A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places By Christopher Brown
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A Natural History of Empty Lots is fantastically written and is entirely captivating The author chose such an unappreciated landscape for their spotlight and absolutely shined There are so many of these unfortunate empty lots scattered throughout the United States and when left untouched by human hands for long enough these spaces revert to their natural wild beauty This author reminisces on their hidden beauty and insight into how he views these spaces and which the rest of us can learn from 9781643263373 I would highly recommend this book to anyone who lives in a city but yearns for the country or thinks that somehow people have removed themselves from nature and into an unnatural world The natural world is in you and around you just waiting for you to notice and connect and the masterful writing of Christopher Brown can show you how through the example of his recent life 9781643263373 Somehow just from the title and cover I d assumed this was British nature writing and that despite empty lot now I think about it being of an American term But the Americans surely they don t need to write about edgelands They have all those vast open spaces don t they It s only on this old crowded little island that the Anglosphere needs to grub around in the neglected corners for some tiny sliver of wildness right Well apparently not Inevitably this means that there are times when a UK reader who pays the least attention to this stuff will be tempted to gentle condescension aw bless he s seen his first urban fox and he s treating it like a big deal But it s always good to have people on side and the differences are fascinating right down to little stuff they do have feral parakeets too but a different species to England More broadly though the wild that s itching to come back is different under their crumbling light industrial units the earth still remembers being a prairie and there s a wider selection of decent sized fauna ready to slip into the gaps too On the human end of the equation the myth of the frontier still lingers its roots troubling and its persistence easily hijacked by the automobile industry among others but also potentially useful to naturalists if they can just find the right handholds The overall effect is oddly optimistic at least early on a welcoming eye on the way the world reclaims even the territory humanity appears to have most thoroughly mucked up albeit always with a countervailing awareness that capitalism just as opportunistic as any weed though a good deal uglier will often be ready to grab those derelict spaces right back And as the book goes on that s exactly what happens Brown s own wild house project part of the gravity that makes his neglected corner of Austin an appealing prospect after all bringing with it the usual hideous developments that kill precisely what made an area attractive to them in the first place The signs promised the coming of a complex that called itself The Eclectic even as they and you knew it would be anything but The book tries to retain at least a note of bittersweet hope talk about allying with your neighbours to fight City Hall but it s too aware of how rigged the game is to feel like than a faint gleam in the darkness Still at the same time as he has the eye of a lawyer which he is for the way systems twist to maintain control he also has the knack of a science fiction writer which he also is for the powerful image the husk of the Chevy in the hidden wetlands in particular feels like something out of a story by Jeff Vandermeer who provides a blurb offers a promise that one day some approximation of the wild will win this thing with or without us. Book a natural history of empty lots in florida Running in parallel with all this though there s a strand of what I m pretty sure would have been played at least slightly for comedy in a British equivalent but is possibly even funnier for being delivered with an entirely straight face I think I was primed for this simply by his son being called Hugo a name which in Britain I only ever encounter on absolutely terrible people and yes by his father s account this Hugo is very different but parents always feel that way don t they Meaning I was already prepped to read on two levels before Brown started talking about the desire to make a home which breaks down the conventional Western division between inside and out our space and nature s A green roof is mandatory of course which entails shipping barrels of special sealant from halfway across the world much to the interest of Homeland Security heavy watering during a drought and of course a flamethrower Sharing the house with large ants is already a step wildlife friendly than I m prepared to go but that s as nothing compared to the immortal line The architects who designed our house did not intend to create an optimal habitat for deadly serpents between the bedroom and the kitchen But that s what they did Most of us might rethink at that point but not Brown who even after a litany of other lethal housemates and a reluctant admission that he might occasionally need to kill something posing an immediate threat to his dogs or infant daughter nevertheless cheerily concludes But the revelation that you can coexist with the full ambit of the food chain down in the postindustrial hobbit hole you have made your home is potent affirmation of the possibility of cultivating biodiverse life in a little corner of our urbanized world To which fond as I am of just vibing in the various semi rewilded spaces around my own home I can only reply rather you than me mate Netgalley ARC 9781643263373 After his divorce and the 2008 market crash Christopher Brown purchased a vacant lot in Austin Texas Not a vacant residential lot which wouldn t have been anything out of the ordinary but a vacant lot in an industrial area Littered with trash and concrete as well as an old petroleum pipe the site needed plenty of cleanup before he could build a home there And in the years it took to accomplish all this he started a new family and explored the area which abutted the Colorado River which runs through Austin finding wildlife than he had expected and chronicled it in this memoir. A natural history of empty lots books for sale Brown a lawyer and science fiction writer has built a truly amazing house I looked it up online and it s really cool It s not an embarrassing mansion but rather a modern concrete and glass structure that incorporates its design into nature the roof is covered in native soil and plants practically hiding it from certain angles He even has a triangular pool out front that complements the house beautifully And the high point for me really was when he discussed the house itself and the way it invites nature sometimes in unpleasant and unplanned ways such as the snakes that found it to their liking But while I applaud his admirable accomplishment there s a profound sense of ennui from Mr Brown s writing which saturates the book with weariness and cynicism He continually refers to pretty much everything as polluted destroyed and even brutalized by us He seems to have such a deep disdain for humanity especially the white colonists of the US that everything about us is a plague It s so pervasive that I found little joy in his descriptions of seeing foxes owls and hawks He even describes the trash along the river in great detail Of course environmentalist that he is he complains when the real estate crowd starts looking at the area for redevelopment after he sets in motion the gentrification of his neighborhood by publicizing his beautiful home in the dumps The optimism or at least the small measure of joy I hoped to find in the book was too weighed down by Brown s pessimism and I had to force myself to finish In the end I found the book simply meh nice in a few parts but mostly not an enjoyable read I received an advance electronic reviewer copy from NetGalley and the publisher 9781643263373 This book merges the strains of nature writing found in Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey and brings them to your back yard It has the close observation and reverence of Leopold with the cutting insight and fierce defense of Abbey except it doesn t ask you to go to Sand County or Utah You can go down to that weed choked creek nearby and see for yourself. A natural history of empty lotspeare The author is a lawyer so he sees the way our legal system and society views nature as either productive property or waste lands The final chapters give some hope that nature might have some standing in the system In the meanwhile we can fight for that vacant lot in the neighborhood and the voles foxes and vultures that call it home. Book a natural history of empty lots in ny great premise absolutely love nature writing Something didn t quite gel for me whether it was the USA roots social narrative or writing style thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an ARC 9781643263373 A genre bending blend of naturalism memoir and social manifesto for rewilding the city the self and society 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 To do this we must challenge our assumptions of nature itself During the real estate crash of the late 2000s Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin Texas The property a brownfield site bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash was an unlikely site for a home Along with his son Brown had explored similar empty lots around Austin so called ruined spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment as Austin became a 21st century boom town 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 learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards and discovered that by working to heal the wounds we have made on the Earth we can also heal ourselves 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.
| A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places By Christopher Brown |
| 1643263374 |
| 9781643263373 |
| English |
| 296 |
| Kindle Edition |
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