A genre-bending blend of naturalism, memoir, and social manifesto for rewilding the city, the self, and society.
“Brown lives far from any conventional battlefield, but he is surrounded by the wreckage of a different war, and he, too, finds hope in cultivating the ruins of nature…A Natural History of Empty Lots is less a departure from the nature writing tradition than a welcome addition to its edgelands.” —New York Review of Books
A Natural History of Empty Lots is a genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect.
During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—abandoned and full of litter and debris—was an unlikely site for a home. Brown had become fascinated with these empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, and how we can heal ourselves by healing the Earth.
Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.
A Natural History of Empty Lots
Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 17, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781643263373
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781643263373
- File size: 9487 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from September 1, 2024
Lawyer and sf writer Brown is riveted by places "where the worst of our industrial abuses of the Earth collide with wild nature." He recounts his explorations of trash-strewn empty lots, polluted urban rivers, medians, brownfields, scraps of prairie, and "dirty wilderness." Obsessed with "ruin and rewilding," he acquired a patch of land along an abandoned petroleum pipeline in a helter-skelter district of East Austin, Texas, occupied by warehouses and factories, operational and vacant. Determined to live in sync with nature, Brown builds a creatively designed house that embraces the wild with wondrous, funny, and problematic results. Brown precisely and passionately describes the ravaged land and its determined plants and trees and intrepid wildlife, including blue herons, owls, vultures, foxes, coyotes, snakes, ants, and millipedes. He formulates striking observations about the American concept of the frontier and the harsh reverberations of conquest, the biases and consequences of the real-estate industry, the primacy of cars in shaping landscapes and cities, and the impacts of climate change. An astute observer and deep thinker, Brown celebrates edgelands and "nature's resiliency" even as he states that the wild is "mostly losing" the battle against voracious human consumption. A vivid, many-faceted, and provocative ecological inquiry.COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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September 1, 2024
Discovering nature in urban "brown lands." The image of the frontier runs so deep in American culture, writes SF novelist Brown, that we take for granted that to find nature you have to drive out of town. In fact there is another, hidden wilderness that hides in plain sight around abandoned buildings and empty lots, behind chain-link fences, and along the pathways of infrastructure, rights-of-way, traffic islands, and medians often littered with decades of trash. "The city contains green frontiers that are very real, but the line that defines them is often a 'No trespassing' sign." Brown's unusual combination of memoir and "natural history" contains many surprising images. Strolling through a parking lot, he looks up to discover five great blue herons going about their business in treetop nests. He sees a fox and then, after setting up a trail cam, records a steady stream of them. Wild plants and animals thrive in spaces from which the city excludes human inhabitants, he finds. This encompasses the pests that find urban areas irresistible (rodents, pigeons, deer) as well as the more exotic animals that eat them: owls, hawks, coyotes, even the occasional wolf. "The wildflowers in the right-of-way and the coyotes in the alley remind us that wild nature is always ready to come back, to adapt to the opportunities we give it," he writes. "But they also remind us that nature is mostly losing." Readers who find this material unpromising may change their minds as Brown discovers a rich natural history in unexpected places. An appealing mixture of nature writing, memoir, and self-reflection.COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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