The species that I’ve written about here are, at best, invisible, and at worst, reviled. We honor least the nature that is closest to us. As Courtney Humphries put it in Superdove, “We create and destroy habitat, we shape genomes, we aid the worldwide movement of other species. And yet we seem disappointed and horrified when those plants and animals respond by adapting to our changes and thriving in them.”
Because they are associated with human disruption, the organisms that spring up from our footprints look like corruptions of nature. But I’ve come to see it the other way around: These species represent nature at its most vital and creative.
Nature never misses an opportunity to exploit a catastrophe. When humans bulldoze and pave, nature sends in a vanguard of species that can tough it out in the new environment. These invasive species are not nature’s destroyers, but rather its creators. They begin setting up food webs, they evolve and diverge into new species. Because humans purposefully import exotic plants—along with the insects, seeds, and microbes we accidentally bring in from around the world—cities are remarkable centers of biodiversity. These creatures crossbreed, hybridize, eat one another, form cooperative relationships, and evolve. And so, at a time when thousands of species are at risk of extinction because of our destruction of wilderness, new species are springing up in the new habitats we have created. And it’s not just one or two new species: The conservation biologist Chris Thomas, who studies the emergence of species in human-dominated areas, has estimated the increase in plant species over the last 150 years is just about equal to the extinction rate for mammals.
We tend to think of nature and civilization as being irreconcilably opposed: Civilization’s gain is nature’s loss. But in fact, cities have become prime habitat for speciation, hybridization, and, in short, rebirth. Certainly, civilization has upended the status quo in nature, but it is also proving to be a vehicle for a natural renaissance.
This doesn’t mean that we should stop worrying about extinctions and the environment. Earth as a whole is going to be fine, but the Sumatran tiger is not going to be fine. And many humans are not going to be fine. By altering the climate, we are making the world less hospitable to humanity too, and the poorest among us have already begun to suffer.
As more people have moved to cities, a romantic mode of thinking about nature has grown more dominant. If you ask city dwellers if they want to preserve biodiversity, the vast majority say yes, but that’s very different from truly valuing the natural world. It’s all very well to romanticize nature when it is far away, but the real test comes when nature asserts itself in our lives. Then we remember that nature is not only awe-inspiring, but also annoying, capricious, deadly. We are alienated from the natural world, and so we long for it—or at least for an Edenic version of it that never existed. However, if we can see the urban wilderness all around us, I think we will engage with nature more realistically. Instead of glorifying only untouched wilderness, we might build an environmental ethic that allows humans and nature to live together, an ethic that—instead of telling us to stop spoiling nature—would tell us how to use nature to support ourselves.
We might begin to honor and respect the people who deal directly with the natural world—the farmers, the miners, the loggers—who make our lives possible. City dwellers often denounce these people for defiling nature while simultaneously demanding the raw materials they provide. If we had a more realistic sense of the give-and-take necessary for living with nature, we might begin to value their hands-on experience. We might see that we need their practical knowledge to guide us to true sustainability.
How do we reach that place where we might use nature carefully, mindfully, to meet the needs of humanity? The first step is to stop thinking of nature as something far away that we must save from someone else and start seeing it all around us. The first step is to open our eyes to the existence of nature in our daily lives.
All this talk of accepting the reality of nature might sound as if I’m arguing for disenchantment. My purpose is precisely the opposite: The point of this book is re-enchantment. Instead of glorifying some distant and mythologized version of nature, I argue for the magic of the real.
It only makes sense that my daughter inspired this project: It is clear to a child that we live in a world full of magic. As we grow older, tedium and laziness erode this sense of wonder. We get used to things. We stop seeing them.
Rachel Carson wrote that she wished for all children “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years.” Parents who are able to nurture that sense of wonder give their children a great gift. And for those of us who feel it slipping away in ourselves, it’s not too late. The cure is to simply watch the natural world closely and patiently until your eyes burn through the scrim hung by your expectations and you catch sight of something wholly unexpected.
This act of wizardry, of re-enchantment, takes work. You can’t do it all the time. It’s simply not possible to always see the world fresh and in full, like a child, while also making money, paying bills on time, and taking care of a family. There’s a reason my brain had created a shorthand for noting and dismissing “generic” trees: They are not important in meeting my immediate needs, are not a threat, and are not going to make the rent more affordable. It would be hard to function if like a two-year-old I became so transfixed by a seedpod that I forget to go to work.
But doing this work and occasionally acting like a two-year-old pays dividends of awe and pleasure. It doesn’t take very much time to notice that you live within nature: It can happen while you’re waiting for the bus in the morning, or eating lunch, or walking home in the evening. Wonder doesn’t come from outside after driving somewhere spectacular, it comes from within: It’s a union of the natural world and the mind prepared to receive it.
“A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness,” the poet Gary Snyder said. “The planet is a wild place and always will be.”
If we come to love nature not only when it is rare and beautiful, but also when it is commonplace and even annoying, I believe it will heal the great wound of our species: our self-imposed isolation from the rest of life, our loneliness for nature. We might remember that we are no different from our surroundings, that the trees and birds are as much our neighbors as other humans. We might remember that before the land belonged to us, we belonged to it. We could belong again.