refining the initiative’s targeted goals and objectives as well as crafting a strategic plan. While work on EPiC is just beginning, it has embraced a green infrastructure framework to promote urban and green design at regional, community, and site scales.
While EPiC is currently focused on the Midwest US, it has the potential and ambition to scale to a nationwide network in the future. This ambition is well illustrated by one of EPiC’s initial focus projects, “Milkweeds for Monarchs”: a multi-city landscape conservation design to protect and restore Monarch butterfly habitat and migratory corridors. By promoting planting gardens that support and attract monarchs in backyards and municipal sites around cities, this project hopes to both increase the dwindling monarch butterfly population and to revitalize communities through reconnecting people with nature in urban areas.
With projects like this, EPiC is helping realize their vision of “an interconnected network of cities and landscapes where people live in harmony with nature.” That’s pretty epic if you ask me!