National Geographic Live: Uncovering Our Concrete Jungle with Chris Schell
Urban ecologist Chris Schell reveals how coyotes, foxes, and raccoons adapt to city life, and how American history has quietly shaped urban wildlife patterns.
Why we picked this
Schell's research connects environmental justice to urban wildlife in ways that make you see your neighborhood differently — this is ecology that starts in your backyard and ends up rewriting the story of American cities.
Chris Schell is a UC Berkeley biologist whose research takes him not into remote wilderness but into American cities — studying how coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and other wildlife are adapting to the urban environments humans have built around them. What he’s found goes well beyond behavioral biology. The patterns of how wildlife move through cities, which neighborhoods they avoid, and where they thrive track closely with the history of redlining and environmental racism that shaped American urban geography in the 20th century. The animals, it turns out, remember the maps.
The National Geographic Live format brings that research to Benaroya Hall through cinematic imagery and fieldwork footage — the kind of visual storytelling that makes ecological data feel immediate. Schell is a compelling presence who bridges the scientific and the political without losing rigor in either direction. His work has appeared in Science and earned recognition from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he speaks about it with the directness of someone who understands exactly why it matters.
The social justice thread running through Schell’s urban ecology is not incidental. He argues that the same forces that concentrated pollution and denied green space in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods also created the wildlife corridors and behavioral patterns we see today. Understanding cities as ecosystems means reckoning with the full history of how those ecosystems were built.