Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats

Foreword

ix Foreword An Unruly Wildness Within William Cronon Ask many people what first occurs to them when they think of wild nature, and their most likely answers will sound pretty familiar. They conjure images of sublime landscapes, of Yosemite or the Everglades, Everest or the Serengeti. If they favor humbler embodiments of the wild, they may name a local park or woods or wetland where they watch birds or hike or fish or hunt deer. If watery nature is their passion, their answer will evoke the rapids of the Colorado, the lakes of the North Woods, the tide pools of Maine or Puget Sound, the trackless expanse of the open ocean. If they prefer their wildness animate, they speak of grizzlies in Alaska, wolves in Yellowstone, lions and elephants and wildebeests in the Great Rift Valley . In most cases, what counts as “wild nature” for them is relatively far away and disconnected from their daily lives. Even if they live in Manhattan and regard the Ramble in Central Park as an icon of wildness—which it most certainly is intended to be—it carries that value for them precisely because its curving, rustic pathways feel so very far from the city’s gridded streets and avenues. Such places and the organisms they shelter have long stood as symbols of the world we humans did not make, the nature we cherish because it is not us. But if by “wildness” we also mean the plants and animals and places that resist human control, we need not look nearly so far afield to find it. A vacant lot that stops being tended by its owner quickly fills with a tangle of weeds that, however familiar (or exotic) they may seem to us, are certainly not under our control. Quite the contrary: our difficulty in getting rid of them is why we call them weeds. They may not be what we imagine when we think of wild nature, but they are hardly tidy or tame. We may create the habitats in which weeds thrive, but the exuberance they bring to their x Foreword invasion of those habitats is surely the expression of a wild life force whose vivid power is not of human making. Nearer still are the creatures that live in our midst and sleep under our roofs. When these animals enter our dwellings unbidden—demonstrating like weeds their indifference to our illusions of control—we think of them not as wildlife but as vermin. Dawn Biehler catalogs some of the chief species among them in the title she has chosen for her fine new book, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats. Such organisms rarely turn up in the work of nature photographers or grace the covers of magazines like Audubon or National Geographic. So it may seem perverse to suggest that they too are “wild” . . . but it would be even more perverse to call them “domesticated.” Opportunistic in the extreme, seizing whatever openings we give them to set up housekeeping in the ecosystems we unknowingly create for them, these creatures are near perfect exemplars of what Baruch Spinoza called natura naturans: nature naturing. In Pests in the City, Biehler sets out to explore the environmental history of the much-unloved wildlife that has so triumphantly colonized the domestic territories of human habitation. Comfortably straddling the disciplinary boundaries between history and geography, she pays careful attention to space as it has shaped the lives of people and animals in American cities since 1900. A core premise of her book is that one cannot understand urban environments without attending to the innumerable boundaries that divide urban spaces into outside and inside, public and private, open and closed, empowered and disempowered, along with the social distinctions among classes and occupations and races and ethnicities and genders and sexualities that cannot be expressed with such tidy dichotomies. Put them all together, and one discovers an intricate historical geography that Biehler explores and elucidates quite brilliantly in this book. She begins, appropriately enough, with the animals themselves, focusing on a rogue’s gallery of organisms that have played outsized roles in urban pest-control efforts since 1900. They find their way into our dwellings via different routes, occupy different spaces, interact with people in different ways, and pose different threats and annoyances as they pursue their own livelihoods. Houseflies concentrate in the kitchen and dining room (and outhouses, before the advent of indoor plumbing) but flit hither and yon in the most annoying...