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Can Naturalists and Urbanists Find Happiness Together? Phillip Lopate Why does nature matter to New Yorkers? Or maybe the question to be asked is: Why should New York and other big cities matter to naturalists? And can naturalists and urbanists find happiness together? We might all agree that they should find happiness together, but not necessarily that they can find happiness together. They should because, from my perspective, the real hope for the future is to have both cities and wilderness, and to find a way to contain suburban sprawl, which is now eating up one acre per hour. The only way that is going to happen is by our not just protecting the environment, but by recognizing that dense cities have a very important role to play in protecting the environment. That may necessitate a rearrangement of some people’s attitudes toward density—particularly the environmentalist attitude. If indeed, as some experts have told us, the most energy-efficient site in America is a Manhattan street, then density should be considered a good by environmentalists as well as by urbanists. I want to take a step backward first and consider the problem in context : where all the resistance to cities is coming from. We have to remember that it’s a rather American problem, or prejudice, this idea that cities are bad. There has been an anti-urban bias in American thought at least since Jefferson, who was particularly adamant in his mistrust of cities. He mistrusted them partly because he saw the archetypal citizen of the new Republic as a farmer, a yeoman—in any case, as someone who engaged in agriculture—and partly because he saw cities as giving too PAGE 63 63 ................. 18313$ $CH7 09-07-12 13:54:41 PS 64 Phillip Lopate much power to the bankers and businessmen. He warned against the threat of cities to the continuing growth of democracy. Or we can look at Edgar Allan Poe, who was antidemocratic in many ways, and whose story ‘‘The Man of the Crowd’’ is all about how people in crowds become automatons. They lose their souls. It was a small step in Poe’s mind, and in many people’s minds at the time, from the crowd to the mob. There was a lot of fear of what was called mobocracy. Indeed, our whole representative system of government comes partly out of fear of the mob. If we just think about New York City, that fear was not always unjustified. Philip Hone, one of the city’s earliest mayors, wrote in his diary in the early nineteenth century about how a Jacksonian mob rushed into City Hall and ransacked the place. Then there were the infamous draft riots during the Civil War, when mobs beat up blacks in the street. So urban crowds were associated with mobs. Of course not everyone felt that way. Whitman certainly embraced the crowd, which he saw as a kind of natural phenomenon, like a waterfall . He waxed poetic about the crowd in much the same spirit that Wordsworth did about mountains or streams. But the mistrust and dislike of cities on the part of many American commentators continued until we get to Henry James, who returned to New York in the early twentieth century and was appalled at the immigrants streaming through Ellis Island. He couldn’t understand how the Republic would hold, with all these swarthy types, these Italians and Jews and blacks, swarming in. What would happen to the native stock?—by which he meant not Native Americans, but people of English, Scottish, and German descent. So cities were places that attracted immigrants, which challenged the notion of a stable WASP leadership class. Other opposition in the twentieth century came from city planners, who had a fastidious bent and could not understand how metropolises could keep getting denser and denser and expanding in more or less organic fashion. They ought to be planned and contained. Patrick Geddes in England and his disciple Louis Mumford in America championed the idea of garden cities. The idea was that we would break up the big cities and form new planned communities, such as would be attempted in Radford, Virginia, or in our very own Sunnyside, Queens, or more recently, by the Disney Corporation, in Celebration, Florida. These planners kept asserting that you can’t just permit a city to grow—it’s not rational. There was a feeling that New York City, especially, ‘‘growed like Topsy,’’ that it...

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