November 14, 2022
“The city is an ecosystem,” contends historian Wilson (Metropolis) in this thorough exploration of urban ecology. He studies metropolitan “edgelands”—“the middens and rubbish dumps, the abandoned sites and empty rooftops, the strips of land behind chain-link fences”—suggesting they act as life support systems and mitigate the effects of climate change. Wilson covers the founding of the first cities in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE, where the bounty of food sources afforded by the wetlands freed up time to develop infrastructure and trade, and continues through to the present day. He describes how developments in such seaside locales as Staten Island’s Oakwood Beach are being dismantled so that the marshes can return and serve as a buffer between rising sea levels and communities further inland. Wilson is optimistic about the progress being made to ameliorate ecological damage, detailing such “rewilding” projects as the transformation of a garbage dump into a park in New York City and Amsterdam’s efforts to function “as a healthy local ecosystem” by achieving zero waste. Wilson’s account of these efforts makes a convincing case that the natural world extends farther than commonly acknowledged, and the trivia is delightful (London pigeons take the tube to travel between their nests and food sources). Stimulating and wide-ranging, this will change how city dwellers view their relationship with nature.
December 15, 2022
Historical survey of the damage that cities have done to nature and the possibilities for mutually beneficial coexistence. Early on in his latest book, Wilson, British author of such popular histories as Metropolis and Empire of the Deep, reminds us that without nature, cities are unsustainable. "The veneer of civilization is paper-thin," he writes. "Scratch at the carapace and you discover a world teeming with wildlife." Despite this fact, cities are only beginning to learn how to live with the increasing numbers of living things that are attracted to and thrive on the biodiversity to which they give rise. Drawing examples from around the world, Wilson illustrates the interdependencies that cities have with plants, trees, water, food sources, and birds and animals. In each chapter, he discusses the accommodations struck when cities first emerged, the later destruction brought on by industrialization, and current attempts to reconnect around ecological and human resilience. As he points out, technological solutions that attempt to dominate nature--e.g., the concrete channeling of streams and canals--no longer make sense. Also insufficient are parks, tree-lined boulevards, private gardens, and low-density suburbs. Instead, we need green and blue (water) infrastructure and ecological buffer zones that engage with the natural processes essential to a city's ecosystem. If contemporary cities are not to suffer the fate of the Mayan city of Tikal or the Cambodian city of Angkor Wat, "both devoured by rainforests," they will have to follow the leads of Amsterdam, Singapore, and Berlin in attempting to live proactively with nature. The title of the book is unfortunate given that public debate in the U.S. regarding cities has used the phrase not to allude to nature but to speak with disdain and alarm about race and crime. Nonetheless, Wilson is a helpful guide to the intersection of nature and city life. A sharp, dispassionate plea to recognize our dependence on nature and mitigate the dire consequences of climate change.
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March 1, 2023
Wilson leads readers on a brisk ramble through urban nature, emphasizing both peril and potential. In Metropolis (2020), Wilson hails cities as "humankind's greatest invention." Here, anticipating a counterargument, he acknowledges the environmental harm wreaked by unchecked urbanization. His examples include grim historical incidents, such as London's 1858 Great Stink sewage disaster, and a litany of all-too-familiar present-day catastrophes. But closer consideration of urban wildlife reveals pockets of unsung adaptation and profound ecological interdependencies. It isn't just rats and pigeons. Foxes, coyotes, and even honeybees are increasingly adapted to living in humanmade shadows; green plants invariably find ways to transcend concrete. Density and sprawl may be irreversible, but urban gardens, flood-friendly city planning, and the rewilding of abandoned industrial land can turn cities into bastions of environmental resilience. "Our metropolises," Wilson proposes, ""could very well be where we conserve a significant chunk of global biodiversity during upcoming decades when living systems are put under severe pressure." Argued in a quick and assertive style that bounces from Yonkers to the Yangtze, this inquiry achieves a fascinating intertwining of apocalyptic warning and pragmatic optimism.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.