I live at the moment in the middle of a middle-large city well-known for its, shall we say, organic road layout. The layout is such a mess that it’s a common myth that the roads are just paved over cow paths and travel sites put out survival guides with tips for driving around town (tip #1 at that link: don’t).
Roads of downtown Boston and surrounding cities. As it happens, I live in the only true grid in the city — right near the middle of the photo, on the south side of the river — which is on entirely human-created land, built on fill in the second half of the 1800s. Map by author.
Realistically, the roads were just established back when there were a lot fewer people moving through the city, and were doing it much slower overall. Rather than optimizing for car speed, people optimized for foot travel, avoiding swamps, hills, and forests. Trails formed as people repeated the same paths, then developed further into roads as they became part of life in the city, the normal way a person got from here to there. They were never so much planned as they were born, shaped both by the landscape and the people who lived there.
When you think of natural land forms, city streets aren’t necessarily the first thing that springs to mind. Natural — or the noun, nature — is generally reserved for rural areas, where (it’s said) people can be closer to the Earth we come from.
That’s silly. To think of cities as entirely apart from nature is to give ourselves entirely too much credit for these sprawling systems born as much out of undirected human energy as by any central planning board, to discredit the mice, pigeons, foxes, forbs, trees that live happily alongside us. To think of rural lands as one with the natural world is to ignore the massive feats of engineering that let us rely on a single plot of land to sustain our entire lives — or, in the modern era, massive agribusinesses. It’s much smarter to think of both rural and urban areas as a type of deeply human-influenced system, one with both natural and anthropogenic (that is, human-caused) inputs determining its shape over time.
Consider the Farmer
For instance. Did you know that the prairies of the Midwestern United States can have up to 300 species of plant coexisting in a relatively small area? Contained in that assemblage are all sorts of native grasses, species which actively enrich the soil around them with nitrogen (which can then be used by other species), beautiful flowers, and even some woody stemmed species.
Meanwhile, much of the historic prairie has been replaced by farmland. The main thing on that farmland? Corn.
Map of US land usage. 1/5 of the continental US is devoted to cropland, with the majority of that land — especially in the areas with the most fertile soils and historically the highest biodiversity — dedicated to corn. Map USDA.
A successful corn operation will see row upon row of fields neatly filled in with planted seedlings, packed tightly enough to maximize yield without exposing the plants to competition from their siblings. In the early days the field will be doused with herbicides to keep all other plants at bay, at least until the corn grows tall enough to shade out any other plant that would try to take over the field. Pesticides will be applied throughout, making sure that no insect takes a bite of the product before it can be harvested. No expense will be spared to eradicate rodents and birds. All of this is enabled by marvels of modern engineering, huge trucks and tractors with attachments specifically designed to aid in each stage of the corn growing process, from planting to harvesting. Farm technology is so advanced that foresters will often buy equipment made for fields and modify it until it can work in a timber stand — it’s often easier to manipulate the high-end technology that enables farmers than to try and build anything custom for the job.
If all goes well, nothing except the corn will survive in the farmer’s field from planting until harvesting, with all possible cohabitants discouraged or dead due to the farmer’s careful management. The only survivor will be the corn, carefully packed into an exact square (sometimes circle, depending on the irrigation technology the farmer prefers) so precise you can see the outline from an airplane.
A similar pattern happens across soy fields, wheat plantations, cow pastures, all these agricultural industries that provide an economic engine for rural communities. Each of these business models are enabled only by careful, intense engineering, with farmers maintaining complete control over their lands.
How did this become our picture of natural?
Or the Concrete Jungle
Throughout the USA, about 40% of urban areas are covered by trees. There are 571 species of street tree in San Fransisco alone. This diversity can help regulate climate throughout a city, reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, improve air and water quality, prevent flooding, lower noise impacts, and even improve human health outcomes.
This diversity extends past tree species, too. The diversity presented by the urban landscape helps create unique assemblages of all sorts of animals, from butterflies to birds, many of which have started to adapt specifically for these new urban environments. All of these organisms make their living in and around human activity, every day, without fussing over whether or not they’re becoming separated from nature. This is their habitat. This is their home.
I’m not trying to say it’s all idyllic. I kicked a rat by accident the other day — punted it clear across Newbury Street — which was an experience that will follow me to my grave. But it says something about how closely integrated our cities are with the natural world that I could kick it without even trying.
All Together Now
A thing that tends to come up when you talk about the built environment as a part of nature, rather than apart from nature, is that there is something fundamentally different about these systems constructed by humans from the ones that arise naturally. We’ve been taught for so many years to view the world as split into a man-made and natural binary, with no crossover between the zones, that we become blind to the similarities between the categories. Human activity is designed, is engineered, we tell ourselves. Nature just happens.
Never mind that we are not nearly the only animal that engineers our surrounding environment, reworking it into a shape more fit for our own comfort and survival. The world’s largest ant colony stretches 3,700 miles, and has been built entirely within the last 100 years. The world’s largest beaver dam is almost 2,800 feet across and the species frequently builds dams taller than humans, flooding out waterways to create aquatic highways to move across the landscape. For what it’s worth, the Hoover Dam is only 1,244 feet across. But that’s not really the point.
The point is that humans have existed within the natural world for as long as humans have existed. In America, a lot of energy is spent talking about the pre-human landscape, usually as an ideal state before all our engineering had created the environmental crisis we currently exist in. Generally speaking, we pick somewhere between Columbus and Jamestown as the moment we started to tear this continent apart, turning pieces of it into entirely artificial, man-made spaces ripped entirely from their natural state.
To do so is to ignore and paper over the fact that indigenous peoples had been managing these landscapes for millennia prior to any European contact. Native American peoples actively managed their lands, migrating plant species north and making extensive use of controlled burns to manage forest growth. Famous stories still survive of the famous managed fisheries so full of salmon you could walk across the river on their backs. Even pre-European settlement, the Americas were being heavily engineered by the humans who lived in them, yet most of us don’t view native settlements as “artificial” in the same way as our modern cities.
But that’s not really the point either. More important, in my view, is that we view our species of animal as somehow separate from — and as corollary, better than — the rest of the natural world. We do our best to separate every inch of our lives from the rest of the animal kingdom, in order to give us a sense of control over our lives in a confusing and scary world. And when the ways we try to split ourselves off start having deleterious impacts on the planet we live on, we frame it as a “natural” tension between humankind and nature, rather than an outcome from the decisions we’ve made along the way. We resign ourselves to the inevitability that our man-made systems will always be damaging to the world around them, rather than try to better integrate ourselves with the surrounding environment.
We like our man-made and natural divide because it absolves us of any responsibility for the place we find ourselves now. It allows us to view human activity as a necessary evil, as an inherently corrupting influence which should be restrained and mitigated as possible. It lets us ignore the fact that the causal factors of our current environmental crisis aren’t humans in the first place, but humans behaving badly. Because if it turns out that the issue wasn’t our poisoned artificial influence after all, but instead the choices we’ve made in how we interact with the world, then we might have to face the fact that we have always had the ability to prevent the way things are today and simply chose not to.
Coda
I’m not trying to say that the solution to climate change is to recognize the artificiality of rural regions. I’m not trying to say that habitat fragmentation can be solved by calling cities habitats.
Rather, I think that by recognizing that our lives and systems are not as separated from the natural world as we’d like to believe we become more open to a host of environmental remediation strategies. There is no binary division between man-made and natural systems, just systems that we manage more and less intensely. By better integrating other species into our built environment, we can begin to manage systems to the benefit of both humans and the plethora of other organisms we’re currently excluding from our tightly-controlled world. It’s not a panacea, and there are plenty of environmental problems which we may have to solve through uniquely human endeavors. But it’s certainly a start.
Note: A lot of this post is informed by William Cronon’s fantastic book: Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the environment or the development of the modern West, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.