Introducing the Urban Ecology Library

“All organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species.”

— The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Until recently, I thought about nature as a thing that exists “over there,” a place you visit when you go hiking or camping. Somehow, I couldn’t see the nature that was everywhere, a thing we belong to, and that sustains us: It’s the air we breathe; it’s the water we drink, which comes down from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds almost completely unfiltered. It’s wild pollinators and it’s pigeons, it’s the plants flourishing along roadways and vines climbing up the outsides of buildings. It’s over here, in New York City as much as anywhere else.

I put together the Urban Ecology Library because I was curious about how nature and cities could fit together, and what place I could have in the natural world as a city-dweller who loves city life. This frame of questioning was completely new to me when I started reading about it. I wanted to know what I should make of abandoned lots full of plants or of the seals lounging on rocky islands originally used as quarantine stations, or how oyster reefs in the harbor and wetlands on the shoreline have always protected us from storms and floods.

The books in this collection cover a lot of disciplines and genres, from anthropology and history, to botany and entomology, and fiction and poetry too. Yet they are all part of the same conversation, and a few common thematic threads run through them:

1. Humans are part of nature, and nature is an intrinsic part of the human condition. In separating ourselves from the rest of the biosphere and seeking to dominate nature, we have created ruinous conditions that can only be repaired by recognizing our connected fates with all of life on Earth.
2. We are living in catastrophic times, but we have a lot of the tools we need to get to a better place. It’s hard to carry our grief and our knowledge of the visible woundedness of the land and of people, but in accepting that we cannot turn back the clock, we can make new ways of living together.
3. Humans are capable of cultivating relationships with the land based on care and mutuality instead of extraction.
4. Cities are peculiar ecosystems that are worth studying. Both through decades of effort and by accident, America’s major cities are hospitable places for many non-human organisms. The homes that plants and animals make in cities bring up questions of coexistence but also point the way to a shared future.
5. Ordinary people can and should participate in the project of shaping our cities and stewarding the land we live on, because it’s ours.

What if we thought of cities not just as habitats for humans, but as the home of multispecies communities? Rather than conceiving of separate spheres for humans and nature, we would be working on becoming good neighbors. Residents of cities already live in proximity with nature of many sorts, including organisms that have been introduced to serve human needs like street trees, and those that have adapted to anthropogenic conditions and thrive here even despite our attempts at eradication. We can embrace this reality and look at urbanism and environmentalism as part of the same project to create a livable world for all. A livable world and a functioning ecosystem are one and the same – a stable network of relationships that together regulates temperatures, absorbs stormwater, maintains soil structure and prevents erosion, and supplies us all with food, clean water, and oxygen.

The Urban Ecology Library currently lives at Green Oasis Community Garden, in a couple of weatherproof plastic boxes in our gazebo. Our garden is one of the places where people in the neighborhood can put their hands in the dirt, and be stewards of the land, and experience being collaborators with other species in creating the garden. The books help to connect the work we do with our hands to the larger ecosystem and civic context around us. As we develop a dialogue around these bigger issues, our theory of urban ecology can begin to intersect with our practice of it.

Urban Ecology Library books are listed here. Some books in the library:

Concrete Botany: the ecology of plants in the age of human disturbance, by Joey Santore

This is a good “gateway book” for understanding urban ecosystems and how plants function in them, as well as why planting native plants is so important. It explains how plants are the base of every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, why some plants thrive in cities while others do not, and why plants are so fascinating beyond whether we can eat them or how pretty they look.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

This book really tackles our emotional orientation toward nature and how humans can connect positively with nature, showing us what a “right relationship” with the world around us might look like if we took our cues from indigenous teachings, emphasizing reciprocity, respect, gratitude, and kinship. This book made me cry at times with its moving descriptions of the abundance created by Indigenous stewardship juxtaposed with the devastation and loneliness caused by our alienation from other species.

Tactical Urbanism: short-term action for long-term change, by Anthony Garcia and Mike Lydon

A short and readable overview of tactical urbanism with case studies. It demonstrates that we can effectively shape civic infrastructure not just by talking or protesting, but by making quick and low-cost physical interventions in our cities to promote walkability, micromobility, greening, art, and community. Written by people with an urban planning/design background without much allusion to nature beyond “green space,” it nevertheless contains a lot of useful information about how we can reclaim our agency over streetscape, parks, and public space.

Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos, by Audrea Lim

This book discusses politics of decommodifying land, our models for how it’s been done in the past, and its future potential, covering everything from the Land Back movement to bring land back to indigenous hands, to conservation trusts, to efforts at building affordable housing. It highlights how the social, political, and economic issues that threaten human society and the natural world are intertwined, because we all live on the land.