Yesterday was a hard day, but I’ve decided to spare you (and the many sponsors who helped achieve said hardness) by not discussing it. Let’s just say that by five pm there were not one but TWO musing articles titled whether ‘beavers are friend or foe?’ or ‘eco-heroes or eco-destroyers?’ from fairly key players. Which is exhausting in an of itself. Thank goodness this appeared later that night from Dan Protess, writer and producer of the series.

Getting over Purity

This is the WTTW nature series out of Chicago public radio that produced the program with Ann Riley I posted earlier. Over the episodes the producer has had a real education in what urban nature IS and why it matters. I appreciate his learning curve because it mirrors are own.

Somehow I never noticed that I work in a desert. Not an actual desert—those are filled with cacti, snakes, and other forms of life. My office is in a suburban-style neighborhood, surrounded by vast lawns, which, I recently discovered, are not good for much. Turf grass does not provide nectar to butterflies and bees, or perching spots for birds. In fact, just to be certain that our lawns are completely useless, we regularly burn fossil fuels to mow them.

All of this is painfully obvious to ecologists. But as a journalist who slept his way through high school biology class, the ecology of my suburban neighborhood did not come to my attention until a few months ago, when I started production on Urban Nature.

Urban Nature is a web video series, in which we look at coyotes, squirrels, migrating birds, monarch butterflies, and all of the charismatic creatures that we often like to celebrate. But in the series we also discover the unexpected ways in which unassuming species are eking out an existence at the fringes of cities.

On the side of the expressway are random patches of clover and dandelions, which are absorbing storm water and carbon dioxide. In vacant lots, there are non-native trees with dead branches, which are providing homes to squirrels and woodpeckers. And in the most polluted waterways, there are fish, water birds, and even the occasional beaver.

Got your attention yet? Definitely got mine, although for some reason the sight won’t let me post a comment and keeps erasing them when I try. But I have to believe he’s heard of our urban beavers and the lessons they taught.

I have come to understand that this ragtag bunch of urban wildlife and habitat is downright useful—way more useful than the lawns surrounding my office.

Although I have lived in Chicago my entire adult life, I have never appreciated the less-than-pristine forms of nature that you tend to encounter in cities. That is not to say that I did not appreciate nature. But my relationship with the natural world was fairly similar to my relationship with champagne: it was something I reserved for special occasions. I would fly to Arizona or Patagonia, hike and camp for a week, and then come back to Chicago and turn my attention back to my computer screen.

My love of nature did not extend to city parks, pigeons, or invasive plants. It was a love I reserved for the kind of “pure” nature that I saw on my trip to Alaska. Sure there were roads there, and sure the glaciers were melting because of the carbon dioxide I was emitting on my daily commute in Chicago, but I did my best to avert my eyes from the heavy hand of humankind. If I squinted hard enough, I could imagine the unspoiled wildernesses that the Native Americans must have seen; a people who, I imagined, walked so gently on the earth that they did not even leave footprints. The idea of pure nature was my fetish, and my vacation pictures from Alaska were my pornography.

Then I set out to produce the Urban Nature web series.

In a story about “daylighting” creeks in Berkeley, California, I learned about a centuries-old battle between humans and urban waterways. In the nineteenth century, we were so confident in our engineering might that we buried streams, which stood in the way of our development. For 100 years these waterways have flowed in culverts and sewers beneath our streets and homes, only to overflow occasionally during heavy storms. But now we are using bulldozers and modern science to bring these streams back aboveground, buoyed in part by a sense of nostalgia, and concerns for the increased flooding that has been brought on by climate change.

My previous vision of ecology included complex relationships between microbes, flora, herbivores and carnivores—pure systems into which Homo sapiens might occasionally intrude.

Now I find myself appreciating the equally intricate web of life that my neighbors and I have woven on our block.

Not only is the nature on your block equally complex (and why on earth would city nature be less complex when it has such a harder job?) but it is also the FIRST NATURE that babies and children will see and the one nearly all of us will see the most. Bear with the child psychologist in me for a moment, but we all start out life in a dark world where everything is part of us, so we are EVERYTHING and there is nothing that isn’t us. We spend the next year slowly learning that this isn’t true and our mother is OTHER and separate from ourselves. What a demotion! People don’t do or bring things just because we will it. No wonder babies cry a lot. We once were the entire universe and then we slowly begin to realize we aren’t even the center of it.

Awareness of the other is a huge job. (And some adults who happen to be president never master it.) Watching that crow fly over, collecting pine cones or poking a snails long eyes is part of the complex unfolding moment that awakes our awareness of yet another other.

And if we don’t care about that gritty, opportunistic, urban nature that’s right in front of us, if we don’t see the robin’s egg shell on the sidewalk or carpenter bee visit the dandylion, if we don’t hear the voices of excited raccoons chittering away to find new garbage, then we won’t be ready to embrace and defend the cheetahs, whales, and rhinos that will need us down the line.

Asphalt is the tundra most of us travel. And when we realize it, too, is where the Wild Things Are, we become part of everything and I would argue, more fully ourselves.