Christopher Brown has urged me to take a long and meandering walk. Or, at least, his new book, A Natural History of Empty Lots, has inspired one. Sadly, the empty lots I find in my East Austin neighborhood, unlike his, seem not to have been empty for long. One, where it appears a house used to be and will again be soon, contains evidence of humans but hasn’t yet been taken over by plants and animals, as have many of the places Brown describes. There is a toy figure of a man in samurai garb, now one-eyed and one-handed, atop a cinder block. A loose fork. Long and coiled green sacks of sand that have no apparent use except to corral piles of gravel and fallen branches. Vertical wooden planks bolstering two trees to protect them from heavy machinery. Back on the street, though, I lean down to take a photo of a Virginia creeper vine scrambling along scattered leaf litter in the street and climbing into an abandoned Honda’s wheel well. Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
I am not as prolific or daring a walker as Brown, who has for decades explored abandoned lots, train tracks, and other in-between (and often off-limits) places wherever he’s lived. Then again, I’ve only just read (and reread) the science fiction writer’s lush first volume of nonfiction, and already I find myself seeing Austin from a new angle, becoming more curious about what survives and thrives, and wandering into places that appear legally closed off to prying feet. At one point, driving home on the Interstate 35 frontage road, I spot a former Mercedes mechanic shop that seems to have been defunct for a while, and I brake quickly, screeching around the corner to get a better look at what might have grown or made a home in the absence of humans. As I peer at the morning glory vining up the chain-link, a man in a cowboy hat, Tesla parked outside the gate, looks at me suspiciously. Guess this is his empty lot.
The “nature is healing” meme, which took root during the COVID pandemic as certain flora and fauna became more brazen amid the decrease in human activity, immediately came to mind when I first read the synopsis of A Natural History of Empty Lots (“A genre-bending blend of naturalism, memoir, and social manifesto for rewilding the city, the self, and society”). Brown writes a weekly newsletter called Field Notes, and this book is an outgrowth of that. It offers keen observations about nature in “urban edgelands, back alleys, and other wild places” (as the subtitle states) that provide insight into not only what thrives in these spots, but also how readers might discover such places in their own cities and use what they learn to bring nature into their own homes and plan for a better future. Brown mentions the meme later in the book, but overall, he posits that nature has always looked for ways to fill the “interstitial habitat[s]” that we humans (an invasive species if there ever was one, he notes) leave open. Brown himself lives on a formerly empty lot on Austin’s East Side—a petroleum company’s leftover—which we have featured in this very magazine. The roof, which slants down to blend with the ground, is verdant from native plants; the house is split into two sections, with full walls of glass windows facing each other across a path that runs through the middle, where the petroleum pipeline once ran. Brown and his family must cross the path, in whatever elements present themselves, to get to the other half of the house.
At one point in the book, Brown describes showing a real estate broker around his property when a fox races by. The broker doesn’t see the fox because “it wasn’t what he was looking for.” But Brown is really looking, and that is the key to this book’s wonder—in addition to keeping his eyes peeled, Brown is also educating himself about what exactly he’s seeing, delving as far back as medieval times to explain the histories of not only natural wonders but also laws around land and property and what we are permitted to access. He waxes poetic on all manner of natural spectacles: the origin of Austin’s non-native monk parakeets, the mating habits of the stick bugs that copulate on his doorframes, and which animals are eating the seedpods that fall from the mesquite trees in his yard. If a sudden apocalypse ever befalls us, I’m seeking Brown out. I have a feeling he’d be good at gathering food for survival.
In A Natural History, cars are described as predatory animals, realtors searching for empty lots as Neolithic trackers, a deer skull next to an empty can of Budweiser as “a powerful totem.” His daughter picks up the green and oddly brain-textured Osage orange, which he goes on to tell the reader might be better named the Mastodon Cheeto (it was a favorite snack of the giant prehistoric creatures). The line between humans and nature, between ancient times and the present, is always quite thin. As is the line between where we’re allowed to wander and where we can wander—Brown is a big proponent of “walk[ing] where the land tells you to go,” not paying attention to the “often-invisible boundaries we erect to partition it.” In other words, trespassing, though he notes that most edgelands are ambiguous as to ownership and legality. On another walk, I trekked alongside the train tracks in Cherrywood, which, in my mind, have always been marked by an invisible boundary, one that says it’s dangerous (and illegal) to venture even remotely close to where a train might come barreling by. I didn’t see a mystical-looking coyote, like Brown and his son did as they walked along another set of tracks, but I did walk by a warehouse with a sign that read, “BY ORDER OF JUDGE JUDY NO GRAFFITI PERMITTED.” Judging by the tagging beneath the sign, this was another boundary someone found permeable. (Brown, too, takes some time to remark on what humans leave in our city’s semiwild spots, including political graffiti by East Austin Maoists on a wall in a traffic triangle turned mini forest.)
Yet another thin line is the one between science fiction and nonfiction. Brown has written three dystopian sci-fi novels (two set in Texas), and the descriptive language he uses in all his writing tends to cross-pollinate in delightful ways. In A Natural History, he describes a car that’s crashed into his front fence, “the eerie eyes of the LED headlights shining like some crashed UFO, its driver as vanished as if they had been abducted in one.” In his novel Tropic of Kansas, a character “crawl[s] through a vacant subdivision of knee-high grass, broken doors, and gardens gone wild.” As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Brown is interested in ruin and rewilding—not in the sense of engaging in “eco-fascist fantasies of compulsory depopulation,” he writes, but rather with a desire to preserve the few wild spaces we have left.
Amid all Brown’s skillful observations of the city and its pockets of wildness, some memoir bits sneak in, like bright yellow flowers popping up out of a crack in the sidewalk. These subtle moments are often found in the context of or in direct comparison to the interplay between urbanness and nature. In the first chapter, Brown remarks that “by working to harmonize the radically conflicting energies of the place, I might do the same to the conflicts in my own life.” (He’s quietly referring to his divorce in the late aughts.) Like so many other nature writers before him, Brown is exploring what he might learn about himself from being closer to the outdoors. I felt this most strongly during the pandemic, when I did therapy sessions via phone while walking along my neighborhood’s creek, Willowbrook Reach, which is intentionally kept wild by residents. Observing pinky nail–size snails on certain trees, seeing the sine-wave motion of a water moccasin in the stream, noticing passiflora buds become alien flowers become fruit, I began to associate specific revelations about my emotional life with the natural world I witnessed as I was speaking them.
But Brown rarely gets too personal. I wish there were a few more memoiristic moments in place of some ideas that feel underdeveloped or stray into preachy territory, such as a rumination on green buildings and whether “technological change” in that vein is equivalent to actually changing the way we live. Brown suggests that climate-control systems are “the barrier between us and real life” and that experiencing our homes without temperature control allows us to see “how else life could be.” But we have seen how it could be: 246 people died, mostly from hypothermia, during Texas’s 2021 freeze. In Harris County, 38 people died after Hurricane Beryl, many from heat-related issues after widespread power outages. Brown takes pains throughout the book to acknowledge how capitalism and power structures play into our relationship to nature, so this line of thinking feels particularly incongruous with his typically careful considerations. For example, his musings about Henry David Thoreau note how the writer “married the idea of pastoral solitude with personal virtue”—but Brown also wryly points out that while Thoreau was at Walden Pond, his mother, who was a twenty-minute walk away, brought him food and did his laundry. Brown writes about how the archetype of solitude in nature is “invested . . . in white privilege and patriarchy.” He similarly notes how easy it was to get a loan to buy his empty lot as a “white male lawyer with a good income,” then goes on to describe the history of Austin’s I-35 as a segregating line across the city during the Jim Crow era.
Ultimately, Brown is advocating for changing our thinking, which, he emphasizes “doesn’t have to come at the expense of [our] creature comforts.” Doing so comes down to recognizing the boundaries we encounter daily between “human space” and “wild space” and then doing our darndest to blur them. For some, that might mean an act as small as not raking up the leaf litter in the yard, allowing it to serve as a space for beneficial insects and other critters. Others with the benefit of money or time or both might work to advocate for the limiting of overdevelopment and the preservation of wild spaces beyond our direct dominion. The book contains no shortage of both incremental and larger philosophical solutions. And Brown’s intricate prose—with sentences like tendriling vines—and excitement about sharing his deep fascination with the world around him has the potential to make us all more curious about wild and in-between spaces. You’ll never see an empty lot the same way again.
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