It's Maria's MutS and Stuff.
What a great idea.
On iHeartRadio, Welcome to Maria's Mutts and Stuff and with me is author Christopher Brown. He's also a lawyer, but he has his new book out, A Natural History of Empty Lots Field Notes from urban edgelands, back alleys and other wild places. I love that big, long title. By the way, thank you so thank you for this, for the book, and for chatting. So let's go from the beginning. What made you decide to write this book?
I you know, I spent almost twenty years of my adult life, initially by accident, later on purpose, exploring the little pockets of wild space that exists in the cities, and then kind of learning how to find them, saying how much wild nature could like rebound and find habitat in these kinds of spaces, and then learning how much kind of interesting, charismatic, fascinating wildlife could be found there, and you know, learning how to better go about kind
of facilitating the serendipity of having encounters with wildlife.
You know, everything from you know, coyotes and.
Raptors to more exotic creatures and even smaller creatures like you know, fascinating little insects that flutter around on our wildfires down here in Texas where we are, and so, and I'm also a novelist, and I wanted to sort of figure out a way to write a book that helped the reader kind of experience some of the wonders of these kinds of places, to maybe learn how to see them, and share some of the lessons that I learned in there, and the hope that they might help
other people, well, you know, find some useful, actionable information and hopefully tell an interesting story along the way.
Right.
So, I mean this whole thing started you were looking at a house, is that correct? And then it was out of your price range, and then you saw a piece of property.
Am I following right? And then you see that yeah?
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's the big part of the story. Had started just as a young dad with.
First my son and then my daughter and sort of looking things to do, looking for things to do with my kid or kids.
And instead of driving out into the countryside or you know, going to the mall or something, I got the idea of like exploring the little creek behind the dead end street where we lived and seeing what we could find there, and that one thing led to another, and we found so much interesting stuff exploring these kinds of spaces, going paddling on a little stretch of urban river, that we decided to try to find a place where we could live in that kind of urban wilderness and actually cultivate
that wild urban.
Nature right in the you know, in our own backyard.
And so I found, yeah, as you as you as you noted, this kind of brown field lot in East Austin, Texas that was bisected by an old petroleum pipeline, and set out to rehabilitating a lot, partly by taking that amazing restorative power of nature that you can see often in the untended empty lots, and and bring back the kind of prairie ecosystem that once was here.
And the results were pretty remarkable.
Yeah, And I mean it kind of when I was reading your book, I just it made me feel hopeful, And I think that was your intent. I mean, because it's right, Yeah, Because I mean it's really easy for all of us to just be like, oh, the environment, oh no, and pollution and we're losing species of animals.
And then I read.
Your book and I'm like, oh, he did this, and wow, you can find this bug and he found you know, this this animal or or this insect like you said, And it was just I don't know, I just got the feeling that it's a feeling of hope that not everything is lost, not everything just because big glass, ugly buildings are going up.
It's it's not the end.
There's you know, there's positive stuff down the road.
And that that was what I got out of it.
Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say that, because that was absolutely the intent.
Well, at the same time, taking a clear eyed view of like you know what, of how out of balance sometimes our relationship with nature is sure providing the reader a way to like see that the way we think about the climate future, which sometimes feels like it's like we don't even think there's going to be a future so dire, right, and we all feel such a lack of agency in what's going on.
We're sort of waiting around for you know, the.
Big institutions that kind of control our lives in a way to take action. And kind of a lesson of this book is that one you don't have to get in your car and drive out to a national park to find wild nature it's actually right nearby wherever you live. And two that you don't have to wait for others to take action to start.
Healing some of the damage we've caused.
Whether you're talking about climate, you know, warming or biodiversity lass you can do that. Whether you have a little apartment with the balcony or you know, do you want to do a little gorilla gardening like my friend who does it, you know, a patch of dirt under the untrained queens.
Where I love that you got to work every day, right or.
Yeah, or you know, a conventional backyard. And people are doing this kind of stuff all over the place.
People are doing it in their businesses.
People are putting green roofs on buildings not only because they're you know, green and beautiful, but because they have you know, economic and thermal benefits. And people are and you know, in both projects large and small, going.
About these kinds of rewildings where you bring.
Back you know, you just cultivate a bio you know, your own particular flavor of biodiversity wherever you are, usually with native plants to start, but and very quickly you find just astonishing results and it can kind of feel like Avatar and so.
Sure if more people, as more people start.
Doing that kind of thing, yeah, the impacts can really be profound.
Right, And I think you're positive, Yeah, and positive, And I think that's where your book really shows that it can be done.
Yeah.
I mean I'm not a I'm not a professional gardener, no, right, right, I'm not a scientist. I'm a like lawyer who writes books, right, who practices law, whichever order you want to put it in.
And I didn't know anything about how to like make up prairie.
You know.
I bought this.
Kind of gnarly, you know, little urban acre that I could affordably because it was so gnarly, and it was like the death of the financial crisis, right, And I was.
Like, oh, but turns out it's pretty easy, you know.
You. I mean, it was basically like we put black plastic on the ground for one season and it sort of all the invasive plants came up and they found no sun and they sort of.
Died in the ground.
And then we tilled it and put these you know, bags of like a mix of native seeds of the prairie archetype that used to cover a ninety nine percent of the region where we live or used to cover hundred percent, and now nine percent is gone. And and and within six months we had our own little successional prairie right outside our back door. And it's just it's a remarkably easy thing to do. So it really is very much within anybody's accessibility, I.
Think, right right.
And I think they would learn like I did from your book if they want to do it the same way. I was just some things I was like, oh, I would never even think of that.
And I'm thinking particular.
When you came upon a dead animal, and it's like, what do you do about that?
So let's talk a little bit about that, about that experience.
Well, I came upon I mean, I've come upon dead animals, and I've come up upon like wounded animals.
It's the wounded animals that are the heartest.
Exactly like the owl you said, right.
Yeah, I found a barred owl, you know, not long after I'd had my first like encounter with a healthy bard owl, kind of down.
In the woods behind a door factory.
Go figure sitting on a branch of a willow tree over a little sort of anthropocene lagoon where like drainage pipes emptied out at the in the floodplant of an urban river, and I was like, well, that's a really exceptionally beautiful animal.
And yeah, when you have those encounters with.
These creatures, it's sort of it's and you're sort of you know, having a little momentary stare down with them. It really gives you a connection with them and an investment in their presence.
It's profound.
And so then when a few months later, like driving back from dinner with friends, my wife and I encountered this owl like stranded at the side of the road, we perhaps unwisely to turn around, stop and pull our car and to start her card in the middle of a toll way bridge with no shoulder and put the hazards on and try to save this owl. And found that that's also not that unlike bunting a payer in your yard. Maybe isn't a thing to do as an amateur.
It's a little more challenging, but it gave us a sense of like how hazardous the city can be.
For a while, sure, I mean, yeah, you see we all for bust of us.
Our main experience of you know, urban wildlife anymore is with seeing roadkill while driving to work. But it also gives you a sense of how resilient this wildlife is. Not just the way that eventually that owl was able to recover without me fiddling with it and take off and fly away, but the way things like, you know, everything from the raccoons, which we're all familiar with in
the American landscape. One of our weirder native animals have like learned to evolve more rapidly than their country cousins because they're constantly adapt figuring out how to adapt to the challenges the city presents them, like how to get bunging cords off a trash can. Things like that, how the cardinals that nest in the eaves of our green roof used like industrial materials they harvest from the nearby factories to build their nests, you know, like insulation used from packaging.
Wow.
Or the way that coyotes have like completely overtaken the urban spaces that you know, when I was a kid in the seventies used to be like occupied by stray dogs, mostly gotten under control, and now like even you think, like Chicago, who knew.
But there are I think thousands of.
Coyotes living in Cook County, and hundreds of them right in the heart of the loop, not scavenging like the straight dogs did, but hunting the smaller mammals that you know, live off our trash. So it's a it's a fascinating lessen in resilience once you start paying attention to this stuff.
It is it is.
And so what was it like for you the first time, your first coyote sighting?
What was that like, I mean, my.
First coyote sighting, especially in the city, was it was really it was slightly scary, super intense, a little bit mystical, even because coyotes, when you see them in my experience at least, they have a way of like you can see why the indigenous peoples of the America is often you know, ascribed to them the powers of tricksters, because they have a way of even like there's like this silver undertone to their coat mixed with other colors, and
they have a way of kind of camouflaging themselves in the woods, but.
Also in the city.
They like or especially in the winter, they like almost like baffle the light and sometimes you won't even notice that it's a coyote kind of moving through your frame until they sort of stop and look at you and let you kind of see their eyes and rostrum and snout and then if you have a really like physically near encounter, right, you see how Yeah, I kind of begged.
They often are at least the healthy ones, right, and their wolf like right, it's just like and they just like that experience of like, oh, like is still possible in this world to encounter an animal that, you know, another predator that bit in the right circumstances be able to make hewits prey, right, And it just kind of gets you out of your head and just seeing a wild, wild animal like that, Like I saw My first one I saw in the city was like crossing the railroad
tracks behind an Amtrak station on a Sunday morning at the edge of downtown Austin, Texas. Wow, you know, fastest growing city of an America. And here's the like walking with my son to go get you know, get some breakfast, and here's this canvity crossing our path, and it really it takes you out of your head and kind of.
Put your life in a in a different context. If that makes sense.
No, it totally does.
And I think it sort of takes away and not saying that you are but the arrogance of humans when you know what I mean, like, well, where's a arrogon and where a top of the food chain.
But oh wait, there's a coyote near me? You know that?
Yeah, well, yeah, one coyote is an intense two or three cooties, which I've experience is a lot more intense because they really could take you. Then on it sure you're hungry, and that's you have a little kid with you or something.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, it's it really ignites primal feelings. Of course, well in the one time, and then on the one hand it's a little bit scary, but it's also like, oh afterwards, you're like, oh, I feel a little bit more alive.
I knew you were going to say that.
Yes, yeah, of course, because it was like your brush with nature. I'm sure like all your nerve endings are you know, all flaring, but it's your brush with nature and yeah, invigorates you.
Yeah, and you just you stop like actively thinking in the way we kind of go through our lives. It's you're not language and words are no longer in your head. You're not kind of looking at yourself in some orbital mirror.
You're just like in this immediate sensory experience and all encounters with nature. I think when you're sort of at least opening yourself.
Up to them, even in like extremely urban environments, they
can have that impact. Maybe none of the scary, but just like that get you out of your own self absorption and to just see the wonder of what's around you and see your place in the world, whether it's your places the descendant of Haman d who had to worry about the big leopards, you know, coming and taking them from their tree and having them for dinner, right, or just as you know, seeing how those insects that are pollinating the plants along the street in front of
your house are actually like sustaining the entire ecosystem around you.
Yeah, no, it's true.
I mean I just remember interviewing years ago someone about birds, and she said, just go for a walk in the morning and pay attention to the birds, and you're going to hear so many different birds and different calls, and they're all talking if you pay attention. And I feel like that's the same thing that you said that you
can across in this book. You just need to we need to pay attention to nature because it's there it's just I guess in our urban lives or just busy lives, most people just kind of ignore it instead of embracing it.
Yeah, and absolutely.
And also there's a problem that I think a lot of us feel like we're taught that you have to have some special knowledge to be able to experience nature. Like you you go out, you talk about birders, and if you're not a burder and you go out with a bunch of burders, you may.
Find that many of the serious birders.
Are going to kind of almost have a competition to show who can name right that particular species faster than the others, and who has more command of the book knowledge, so that field or with plants or insects, so you name it trees.
Right, yeah, and so but you don't need to You can just go out like some eighteenth century naturalists and have your own experience and that's right. What the heck is that? That's really interesting?
Yeah, and then you can go look it up right exactly? Yeah, Yeah, no, I agree.
I joke in the book that I say that like taxonomy can be the enemy of wonder, meaning like having to like name the thing first often like gets in the way.
Of just experiencing. Sure yeah.
And so I think it's fun to just go out, like you say, and just listen to see what you see.
Sure yeah.
And I think it goes full circle back to the arrogance of being a human. You know, let's compete with each other to see who can identify the most birds. No, just open your eyes and open your ears, you know, and just like take use all your senses and take in nature, because it is out there. Whether you're in suburbia or you're in a you know, an urban city,
it's out there. And you know, your book describes it and explains to us really how it's it's very much out there, regardless of you know, whoever's listening to this right now where.
They are, absolutely and it's easy to find it. You know. There's like easy little tricks like look for the nearest creek.
Yeah, look for the nearest bit of watered other watershed. Look for that empty lot or that sort of building that hasn't been getting a lot.
Of care, and you know, go to the edges of the park, not that they kind.
Of you know, maybe step off the trail a little bit, or step off the sidewalk and see what you see. But those places are out there, yeah, as you noted every city and often like much closer than you think, and you see them once you start looking for them.
So I gather, and of course that you feel positive about our future, yes, with nature and the environment.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like people are waking up to the importance of like living in balance. I think that the experience during COVID lockdown, where so many people were suddenly and kind of abruptly liberated from the daily grind of going into the office and the constant you know, human bubble of our eyes on each other, the kind of constant surveilance of each other in a way that we do, and contemporary urban life.
That were free to like, oh, like I could like take a little break now and go for a long Yes, structure my own day and go outside and see what's there.
I think that really awakened people on a kind of a mass basis to like how easy it is to without giving up you know, you know, you can still get your work done, but you can integrate into daily life, even if it's just for a few minutes, little experiences of nature.
It's out there to.
Be enjoyed, and that doing so can really bring tremendous balance to life. And that by doing the additional work of like attending to our capacity to be better stewards of nature, to help do these little healing kinds of rewilding projects, you find you not only like helping nature, you're kind of helping yourself run a way. It makes you feel better and sure, and so I feel hopeful
that absolutely that. I mean, people are just in the United Kingdom this earlier this year, they enacted legislation, this was under the Conservative government before the elections. Are they enacted new rules that for any new housing project or office real estate project bigger than a single home, you have to demonstrate after you finish the project that you've achieved a ten percent net gain in biodiversity.
Oh wow, it's like wow, Well.
That's like, you know, not a bunch of you know, you know, greenpeace types.
These are like, you know, kind of conservative politicians.
Yes, and so if and so if we put in place, you know, and like in this country, we have we have a real housing crisis, right especially an affordable housing crisis. And if we but you're seeing people talking about policy tools to not only like let's build more housing and let's work on rewilding the city at the same time. Those two things don't have to be at odds with each other. They can actually be harmonized. And so and you're seeing, you know, big projects like that all over
the country, from Fresh Kills Landfill and Staten Island. It was like the main dump for years by Burroughs, and now it's this beautifully rewilded wetland with more to come. Still, but the Ballona wetlands in West la like between lax and Marina del Rey, used to be part of the oil patch and now it's this beautiful kind of restored wetland. And all over the great plains in between, we have all kinds into prairie restorations and river restorations and whatnot.
And so when I see projects like that, I'm really I really.
Get excited that.
I feel like, you know, a lot of people who've advocated, like on the on a kind of radical extreme that you know, the only way to save nature is for there to.
Be fewer humans.
And then they advocate a kind of a vision of a rewolded future that's sort of like after us.
I was gonna say, without us.
Yeah, I'm like, it didn't have to be that exactly.
We can just learn to share our habitat with the other life around us and.
Enrich that other life at our own lives.
In the process.
Yeah.
Yeah, and again it goes full circle to that hope, because there is hope, and you just gave so many different examples. So you know, for my listeners, I would love them to read this book and learn all about it, because it doesn't matter where you live, whether you're in a city or in a suburbia.
Your book really gives hope.
And I have to ask you because I really totally believe in this and whenever I run into someone who believes of signs from nature. Towards the end, you your last chapter, you talk about black witches.
Let's talk about what a black witches to our listeners.
Yeah.
So, right after I sold the book and signed a contract to write it, my dad died eighty six and he lived a long line, thank you, and we were with him when he passed, and you know, it was it was an intense and beautiful but it was it was a you know, it was.
Time and and anyway, and so we you know, took mom home and then came.
Back down to Texas and he was up in the Midwest, and when I got home there was this one evening a couple of days there was this strange I thought it was a butterfly.
It was like trying to get in the house.
Every time I would open the door, like what is that? And they would like brush it off, like no, don't go come into the house, be come in the house.
You make it trap and you can't get.
Out, and and so then in the evening I found them off again and it was like just like waiting on the doors if it was trying to get out, get still trying to get in, and.
It was kind of weird. I was like, Oh, it's not a butterfly, it's a moth.
It's this really beautiful black almost kind of like that like you know, Silence of the Lambs.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking when I was reading, because I love that movie.
So and so my mom is like one of those nature nerds, right, the people who you're like, what the hell is this? So I text my mom, but she's usually very slow to reply to my text, and she's like just like immediately goes that's a black witch. And then she tells me the the like Latin, you know, scientific name or whatever, and so I look it up and what turns out, the black Witch is the name of this moth. It has all these other names and the languages of other cultures, like the Haitians and the
other people from French colonies. In the America is called it the socierre noir, which is the kind of version of that same word, and.
Like the Jamaicans call it the duppy bat whatever that means. There's always cool names.
But in all these cultures it's associated with the death of a loved one, right, and there are different variants of the like myths around it. And sometimes it gets into the house, I mean, somebody's gonna die, but mostly it means like it's like the loved one saying goodbye, and you know, you just like have a weird, like, you know, little experience like that, and I wasn't thinking of any of those things, and it just.
Reveals to you that then you see how it's.
A story that you know exists across all these cultures, and it tells you that nature does have this capacity, whether through know some kind of invisible hand you know, running the show, or just through the serendipity of life.
And the kind of just.
The way that things interact in the universe and ways sometimes you don't understand to send us these kinds of messages and provide us comfort and challenging moments, you know, sure physically or emotionally, and and those, yeah, those experiences. Since I've kind of gotten into doing this work, they've just been proven to be bountiful yes, and deeply meaningful yes.
And it gave me chills to read that, and it gives me chills again to hear you describe it. But it's if you believe it and you keep your eyes open. I think the signs are there. Like you said, You've had even more signs from nature, and I just think people just need to be open to it because they are there.
They really are. It's really astonishing.
Yeah.
So, Christopher, what even though this is really huge, your book and this project, but what's what's next for you?
I'm I'm working with a colleague on a project.
We haven't publicly announced yet, but it's it's a project to do and it's another colleague who's done similar kinds of work as me, who's also written novels and similar genres, and we both have these interests and we're going to we're working on a more like how to kind of rewilding book for the kind of the homeowner and the apartment dweller.
Really digs into.
This book is kind of telling a personal story and and it's kind of a field guide to wandering around in large part and and about kind of the you know, social and policy lessons you can find when you do this kind of work.
This book will be more of like digging into like, Okay, you want to rewild your yard, and this is the region you live in, this is how you do how you do it?
Okay.
Yeah.
And then I'm working on some new fiction projects that play with some of the same material through a little bit more made up kind of storytelling, and and doing a lot of work on sort of you know, some op eds and shorter works in a similar vein that will be come an online sam to try to help raise awareness in different ways and in different forums on this on this on these you know, I think valuable lessons that are out there to be learned for all of us.
Sure, And so for my listeners who want to keep in touch with you on that, they can go to Christopher Brown dot com. Can they get your book, A Natural History of Empty Lots, also on your website, they.
Can you can find it through my website.
I have links to the publisher and to all of the bookstores, and really you can find the book anywhere bookstores are.
Sold, online or in the in the real world as we like to call it.
I like that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, thank you for this book, and thank you for giving us all hope. You definitely gave me hope reading your book, and I'm sure my listeners will pick up the book and get the same feelings that I did.
So thank you and I look forward. We'll talk again with your next project.
Okay, sounds good. Thank you so much, Maria. I really appreciate it.
Okay, bye, all right.
Bye bye. S Never beated Rader operator and this one see you, Rader Momigator