A Natural History of Empty Lots Quotes

“You can’t teach the love of nature. It has to come from within, through serendipitous discovery of one’s own unmediated presence in the world.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“When you learn to see the natural world that is all around you”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“In that balanced understanding comes the path to redemption: a compromised redemption that starts with acknowledging the failures of our stewardship”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“The idea of the frontier runs so deep in American culture that we internalize the idea that to find nature—real nature—you have to get in your car and drive out of town.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“The same term, "brown lands," is sometimes used to describe those parts of the modern urban landscape that have fallen to ruin, at least in the eyes of the planners who measure the city's health based on its contribution to the wealth and growth of the human community. Empty lots, abandoned buildings, trash woods—all the parcels whose former use for industry, residence, agriculture, or other productive purposes has been abandoned, often due to changing economic or technological conditions, and have not yet been replaced by or redeveloped for some more lucrative and vibrant contemporary use. They're zones of economic entropy that become almost invisible due to their removal from the dynamic commercial flows of metropolitan life. Since the postindustrial cleanup era began in the 1970s, the more common official term used to describe such zones is "brownfields," but that has a more specific meaning, describing areas polluted with environmental toxins. Brown lands are more inclusive, encompassing all the properties where human occupation has effectively ceased for many different reasons.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“The wasteland is the land from which human beings can extract no value to sustain their lives.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“Railroad rights-of-way are weird zones that you can find almost anywhere in the American Landscape. Our urban spaces have worked to overwrite them in favor of motor vehicles in the era since World War II; often you can see the traces of tracks from old streetcar lines or intercity routes peeking through the asphalt of a public street. Sometimes the remains persist as actual ruins.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“In the morning mist, as I worked my way upstream, I watched three deer wade across the river ahead of me and quickly got out of my own head. The foliage was thick and green, in that moment before Texas summer becomes too hot to endure without immersing yourself in the water, and the air buzzed with insect and avian life. Canoeing, especially alone, has a meditative quality. I had to tune into the water, into the current, into the air. I felt and followed the flow of the elements around me, moving my body and the vessel that carried it through space, my form propelled by the paddle I stroked along the sides of the boat with learned grace, at the pace of the place, mostly silent. Not unlike the rudimentary meditation practices I had learned in high school from a visiting Zen priestess, I realize now, the activity had a way of emptying the mind of active thought. In zazen, the aim is no more mind than a dim mindfulness of the act of breathing. In a canoe, there’s a lot more going on, a way of moving through the natural environment that by its very essence leaves little room for distracted thought—an exorcism of the self that compels you to let the world around you into your consciousness. I literally had to feel my way using all my senses, opening my being up to everything it was interacting with. To do so without leaving the city, finding myself totally alone in a pocket of urban reality filled with bountifully diverse life, was absolutely transcendent.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“The planetary crisis we find ourselves in is a result of this system. The natural human instinct for survival, enabled by our technological gifts, has caused the greatest mass extinction of other species since the Cretaceous period and brought our own endangerment into the realm of the plausible. To really alter our path, we need to confront the design flaws of the Neolithic Revolution, evidenced by our addiction to growth and the accumulation of more surplus than we need. That’s not to suggest some twenty-first-century nomadology. Even the most imaginative science fiction writers would find it challenging to envision a human society that had developed without agriculture, without the bureaucratic systems it engendered to count the accumulated wealth—the original reason we developed mathematics and written language. But we know that the tiny bands of humans who managed to survive into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries outside that system were—and in a few cases, are—happier than us, even if they do not get to read novels, hear symphonies, or binge-watch a season of a television series after dinner. Walking in the edgelands of the twenty-first-century city, finding the wild nature they harbor, you can get glimpses of your own true nature as a creature that lives in and from the world, and maybe even a way to be a nomad without leaving your house. Finding such places is easier than you think. Finding your personal connection is harder.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“As a parent, I appreciate the value of surplus—of having enough food to feed my family, even if a lean spell comes. As a species, the production and accumulation of more than you need is a masterful strategy for survival and advancement. But it has a design flaw. There can never be too much, especially in an age when most of the surplus we accumulate is in the forms of symbols like money, distantly tied to tangible commodity value, if at all, and largely immune to spoilage. The equilibrium that economists would have us believe this system always wants to return to never arrives, because the things the system values omit the value of all other life on the planet, except to the extent it can be converted to our use. This way of living creates systems of power designed to enslave us and the entire world on which we live. The system is founded, at its essence, on control over the reproduction of others: plants, animals, and even people, as our daily debates about reproductive rights show. The only life it really values is that of the people in control.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“To be a so-called barbarian, Scott argues with anarcho-libertarian flourish, was the only way to be truly free, living a life with no “labor” other than the natural activities of hunting, foraging, and making tools from the world around you. As a theory for freshly understanding the rest of human history, it’s intuitively compelling. Especially when you couple this reconsideration of the bargain with Demeter with the deeper understanding Scott provides of the powers we acquired through the gift from Prometheus. How our mastery of fire coupled with our relentless pursuit of surplus—in its elemental cereal form and all the actual and metaphoric forms we have been able to discover or imagine, from hordes of gold to storage lockers full of stuff and infinite digital vaults of virtual currency—has led us to the brink of an overheated climate that may bring our civilization to the point of collapse before this century is out.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“Author Marta Vannucci speculated that Demeter, with a different name, must have been a historical person who came to Attica in the seventh or sixth century BCE from the matriarchal cultures of southern India, carrying with her the secrets of hexaploid wheat, the grain from which bread is made. Vannucci’s article appeared in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, a journal so obscure that when I found it, I wondered if it might be a Borgesian fiction implanted deep in JSTOR by mischievous scholars.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places