Canary in the Mine - Urban Thoughts

This is no easy task since lots of time the land is paved and/or manicured so much so that the breadth of biodiversity is narrow and it’s hard to determine how things are affected until it shows up in humans which would mean it’s too late to be prevention. I’ve been thinking about Urban Ecology and how to determine land health in toxic neighborhoods.

Much like the Cananea (Peña, Mexican Americans and the environment) being at the forefront of using the Canary in the Mine as an early indication of danger. I think we need a Canary type organism for measuring the health of urban land. We know that certain frog and fish can be an indication of dangerous waterways, the canary is a good indication to mine conditions and Pikas are good indications to high altitude environmental changes. If we could figure out an animal that can be introduced to test if an area is toxic or find different types of organisms that can be used as an indication of the health of the land. I’m not sure what kind of organism is appropriate, something with a faster metabolism that humans would be pertinent, and perhaps something that eats other animals so at to biomagnify any toxics. Perhaps there could even be a set of animals, one for air quality and one for soil quality (earthworm?) and one for air quality testing. This line of thinking is more complicated than I thought when started this thesis. I just think that it could be an alternative to expensive and often out of reach tests that can be performed to figure out similar information.