Read This: A Natural History of Empty Lots

As a kid increasing up successful small-town South Carolina, successful an epoch earlier smartphones oregon computers, I spent agelong summertime days and weekends exploring outdoors. My parents had bought a humble location successful a caller vicinity inactive nether operation — a wonderland for children escaped to inhabit themselves nevertheless they saw acceptable until dinnertime. Around our location were wooded tons wherever my sister and I and vicinity friends constructed forts retired of branches; muddy ditches stubbled with crawdad mounds; shallow creeks that could beryllium crossed connected fallen histrion trunks, wherever minnows could beryllium caught successful solid jars; and forested belts of saccharine gum, shortleaf pine, and achromatic oak, wherever we rolled abandoned tires and woody cablegram spools and made BMX-worthy motorcycle trails we dubbed Dead Man’s Hill and the like. We didn’t interest astir trespassing and got yelled astatine a fewer times for it, but it was mostly a satellite without fences oregon different barriers. I climbed trees, scrambled into gullies, poked astir successful framed-out shells of houses, watched retired for spiders and snakes, and brought location the occasional toad, salamander, and bunny.

Eventually we moved to an older, much established neighborhood, and I grew into a teen much funny successful looking for boys astatine the mall, and I stopped seeking retired semi-wild edgelands to explore. But a caller publication by Austin writer Christopher Brown has sparked memories of those feral puerility adventures. A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places (2024) is adjacent parts quality writing, memoir, and eco-criticism. It’s an Anthropocene emotion missive to quality — the pockets of it that bent connected successful our over-built satellite — and a gentle exhortation to assistance our heads retired of our screens and announcement it each astir us, adjacent successful the astir improbable places.

Christopher Brown speaking astatine the Texas Book Festival

It’s an excellent, thought-provoking, sometimes melancholy but stirring book. After speechmaking it, I went to perceive Christopher talk connected a sheet astatine the Texas Book Festival. Christopher straddles divers worlds done his assemblage arsenic a lawyer and broadside gig arsenic a writer of dystopian subject fiction. So it seems fitting that successful his spare clip helium explores the edgelands of post-industrial East Austin, seeking retired heron rookeries on the stream and keeping an oculus retired for ghostly coyotes and different chaotic creatures making their homes successful slivers of abandoned municipality landscapes.

Before speechmaking his book, I’d heard a bully deal astir Christopher’s nature-embracing home, Edgeland House. Half buried successful the world similar a Native American pit house, its triangular roofs shaggy with autochthonal grasses and forbs from the blackland prairie, the glass-walled house sits lightly connected an aged brownfield tract successful East Austin. Christopher and his household stock the property, successful his telling, with plentiful coral snakes and different creepy-crawly critters, positive owls, deer, foxes, naturalized monk parakeets, mesquites, rainfall lilies, and different wondrous flora and fauna. The divided operation of the house requires that its residents measurement extracurricular — to be outdoors, astatine slightest for a fewer moments — to transverse from its communal spaces to the backstage rooms. Being architecturally curious, I’d hoped that A Natural History would see much astir the plan and operation of the location and its rooftop prairie. I support wondering astir the acquisition of surviving successful a operation that commits you to being half-outdoors successful each weather. Is the location successful immoderate mode a exemplary for others, and tin the conception beryllium adopted for wide operation successful eco-neighborhoods? Would anyone other privation to unrecorded this way??

But that is possibly a taxable for different book. In this book, Christopher wants to unfastened our eyes to the wilderness surviving successful the neglected margins of our world, and particularly wrong the post-industrial “wastelands” that support humans out. The resiliency of quality gives him hope, though grief for what’s been mislaid is threaded done his observations too. “When I archetypal started learning however to acquisition chaotic nature’s persistence successful the margins of the city,” helium writes, “I felt an astir childlike joyousness astatine the quality of it…That consciousness of wonderment ne'er goes away, but implicit clip it becomes tempered with realism. I’ve learned to spot much intelligibly however outmatched the chaotic things are by our 10,000-year experimentation successful terraforming the Earth into a instrumentality to provender us…”

But there’s a way to redemption, helium says, and that starts with seeing, appreciating, and making country for wildness successful our yards and successful our cities. Nature volition reclaim abstraction if we fto it — and sometimes adjacent if we don’t. But by “breaking down the boundaries betwixt ourselves and the world,” urges Christopher, we tin marque imaginable a healthier, ecologically balanced future.

Our children and children’s children merit to unrecorded successful and research that world.

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