Marginal Nature and Urban Wastelands

2012-02-05T05:51:00.000-08:00

Urban pigeon rescue

This article from the New York Times is well worth reading for what it reveals about changing attitudes towards urban nature. Are all creatures worthy of compassion? How are we urbanites changing as we connect to marginal nature? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/nyregion/rescuing-the-birds-many-love-to-hate.html?hp

2012-01-13T04:47:00.000-08:00

2012 A Year of Natural History: Origins, Practices, and Examples

AWU-CER Lunchtime Lectures by Kevin M. Anderson
at Austin Water Headquarters Downtown Austin, Texas

Time - Each talk begins AT NOON
Location - Waller Center [625 East 10th Street – between I-35 and Red River]
Date - First Wednesday of the Month - Waller Center Room 104 or 105
Cost - Free and Open to the Public – bring a lunch and learn

Natural history is the study of plants and animals leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods. This definition satisfies depending on how much one likes to lean toward observation and if one is a scientist. The originators of natural history were not scientists. In Western history, the origin of the term traces from Aristotle to Pliny the Elder to Linnaeus, a 2000 year journey to someone who might be considered a “scientist”. However, the most famous natural history in English was written by Gilbert White, a contemporary of Linnaeus, who was a country clergyman. White’s Natural History of Selborne inspired a tradition of natural history by nonscientists like Thoreau and others who carefully observed and recorded the nonhumans around them in the place where they lived. In the 20th century, natural history followed one pathway into scientific research where today it fights to survive in shadow of “experimental” biological science and another pathway into what is now called “nature or environmental writing” where it is best represented by Aldo Leopold, Roy Bedichek, and others in the 20th century and by writers like Gary Nabhan, Robert Michael Pyle, Anne Zwinger, and others in the present century.

Over the next year, we will explore the history, the practice, and examples of natural history in America and Europe.

The History of Natural History [February – April]

We will begin the year looking at the history of natural history, which is as much an “unnatural” history of culture as it is of nature. At its core is a dedication to faithful human observation of the nonhuman world. The practice of natural history formed the foundation of modern biology emerging out of the taxonomy of Linnaeus and the biogeography of Von Humboldt which was grounded in “scientific” practice found in Aristotle and Pliny. So we will begin in the past and work forward along the dual pathways leading into science and literature. We will start the year by recounting that 2000 year passage from Aristotle to the emergence of natural history in the 18th century and its development in the 19th century. We will then look at the twentieth century development of natural history as a science and as natural history literature that predates contemporary environmental writing. Finally, we will look at the practice of natural history today where it persists as a diminished part of biology and is overshadowed by environmentalist literature dominated by activists and journalists.

February 1 The History of Natural History: Origins and 19th Century Development [Room 105]

March 7 The History of Natural History: 20th Century Science and Literature [Room 105]

April 4 The History of Natural History: Contemporary Natural History

Natural History and Ecological Change – Americas, Texas, and Austin [May – July]

From spring into summer, we will learn about the natural history of where we live at different spatial scales. First, we will look at the natural history of the Americas as it was described by early explorers like Von Humboldt and others in the 18th and early 19th century and by the biological surveys of the late 19th century which documented the transformation of the natural history of the Americas by the development of modern society. We will then shift more locally in scale and focus on the natural history of Texas documented by the work of scientists like Bailey and Oberholser in the great biological surveys of Texas and more literary types of natural histories in writings ranging from Lincecum to Bedichek. Finally, we will look at the natural history of Austin from the 19th century to the present where observers ranging from university researchers and “citizen scientists” to writers like Bedichek have documented the changing plants and animals of the Austin area.

May 2 The Natural History of the Americas: Discovery and Transformation

June 6 The Natural History of Texas: Biological Survey and Ecological Change

July 3 The Natural History of Austin: Biological Context and Urbanization [Note! Tuesday not Wednesday in July]

Unnatural History – Urban Natural History [August – December]

We will finish the year exploring an often neglected type of natural history - urban natural history. First, we will look at examples of how natural history is practiced in cities from London to Berlin to New York and then literary examples natural histories of cities. Then we will look closely at the natural [and unnatural] history of three different places in Austin which are iconic types of urban habitats: a creek, a vacant lot, and a sewage farm. We will end the year looking forward at the possibilities for natural history and nonhumans in a human dominated world.

August 1 Urban Natural History: Life in the City

September 5 The Natural History of an Urban Creek: Waller Creek

October 3 The Natural History of an Urban Vacant Lot: Tannehill Urban Wild Woodland

November 7 The Natural History of an Urban Wasteland: Hornsby Bend

December 5 Natural and Unnatural History: the Path Forward

2011-12-06T05:36:00.000-08:00

finding bearings in a disorienting landscape – Urban Nature as Chaos

Urban nature is not sublime…There’s too much sterility in the form of roofs and pavement, and, oddly enough, there’s also too much wildness, too many weeds and wooded borders and tangled banks, not to mention vacant lots going to brush.

Of course, “wilderness” won’t do to describe such landscapes either. Despite the degree of wildness, there’s too much human impact, too many alien species, too few large animals to meet the legal and cultural criteria.

The fact is that urban landscapes are just too mixed up, chaotic, and confused to fit our established notions of beauty and value in nature. … Maybe it’s not really nature at all, not a real ecosystem, just a bunch of weeds and exotics mixed up with human junk.

- John Tallmadge. The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City (2004)

Tomorrow I do the last lecture of my fall series on urban ecology and urban nature, and I will focus on the growing genre of urban nature writing. The quotation above from Tallmadge’s book about Cincinnati illustrates the conflicted responses one finds in these books. The writers search for a redemptive moment of nature encounter without analyzing what they seek to redeem. The City? Modernity? Capitalism? Degradation? Themselves? As I argue in Marginal Nature, our ideas of “real nature” rely on ideas of nature that are literally and figuratively out of place in urban landscapes. Thus, Tallmadge seeks something (The sublime or wilderness) in the urban landscape that, by definition, cannot be there, and then he struggles to comprehend his experience of what he finds “a bunch of weeds and exotics mixed up with human junk”. However, what he actually finds, his redemptive moment, is a heron near the city’s wastewater outfall, and he cannot comprehend what to him is a bird out of place.

I find it so interesting that he and other such urban nature writers never embrace these places as coproductions of humans and nonhumans or recognize that the encounter goes both ways. The heron drew him there to its place and observed him watching…the encounter is a coproduction as well. Is this not sublime in the old sense of “gloom and glory” as Marjorie Hope Nicolson characterized the mountains?

I think that the sublime may work quite nicely to assess the experience of nature encounter that these writers seek. However, it is a different “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused” than old Romantic notions of nature. Unfortunately, it is those old Romantic notions that are still misapplied to urban landscapes leading to confusion, despair, and disgust with the “chaos” of urban nature.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1963)

2011-10-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

Hybrid Nature and Sewage Treatment

Yes, I return to posting with a book on sewage treatment, but also a kind of marginal nature engagement. One new approach to labeling urban ecosystems is to call them hyrid ecosystems, and so it follows that biological treatment of sewage fits that rhetoric. The book is just coming out...

Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem by Daniel Schneider
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12703

2011-08-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Another book on marginal nature, sort of...

Rambunctious Garden explores some of the same ground that I cover in marginal nature. Don't like the title but it hints at natural agency. Marris is a science journalist and so it is a readable account thin on the challenging nuances of ecology and natural agency. But I am glad to see more mainstreaming of the reassessment of nature.

More at http://www.emmamarris.com/rambunctious-garden/

2011-08-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

Richard Mabey is out with a new book: Weeds and a reissue of Unofficial Countryside.

Richard Mabey is much better known in Britian, but he was a big influence on my thinking about marginal nature and he knows his plants.

Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature
It gets two reviews in the Guardian with links to other works by Mabey http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/09/weeds-vagabond-richard-mabey-review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/10/weeds-richard-mabey-review

One link is to the Unofficial Countryside reissue review in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/29/iain-sinclair-richard-mabey-rereading

2011-08-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

Urban Nature and Urban Ecology: Understanding Urban Ecosystems

Every month I give free lunchtime lectures here in downtown Austin and for the next four months I will focus on urban nature and ecology. The talks will all touch on marginal nature as the counterpart to the other kinds of nature that we officially sanction in the city.

I will begin in September by examining a range of perspectives on nature in the city, including urban ecology, urban planning, restoration ecology, political ecology, and more. In October, I will focus on the issue of officially sanctioned urban nature versus non-native intruders, and the different views of nature in the study of urban ecology. Focusing on urban planning in November, I will look at how nature is incorporated into the urban landscape and how it resists our planning. I will wrap up in December by assessing encounters with urban nature as revealed by urban nature writers.

September 7 Noon-1pm

Varieties of Possibility: Perspectives on Nature and the City

October 5 Noon-1pm

The Weeds and the Wild: Invasive Species and Urban Ecology

November 2 Noon-1pm

The Proper Place of Nature: Urban Planning and Urban Ecology

December 7 Noon-1pm

Encounters with Nature in the City: Urban Nature and Literature

Each talk begins AT NOON

Location - Downtown Austin at Waller Center [625 East 10th Street – between I-35 and Red River] Room 104

First Wednesday of the Month!
Waller Center Room 104!
Free and Open to the Public – bring a lunch and learn

2011-07-03T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Paradox of Meddling - San Francisco and the Albany Bulb

As I talk about in the dissertation, we often destroy marginal nature when we meddle with it. As we impose our human/scientific/aesthetic/environmentalist expectations on places claimed by marginal nature, we undo it. However well intended, such interventions by humans may result in the undoing of marginal nature in waste space. These habitats are accidental from our perspective, but they are deliberate expressions by the flora and fauna of marginal nature. The Albany Bulb on the bay in San Francisco is like the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto, old construction debris dumped in the bay and forming a place for habitat and humans to interact.
http://www.faroutflora.com/2011/03/11/the-albany-bulb/#comment-3896

It appears to be a target for nature conservationists wanting to incorporate it into a state park. This YouTube film presents the place and the issues http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szVpscxngDU as an ecological and cultural balance [what I term an ecology of place]. A group called Let It Be is resisting the planning and official sanctioning and removal of non-native plants and people. Heidegger might smile.

Vacant land is a prime target for urban improvement schemes that replace marginal nature with what is viewed as appropriate land use. The list of social, economic, and environmental problems associated with waste space is long. Sites like vacant lots and brownfields can harbor pollution, vermin, and disease. They are portrayed as dangerous since they are used for illegal activity and since homeless people often utilize them as campsites, resulting in trash and trouble. The dominant view of urban waste space is that wastelands are "problem" sites for the institutions charged with maintaining public safety and environmental health. Proper management entails reclaiming control over these badlands through police surveillance and investment in appropriate development. Narratives of redemption and restoration are used to justify turning negative spaces into positive spaces. However, there are social and environmental counter-narratives about positive values of these disreputable spaces.

The social counter-narratives are based on how urbanites utilize this kind of urban space as a different kind of “urban commons.” This counter-narrative adds further complexity to the dualities entangled with this kind of urban space, because it suggests they can be viewed as liberated spaces beyond the control of planners and managers. In Kevin Lynch’s posthumously published book, Wasting Away, he celebrates waste places for their social attractions,

"Many waste places have these ruinous attractions: release from control, free play for action and fantasy, rich and varied sensations. Thus children are attracted to vacant lots, scrub woods, back alleys, and unused hillsides…those screened, marginal, uncontrolled places where people can indulge in behavior that is proscribed and yet not harmful to others – are regularly threatened by clean-ups and yet are a necessity for supple society."

Lynch’s libertarian argument stands out in contrast to traditional urban design and planning narratives of waste space. He insists that allowing space for impropriety is necessary for society, and, just as “red-light” districts are part of urban culture, wastelands play a social role. Lynch appreciates wastelands as sites of freedom from surveillance and control for humans, but he acknowledges the negative aspects of the exercise of freedom that results in illegal waste dumping and contamination. The wastelands become unique spaces where freedom and marginality combine, but Lynch’s social counter-narrative defines this wasteland solely as spaces for human activity.

The scrub woods themselves also find these spaces to be liberated zones where they find root-room to grow. The challenge for an environmental counter-narrative is to incorporate these weedy wastelands within the narrative of good nature. However, good urban nature is expected to stay put in sanctioned “open” or “green” spaces, like parks, preserves, and gardens, and the boundaries of these urban nature spaces are continuously transgressed by weedy marginal nature as it “invades” from the wastelands. Thus, urban environmentalists and nature preserve managers usually push to extend control over wastelands in order to restore them to culturally and ecologically sanctioned kinds of nature. Their control is also evidenced by the rhetorical embellishment of relabeling wastelands as “urban wildlands” or “open space” where sanctioned nature is officially cultivated and controlled. This renaming reconfigures expectations for what kind of nature is proper to these spaces.

2011-06-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

Herewith, four urban pastorals.

One of the "practices of nature" imported into the city is the pastoral. Our parks and gardens reflect our expectations of this cultivated, improved nature sometimes referred to as "second nature" for agrian landscapes or "third nature" for gardens.

This wonderful New York Times article about marginal rooftop gardens does a great job of illuminating the culture of marginal urban gardening where spaces are transformed to places without official sanction. Through the work and affection of individual humans, a non-human community is created, not my marginal nature in which non-humans take the lead, but a similar transitory lifeworld emerging in the margins of the city. Up on the roof.

Check out the article here http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/garden/on-city-rooftops-scrappy-green-spaces-in-bloom.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

2011-06-15T18:07:00.000-07:00

Herculaneum sewer sheds light on secrets of Roman life

Okay, file this one under what the future might learn from our wastelands. As a sewage professional, I am fascinated by our scatalogical past. Here is the BBC on Roman waste...http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13781202

2011-06-14T17:17:00.000-07:00

Urban Ecosystems and Conservation Biology

Austin is a strange place. We are known as a liberal island in Texas welcoming all the weird and the left wing and the artists. But now we have made it clear that some are not welcomed in our city. Non-native invasive species are not welcomed - presumably excluding Willie and most of the musicians in town. We have a city council approved policy and now a Austin Invasive Species Coalition http://www.austininvasives.org/ with a list of offenders which are all plants. Rats, English sparrows, and a long list of insects have not made it into onto the Coalition's hit list, yet.

I am disturbed by this zealous effort at many levels, but I am thinking about science and the sociology of science this evening. As the Coalition thinks about urban ecosystems, it frames its conversation around the beliefs of conservation biologists. The loss of native habitats around the world is a depressing fact, and the struggle to protect existing native ecosystems is one that I have supported. However, to import the ideals of conservation biology into urban ecosystems seems both profoundly misguided and expensively impractical. The time and money spent on eliminating china berry (Melia azedarach) or Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) from the urban landscape will be excessive and perpetual. And for those of us who appreciate the character of these hardy species, it is offensive to see them targeted for removal without clear evidence that they are locally a problem or that native replacements for these species will readily grow in the city. Is the Homeland really at threat?

As I have argued elsewhere, much of this zealotry is based on unexamined beliefs about nature, ideas imported into the city and embodied in preserves and parks. But cities are odd garden ecosystems, or "hybrid ecosystems" as the trendy and largely unhelpful language has it. Conservation biology was not created to study gardens or cities. As we study urban ecology as its own hybrid system, we come to value the ecosystem services and aesthetic pleasure that non-native species add to a city, even Austin, Texas.

But, alas, they must all go under the knife, saw, and spray of a "citizen scientist" enlisted into the cause to defend Texas against invaders. Yes, the social history of such social movements is also unexamined, and I risk my welcome by questioning the Coalition. But what would Willie do? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7A7pevbD_A

2011-05-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

Urban Wildlife Conference and the Leslie Street Spit

I spent most of this week at the International Urban Wildlife Management and Planning Conference here in Austin. http://urbanwildlife2011.tpwd.state.tx.us/

I gave a presentation on Marginal Nature which was put in the "nontraditional habitats" group along with golf courses and airports. The traditional habitats were green space, open space [vague terrain, no?], parks, preserves, greenways, etc.. Management talks focused on fostering traditional habitats to welcome nonhumans into the city and talks focused on managing the nonhumans when they misbehave. All talks focused on human control, design, and making "nature" satisfy our needs in the city. Disappointing over all.

One other presentation addressed marginal nature and wastelands. It was by Jenny Foster from York University in Toronto. She talked about the Leslie Street Spit, the peninsula of land jutting out into the lake from downtown Toronto created through dumping construction waste. Now colonized by nonhumans [it is an IBA] and defended by human nature lovers http://www.friendsofthespit.ca/ . The responses to the Spit are similar to some of the responses I see here at Hornsby Bend http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/water/cer2.htm but the mobilization of the Friends group is more institutionalized and formal.

Besides this Canadian, there were some Europeans attending who were also puzzled by the traditional/nontraditional division of the talks. More on that soon.

2011-05-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

Cosmopolitan Communities

In my research on marginal nature, I was surprised to find such strong cultural influences on the perceptions of urban ecologists about the value of wasteland habitats. Cultural influences are found in differences in attitudes and practices between European and American urban ecologists. One finding of urban ecology has been that the ecosystems of cities of similar temperate regions of the world share species, and, perhaps, their plant communities are evolving as a generalized temperate urban plant community. In America, this homogenization of species is seen as something which must be stopped and native species must be defended against foreign invaders.

Urban ecology in Europe is more accepting of these unique population dynamics of urban ecosystems. For them, the given conditions of urban ecosystems are that species composition is very dynamic and that global connectivity is a defining feature of that dynamic community. Although European urban ecologists take invasive species seriously, they are more accepting of introduced species as part of the long history of cosmopolitan mixing. From this perspective, non-native species additions to biodiversity in urban ecosystems, and so the European view of urban ecosystems is that, “although wild and rather specialist species may be missing, cities are great havens for biodiversity, in terms of both ecology and species, even in industrial areas.” (Bradshaw 2002) This contrasts with the views of many American urban ecologists, who generally insist that urban growth “replaces the native species that are lost with widespread “weedy” nonnative species (and) this replacement constitutes the process of biotic homogenization that threatens to reduce the biological uniqueness of local ecosystems.” (McKinney 2003)

Urban wastelands have been studied in both European and American cities, but, where European ecologists celebrate wasteland species diversity, American ecologists describe them as degraded habitat. From the American perspective, wastelands are the weedlands and biological slums from which invasions are launched on remnants of first nature. European urban ecologists have shown more interest and have had more opportunity to study urban “wasteland” sites due to the urban destruction left after World War II, and this research dating to the late 1940s has fostered more openness to species introductions as inevitable results of an urbanizing world. Sukopp observed of Berlin that wasteland sites are,

"…the field laboratories where possibly new and well-adapted ecotypes of our native or naturalized wild plants will originate in the changed environmental conditions. Ecosystems which have developed in urban conditions may be the prevailing ecosystems of the future. Many of the most resistant plants in our industrial areas and in cities do not originate from Central Europe, but are non-natives." (Sukopp 1979)

His openness to engaging the unique conditions of urban ecosystems (and wasteland sites in particular) without resorting to qualitative comparisons with lost native ecosystems is reflected in his rhetoric and his practice of urban ecology. Sukopp does invoke a cultural perspective on wasteland plant communities, but, rather than bemoan the lost of homeland purity like American ecologists do, he suggests that this dynamic mixture of native and non-native species evokes the social mission of urban settlements, and so he characterizes them as “cosmopolitan communities.”

More on Berlin and Sukopp's biodiversity work http://infolib.hua.edu.vn/Fulltext/ChuyenDe2009/CD311/46.pdf

2011-05-10T05:57:00.000-07:00

Marginal Citroen

Our friends have a marvelous collection of their old cars rusting away at their winery and becoming one with marginal nature.

2011-05-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

Life on Waller Creek, Austin, Texas

Since I arrived in Austin in 1988, I have explored its urban creeks. Waller Creek has been my main focus since it flows through the University of Texas campus and the Austin Water headquarters is on its banks. With others, we have mapped its "invasive" "are they really native" palms http://www.biosci.utexas.edu/prc/DigFlora/00WallerPalmCensus.html and we have worked with the UT Texas Memorial Museum to clean up the creek on campus and monitor its biodiversity http://www.utexas.edu/tmm/sponsored_sites/waller/

My own exploration has been focused on Waller Creek as a study site for marginal nature - images here https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/webUpload?uname=110071841493767971267&aid=5603735479554621425

Now they will build a tunnel to take its storm flows away from its low reach so that we can "develop" that area. http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/wallercreek/ Some will make lots of money, and some will be out of a home. So it goes.

The dynamic of marginal nature is regular disturbance and unexpected response. I will continue to monitor for the response to this latest disturbance.

More on Waller Creek in Prof. Joseph Jones great book, Life on Waller Creek http://openlibrary.org/books/OL3215936M/Life_on_Waller_Creek Joe Jones was a wonderful man who I met in 1988 not knowing who he was, just an old guy with a bucket poking around on the creek like me. At that time, he was busy doing a small part in a movie by one of his students...Richard Linklater's Slacker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_(film) in which he appears near the end as an older man talking into his tape recorder as he walks the streets of Austin.

More on Joe Jones here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Jay_Jones

See how urban creeks lead you onwards...

2011-05-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

More tales from zoopolis (the mongrel hordes roam the city)

'Ransacking' raccoons hit Chicago lakefront

'This is all the fault of the general public that comes out and tries to feed what they think is a Disney-like creature'

BY LISA DONOVAN

Staff Reporter

ldonovan@suntimes.com

Last Modified: May 3, 2011 02:13AM

Chicago’s lakefront is like a giant hotel for hundreds of species of birds, rabbits, foxes and coyotes. But an influx of raccoons has led to a mass eviction in recent weeks.

About 120 of the small mammals have been trapped between Belmont and Montrose harbors on the North Side as well as near the harbors at Jackson Park, Chicago Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner said.

“There’s been some reports that they’re living under docks and ransacking boats and being aggressive toward people. So obviously it’s a public safety issue,” Maxey-Faulkner said. Raccoons carry roundworm, which can be deadly to humans. The trapped raccoons have been euthanized.

Maxey-Faulkner said the park district has had to remove raccoons at other parks and there have been complaints about them on the lakefront in the past.

But nothing like this.

“It is not unusual to receive a report of a raccoon in a park on occasion, but we don’t recall a time when they have been in such abundance,” Maxey-Faulkner said.

Complaints from boaters in particular started coming in last summer and the park district decided to tackle it this spring. Westrec Marinas, which manages the harbors, subcontracted with suburban Ampest Exterminating & Wildlife Control to trap and euthanize the animals. Money for the project — less than $25,000 — was taken from the harbor budget, which Maxey-Faulkner said is funded by boat slip and concession receipts.

“They were calling this, classifying this as an infestation,” Dan Peifer, Ampest service manager, referring to the call he got from officials about the raccoon problem along the lakefront.

His firm has a permit from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to remove nuisance animals. In 2009, the most recent year for available statistics, private firms and animal control offices in the 8-county region that includes Cook County, removed nearly 17,000 so-called nuisance raccoons, according to the IDNR.

The lakefront raccoons are caught in live cage traps that are checked daily — usually in the morning — and the animals are removed accordingly, Peifer said.

State law allows trappers multiple options in cases like this — from releasing the animal within 100 yards of where they were caught to turning them over to a veterinarian who is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator to “humane” euthanization, according to IDNR spokesman Tim Schweizer.

While he wasn’t familiar with the raccoon problem on Chicago’s lakefront, he did say that euthanization in many cases is the only option when there’s “overpopulation.”

“You don’t want to take a problem from one location and create a problem somewhere else,” he said.

In this case, the animals were taken to Ampest’s facilities, where they are placed in a CO2 chamber, Peifer said.

Charlotte Newfeld, steward of the Bill Jarvis Migratory Bird Sanctuary along the lakefront near Addison, says the raccoon problem can be squarely blamed on other humans.

“This is all the fault of the general public that comes out and tries to feed what they think is a Disney-like creature, which it’s not,” Newfeld said. “We’ve had feeders out there, whom we’ve had police arrest, and the still continue to give them food.”

2011-05-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

Tales from zoopolis (the homeland is invaded)

04/30/2011 09:19 PM

Wild Hogs Invade Austin Neighborhood

By: Jeff Stensland

A group of wild hogs have moved into a Northeast Austin neighborhood, and neighbors are not happy. Families started spotting the pigs around April 18, 2011. However, those who live in the area have no idea how the hogs got there.

"I never know what to expect when I go outside now," said Chris Elmore, who has seen the hogs at least twice.

Elmore's first sighting was about a week ago around 5 a.m.

"There were like eight or nine of them," Elmore said. "They were pretty organized, but at the same time, it was pretty weird to see them taking up the whole street like that. I didn't know where they came from."

A couple days later, Elmore spotted the pigs just after sunrise when he was taking his son to school. A neighbor took this picture of the hogs, which is now circulating throughout the neighborhood. The wild hogs chased several other kids to school, including AJ Reed.

"We thought it was a group of dogs, so we started running," Reed said. "As they saw us, I saw the long snout and didn't think it was a dog anymore."

The sightings have left Reed, Elmore and others with more questions than answers.

"Did they live in the woods back there," Elmore asked. "Does it have to do with the park being built? Did them cutting down the trees stop them from being wherever they were at or where they came from? Did somebody just drop them off?"

The president of the Harris Glen Homeowners Association believes the pigs came to the neighborhood because of a nearby spring. It is one of only a few places the hogs can find water during the widespread drought. Next to the natural spring is the site of the future Harris Glen Park and Pool. Crews cleared tall grass and brush on the property, which is just beyond the fence line of homes in the Harris Glen subdivision.

HOA President Ken Blevins said he plans to meet with city leaders in the coming days to talk about several issues facing the neighborhood, including the wild hogs.

Elmore has called animal control several times, but so far, he says no action's been taken. He worries the pigs could get vicious.

"They weren't the biggest hogs, but they had room to grow," Elmore said. "They were on a mission."

Wild hogs are omnivorous and can even eat small animals. Besides chasing kids and blocking traffic, neighbors say the hogs have damaged several yards.

2011-04-30T17:41:00.000-07:00

Beautiful flower in your garden
But the most beautiful by far
Is the one growing wild in the garbage dump
Even here, even here, we are
- Paul Westerberg
“Even Here We Are” (14 Songs, 1993)

The fact is that urban landscapes are just too mixed up, chaotic, and confused to fit our established notions of beauty and value in nature. … Maybe it’s not really nature at all, not a real ecosystem, just a bunch of weeds and exotics mixed up with human junk.
John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City (2004) p. 42-43.

2011-04-21T20:43:00.000-07:00

The roots of the problem of nature in America

The American idea of wilderness as untrammeled nature is threatened by the shadow of the city as urbanization sprawls across the land. This cultural construction relies on the belief that there was untrammeled nature before Europeans arrived in America.[1] Despite the debunking of the myth of Pre-Columbian wilderness,[2] the belief persists that there once was an American Eden that was undone by the arrival of Europeans.[3] This concept of wilderness as a Lost Eden sets up a misanthropic exclusion of humans from nature which relies on the persistent root idea of the natural as the antithesis of the cultural.[4]

However, as Thoreau formulated our dilemma, Americans look toward this mythic wilderness as our “West and our Wild”, and our paradoxical quest is both to tame the wild and preserve it, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price.”[1] We look out from our American cities with longing for that pristine natural world and import vestiges of the wilderness as “nature preserves” and persist in misreading Thoreau’s words so that wildness is equated with wilderness. In Cronon’s 1995 essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” he argues that Americans need to reassess the role of the foundational myth of wilderness as the standard of nature in America and abandon the polarizing dualism between wilderness as natural and all else as artificial. Instead, Cronon argued that “we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others.”[2]

[1] Thoreau, “Walking,” in Glick (1993) p. 348.

[2] Cronon (1996), pp 88-89.

[1] Oeschlaeger (1991)

[2] Deneven (1992) “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the

Americas

in 1492”

[3] Merchant (2003) p. 3.

[4] Williams (1980)

2011-04-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

More on Biological Slumming and Discursive Strategies

(Wastelands)…have very high diversity (and) large connected vacant sites are particularly outstanding habitats, ranging from pioneer stages, in heavily disturbed areas, to pre-forest stages in others.

- Herbert Sukopp, Development of flora and fauna in urban areas (1987)

A scientific mode of engagement with wasteland ecosystems holds the potential for a more objective and neutral narrative of marginal nature. However, we who study these fortuitous habitats are familiar with Mabey’s ambivalence about his attraction to this marginal nature which he labels “biological slumming.” This lifeworld is subject to a range of interpretive ecological readings: a weedland community of inappropriate nature, a cosmopolitan community of uniquely adapted ruderal organisms, or an invading force of alien species destroying the integrity of our homeland. There is some truth in each view, but all are influenced by cultural perceptions of good and bad nature. Thus, the assessment of the ecological standing of wasteland ecosystems is necessarily both scientific and cultural.

Wasteland ecology, also, requires addressing the question of nonhuman agency. The lifeworlds of wastelands and margins are coproductions of humans and nonhumans. They are the actualization of what David Harvey called a “socioecological project,” which result in a commingling of the proper and improper – social activities, natures, and agents. Urban waste spaces are filled with life through the agency of non-humans taking advantage of the open habitat and human neglect. These ruderal species claim the wastelands and thrive.

Harvey noted the need for, “discursive strategies that allow us to talk freely about the production of nature…in which it’s not simply the social that’s the activating unit but also, scallops and mice and all the rest of them.”[1] Here in the wasteland is the context of “all the rest of them,” from nematodes to mice, from cryptogamic crust to ailanthus trees, whose collaboration in harsh environments produces marginal nature.

It takes a relocated Texas songwriter to offer a discursive strategy for talking about urban wildlife. He imagines the thoughts of Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk who nests on the edge of Central Park in New York...

Pale Male the famous redtail hawk

Performs wingstands high above midtown Manhattan
Circles around for one last pass over the park
Got his eye on a fat squirrel down there and a couple of pigeons
They got no place to run they got no place to hide
But Pale Male he’s cool, see ‘cause his breakfast ain’t goin’ nowhere
So he does a loop t loop for the tourists and the six o’clock news
Got him a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys
He looks up and down on fifth avenue and says “God I love this town”
But life goes on down here below
And all us mortals struggle so

We laugh and cry
And live and die
That’s how it goes
For all we know
Down here below

Pale male swimmin’ in the air
Looks like he’s in heaven up there
People sufferin’ everywhere
But he don’t care
But life goes on down here below
And all us mortals, struggle so
We laugh and cry
- Steve Earle

This kind of ironic perspective on urban wildlife, with a bird more at home in the city than the suffering humans down below, suggests the possibilities for reinterpreting narratives of nonhuman agency from the vantage point of city margins as habitat. We can imagine Pale Male as an agent making his way through the city picking off squirrels and courting and nesting while New Yorkers line up below to watch. He is an active subject intentionally using the city, rather than simply a passive object shuttled about in flows of urban metabolism. The mobility of urban wildlife like birds and large mammals allows them to exploit the entire city as habitat, but many come home to the wastelands as part of the marginal community.

The agency of marginal nature is a more collective undertaking, a gathering of nonhumans in a collaborative project to make home in a particular place in the city. The less mobile members of marginal nature do not have the ability to elude the human interventions of restorationists or environmental managers, and so they take advantage of more discrete opportunities like high alkalinity of soil which some flora and fauna tolerate better than others. Soon the community has begun to gather and the coproduction of marginal nature has begun.

[1] “Nature, politics, and possibilities: a debate and discussion with David Harvey and Donna Haraway”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1995, Volume 13, p. 515.

2011-04-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

Biological Slumming

The phrase is from Richard Mabey as he struggles to justify his interest in what he calls "unofficial countryside" in London. He insists that they are not a substitute for official countryside, "nor are they something to be cherished in their own right, necessarily." The tag at the end gives him leave to enjoy biological slumming in urban wastelands without losing his bearings about what kind of nature we should really cherish.

This kind of rhetorical gymnasitics drives my philosophical interest in marginal nature. But as an urban ecologist, I do not share Mabey's ambivalence to marginal nature. I do cherish these habitats. I even like non-native species which numerically add to the biodiversity of the habitat and often add to its functionality. Heresy this is, in the eyes of the orthodox environmentalist community [and to conservation biologists, restoration ecologists] in Austin and the US. So it goes.

Why do I not feel any guilt about enjoying this kind of nature? My mental deficiency perhaps.

2011-03-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

Finding rootroom in the city

Found this guy on a downtown bridge in Austin several years ago. Once the SXSW crowds disperse, I will do my spring monitoring of downtown and then I will post update images.

2011-03-14T21:04:00.001-07:00

thanks to birdchaser [birdchaser.blogspot.com] for this one of a bird out of place...or not

2011-03-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

Marginal Nature: Urban Wastelands and Hybrid Ecosystems

I will be doing a presentation with this title for the International Urban Wildlife Management and Planning Conference in Austin May 22-25 this spring. I will also host a fieldtrip tour of Hornsby Bend on Sunday May 22. My topic for my talk is a deliberate response to one of the main speakers Marina Alberti's use of "hybrid environments" in her recent book Advances in Urban Ecology. As she uses hybrid environments and complexity theory, I don't find much of what she proposes very insightful. I was also surprised that she does not reference the work in hybrid geographies in her book. I do agree that urban ecosystems are definitely hybrid systems [agricultural land is too], but urban ecologists have already said this without all the obfuscation of complexity theory and emergent properties. Kowarik and his book Urban Wild Woodlands is a good example of more insightful ecology.

However I appreciate Alberti's work and look forward to meeting her. Perhaps she will come for a tour of a real hybrid ecosystem, Hornsby Bend?

2011-02-23T11:02:00.000-08:00

This is the landscape that nobody wants. It’s my cup of rejection:
Driven to this unformed scraggly ignored backlot, this not-quite
Prairie, not-quite thicket, not even natural corner of
Texas, the hardscrabble left butt of a demoralized nation,
It is my choice and my pleasure to cherish this haphazard wilderness.
No, it’s not even “wild” – it’s a neglected product of artifice.
Come, let us walk by an improvised lakeshore, be given a vision:
Beaches of black dust, beautiful white ghosts, this drowned forest…
- Frederick Turner, Texas Eclogue

Does our discourse of urban nature allow a space for marginal nature to emerge literally and conceptually? The problem is that we use the metaphors of wilderness and pastoral nature to construct a conceptual framework for nature appreciation and writing, for science and conservation, for environmental management and protection, and then we expect “nature” to measure up to these standards or be regarded as a thing degraded, demeaned, or deceased.[1] This framework limits the possibilities for marginal nature in the city by setting expectations for the kinds of nature, the wild and the pastoral, welcomed in the urban landscape.

The implied comparisons of metaphor rely on the implications of the comparison to generate new meaning. For metaphors to succeed, they must “both warp us away and return us to the world,” and their “bidirectionality” leads to the creation of new meaning.[2] As Jackson’s poem demonstrates, this “not even natural” marginal nature resists bidirectionality with the dominant metaphors of affection for nature. The “not even natural” wasteland pales in comparison to scenic wilderness and is decidedly not a primeval nor a rural retreat. This “neglected product of artifice” is more than a human artifact, but we ignore or reject it through strict adherence to the root metaphors of American nature. In his poem, you see Jackson’s struggle to find metaphors that account for his cherishing this “haphazard wilderness” that is not even “wild.” His encounter with this landscape of marginal nature leads him to sort through metaphors like a field guide to nature discourse, searching for language that rings true to this wasteland/wildland place. All of us who cherish similar wasteland sites know his struggle to articulate the meaning of this marginal nature.

[1] McKibben (1989) The End of Nature. For the argument that nature untouched by humans has ceased to exist.

[2] Buell (1995) and much more about the bidirectionality of metaphor in Ricoeur (1975)

2010-11-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

Upcoming 2011 conferences in Austin add fieldtrips to the urban wasteland

A sign of change as two conferences in 2011 have asked to bring fieldtrips to Austin's urban wasteland, Hornsby Bend.

The 2011 International Urban Wildlife Planning and Management Conference May 22-25 2011 at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Austin is planning a day-long fieldtrip to Hornsby Bend

http://urbanwildlife2011.tpwd.state.tx.us/

And the huge Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting is Aug 7-12 2011 at the Austin Convention Center and they are planning a Hornsby Bend fieldtrip as well

http://www.esa.org/austin/

Hornsby Bend is Austin’s sewage farm. This Austin Water Utility facility was built to recycle the sewage and yard waste of the city, but it is also managed as urban wildlife habitat open to the public seven days a week. For over 50 years, birders have visited the 1200-acre site on the Colorado River compiling sightings of over 370 bird species. Hornsby Bend is nationally known as one of the best birding sites in Texas, and Texas Parks and Wildlife has designated Hornsby Bend as a stop in its ecotourism trail for Central Texas. Birds are only the start of the biodiversity at the site, for instance, 82 species of dragonflies and damselflies have been found there. Ecological research at Hornsby Bend is coordinated by Austin Water’s Center for Environmental Research [CER] located on the site which works with Texas universities and government agencies to study the ecology of this urban wasteland [website - http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/water/cer2.htm ]. Research projects include urban waste recycling, soil ecology and environmental trace contaminants, hydrology and riparian ecology, biodiversity studies, and avian ecology.

And it is where I live and work...

2010-11-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

Marginal Nature: Urban Wastelands and the Geography of Nature online

My dissertation is now available online through the University of Texas library. Lots of pictures ;-)

http://gradworks.umi.com/34/07/3407555.html

2010-11-04T10:44:00.000-07:00

Ecologists shun the urban jungle

I cover some of these same issues in the urban ecology chapter of my dissertation, but here the ESA struggles with the tendency to prejudge and neglect nature in urban landscapes.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100716/full/news.2010.359.html

2010-01-15T10:59:00.000-08:00

…the danger…is being tempted into some biological slumming. The habitats I’ve described in this book are in no way a substitute for the official countryside. Nor are they something to be cherished in their own right, necessarily.

- Richard Mabey, Unofficial Countryside

(Wastelands)…have very high diversity (and) large connected vacant sites are particularly outstanding habitats, ranging from pioneer stages, in heavily disturbed areas, to pre-forest stages in others.
- Herbert Sukopp, Development of flora and fauna in urban areas

… the reference point is not an original condition of a natural landscape, but rather a condition defined based on the current site potential and the greatest possible degree of self-regulation. From this perspective, therefore, the natural capacity for process is the central point, not a particular, retrospectively determined and often idealized, picture of nature.
- Ingo Kowarik, Urban Wild Woodlands[1]

The Weeds and the Wild: Marginal Nature and Urban Ecology

A scientific mode of engagement with wasteland ecosystems holds the potential for a more objective and neutral narrative of marginal nature. However, we who study these fortuitous habitats are familiar with Mabey’s ambivalence about his attraction to this marginal nature which he labels “biological slumming.” This lifeworld is subject to a range of interpretive ecological readings: a weedland community of inappropriate nature, a cosmopolitan community of uniquely adapted ruderal organisms, or an invading force of alien species destroying the integrity of our homeland. There is some truth in each view, but all are influenced by cultural perceptions of good and bad nature. Thus, the assessment of the ecological standing of wasteland ecosystems is necessarily both scientific and cultural.

The ecological setting for wasteland habitat begins with a presettlement ecosystem. In America, this setting is associated with the myth of wilderness as first nature. Wilderness is that pristine pre-Columbian place that continues be the standard of American nature despite the work of geographers, historians, and ecologists who have established the role of Native Americans in transforming the ecology of America.[2] For thousands of years, Native Americans had been busy manipulating and cultivating wilderness in ways that European American eyes failed to see, or chose not to acknowledge.[3] Now we reify native species as the embodiment of the original moment before our own arrival, a misapprehension bound up in the retrospective discourse of conservation biology and restoration ecology and then deployed as the focus of nature protection in America.

The issue of what is native or alien to a place is a question of biogeography which is transformed into scientific programs of conservation biology and restoration ecology. Here in the wastelands, the question of native species and first nature arises most sharply when a patch of remnant habitat is found. In the wastelands, these remnants are promoted as highly prized reminders of the past; benchmarks for restoration; and “shrines” for nature enthusiasts.[4] They are the standards used to judge the rest of wasteland nature and to label it as degraded habitat. The quest for these remnants is one aspect of engagement with wastelands, but one where only remnant shreds and scraps are valued. Habitat in urban waste space as a whole is devalued when compared to the few sites with remnant first nature. Moreover, this remnant first nature is the catalyst for restoration projects that seek to transform wastelands.

When no remnants are found, this ecological meddling in the margins can take the form of claiming them for the functional landscapes of second nature, which entails the transformation of the ecological community in wastelands for social purposes. The sports fields and lawns of urban pastoral parkland typically consist of non-native turf grasses. The reclamation of vacant lots into community gardens and urban farms replaces wasteland weeds with cultivated plants, most of which ironically are non-native species. Vegetation managed as functional infrastructure in flood plains or along waterways also consists of native and non-native vegetation. Thus, the wastelands disappear as we turn them into landscapes of second nature.

The German urban ecologist, Ingo Kowarik, uses the iterative concept of nature to argue for appreciation of wasteland habitats.[5] The focus of his research is woodlands that grow without human help in urban industrial waste spaces. He argues that these “urban industrial woodlands” must be recognized as a distinct kind of ecological community. The woodlands that have grown in the derelict iron and steel foundries and mining areas in the Ruhr valley are well studied German examples.[6] They, also, have been extensively studied in old railyards, abandoned railways, and other vacant lands in Berlin. If these woodlands are compared to original mature woodlands outside of the city, they are classified as degraded woodlands. Kowarik argues that this comparison amounts to judging them with a retrospective standard of nature based on past conditions. He characterizes this standard as “a particular, retrospectively determined and often idealized, picture of nature.”[7] This picture of nature is usually a first nature image of woodland. He argues for a “contemporaneous” approach to evaluating these urban woodlands which does not value them based on a retrospective judgment about the anthropogenic origin of the site. Additionally, they should be evaluated with a “prospective” approach which assesses their potential for capacity to grow without the intervention of humans. Both their self-generation and successful growth independent of human cultivation indicate their ecological functionality from the perspective of ecosystem process.

Based on these ecological attributes, Kowarik argues that urban industrial woodlands have more similarities to first nature woodland, to which they are usually negatively compared, than to cultivated, intensively managed forests or parkland/garden trees. He suggests a revision of the iterative classification of nature where urban industrial woodlands are recognized as a fourth nature following on traditional first and second nature and including the Renaissance idea of gardens as third nature. Fourth nature “encompasses the natural development that occurs independently on typical urban industrial sites, without horticultural planning or design,” which emerges as a kind of “new wilderness.”[8]

One goal of his proposal is to shift the focus of urban nature conservation planning from particular sites which manifest first nature remnants or pastoral attributes to significant examples of each of the four types of nature.[9] A second goal is more controversial, especially in America, since he asserts a “fundamental equivalence of values” between these four kinds of nature which is a direct challenge to the primacy of wilderness, "The second goal is to convey, through a simple distinction between natures of the first, second, third and fourth kind, that a fundamental equivalence of values exists among the four different nature types. The original nature, which is identified as the “correct” nature from a scientific perspective through the application of the retrospective perspective of naturalness…is therefore not automatically more valuable than the other manifestations of nature."[10]

Kowarik creates this new classification to overcome the prejudice that, even in Germany, sets first nature or preferred cultural landscapes as the correct nature to conserve. This sanctioning of original nature within conservation biology is based on a prejudice for wilderness or traditional cultural landscapes.[11] He is not alone in making this criticism of conservation biology, but his focus on urban nature conservation is relevant to assessing the value of marginal nature.[12] Even though Kowarik is not arguing that first and fourth nature are the same ecological communities, his appeal to functionality and ecosystem processes undermines the dominance of first nature as the sole standard of appropriate nature. This socioecological revision contrasts sharply with the strong argument for pristine nature that we find in American environmental ethicists. For example, Katz argues that the intervention of human intentionality at any point undoes the authenticity of the natural, turns a once natural place into an artifact.[13] This absolutist belief in the authenticity of natural value relies on the strict divide between the natural and the human, with pristine nature as the only ground for natural value.

[1] Kowarik (2005) p. 20.
[2] Denevan (1992), Crosby (1972)(1986), and Butzer (1992)
[3] Sauer (1950), Cronon (1983), Merchant (2003)
[4] Moskovits (2002) for Chicago, Houck (2000) for Portland
[5] Kowarik (2005)
[6] Dettmar (1999) and Weiss et.al. (2005)
[7] Kowarik (2005) p. 20.
[8] Kowarik (2005) p.22.
[9] Kowarik (2005) p. 23.
[10] Kowarik (2005) p. 23.
[11] Kowarik (2005) p. 23.
[12] Zimmerer (2000) makes a similar argument for reassessing conservation priorities to include “hybrid-rich” second nature landscapes. For urban nature conservation priorities see Kendle and Forbes (1997) and McKinney (2002).
[13] Katz (1993) (1997) (2000)

2009-10-31T08:26:00.000-07:00

Wastelands and Margins

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Elliot’s “Wasteland” resonates with negative connotations of neglect, abandonment, and emptiness. Etymologically, wasteland has roots in the vastness of the barren, uninhabitable desert wilderness of Western biblical tradition. This linkage between wasteland and wilderness emerges in other ways in the discourse of marginal nature, but here it resonates through the basic spatial distinction between urban space inhabited by humans and space which is perceived as devoid of humans and “going to waste”. “Waste” has roots in the Latin vastare, to lay waste, devastate - but as an adjective it evokes synonyms like discarded, worthless, valueless, profitless, useless, empty, barren, dreary, uninhabited, desolate, superfluous, unnecessary, functionless, purposeless. Indeed, wasteland warrants each of these adjectives when viewed from the perspective of urban growth and management in a narrow capitalist sense, but, as noted above, there are other more positive interpretations of wastelands which engender a wasteland discourse of freedom and attraction. Much of this wasteland discourse echoes the criticisms of weedy, degraded marginal nature.

Wastelands are the home-realm of marginal nature in the built landscape, but the territory of marginal nature reaches beyond literal wasteland sites and infiltrates throughout the city. Urban waste space is deliberately a broader term than the category of “vacant land” used by planners, because it also includes smaller patches and scraps of habitat intruding on developed sites, as well as literal wastelands like dumpsites and sewage ponds. Types of waste space include whole parcels, like the iconic vacant lot, which may be an undeveloped industrial tract or a small backlot in a residential neighborhood. Marginal nature ventures forth from these larger wastelands to colonize the neglected drainage channels, alleyways, forgotten corners of developed tracts, and even claims walls and fencelines, creating habitat wherever the flora and fauna of marginal nature can establish themselves.

2009-09-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

The Natural History of Unnatural Nature: Urban Natural Histories

Pale Male the famous redtail hawk
Performs wingstands high above midtown Manhattan
Circles around for one last pass over the park
Got his eye on a fat squirrel down there and a couple of pigeons
They got no place to run they got no place to hide
But Pale Male he’s cool, see ‘cause his breakfast ain’t goin’ nowhere
So he does a loop t loop for the tourists and the six o’clock news
Got him a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys
He looks up and down on fifth avenue and says “God I love this town”

But life goes on down here below
And all us mortals struggle so
We laugh and cry
And live and die
That’s how it goes
For all we know
Down here below

Pale male swimmin’ in the air
Looks like he’s in heaven up there
People sufferin’ everywhere
But he don’t care
But life goes on down here below
And all us mortals, struggle so
We laugh and cry
- Steve Earle[1]

It takes a relocated Texas songwriter to capture the irony of Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk who nests on the edge of Central Park in New York. This kind of ironic perspective on urban wildlife, with a bird more at home in the city than the suffering humans down below, suggests the possibilities for reinterpreting narratives of nature from the vantage point of city margins as habitat. The mobility of urban wildlife like birds and large mammals allow them to exploit the entire city as habitat. The emplaced nonhuman communities of wastelands and margins do not have the ability to elude the human interventions of restorationists or environmental managers. We can imagine Pale Male as an agent making his way through the city picking off squirrels and courting and nesting while New Yorkers line up below to watch.

The agency of marginal nature is a more collective undertaking, a gathering of nonhumans in a collaborative project to make home in a particular place in the city. Most members of the community are not as mobile as the mammals and birds, and so they take advantage of more discrete opportunities like high alkalinity of soil which some flora and fauna tolerate better than others. Soon the community has begun to gather and the coproduction of marginal nature has begun, as Richard Mabey describes in London,

"Within a few years the young shrubs will be head and shoulders above the grass, and in a decade may form dense thickets. This is the natural succession of plants on disturbed ground. But it is the fate of disturbed ground to be roughed up again, and it’s not often that the scrubland stage is reached. Where it is, it is in those awkward-shaped parcels of ground – left over like a hem when the surrounding areas have been sewn up – often called ‘marginal land’. These seem to be multiplying with the piecemeal extension of built-up areas: a sliver of land left over between two strictly rectangular factories, a disused car dump, the surrounds of an electricity substation. Nothing can be done with these patches. They are too small or misshapen to build on, too expensive to landscape. So they are simply ignored – at least until the bushes start shutting out the light from the machine shop."[2]

Like Mabey in London, the most open engagement with this successional habitat in American urban wastelands is found in urban natural history writings. Mabey references Fitter’s London's Natural History (1945) as a guide to his exploration of London, and in America we have examples like Kieran’s A Natural History of New York (1959) in which sanctioned and unsanctioned nature is included in the account. Both are survey accounts of flora and fauna and good examples of traditional natural history writing reminiscent of the Nature Study movement in the early Twentieth Century and both were written before the overt politicization of environmental writing. They both turn a naturalist's eye to the margins of the city and discover a richness of flora and fauna usually overlooked in the everyday landscape of the city.

A more recent example that follows the tradition of the nature study movement launched at the end of the last century in urban America and that focuses in on a specific type of marginal habitat is Vessel and Wong’s California Natural History Guide No. 50: Natural History of Vacant Lots (1987). Vessel and Wong point out that, although Californian vacant lots contain plants specific to the climate of California, they contain a large number of plants that are common to most urban landscapes across America and beyond. The presence of hardy exotic species provides the commonality, for instance Gingko trees (Gingko biloba) or Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) introduced from Asia or Field mustard (Brassica campestris) from Europe. In terms of plant species composition, these new habitats which emerge in urban margins reflect the cosmopolitan influence of urbanization. In Austin, Texas, this cosmopolitanism takes the form of Chinaberry (Melia azedarach), Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and Texas Oaks (Quercus buckleyi) growing together in marginal places.

The best recent example of this genre of urban natural history is Houck and Cody’s Wild in the City: A Guide to Portland’s Natural Areas (2000), an edited collection of essays and site descriptions of the “natural areas” in and around Portland. The book is the distillation of almost twenty years of the journal Urban Naturalist, which documented the natural history of Portland including of non-native species. Although utilizing the traditional discourse of wildness and green nature and focusing primarily on the pedigreed nature of parks and preserves, it openly addresses the ruinous attractions of marginal nature in wastewater ponds and vacant lots. Perhaps this is influenced by Robert Pyle who contributes an essay on the value of vacant lots entitled “No Vacancy” in which he takes to task the unexamined support for “infilling” as a way to save the rural. “Every time infilling takes a vacant lot, either through direct development or conversion to formal parkland, something precious is lost in the heart of the living city.”[3]

The focus of urban ecologists, biologists, and naturalists is on the nonhumans who inhabit the urban landscape, but, as we have seen in this chapter that nonhuman focus is insufficient to account for the community gathered in the margins. For that account we must turn to writers like Pyle and Mabey who enter the wastelands in search of community with nonhumans and lose their bearings amidst the ruinous attractions of marginal nature. We end this post with Mabey for some “biological slumming” as he looks out across an abandoned water-filled gravel pit on the edge of London,

"A red-crested pochard, a rare vagrant from Eastern Europe with a bill so luridly crimson that it looks like Bakelite. A solitary cormorant overhead, as dark and reptilian as a pterodactyl. Kingfishers, siskins, herons, teal.

At times like this I would find in myself an affection for these grubby landscapes that I could never have predicted and would be hard put to excuse. Visually, they were without exception ugly. Although the healing processes of natural growth were everywhere in evidence (they were what I had been looking at the whole year), each one of these habitats represented an assault upon some green country. They had none of the restful predictability of ancient countryside, that feeling of seasoned flow and stability that you find in downland and forest.
Yet it is the disorder and incongruity that I find so exciting and irresistible."[4]

In praise of grubby landscapes.

[1] Steve Earle, “Down Here Below”, song on Washington Street Serenade (2007)
[2] Mabey Unofficial Countryside (1973) p. 32
[3] Pyle in Houck and Cody (2000) p. 23.
[4] Mabey Unofficial Countryside (1973) p. 154

2009-09-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

The Agency of Nature

Hackberry trees [Celtis sp.] are treated as "trash trees" in Texas even though they are one of the most significant trees as host plants and food sources [and, moreover, as early successional forest species driving the recovery of the bottomland forest here at Hornsby Bend]. They are short lived, and so they are not promoted by urban foresters. They are a highly "invasive" species, popping up as "weeds" in yards and fencelines, but, since they are native to Texas, they are not classified for extermination. Instead, they are rhetorically marginalized as "trash trees" and go uncelebrated in native plant culture.

But they are capable of remarkable feats of survival and vigorous growth in the city. This one has created one of my favorite sculptures here on a field edge at Hornsby Bend.

2009-08-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Open Question of Marginal Nature -

The Discourse of Urban Nature and the Wasteland

In the United States, the foundational myths of Nature that we celebrate are the myths of wilderness and pastoral arcadia. They are the foundation of the discourse of American nature from which we assess the value of nature in America. However, we are now predominately a country of urbanites who have only occasional contact with wilderness or pastoral nature. To compensate for this urban depravation, we have incorporated green islands of nature into our cities to allow for contact with approximations of wild and rural landscapes. These deliberate systems of gardens, parks, and preserves are “green space” for formal, mediated encounter with officially managed “pedigreed” nature that incorporate elements of both wild and pastoral landscapes. Thus, our understanding of what constitutes “official” urban nature in cities is shaped by culturally dominant metaphors of Nature, which valorize urban nature that is either deliberately welcomed into the urban landscape – parks and gardens - or that redeem the built landscape through reminding us of native landscapes obliterated by the creation of the city – preserves, sanctuaries, and refuges.

Urban nature that falls outside of the categories of official planning is acknowledged positively when it can be discursively altered to fit within these narratives of wild or pastoral Nature. Thus, urban “wildlife” is another mediated, managed kind of urban nature found in the city. This urban fauna is judged as good when it in some way fulfills our expectations of wild or pastoral “urban” nature or condemned as pestilent when it fails to follow the narrative for “good” fauna in the city. This narrative of nature declares that everyday house sparrows, grackles, and pigeons are urban pests that further degrade the city, but nesting red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons are redemptive “wild” additions to the urban scene. However, this discursive categorization of good and bad urban wildlife illustrates the American expectation for urban nature to be decorative “natural” signifiers and to be managed as urban amenities like “green space” or “urban wildlife”. Moreover, it creates the odd circumstance that upon crossing the city limits a “rock dove” becomes a “winged rat”. The nature/society questions raised by urban fauna are numerous, and they have spawned a great deal of academic attention. What is marginalized in this new academic narrative of urban nature/urban fauna is another kind of urban nature which is the habitat for many of these “urban wild things.”

This other urban nature emerges in the wastelands and weedy margins of the urban landscape from the central business district to the suburban/rural fringe of a city. This other urban nature capitalizes on our neglect and flourishes through its own agency in urban wastelands like vacant lots, sewage ponds, unmaintained roadway and railway verges, derelict brownfields, and untended margins. Although we think of these places as idle and degraded land, nature is always busy "developing" these sites to its own standards of economy. Taking advantage of an opportunity, “weeds” – those plants out of place - colonize the bare earth, sprout from crumbling walls, or force their way through to make root-room in concrete and brick. A diverse community of urban fauna then claims this "fortuitous landscape" amidst the garbage and the flowers. This unplanned, unmanaged urban “open space” or “green space” is far more ubiquitous in the urban landscape than planned, managed, and officially sanctioned “open space” or “green space”. This rogue habitat emerges as the everyday backdrop to urban life, and, though hidden in the margins, it is close at hand for informal, unmediated encounter with “nature” – but what kind of nature is this ragged, prosaic habitat?

This assertive, resistive community is a hybrid type of nature both weedy and wild - the unintended product of human activity and nature's unflagging opportunism, which I call marginal nature. Marginal nature in the urban landscape is neither pristine nor pastoral, but rather it is a kind of nature whose ecological and cultural meaning is an open question.

2009-08-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

Sideoats Grama - the State Grass of Texas

This is the landscape that nobody wants. It’s my cup of rejection:
Driven to this unformed scraggly ignored backlot, this not-quite
Prairie, not-quite thicket, not even natural corner of
Texas, the hardscrabble left butt of a demoralized nation,
It is my choice and my pleasure to cherish this haphazard wilderness.
No, it’s not even “wild” – it’s a neglected product of artifice.
Come, let us walk by an improvised lakeshore, be given a vision:
Beaches of black dust, beautiful white ghosts, this drowned forest…
- Frederick Turner, Texas Eclogue, 1st stanza

Hadean Eclogues by Frederick Turner [ Story Line Press 1999]

…we [need to] abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial – completely fallen and unnatural – and the tree in the wilderness as natural – completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others.

William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.pp 88-89.

2009-08-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

"A 'cesspool' under Montopolis bridge - access being ruined by trash, glass and pollution, some say"

This site in East Austin is one of the most used and abused marginal spaces in the city. I have monitored it for ten years and, in particular, I have followed the fortunes of this bald cypress tree growing from the concrete footer of Montopolis Bridge.

On some weekends you can find hundreds of people gathered to swim, fish, drink, bbq, and hang out. The Austin newspaper proclaimed this site a "cesspool" in an article yesterday [without saying if the pun was intended]. The article set off a racist/classist/enviro flame war in the comments after the article, revealing the social tensions over urban margins and cultural expectations/differences about how to engage nature. [and also how racism and environmentalism can be entwined]. Read for yourself http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/08/19/0819watch.html

No report about what the cypress tree thought...

2009-08-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

The Paradox of Meddling 1

The paradox of meddling in the margins arises from human interaction with urban wastelands. Since the social appeal of these marginal spaces and wastelands is the absence of official sanction and control, we risk destroying the very characteristics which make these socially engaging spaces in the first place when we try to improve them through planning and management. For Kevin Lynch these spaces are “liberated zones” freed from social expectations of proper use of urban space,

“Shabby, ordinary places escape the weight of power, the intent to impress; they are liberated zones. They relieve us from the necessity of calculated communication and behavior. Not that they lack meaning – far from it – but they have the simplicity and ease of well-settled custom and familiar use. In many famous cities, the backsides are not only more revealing to the inquiring eye, but offer more enduring delights, once we are no longer tourists.”[1]

His perspective is decidedly a minority one within urban design and urban society as a whole. Whether it is urban planning, urban ecology, or urban nature appreciation, there is a compulsion to meddle with this waste space. The paradox of meddling is not just a problem for the social values of waste space, but it emerges as an unrecognized dilemma even for supporters of urban nature, such as urban landscape architects whose primary commitment is design with nature. However, as is the case with the new High Line landscape, urban nature enthusiasts purge the unwanted, weedy species which comprise marginal nature, and so, through this meddling “improvement” of the wastelands, we undo the cosmopolitan community which thrives there.

[1] Lynch, Kevin, Wasting Away
San Francisco : Sierra Club Books, 1990. p. 27

2009-08-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

Urban Wastelands - Traditional Narratives and New Counter-narratives

Within the urban landscape, marginal nature seeks out neglected open spaces to establish itself. These can be “slivers” of leftover marginal land or whole large parcels of vacant land, but all of this urban space is “wasteland” from the perspective of the economic function of the city. Wasteland, vacant lot, derelict land, and brownfield are a few of names for the kinds of urban spaces in which marginal nature makes home. These are urban spaces defined by neglect and abandonment, where derelict structures decay and marginal nature is able to take hold. Urban wastelands and margins are literal “shreds and scraps” throughout the urban landscape, and so marginal nature can be found from the urban center to suburban fringe wherever leftover land is found.

These marginal spaces are assessed negatively by traditional narratives of good and bad urban space, for this is “wasteland” and “vacant/derelict land” which needs planning, management, and infill to be reclaimed by urban economic development and for proper social/environmental uses. The list of social, economic, and environmental problems associated with them is long. Sites like vacant lots and brownfields can harbor pollution, vermin, and disease from illegal dumping. They are also perceived as dangerous since they are used for illegal activity and since the homeless often utilize them for campsites, resulting in more trash and trouble. Thus, the dominant narrative of urban waste space is that wastelands are "problem" sites for the institutions charged with maintaining human and environmental health and safety. However, there are ecological and social counter-narratives about the positive values of these urban waste spaces.

In Kevin Lynch’s posthumously published book, Wasting Away, he celebrates “waste places” for their “ruinous attractions”,

"Many waste places have these ruinous attractions: release from control, free play for action and fantasy, rich and varied sensations. Thus children are attracted to vacant lots, scrub woods, back alleys, and unused hillsides…Adults, more inhibited by accepted ideas of beauty and value, will nevertheless also enjoy visiting a well-managed local dump or an established ruin…those screened, marginal, uncontrolled places where people can indulge in behavior that is proscribed and yet not harmful to others – are regularly threatened by clean-ups and yet are a necessity for supple society."[1]

Lynch’s libertarian argument turns the wastelands into sites of freedom from surveillance and control for humans. Thus, the wastelands become unique kinds of liberated spaces where social freedom and social marginality are seen as positive attributes of the urban landscape and “a necessity for supple society.” Though Lynch does not make the point, this issue of social marginality and wastelands is reinforced by the fact that wastelands are often literal human habitat, since they are a common location for homeless camps. This social counter-narrative, then, adds further complexity to the discursive dualities entangled with this kind of urban space, because it suggests a similar view of urban waste space as liberated spaces for nonhumans where they can be free of surveillance and control of humans. These urban waste spaces are perceptual ecotones where the boundaries of proper and improper nature and society meet and merge.

What emerges from the commingling of the proper and improper in these wastelands is a new narrative of urban waste space which casts them as a collaborative project between humans and nonhumans. This coproduction begins with the creation of this unique kind of opening in the urban landscape. Human agency creates the built landscape which ebbs and flows with development and dereliction and redevelopment. During ebb times, human neglect provides the temporal opening for the emergence of marginal nature, but these urban waste spaces are then shaped and filled through the agency of non-humans taking advantage of the opportunity and thriving. The nonequilibrium dynamic of periodic disturbance only adds to the diversity of the landscapes of urban waste spaces. This waste space is constantly changing with the process of urban development, a dynamic which favors a community adapted to disturbance – opportunists who make this wasteland home.

The creativity and novelty of marginal nature, its opportunistic, assertive, transgressive reclamation of urban wastelands and margins, reminds us that the built landscape is not just a homogeneous space of human action and domination but a heterogeneous nature/society hybrid. However, our perception of the built landscape as a nature/society coproduction is hampered by a discourse of urban space which delineates the value of urban space in reference to human society only. And so the reinterpreting of urban waste space from the perspective of marginal nature requires a rewriting of the narrative of the wastelands that includes nonhumans as collaborators in their creation. These nonhuman agents create spaces holding “ruinous attractions” which draw humans to them. A paradox arises from the uniqueness of this collaborative creation in urban waste spaces in which the meddling of well intend humans who seek to intervene in these spaces leads to the undoing of the qualities of these waste spaces that attract humans to them.

Future posts will explore this "Paradox of Meddling"

[1] Lynch, (1990) p. 26

2009-08-09T09:47:00.001-07:00

The Marginal Nature of Walls

The best examples of the tenacity and opportunism of marginal nature are mosses, lichens, and plants that grow on walls. Some bird species like cliff swallows and barn swallows attach their mud nests to walls and bridges.

Urban ecologists study the wall ecology of older walls, and in Europe and Asia they have been studied as unique habitats - see Segar, Ecological Notes on Wall Vegetation (1969)

2009-08-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

The case against the “imaginative greening” of the High Line

“The case for the imaginative greening of "brownfields"—derelict industrial sites, in planners' jargon—was tremendously advanced with the opening this June of the first segment of New York City's High Line, a linear park superimposed on the eponymous long- defunct cargo railroad trestle that wends through nearly a mile and a half of Manhattan's West Side from midtown to Greenwich Village.”

So begins Martin Filler’s piece in the New York Review of Books [Aug 13, 2009 Vol. 56 No. 13] about the High Line park in Manhattan http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22954 . Unfortunately, he unimaginatively accepts that “imaginative greening” is inherently good. His assumption, like that of the Friends of the High Line, is that we can “green” these places that nature has already greened and improve on nature’s agency. The “improvements” in the case of the High Line reveal little interest in preserving the actual plant community which inhabited the High Line. Rather, they developers of the new park destroyed that community shaped by the agency of nature and rebuilt a plant community to their liking and to the standards of human agency - of parkland and garden which creates the appearance of the actual marginal nature that formerly existed. Strange friends indeed.

Filler asserts, “The High Line marks a radical departure from the Classical model of the public park as rus in urbe —"country in city"—epitomized by London's Hyde Park and New York's Central Park, which allow one to imagine having been transported to an idyllic countryside. What makes walking the High Line such an intriguing experience is the way in which it celebrates rather than obviates the collision of natural and manmade environments.” However, although the setting – a rusting elevated railway – is a manmade environment, the new park is a facsimile of the former natural environment that inhabited the rusting railway. Filler points out that the new gardens are “meant to evoke the lush, self-sown greenery that thrived on the High Line during its three decades of desuetude” and the landscape design is an attempt, “to recapture some semblance of that volunteer vegetation.” That semblance excludes the unacceptable non-native species that transgress the code of native species championed by American conservationists, urban biologists, horticulturalists, and landscape architects. As Filler puts it, the High Line plantings are meant to look "messy," "unkempt," and "scruffy" and "less like a park and more like a scruffy wilderness," but the weeds have been banished. Thus, native sumac is used since it is “a shrub with compound leaves reminiscent of Ailanthus altissima, the weedlike "tree of heaven" apostrophized in Betty Smith's best-selling novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn of 1943 as an archetypal urban survivor accustomed to the toughest settings. (Conservationists now discourage use of that aggressively invasive species.)”

I find little to celebrate with the High Line since an occasion to learn from marginal nature and preserve the weedland on the High Line has been lost. The photographs on the Friends of the Highline website http://www.thehighline.org/ demonstrate how nonhuman agents assembled a cosmopolitan community that was aesthetically pleasing and inclusive of nonnatives which has been undone by the semblance of the former wildness imposed on the place by the human agents who think they know what is best for this kind of urban space. Where there was once freedom and unsanctioned creativity, there now is surveillance and only sanctioned nature is welcomed. Hence, no Tree of Heaven is allowed.

But give it a few years. Let the new park age a bit, and in the neglected margins a few weeds will return to remind us of what used to be.

2009-08-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

What do shreds and scraps of the natural scene mean, after all, in the shadow of the citified whole? What can one patch of leftover land mean to one person’s life, or to the lives of all who dwell in the postindustrial wasteland? - Robert Michael Pyle, The Thunder Tree

This blog is a response to these questions from Robert Pyle’s book about a drainage ditch in the suburbs of Denver. These questions were not specifically addressed to geographers, but they are distinctly geographical questions about urban spaces that have been little studied by geographers – the shreds and scraps of nature that emerge in wastelands and margins in the urban landscape. His book is about a personal journey back to the origin of his life-long study of butterflies and of his foundational experience of affection for the natural scene. The irony for him is that it all began in a weedy drainage ditch, but he turns that irony back on himself and other American nature writers and environmentalists by insisting on the importance of “shreds and scraps” of urban space like vacant lots for an experience of nature in the shadow of the city. Interestingly, he uses a rhetorical sleight of hand to assist his argument - with the “ditch” becoming an “accidental urban wildland.” This rhetorical move is an attempt to fit these accidental habitats into the discourse of nature in America and, thereby, to use an accepted trope of the discourse of American nature - wildland - to signal that these overgrown urban margins are a part of nature and, therefore, worthy of our affection. But, if these leftover shreds and scraps of urban habitat are “nature,” what kind of nature is this accidental stuff?

2004-04-27T13:51:00.001-07:00

Since we are now predominately a country of urbanites, the nature that most Americans routinely encounter is in the sprawling shadow of the city, thus it is in this shadow that we must come to terms with our attitudes, perceptions, and concepts of nature. However, the nature that we celebrate is wilderness and pastoral landscapes (Marx, 1964, Nash, 1967, Oehlschlager, 1991, Wilson, 1992). Judged by these landscape standards, urban nature is a degraded, demeaned thing - once a rock dove but now the winged rat of the city. To compensate for this depravation, modern American cities have incorporated islands of nature into urban landscapes through organized systems of gardens, parks, and preserves (Schmitt, 1969, Spirn, 1984, Stilgoe, 1988). These islands of managed nature are sites of formal and mediated encounter where landscape architecture, planning, and environmental professionals provide access to officially sanctioned “pedigreed” nature that incorporates elements of both wild and pastoral landscapes (Hough, 1995).

However, outside these planned and sanctioned landscapes, another kind of urban nature can be found that has received little attention from these scholars. This different sort of nature emerges in unmaintained spaces like neglected creeks, wastewater treatment ponds, vacant lots, road and rail waysides, industrial wastelands, fencerows, cemeteries, dumps, and alleyways. These weedy and unkempt marginal sites in the city are the by-products of urban growth and decay, and they are most often discussed as problems or “trouble spots” to be solved by politicians, urban planners, and environmental professionals (Laurie, 1979, Spirn, 1984, Kendle and Forbes, 1997) and eliminated from the urban landscape. These urban margins can harbor pollution, as well as vermin and disease from illegal dumping. They are also perceived as socially dangerous and squalid since homeless people may use them for campsites and criminals may use them for cover. Thus, at the negative extreme, they are "problem" sites for those city institutions charged with protecting the health and safety of humans and the environment.

But a more positive engagement with these margins occurs as people claim these margins as sites of unsanctioned recreation in the vernacular landscape. Through an informal process of exploration, these margins can become more than just “green space” on a map but rather places of nature encounter and recreation – places where children play and learn about nature, where adults go to birdwatch or to fish or to relax beyond the official confines of outdoor recreation – with the social marginality of these margins somehow a part of their appeal (Dillard, 1987, Pyle, 1993, Nabhan and Trimble, 1994). The strange attractiveness of the margins is both a result of our need for unofficial contact with nature and a result of nature expressing itself in creative ways in marginal places.

Nature can be encountered in these places because of the agency of nature. While urban planning professionals debate what to do with this “idle” land, nature is busy "developing" these neglected sites to its own standards of economy. Native and exotic plants colonize open spaces. Insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals readily inhabit these unintended “spontaneous” habitats (Sukopp, 1987, Adams, 1994, Kendle and Forbes, 1997, Wheater 1999). The result is a so-called successional mix of native and exotic organisms. What emerges in these margins is the unintended product of human activity and nature's unflagging expressiveness whose marginality is its defining characteristic both physically and culturally. By traditional landscape standards, these margins are usually not aesthetically pleasing, but they can have their own rough beauty that draws nature writers and others there to seek encounters with “unofficial countryside” (Mabey, 1973) or the “urban wilds” (Pyle, 1993). However, what they encounter is not wilderness or countryside – but a kind of natural place that strains conceptual categories of nature, because marginal nature in the urban landscape is neither pristine nor pastoral, but rather it is a new kind of nature whose ecological and cultural value is an open question.

Marginal nature offers oblique entry into contemporary struggles with the meaning of the nature/culture distinction, for marginal places are access points into the American urban landscape that can illuminate our changing relationship with nature. The neglected margins of the city are unique sounding boards for measuring attitudes toward nature since they provoke ambiguous responses of attraction and repulsion. They are perceptual ecotones where contesting views of nature appreciation and urban land-use come together. Thus, in cultural terms, the marginality of marginal nature is based, not just on its demeaned ecological status, but also on how we perceive these places, how [and if] we use them, and how we value the nature that we encounter there.

2004-02-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

Marginal nature is found in unmaintained spaces like neglected urban creeks, wastewater treatment ponds, vacant lots, road and rail waysides, industrial wastelands, fencerows, cemeteries, dumps, and alleyways. What emerges in these urban margins is the unintended product of human activity and nature's unflagging expressiveness. Marginality is its defining characteristic both physically and culturally. By traditional natural landscape standards, these margins are usually not aesthetically pleasing, but they can have their own rough beauty that draws nature writers and others to seek encounters with “unofficial countryside” or the “urban wilds” in city margins. However, what they encounter is not wilderness or countryside – but a kind of natural place that strains conceptual categories of nature, because marginal nature in the urban landscape is neither pristine nor pastoral, but rather it is a new kind of cosmopolitan nature whose ecological and cultural value is an open question