City is not everywhere.

• Author: Allen, Michael R.
• Position: Thinking Economically - Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City

Anne Matthews' Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City, 2001, New York: North Point Press, paperback $12, ISBN #0-86547-56-01

In Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City, Anne Matthews intends to prove that New York City is headed into an ecological catastrophe that will shut down the city as we know it--unless more people pay attention to the destructive practices in their own lives. Although her chapters on the city's intrepid birders, rangers and nature-lovers might say otherwise, Matthews believes that New Yorkers are foolishly ignorant of their own city. Matthews writes that "messing too much with the natural world generally hands an urban culture one of three outcomes: a transformed life, a lesser life, a long night." New York is headed into a long night if it continues to exploit its ecology for penthouse lifestyles.

I write "penthouse lifestyles" intentionally because the lives of the economically and politically privileged are those that have shaped the disastrous real estate boom on Manhattan--something that Matthews ignores. Matthews merely chastises planners like Robert Moses--she still calls him a "genius"--whose highway system destroyed human and animal neighborhoods in the 1930s and whose anthropocentric plans made the city welcome to the motorcar.

Matthews has carefully documented the history of New York back to the Ice Age. She clearly understands the conflict between natural time and social time that is the source of the perceived human need to destroy their natural homes. A case in point on Manhattan is the history of a creek flowing through what is now downtown, the Minetta Water. While the human need to develop lower Manhattan led to the Minetta's being channeled and concealed, the water is on a different time, still flowing underground. Someday, Matthews recognizes, rising ocean levels might bring it out of hiding.

As the most complicated city in North America, New York has effectively erased older ways of defining human settlement. New York has become a "galactic city" where the suburbs and city are one large metropolitan area stretching from eastern Pennsylvania to central Connecticut. In this mess of human life, urban centers are being created by each dweller--Manhattan becomes just one choice for a center. Matthews mourns the loss of centers and edges, which have biological as well as political consequences: "fewer and fewer of us remember a common landscape in four sharp clear flavors: urban, suburban, cultivated...