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.

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]

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

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

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[1] Oeschlaeger (1991)

[2] Deneven (1992) “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492”

[3] Merchant (2003) p. 3.

[4] Williams (1980)

   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.

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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.