The title does a very effective job of conflating the goal of benefit for humans with the goal of benefit for "wildlife." Probably intentional, possibly with good intentions, but definitely a bonanza for the green roof industry trade association whose message is uncritically trumpeted in the first three paragraphs.

Yep, it's a fluff piece, probably planted by that industry group. However, it's a fluff piece about some potentially really cool stuff, so I think it's important to separate what the piece works so hard to conflate: benefit to humans, versus benefit to "wildlife." Biophilic design is about improving human well-being by incorporating natural elements that provide physical or psychological benefit to nearby human beings. There's an inevitable self-centered tendency, when people see and enjoy "nature" in the built environment around them, to assume that the benefit goes both ways, and the article encourages readers to believe that these two concerns dovetail conveniently:

> By making our buildings just a little more accommodating to this complexity, we could reap ecological rewards as well as personal ones. It will take more than carpeting roofs and walls with plants to stop the biodiversity crisis – but it could be a stimulating start.

However, providing local, immediate benefits to human beings by accommodating "natural" elements in the built environment is a fundamentally different aim from providing global, long-term benefit to human beings through healthy ecosystems. The latter concern is dominated by global warming and will be for a century. Biophilic design will have a modest impact on global warming, if any. Biodiversity and habitat loss are also concerns, and biophilic design will only benefit the narrow category of species that can survive alongside us in cities.

The argument for combining the two concerns is basically that it's easy. Biophilia is an easy sell because it's about human benefit, and if we can leverage that for ecological benefit, it should be a win/win.

However, I think catering to biophilia is a double-edged sword. People can very easily be fooled by the sight of a few bees and butterflies outside their window into thinking that they are living in harmony with nature, and nature is thriving. It's a cliché for people in rural places to laugh at environmentalists in cities, believing that 1) city-dwelling eggheads don't understand how big and wild nature is, while rural folks who are "closer to nature" can look outside and see that nature is doing fine, and 2) if anything is harming nature, it must be those dirty industrial cities, not agriculture and rural land use. City-dwelling people are equally vulnerable to the illusion that seeing a few isolated wild plants and animals means seeing healthy intact ecosystems, as illustrated by the architect quoted in the article as saying, "You realise how much complexity there is in nature" (when you're looking at birds in your garden in the middle of London.)

Biophilic thinking complicates people's thinking about environmentalism in a direction that undermines our focus on global warming. We have got to the point where I think most people understand how a person living in a metal high-rise surrounded by concrete and getting to work through a mechanized tube can be living more "in harmony with nature" than someone living in a bucolic setting at the end of a long driveway miles outside the city. Even people who hate this idea and would dispute it understand the logic behind it. We have spent decades getting people to think in terms of carbon footprints and direct and indirect energy use, and the conflation of biophilia with environmentalism takes people back to the concrete, simplistic idea that you can judge the environmental impact of a lifestyle by how "natural" its aesthetic is.

So, while biophilic design is a positive thing locally, we shouldn't promote illusions about its environmental impact. We shouldn't mistake investment in biophilic design for investment in global environmental outcomes. And we should be extremely skeptical of an article about green roofs that serves as an uncritical platform for an industry association that makes money from building them.

(I still think green roofs are great, by the way.)