Concrete Jungle. - book reviews

Growing up in Chicago, I experienced only the most negative associations with nature. My first encounter with an opossum came when I was standing on the commuter rail platform and whiffed the tell-tale aroma of rotting flesh. I looked up and saw a filthy, stained, disgusting specimen walking under the opposite platform. I didn't know if parts of the still-moving creature were rotten or if it had rolled in something dead. I was just glad when the train came.

Concrete Jungle puts this type of wildlife encounter into perspective. The book is an eclectic collection of essays exploring the ecology of urban environments - rats, roaches, opossums, squirrels, dogs, cats, weeds, pigeons, flies, viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. - basically all creatures that humans consider pests. The thrust of the book is that cities are a lush environment in which wildlife thrives, albeit not the attractive poster species of the World Wildlife Fund. In these polluted urban habitats, many species survive incredibly well, overrunning other species, their populations controlled only by the availability of food. They adapt to extreme air and water pollution, cramped quarters and human efforts at extermination. Man is fearful of these symbiotic creatures who occupy not only the dank underbelly of the city, but our own dank underbelly as well.

From excavations of outhouses to interviews with master exterminators, from road-kill recipes to examples of our co-existence with microbes, Concrete Jungle successfully broadens the contemporary discussion of Nature and the Natural. The book is organized primarily by species of pest: "Rats," "Pigeons," "Roaches," etc. The section "Cats and Dogs" is particularly poignant given the ambiguous status of pets in our culture. Domestic pets fall inbetween animal and human, object and subject - we endow them with human qualities while casting a blind eye on their butt-sniffing, bird-killing ways. When the animal nature of our pets erupts, in the form of humping a guest's leg or jogging into the house with dried poop in their mouth, we are momentarily repulsed. But soon their innocent blank stares and lack of vocabulary win over our hearts once more. The distinction between pet and pest, the dogs and cats who live in our houses and those who roam city dumps, smells like human symptom and animal odor combined.

A whimsical piece by Gerald Heffernon, entitled "Dog Jobs," takes a prescient look at future evolutionary niches for the dog. Postulating a future shortage in the meat supply, Heffernon identifies the need to "create environmentally friendly, innovative and useful breeds of dog," including a "green dingo: a vegetarian, photosynthetic dog that excretes oxygen" and an epidemic-control dog with antiseptic saliva employed at airports to "lick the hands and faces of disembarking passengers who exhibit tell-tale smells or disease-carrying characteristics humans cannot detect."

In language that is as much political as scientific, the section on "Alien Invaders" examines the intertwining of language around pests and racism, and the phenomenon of "invasive" plant and animal species. These alien species, such as the pigeon, the Himalayan blackberry and the gray squirrel, choke out native flora and fauna, reducing biodiversity while yielding a mixed bag of positive and negative effects. Many of these species have been purposefully or accidentally introduced to new habitats by humans.

"The Mania for Native Plants in Nazi Germany" by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn takes aim at the current penchant for indigenous plants by examining a piece of eco-political history. The article identifies Alwin Seifert as Hitler's landscape architect who first sparked the interest in native plants as part of Germany's xenophobic, racist national agenda. The larger question raised is what is native and to what time period "native" belongs, a la post-modern query, "Whose history?" The article raises important doubts about the political implications of the native plant movement, but it also has the peculiar effect of shutting down complexity and opposing views because there is no way to argue values that have been related to Nazi culture. Is it herbo-racism to cut down eucalyptus trees and plant sequoias instead? Are the "drought-resistant" gardens of Southern California unacknowledged tributes to the Third Reich?

Editors Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman are visual artists whose work explores man's study of and fascination with nature. Dion creates installations that examine the history and method of natural history, and Rockman makes exacting paintings of wildlife. Both artists' work investigates the complex and conflicting attitudes toward nature that circulate in our society.

Dion's interview with theorist Andrew Ross touches on how similar concepts of nature have been tied to very different political agendas, which leads to Ross's critique of the strategies of the environmental movement. This critique is taken up by the book as a whole as Dion and Rockman encourage a reevaluation of environmentalism by exploring the ecology of "really existing" nature, that which thrives among us in degraded habitats. In popular discourse, nature tends to be associated with purity, and environmentalism revolves around preserving/restoring that state of purity. Ross terms this an "appeal to guilt and self-reform in the Puritan mold." While there are certain articles in Concrete Jungle that take this approach, with dire warnings of diminishing biodiversity and planetary over-population, more often the pieces shed light upon the impure state of nature that exists in sewer pipes and trash-strewn highways and beaches. There is no place on the planet that humans have not affected; even the most remote regions share the same polluted atmosphere and will be affected by conditions of global warming.