{"id":9642,"date":"2015-05-26T09:00:57","date_gmt":"2015-05-26T13:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=9642"},"modified":"2016-01-22T09:07:29","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T14:07:29","slug":"nature-new-york-and-the-practice-of-paying-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2015\/05\/26\/nature-new-york-and-the-practice-of-paying-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"Nature, New York, and the Practice of Paying Attention"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of Still the Same Hawk<\/a>, edited by John Waldman. 2012. ISBN: 9780823249893. Fordham University Press, New York. 160 pages.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cDualism is the defining quality of urban nature.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"stillthesamehawk\"<\/a>Thus begins John Waldman\u2019s introduction to Still the Same Hawk, <\/i>a grab bag book of \u201creflections on nature and New York\u201d from eleven different authors. For some readers new to the topic, the very notion of \u201curban nature\u201d may be a dualism in and of itself: a pair of words missing a conjunction to make them make sense. Urban and<\/i> nature. Urban or<\/i> nature. But urban nature? <\/i>What on earth is that? Waldman and his colleagues set out to find out.<\/p>\n

Robert Sullivan literally wrote the book on what he calls \u201cnature that people would rather not think about\u201d\u2014a 256-page meditation on a horde of rats<\/a> living in an alley at the southern tip of Manhattan. Sullivan\u2019s essay focuses on the nature that thrives and prospers in cities, \u201c\u2026the nature that everyone is not looking at, the nature that Ansel Adams avoided, that people don\u2019t use as screensavers or put on the side of their coffee mugs.\u201d Nature isn\u2019t missing<\/i> from cities, Sullivan argues. We just refuse to acknowledge it because it\u2019s unexceptional or unappealing. Rats and roaches, rotting trash and roosting pigeons. He challenges us to pay closer attention and, in doing so, transform the unexceptional into the sublime.<\/p>\n

The book takes its title from Sullivan\u2019s observation that a hawk nesting on the windowsill of an Upper East Side apartment is a newsworthy event<\/a>, while a hawk perched on a cliff in the Catskills is, well, just another hawk. And yet, as the book\u2019s title tells us, it\u2019s \u201cstill the same hawk.\u201d Same species, different context. We humans choose to focus on the former and shrug at the latter. Our expectations shape our perceptions, and vice versa. In short, we can choose to see nature and the city in a different light. If there\u2019s one theme that runs through all the essays in this potluck collection, it\u2019s probably summed up by two simple words: pay attention.<\/i><\/p>\n

William Kornblum, a researcher and writer based at the City University of New York, struggles to craft a coherent \u201cland ethic for the city\u201d in his essay on teaching undergraduate environmental sociology at Queens College. His class wanders outside to explore the landscape surrounding the campus. They discover a tight grid of row houses overlooking the sunken six-lane Long Island Expressway before scurrying along to find a patch of urban greenery in nearby Kissena Park. Like an ersatz Socrates strolling outside the walls of Athens, Kornblum peppers his students with questions as they make their way through the neighborhood: \u201cWhy is the land here so elevated?\u201d \u201cWhat happens when it rains or snows and the water runs off the streets?\u201d \u201cWhat do land uses at three of these corners have in common?\u201d<\/p>\n

The students, Kornblum admits, \u201cseem perplexed\u201d by his questions. So, too, is this reviewer. It hardly seems fair to ask questions that most students are unlikely to be able to answer without some prior knowledge of the topic. This isn\u2019t maieutic teaching; it\u2019s uninformed guesswork. These students may see the things Kornblum points out, but, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they aren\u2019t invited to observe. <\/i>Though his meanderings are well meaning, Kornblum fails to deliver a cohesive land ethic for urban life by the end of his essay\u2014an unfortunate disappointment, given how beautifully he writes about New York harbor in his 2002 book At Sea in the City.<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

David Rosane, another educator, recollects a series of personal interactions with New Yorkers confronting the dualism of urban nature. He casts a spotlight on three New Yorkers in a mini-drama with a raccoon in Central Park: an uptight white woman from the Upper East Side who frets about rabies, a sharp-tongued and world-weary Latina who shrugs off the white woman\u2019s warnings, and a timid Asian woman who wonders aloud if raccoon meat makes for good soup.\u00a0 Rosane is well-meaning in his enthusiasm for New York City\u2019s multiethnic mosaic\u2014we all discover nature in our own unique ways!\u2014<\/i>but the stereotypes are distracting and do little to advance his message.<\/p>\n

Devin Zuber\u2019s essay redeems the theme on teaching and learning that pops up again and again throughout Still the Same Hawk. <\/i>Good teaching often follows the same rules as good writing, and the axiom \u201cshow, don\u2019t tell\u201d aptly summarizes Zuber\u2019s strategy as he invites students at the City University of New York to investigate and interpret the city on their own terms. They find arresting moments of beauty in their everyday experiences of the city, linking small and tangible objects to big and abstract ideas about urban ecology. Like Casper David Friedrich\u2019s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog<\/i><\/a>, <\/i>Zuber\u2019s students venture out in search of the sublime and come back having transcended the divide between nature and the city.<\/p>\n

Zuber argues that imagination and an appreciation for beauty are integral to understanding the complexity and richness of nature in unnatural settings. It takes a wild mind to see the ghost of Minetta Stream<\/a> still trickling under the asphalt of Downing Street in the West Village; to see a line of street trees in Midtown as a single small copse in a sprawling rectilinear urban forest; to see the whole of New York City as a palimpsest landscape first etched upon more than twenty thousand years ago by a massive ice sheet travelling south from the Arctic Circle.<\/a> Imagination, in this sense, is the practice of speculative transformation, of picturing what could be<\/i> and what could have been.<\/i><\/p>\n

In her Corner Garden, <\/i>Dara Ross recalls a small group of imaginative neighbors in Brooklyn that transformed a garbage-strewn vacant lot into a lush community garden. Ross offers a dialogue-driven glimpse at mundane moments in the garden\u2019s history. We overhear Zora and Alma, two of her neighbors, reflecting on the day the garden got started:<\/p>\n

\u201cR.C. was out there cleaning up that nasty-ass mess but so was JoJo, Liliana, Lester, Calvin, Sherrie, NayNay, and even that lazybones Willie\u2026\u201d Zora recalls.<\/p>\n

\u201cShoot girl, now I know that was a lot of work,\u201d Alma replies.<\/p>\n

\u201cSho\u2019 nuff it was,\u201d Zora confirms.<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t caricatures like the ones we find in Rosane\u2019s essay; they\u2019re full-blooded characters, each unique and fully alive on the page. We eavesdrop on their chitchat and discover the truest value of community gardens in their deliberations and debates, reminiscences and remonstrations.<\/p>\n

Kelly McMasters offers up a similar mini-memoir of her time living in a basement apartment near an abandoned moonscape in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her essay inventories the utopian schemes projected onto a parcel of land contaminated by the residue of a manufactured gas plant from the Gilded Age. This \u201csection of land in Brooklyn where the Gowanus Canal curves like a comma\u201d would see plans come and go for a public park, a high-tech vertical farm, and any number of competing proposals for new housing. The winner, in the end, was a hybrid of sorts<\/a>: gardens, parks, and a cluster of condos slated to open in 2017. \u201cThis block will be the most expensive in the neighborhood soon,\u201d McMasters\u2019 landlord declares, his imagination running free. \u201cYou watch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phillip Lopate tackles one of the most enduring contradictions between American environmentalism and urban design: our love\/hate relationship with the sort of dense development currently sprouting up along the Gowanus Canal. Lopate argues that naturalists and urbanists should<\/i> be friends\u2014that high-density cities are more energy efficient and take up less space than the suburbs designed to replace them. \u201cI don\u2019t know when God declared that there should be no skyscrapers in Brooklyn,\u201d Lopate writes, challenging high-minded NIMBYists in a low-rise borough of brownstones to think of the benefits that come with well-planned density. That\u2019s the kicker, though. In the rush to redevelop, cities like New York have seen density increase without a corresponding investment in infrastructure and municipal services. Skyscrapers are fine, but without affordable rental units, reliable subways, well-maintained parks, excellent schools, and access to a decent grocery store, city dwellers may end up striking out for the suburbs after all.<\/p>\n

In Monarchs of the Urban Mind,<\/i> Betsy McCully focuses her imagination backward to \u201cmentally excavate layers of time and space ever deeper\u201d to discover a New York where \u201ccontinents docked and drifted, mountains rose and eroded, glaciers advanced and retreated.\u201d McCully sees a region that was already on the move long before Henry Hudson floated into the harbor or Peter Minuit put a down payment on the island of Manhattan. \u201cIt\u2019ll be a great place if they ever finish it,\u201d O. Henry wrote about New York more than a hundred years ago, long before skyscrapers and superblocks. McCully, reflecting on the cyclical rhythms of butterflies and horseshoe crabs migrating in and out of the city\u2019s harbor, helps us see that New York is a great place because they<\/i> never finish it\u2014they<\/i> being the gods of old who cause mountains to rise and fall and rivers to change their course and the demigods who\u2019ve built canyons of concrete and steel, highways and harbors and railroads and acres and acres of parks.<\/p>\n

Stewart Brand, an iconoclastic environmental thinker with an unapologetic love for cities, calls this sort of perspective \u201clong now\u201d thinking.<\/a> It forces you to look past the trivia of daily life and situate yourself in a broader, more consequential view of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. While McCully digs deep into the long now of New York\u2019s past, Anne Matthews scans and summarizes a stack of scholarly reports forecasting the city\u2019s future and identifies four basic scenarios. The first is a \u201cdystopian battleground of civic chaos and decay, a Bladerunner<\/i> vision of New York\u201d in a warming and increasingly crowded world. The second is a \u201cmilder edition of this chaotic future\u201d\u2014a sprawling megalopolis with creaking infrastructure and ecosystems on life support. Things get better in the fourth scenario: the city is retrofitted for environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of climate change. The fourth is a mix of the preceding three: New York as an archipelago city, surviving though its geography and its infrastructure are altered by rising seas. Which scenario will become a reality?<\/p>\n

If McCully and Matthews bring the \u201clong now,\u201d then essayists Tony Hiss and Christopher Meier bring the \u201cbig here.\u201d In their Welcome to the H20 Region,<\/i> Hiss and Meier invite residents of New York to think of the region surrounding the city\u2019s harbor as a \u201csecond address\u201d filled with rivers and streams, beaches and wetlands, forests and mountains and valleys to rival any National Park way out west. If the residents of San Francisco and Berkeley and San Jose and Sausalito can all claim the \u201cBay Area\u201d as their home, why can\u2019t the people of Middletown and Newark and Fort Lee and White Plains picture themselves belonging to a larger \u201cHarbor Area\u201d with New York City at its center?<\/p>\n

Frederick Buell does a fine job of summing up the book in his essay on the cultural history of nature in New York. Buell argues that we are living through a slow motion environmental apocalypse. There\u2019s no going back to the way things were, and surviving the future will likely involve exploring and appropriating the contradictions between cities and nature that governed our thinking in the past. In the future, nature will be both nowhere and everywhere\u2014not just because of the radical changes from climate change that already in the pipeline, but because we will have learned to think of nature in a different way.<\/p>\n

Still the Same Hawk<\/i> raises more questions than it answers\u2014a fitting tribute to the complexity and chaos of an urban ecosystem that refuses to settle down into anything vaguely resembling a climax community. Though the quality of the essays varies, the book includes some truly thought-provoking treasures that are easily paired with longer classics such as Nature\u2019s Metropolis<\/i><\/a> by William Cronon or The Granite Garden<\/i><\/a> by Anne Whiston Spirn. Sullivan\u2019s essay, for example, deserves a place on any undergraduate environmental studies syllabus. Ross\u2019s essay should be required reading for anyone in the ever-growing urban agriculture movement.<\/p>\n

Waldman deserves credit for compiling the first approachable attempt at deconstructing the idea of nature in the context of New York.\u00a0 Every big American city should have a similar collection of essays to call its own. So who\u2019s next?<\/p>\n

Phillip Silva<\/strong>
\nNew York City<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of Still the Same Hawk, edited by John Waldman. 2012. ISBN: 9780823249893. Fordham University Press, New York. 160 pages. \u201cDualism is the defining quality of urban nature.\u201d\u00a0 Thus begins John Waldman\u2019s introduction to Still the Same Hawk, a grab bag book of \u201creflections on nature and New York\u201d from eleven different authors. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":9648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[299,296],"tags":[49,34,405,404,100],"coauthors":[169],"class_list":["post-9642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay-place-and-design","category-review","tag-communities","tag-experiencing-nature","tag-participationdemocracy","tag-value","tag-wildlife-people-interactions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9642"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}