Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York

Nature in New York

Nature in New York A Brief Cultural History Frederick Buell The writers in this volume see themselves, for the most part, as coming to their subjects with both a special urgency and a sense of doing something almost outrageous, against the grain, counterintuitive. To that one can add a touch of that populist form of civic pride New Yorkers know and cultivate, the theatrical arrogance of doing it in the Big Apple, on the largest stage there is. And there is truth in the contrarian outrageousness. For to write about nature in cities goes against the grain of at least four centuries of modernity , which has done its best conceptually and pragmatically to put nature and culture into opposite categories. It also goes against the grain of much local New York history—both its grim environmental history and its penchant for making fun of its ‘‘other,’’ the heartland. Recognizing this, Anne Matthews investigates the return of wildlife to New York with the awareness that ‘‘of all U.S. cities, nature and culture here seem most spectacularly, insistently estranged.’’ Robert Sullivan gleefully confronts these attitudes by investigating one of the most estranging parts of contemporary urban nature, its ‘‘dark side,’’ the rat. Though conditions have changed as a result of 1970s environmental legislation, one of Devin Zuber’s students puts the still-reigning wisdom trenchantly, with the sort of ironic hyperbole with which the City is most comfortable: ‘‘The problem with nature in New York is that there isn’t any.’’ Discovering, recovering, representing, and disseminating awareness of the nature that actually still in fact does exist in New York is thus a challenge . It goes against both embedded habits of mind and practice that PAGE 122 122 ................. 18313$ CH12 09-07-12 13:55:39 PS Nature in New York: A Brief Cultural History 123 would oppose nature to culture and rurality or wilderness to the city, and it goes against deep-rooted local habits and attitudes of New Yorkers. But it also goes against many of the conventions of romantic and postromantic nature writing, something that, until recently, would put attempts to write about nature in New York in one of the most marginalized corners of that genre. Nor can writers with this subject in mind find help in most traditions of urban writing; most urban authors (from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present day) have with few exceptions accepted the divisions between nature and culture, wild lands and cities as imaginative and historical givens, just as vigorously as have nature writers. But today, as never before, the normativeness of these positions is under pressure to change, and writing about urban natures today stands to put one in the forefront of literary, intellectual, and also, one hopes, policy change. It is one version of the story of this dramatic change that I would like to tell in the following. Be a John Muir or Henry David Thoreau in Manhattan—or in the Bronx, or Brooklyn, or Queens? That seems at first a quixotic ambition, to say the least. Even so versatile and empathetic a nature writer as Terry Tempest Williams writes about how, while working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, she went with a friend to see Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, a spot that her friend cherished as an essential part of nature in the city. After traveling through ravaged urban neighborhoods, they arrived at the park on a ‘‘sinister’’ midwinter evening, to find a desolate beach, a vandalized pavilion, and a dead dog, a black Labrador, stiff on the beach beneath the setting sun, which itself resembled the tip of a burning cigarette seen through fog—and then had to wait for a cab, because trying to walk home would have been too dangerous. Herons and a flock of red-winged blackbirds eventually did rescue the day for her, but, still, the overwhelming impression was the melancholy of a place that had ‘‘little memory of wildness.’’ So, write about nature in New York? Wouldn’t that simply mean having your most gifted colleagues (nature writers past and present) laughing at you (in contemporary literary journals, from across the river Styx)—or, worse, like Williams, indulgently pitying you? And wouldn’t it confront urban writers with an almost irresistible temptation to say back something ironic about Williams’s purist sentimentality and naı̈ve shock at her short stay in the modern world? Wouldn’t the writer who tried to get...