“We have to move past this houses or species dichotomy, it’s ridiculous and damaging,” Soanes says in the video.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soanes, who is a research fellow at The University of Melbourne, wants to save the plants and animals that cling to life in our cities and towns.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Part of the reason I started doing social media<\/a> was to gauge how true it is when a politician or a layman tells me that conservation isn’t important to the average person,” Soanes tells the ABC.\u00a0<\/p>\n Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n She is wearing a fleecy hoodie and grey outdoorsy pants and is standing beside the gnarled, decapitated remnants of a eucalypt.\u00a0<\/p>\n The dead tree is on the edge of a new housing estate in Torquay, on Victoria’s Surf Coast south of Melbourne, near where Soanes lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n The tree was allowed to stay so it could provide habitat for birds and insects. In a place where the houses are large and the blocks are small, Soanes says leaving these pockets of green space is important for people too.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Otherwise, they have nothing, right?”<\/p>\n Dr Kylie Soanes is on a mission to prove nature belongs in cities. (ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens)<\/p>\n Nature belongs in cities<\/p>\n Soanes grew up in Coolaroo, a working-class Melbourne suburb with one notable feature: it was the setting for Australia’s favourite suburbanites The Castle’s Kerrigan family<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I remember when we moved in there was a backyard full of lawn weeds that were as high as your head. But they were the only things that gave you any shade because there were no trees,” Soanes says.\u00a0<\/p>\n “It’s one of the neighbourhoods that is still really under-represented in green space and access to nature.”<\/p>\n She used to think she worked in urban biodiversity because it was an exciting, emerging field of research, but lately she’s had a nagging feeling that it might be for another reason.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We weren’t the type of family that had the time or the energy or the knowledge to lobby their council for green space,” she says.<\/p>\n Everyone, she believes, should have access to nature where they live.\u00a0<\/p>\n “It should be like a public service.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n