This excerpt was originally published in A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown. It was published by Timber Press and released on September 17. Check christopherbrown.com for updates on book launch events in Texas and elsewhere.
Our reflexive conception of the city as human habitat and the country as the place where we go to find nature is no longer true, if it ever was. While there are still large areas of the continental United States that remain sparsely populated with humans, our continued expansion across the land has obliterated the boundary between urban space and wild space, bringing more city into the wild and more wild into the city.
One-third of Americans make their homes in an area that is half covered with wild foliage or within a short walk of an area that is more than 75 percent wild foliage. We live in a weird realm where forest and prairie intermix with the urbanized world. Our continental habitat expresses an ecological paradox—it has been almost completely reshaped by our dominion, but our colonization is so recent that the native wildness was never fully extinguished and pops back up whenever and wherever we let it. This urbanized wilderness is all around us, but we rarely acknowledge it, so steeped are we in the mythology of our more epic wild spaces.
The American edgelands are mostly unobserved by everyone from nature writers to urban planners, who persistently reinforce the illusion that nature exists in officially designated parklands. Pockets of wild urban space don’t fit easily into the registries by which our societies are ordered. Most of the lands that make up these zones are of limited economic value, like the “wastelands” of the early republic, if they even exist as separate parcels of private property. The trees may be counted in municipal censuses and assigned official numbers, but they do not have a price. The wild creatures who inhabit such spaces have almost no existence in the eyes of the state, unless they are blocking traffic or construction. These zones have acquired an official name in recent decades—the wildland-urban interface (WUI)—but the term is rarely used outside of the invisible literature of fire prevention. The WUI is where the wildfires working to make the western states uninsurable occur. That association with property damage may be why the acronym carries a clinical taint of Orwellian negativity—so successfully avoiding any evocation of the uncanny wonder wild urban places produce that you might reasonably suspect it was designed to name them as an essential predicate to their eradication.
The pockets of wild space that exist within the city do so because they are largely unseen and unnamed. They are not the official natural areas maintained by the parks and recreation department, though sometimes they contribute—especially the spaces set aside as wildlife preserves. The interstitial wilderness that exists in every city is unmarked. It is not formally designated as wild space or described as such on any sign or map, and it is often actively hidden by enclosure and cartological obfuscation. It is mostly comprised of zones set aside for some other kinds of land use that serves human need but excludes active human presence: places designed, by and large, to keep people out. Or just not designed to invite people in.
The path of the watershed is the most ubiquitous and reliable natural space to find in any city. Creeks and rivers are the one natural element we are generally unable to erase through our sprawl, though we may impoverish their ecological richness, treating them as sewers, as we have for most of modern history. We sometimes pave our creeks in our efforts to control them, like the one that runs through my neighborhood and is equally enjoyed by egrets and graffiti taggers. We sometimes even pave entire rivers, as in Los Angeles, or bury them under the pavement, as in Hartford. But we can’t really control water, no matter how hard we try, and we can’t prevent other species of planetary life from gravitating toward sources of water. Creeks and river channels are the most reliable places to find wild vegetation in the city—whether weedy brush or more substantial tree cover—and to find wild animals, some of whom may live in the habitat the water provides, and others who may just go there to drink and wash or to hunt. Ponds, lakes, and wetlands have a harder time surviving in the city, as the absence of flow and flood makes them easier to turn into buildable land. The idea that draining the swamp is progress has a long history, from Charles II’s 17th-century redevelopment of the Great Fens to the march of production agriculture and urban expansion across the American continent.
Mirroring the watershed are networks of urban space designed to carry different kinds of flow: the rights-of-way we set aside for the varieties of movement and interchange that sustain urban life. These include roadways and railways, which, unless they are very old, usually preserve some wide zone on either side of the path they define. They also include the rights-of-way set aside for the movement of things other than people and cargo, such as electrical power, petrochemicals, and telecommunications. Many of our rights-of-way follow older and often more natural pathways. Broadway in Manhattan was once the Wickquasgeck Trail, which connected the Indigenous settlements of the island. Highways commonly follow the routes of old pioneer trails that were formerly trails of Indigenous peoples and often have deeper origins as animal trails, like the old highway between Detroit and Chicago that was once the migratory trackway of mastodons. The main trunks most internet traffic in the United States travels on are cables buried along old rail lines, which themselves follow some of the most ancient routeways cut into the landscape of the continent by eons of geological development and wild nature’s adaptation to it. Rights-of-way are sometimes public, sometimes private, but almost never designed as places for you to walk. They are not designed for animals either, as evidenced by the abundant roadkill our roads produce, providing the main experience most of us have of wild animals in the city. But roadkill also reveals how much wildness is out there, finding its way through the world we’ve made. And in springtime, the green spaces along the edges of the road reveal how many wild and native plants are still there in the seedbed, ready to retake the landscape when we and our mowers abandon it. The corridors of land we set aside for our own transportation, energy, utility, and communications networks inadvertently provide networks also used by wildlife to circulate through urban space.
The city also harbors huge swaths of land zoned off from pedestrian and other public access. These zones of enclosure are often behind tall fences or even manned checkpoints that limit access for safety and security. These include industrial facilities, government complexes (including the gigantic chunks of the American landscape set aside for exclusively military use), and corporate and commercial zones. Wild plants and animals do not observe most of the boundaries we create and often thrive in these spaces from which the city excludes its human inhabitants. This is especially true at the margins of such places, in liminal zones where access is often less intensely policed. Walk around any such fence, especially in its farthest corner, and you stand a good chance of finding a gap made or at least exploited by animals, some of which may have made homes inside the fence, where their predators are less likely to roam.
Liminal zones are often the richest and the easiest to find wherever you are—the wilderness of edges made from the untended borders between different land uses. Zones where trees and tall plants are allowed to grow in areas otherwise cleared for human use. Walk along such edges and look for animal trails on the ground, and you will be surprised how many mammals can turn just a few feet of cover into a safe and secure burrow. Urban foxes seem particularly adept at exploiting such fringe habitat, perhaps because of their small size and their adaptation to hunting small rodents that thrive in the trash we leave outside.
Sometimes the liminal spaces are defined not only by space, but by time. The places we call “empty lots” are usually temporary, in the middle of the transition from one land use to another. Often land that was once used for agriculture, resource extraction, or industry awaiting its redevelopment. Places momentarily empty of human presence but full of the natural activity that quickly reasserts itself in our absence. The places we have stopped paying attention to are the ones where wild nature most quickly thrives. If the plants are allowed to grow without mowing, as is often the case when the economics don’t justify the cost of maintenance, the owner doesn’t care, or there isn’t even a true owner, the change can be rapid and dramatic, as the negative space of the city turns into a successional ecosystem.
Sometimes human land use is so abusive that it renders the land unusable. Lands we have polluted, made too dangerous to inhabit, or too hazardous to build on. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling dubbed such places “involuntary parks”: previously inhabited areas that have “lost their value for technological instrumentalism.” You already know famous examples of such places, like the radiated zone around Chernobyl, the Superfund sites of industrial America, and the currently and formerly militarized borders between and sometimes within nations, like the Iron Curtain, which divided Europe, the fortified portions of Israel, the U.S.–Mexico border. You may be less familiar with a more emergent category of involuntary park—the zones that have become uninsurable, mostly due to climate change. Consider the coast of Florida, inhabited by more than 20 million people—close to 10 percent of the U.S. population—where increasingly frequent and damaging weather events have driven most of the major property and casualty insurers to stop underwriting coverage. The private and public insurance funds that have allowed building to continue are almost all at the brink of insolvency. Where property can no longer be insured, new development and real estate transactions cannot proceed, at least not if they require traditional mortgage financing. In these expanding swaths of our increasingly uninsurable world, nature will find all sorts of ways to reclaim the space it has liberated through its reactions to the damage we have caused.
Christopher Brown has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy, and John W. Campbell Awards for his novels Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture, and Failed State. Also an accomplished lawyer, Brown has worked on two Supreme Court confirmation hearings, led the technology corporate practice of a major American law firm, and served as the general counsel of two public companies.