"One giant edgeland"
Southlands Book Club Q&A #1: Christopher Brown
A Natural History of Empty Lots is the first book in the Southlands book club. In October, I’ll convene an online discussion for paying subscribers—so, if you’d like to join, be sure to upgrade now, as I’ll email paid subscribers next week to set a date. The book will be released on September 17 and is currently available for pre-order.
A few years back, when Covid precautions shuttered some of the country’s most famous national parks, I wrote an essay for Outside magazine about the opportunity that presented: We had a chance to remember that wildness also exists in our backyards.
Among the feedback I received was a note from a psychologist who studies the effects of being-in-nature. No, you’re wrong, he told me, in essence. His idea was that we get psychological relief, as human beings, by putting ourselves in spaces that are vast and unfettered.
I love those spaces, but there aren’t a whole lot of them in the South. And really his struck me as a self-affirming academic hypothesis, one that justifies his predilections. Like, I knew he had fond memories of riding on horseback in Western deserts as a kid; now he’d postulated a psychological theory that turned that hobby into a central and necessary human experience.
As a suburban kid, my closest analogs to his grand adventures were small journeys creeping along the banks of a concrete creek, looking through the back ends of the fences that protected homes and churches and parking lots from the trickle of water and weeds. That was a grand time, too. Is crawling through the halfway ruins of suburbia an essential human experience? Honestly, maybe yes.
And we do have a lot of ruins in the South.
I’ve been thinking lately that our attraction to ruins is not so separable from our attraction to the wild. I sometimes call the country’s officially designated wilderness an “apocalypse playground”—a place where we can imagine ourselves in a ruin so big that all traces of humanity are gone.
This is all prelude to the fact that, when I learned about A Natural History of Empty Lots, I knew I’d be reading it. The book, by award-winning dystopian novelist Christopher Brown, delves into “edgelands”—“the places where you can find the coyotes hiding behind the factories, or the foxes at the end of the dead-end street,” as Brown told me. The word, he noted, was coined by English ecologist Marion Shoard. “And I love the word, because, in the way of the English masters of lyrical nature writing, it encodes some romance and wonder of those kinds of places—places that in the American vernacular we often don’t even see.”
The book is, in some sense, a literal field guide, helping steer readers toward whatever edgelands are in their neighborhoods. It’s also a first-person narrative, depicting Brown’s own twenty-year exploration of the edgelands of Austin, Texas. That journey eventually led Brown to build a house on a formerly industrial lot along the Colorado River in East Austin—a half-buried home roofed by a restored patch of blackland prairie. The house is split, so to get from the bedrooms to the social spaces, its inhabitants must step outside and experience the open air. (To be honest, I found his descriptions of the resulting visits from snakes and spiders somewhat intimidating.) Ultimately, Brown aims to take the accumulated lessons of these edgeland wanderings to start considering how we might “rewild the future”: how to find a hopeful path forward in a damaged world.
He told me that once he set to work on the book, he realized he was reworking the tradition of what he calls “settler narratives”: the journals of explorers; the diaries of so-called pioneers. “Like, ‘We came from this place in this other part of the world, and this is why we left,’” he says. “‘And here's how we got here, and this is where we ended up, and this is what that place was like when we found it. This is how we changed it. This is how it changed us.’ How do you take these narratives of colonization and turn them into narratives of decolonization—both of the things outside us and of the self.” It’s a grand ambition, he notes, but also, I think, a necessary one.
My conversation with Chris—which appears below, after the news round-up—has been edited for clarity and flow.
Recommended reading
🚘 For Wildsam, Wright Thompson examines the long tradition of wandering the backroads of the Mississippi Delta—and envisions a far-off future when new wanderers return again. (Wright’s forthcoming book, which goes similarly deep into the history of the patch of land where Emmett Till was murdered, is next up on my reading list.)
🏌🏼 My last newsletter looked at a deeply unpopular plan to develop some of Florida’s state parks. Since it published, the state fired the whistleblower who helped bring media attention to the issue, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In the Sun-Sentinal, meanwhile, Bill Kearney describes how this has become “one of the most dramatic stories in state history of the uproar that results from trying to alter state parks.”
🐷 Feral hog removal in Conagree National Park (National Park Traveler)
🦈 Why shark attacks are increasing (Garden & Gun)
🎣 Do official assessment methods understate the impacts of commercial fishing? (Science)
⛰️ We’ve got mountains, too, and Outside highlights several lovely Southern mountain towns.
🌱 Why don’t we make better use of all that kudzu? (Gravy)
🫠 WWNO’s Sea Change examines the impacts of a warming Gulf on human and more-than-human life.
🪨 Mining in Okefenokee would be a breach of binding covenants (The Current)
Upcoming events
TONIGHT, September 10: Author Night at Hubbell Library (New Orleans)
September 14: Mississippi Book Festival (Jackson)
September 24: Q&A at Skylark Books (Columbia, Missouri)
September 26: Reading at the Center for River Studies (Baton Rouge)
September 28: Six Bridges Literary Festival, in conversation with Alice Driver (Little Rock)
Delving into the edgelands
Southlands: It strikes me that there’s a paradoxical idea in edgelands. As you write in the book, they are “where the worst of our industrial abuses collide with wild nature.” But you also find in them “the possibility for a better future.” And that’s probably not intuitive to everyone. You often describe these places as “wounds” in the book. So how do you reckon with that?
Christopher Brown: Sure, it's paradoxical or ironic. Or just surprising. But if you think about it, industrial zones, especially in the North American landscape, are zones in which other human activity is mostly excluded. So you'll often find that you have an industrial corridor that secrets behind it a stretch of wild space where there's no other human activity, and wild animals are free to roam free from human gazes.
And when you have the phenomenon of industrial ruin or economic obsolescence—the degeneration of old industrial lands in the period when they have not found their new, renewed economic purpose as productive nodes on the registry of capital—those kinds of places, the “empty lots” of the title, become accidental urban wildlife refuges.
The most extreme example of an urban edgeland is the so-called “involuntary park,” to use the term coined by my friend, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. These are places where our past use of the land has been so abusive that it's rendered too toxic for human use and occupation—like a Superfund site or the Chernobyl nuclear zone. These are also places where, counterintuitively, nature quickly rebounds and reclaims.
What's so hopeful to me is that when you start exploring these kinds of spaces—which I did initially almost by accident, not really looking for wild nature per se—you see how incredibly resilient wild nature is, able to recover, to reclaim little pockets of the Earth from us. You see how quickly significant amounts of biodiversity can be restored.
It's really affirming—existentially, emotionally, ecologically—the wonder of finding a run-down little spot behind a dairy plant that looks like some intact wetland remnant. But, in fact, when you study the history of the land, you learn it was a gravel pit 30 years ago, and it was a roadbed before that, and it was a ranch before that. It's like 200 years of abuse, and then you leave it alone for 30 years, and—wow.
One of the things I’m trying to do with this book is look at those kinds of places, which show how much we've abused the planet, but also show how easy it is to get around to healing things. You're letting them heal themselves with just a little bit of inattention. And if you can achieve that much with inattention, imagine what you might be able to do with active intention.
And if you can achieve that much with inattention, imagine what you might be able to do with active intention.
Southlands: A few years back, there was another word for all this, “novel ecosystems,” that caused some furor in conservation biology. Like, yes, clearly humans have created new ecosystems. But if you enshrine them with their own term, that can become a kind of Trojan horse that allows industrial polluters to say, “We don’t need to worry about conservation, we’re just making novel ecosystems.” Or, like, the idea of Chernobyl giving hope: There’s a darkness there, in saying that, like, get rid of humanity and nature thrives. Do you worry about this?
CB: It’s an important question. Even the word “rewilding” leads a lot of people to a strong negative reaction—because the term is associated with so-called “eco-fascists,” people who advocate a strategy of compulsory depopulation of the planet to try to heal it. Which I'm not at all about. That's a really scary idea.
But I also have the science fiction writer’s proclivity for the so-called “cozy catastrophe” narrative—the romance of a depopulated human future. If you look at a lot of the popular end-of-the-world fictions of the postwar era, they often feature people half-happily roaming the ruins of cities. On the one hand, these kinds of stories are supposed to be a warning. But they're also expressing an unconscious yearning for some kind of restoration of balance.
To me, it's almost a facile truism to note that nature will outlive us. Nature will be fine in the end. The question is whether we will survive. I'm interested in providing very pragmatic tools that provide a reader with agency to do things in their own everyday lives that help advance a healthier climate future, a healthier environmental future, and a healthier human future.
Southlands: I couldn’t help but notice how often Southern landscapes come up in this book—the fight for the Atlanta forests, the Mississippi River, the landscapes of coastal Texas. There is a very “Wild West” notion of wilderness and nature in the U.S. In this newsletter, I guess I’m slowly and casually developing a Southern theory of wildness. And I wonder if you have thoughts on how the edgelands might help us think differently about this region, or think differently about the iconic notion of “wilderness” that so often dominates our conceptions of nature in this country.
CB: Yeah, we live under the thumb of Thoreau and John Muir, and their respective ideas of nature—idyllic New England nature and majestic Rocky Mountain Western nature. A lot of nature writing seems kind of scared of the swamp.
The Gulf Coast is a landscape that is, in some respects, one giant edgeland. It is a landscape that's really been very heavily layered over by the infrastructure of the petrochemical industry, of exploration and extraction, production and distribution. My house—my supposedly empty lot that I found in 2009—was a little acre in a rundown part of East Austin that was bisected by a petroleum pipeline that had been abandoned in place. And it was connected to a big, above-ground storage tank farm a half-mile away that was, in turn, connected to the big production centers in Houston and along the Gulf.
This is the typical kind of place where wild nature exists outside of official parks: in zones that have been walled off from other human activity, from the development of endless subdivisions and suburban tract towns, because there's some other industrial activity going on, usually oil and gas. And that's kind of what protects them, in this counterintuitive and paradoxical way.
What do you think is different about these kinds of spaces in the South?
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