This year I moved into town from the rural side. First time a city dweller in almost four decades(!). It's, well, different, but there are surprises. At the open house I was serenaded by a vireo and an atypically mellifluous catbird. The first morning as a resident I watched a coyote saunter down the street and chase a squirrel around a parked car (the squirrel got away). In about three months my list of urban yard birds has grown to forty species. Not exactly Wild Kingdom, but more than I expected.
Writer Christopher Brown also has lived both rural and urban lives, and he has habits I can relate to -- wandering around outside, questioning what he sees, researching the recent and deep-time history of his environs, learning the plants and birds. But unlike me, he writes an excellent weekly newsletter called Field Notes, which spins his experiences into smart and engaging posts that I always look forward to. He also writes books.
Brown is the author of the memorably titled and presciently Trumpian tale called Tropic of Kansas, and two other science fiction books. Turns out while he was writing SF he was rewilding around and upon his amazing place in the East Austin edgelands, and writing about that as well. (His house gets a chapter in the book, and then some.) Encouraged by his pal William "Neuromancer" Gibson, he's worked his Ballardian nonfictions, as Gibson calls the Field Notes, into his first nonfiction book, A Natural History of Empty Lots. (Please explore Gibson and JG Ballard if you haven't already.) I've been surprised and informed by his nonfictions for months, and I'm here to report The Natural History of Empty Lots is even more than I hoped for.
A sort of feral flaneur, Brown's thoughtful prose is delivered at a walking pace, giving the reader time to think and marvel at the connections he unearths. Almost an urban Barry Lopez, if you can imagine. His bailiwick is a bit unusual - the "wilderness of edges," back alleys, brownfields, and other "entropic zones" of his Austin neighborhood, places he's lived and explored previously, and scenes from the many, many books he's read.
In his spare time the self-described "scruffy cousin of the mudlarks who forage the urbanized margins of the Thames" is a business lawyer.
Maybe that's why he can drop unexpected pronouncements and twist what is often overlooked into fascinating meditations and pithy bons mots. "Taxonomy can be the enemy of wonder." Urban space as a labyrinth of enclosure. "The fence you need to jump is in your head." Interstitial prairies and the interstitial commons. "The dead zones of the city are where real life can be found." Hedge apples, aka mastodon Cheetos, and chiltepins. Zebulon Pike, Persephone and Demeter, William the Conqueror, Chupacabras, The Lord of the Rings, and Carl Woese all show up, and that's just a small sampling.
Brown can even turn AI in our favor: In a recent Field Note, posted from the Iowa data centers that gave birth to ChatGTP*, he posits a truly intelligent AI: "If the real world Skynet that’s coming online now acquired enough data, power, and machine intelligence to really take over, I’ve found myself thinking it wouldn’t raze the planet, but rewild it."
And just in time. In news even more important than recent politics, he reminds us that worldwide vertebrate populations have dropped by 73% since 1970, according to October's Living Planet Report.
Read that again.
That includes more than half of the grassland birds, just in my lifetime - which hints at the simultaneous invertebrate apocalypse. As paleontologist Tim Rowe, quoted in the book, says about birds, the dinosaurs never really went extinct. But they will in our lifetime.
Brown quickly regains his senses: "ChatGPT and its cousins are as hard-wired as servants of capital as were the cornfields their data centers replaced, with a hunger for energy so profound the big tech behemoths are racing to rejuvenate nuclear power to support it. Bringing back the balance that will preserve an ecologically viable future, if it’s not already too late to save the century that’s coming, is on us."
But I don’t want to leave the impression that this is a book about AI. It’s a book about wisdom in the weeds. Elsewhere in the book, Brown says, "There are always paths to carve out zones of autonomy, even when the pirates are in charge. The animals that manage to make home in the negative space of the city teach a similar lesson."
*Recently rebranded chat.com, for a cool 15 mil.
-Jake Vail is an Information Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.
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