It may not feel as if you are in nature when you walk through a city, but you are: All around you is a densely interconnected web of nutrient exchange, competing interests, and cross-species communication. There’s an invisible world right in front of our noses, ready for exploration. This book aims to give readers eyes to see that invisible world. To paraphrase Marcel Proust, the only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
When I started writing about the creatures that inhabit my neighborhood, I quickly found that there are simply too many of them to fit into one book. If I attempted to catalog every single one, I’d end up with a guidebook—a fat compilation of descriptions and bullet-pointed facts. And although I love guidebooks, alone, they aren’t useful for beginners. They give data without context: Each bird or tree or mushroom is sectioned off on its own page, rather than connected to the others in a meaningful way. My goal was not to become a walking encyclopedia, but to find the richness and complexity in what I had previously thought were nondescript city blocks. I wasn’t interested in facts per se, I was interested in living a more meaningful life. “Facts are stupid things,” the nineteenth-century naturalist Louis Agassiz observed, “until brought into connection with some general law.”
When I read a guidebook, I start to forget almost immediately. Most humans, I suspect, don’t learn by memorizing decontextualized data. It’s almost the opposite: We learn by trying to solve a problem, or working out a mystery. Once I have my first clue, the mystery comes alive, and the information begins to stick. Facts scatter like beads on the floor—a problem provides the thread that strings the facts into a meaningful order.
And so, instead of starting with the known and pouring on facts, I started with the unknown in these essays. I started with the puzzles that bewildered me, then sought the puzzle pieces that fit. Often, I found that one puzzle would merge into another. Why are my roses dying? Sure, they are infested with aphids, but maybe the real problem is the newest wave of invasive ants that have moved in and started farming the aphids. What is that bird screeching in my backyard? Sure, it’s nice to identify the bird, but it’s far more interesting if you know enough of its language to deduce that it’s worried about the raccoon climbing its tree.
I was more interested in going deep than in going wide. So, to limit the scope of this book, I focused on just a few plants and animals: all synanthropes, the species that thrive alongside humans. The species I wrote about here are synanthropes that are so ubiquitous they’ve become invisible. I wanted to share that experience I had with Josephine: the transformation of a generic, uninteresting “tree” into something beautiful and compelling. I excluded the charismatic animals that venture into cities: the hawks, coyotes, turkeys, deer, and mountain lions. They are already plainly visible. I also avoided writing about the creatures that grab our attention because they horrify us—rats, bedbugs, cockroaches, and the like. Instead, I wanted to uncover the wonder of the creatures that are so common, so expected, that they have faded into the background.
I’d like readers walking past a ginkgo to experience the same sort of wonder they might feel among a grove of coast redwoods. I’d like them to eagerly seek out the scruffy weeds growing in the cracks of the sidewalk. I’d like readers to feel awe in the presence of the majestic street pigeon. Okay, maybe not awe, but at least a degree of respect tempered by a dose of realistic disgust and an appreciation for the ridiculous. When you actually live with nature day in and day out, you get to see it at its least dignified. This is a good, even necessary way of looking at nature, because it is honest. Nature is not always beautiful. It can be grotesque, it can be cruel, and it can be comical. If humans hope to achieve a more harmonious relationship with the natural world, we will have to see it in full: breathtaking, dirty, and inspiring, and annoying all at the same time. All too often we see only the good, or only the bad. If we can love nature for what it really is—not just as idealized perfection—we’ll have a real chance of ending the strife between civilization and wilderness and replacing it with something like intimacy.
By focusing on urban—and suburban—wildlife in this book, I am breaking with the tradition of nature writing. According to that tradition, a man (it’s almost always a man) goes alone into the wilderness. He comes in contact with a more authentic form of nature, is renewed, and waxes lyrical. Instead of doing that, I want to bring humans and nature back together, to see if I can find the experience of natural wonder without leaving civilization. It seems to me a more honest, and therefore a more pragmatic and useful, approach.
It turns out that a lot of popular nature writing is actually about humans and nature together; the humans just get censored. Thoreau downplayed the details of where he got his food and washed his clothes in Walden, and nature photography and documentary films routinely edit out signs of humanity to preserve the illusion of remote austerity. This tradition is so strong that when Annie Dillard wrote her famous book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she decided she had better not mention the surrounding suburban roads and houses. She worried that being a woman was already a strike against her, so she thought she should do her best to shoehorn her book to fit the other expectations of the genre. In reality, she was simply strolling around her town with her eyes open. Years later she told an interviewer: “I was fascinated because it was just a stupid little suburban neighborhood, but animals don’t care. They don’t care a bit. And I would always see interesting animals around.”
I believe we can stop pretending now. It’s time to give up the pretense that you have to leave home to truly experience nature, that you can find nature only in those untouched places where you can go for days without meeting people.
This, instead, is a book of domestic nature writing. Its ultimate purpose is to endow readers with a sense of belonging among their nonhuman neighbors. This kind of belonging could help tether people to the outside world. There’s a measure of rootlessness to modern life. We move a lot, which means we have less time to learn local history, we no longer walk through surroundings saturated with memories. We have traded local knowledge for mobility. This lack of local knowledge yields a world that is less meaningful—literally less filled with meaning—which abrades the soul. If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, as Wendell Berry has phrased it. But meaning is all around, in the urban wildlife, simply waiting for those with the eyes to see it.
If people start paying attention to the organisms that are thriving, unseen, among us, I think it will change us for the better: On the political scale, we’ll become more realistic and effective in our efforts to protect the environment; on the personal scale, we’ll be happier and more full of wonder.
Cities are engineered to serve humans efficiently, usually without much regard to the needs of other species, which is why I find such hope in this fecundity, this second wave of life bubbling up, and indeed thriving, in the places we sought to reduce to purely human utility. Nature has already adapted to us; it’s time we adapted to it, or at least took notice. The creatures of the unseen city could be our salve, or even our salvation.