Resilience and Redemption in Austin’s Edgelands https://ift.tt/twf3GJ1
Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places is celebrating its first anniversary and is now available as a paperback. Brown, a writer known to many for his work as a science fiction novelist (such as Tropic of Kansas), an attorney, and a hawk-eyed observer of urban ecology, here turns his sights to the present-day reality of the urban landscape.
Brown begins by telling readers about the improbable property in an industrial corner of Austin, Texas, that he bought during the financial uncertainty of the late 2000s real estate crash. This empty lot was the epitome of what he describes as a brownfield: a scar on the landscape, littered with landfill trash, concrete debris, and bisected by the remnants of an abandoned petroleum pipeline. It was, by all accounts, an unlikely spot to build a home. And yet, that is exactly what Brown did.
A Natural History of Empty Lots records Brown’s nearly 20 years in the city, exploring the murky lines between so-called ‘nature’ and ‘civilization,’ including those that exist in that little brownfield he purchased in the 2000s. Drawing from material he first developed in his Field Notes urban nature newsletter (published since 2020), Brown has been documenting similar liminal spaces across Austin. In these places, Brown discovered that the land was teeming with life, ultimately coming to recognize this life as an indication of the remarkable resilience of wild nature thriving in the interstitial habitat humans had abandoned. This realization catalyzed his project, driven as he is by the belief that by working to heal the wounds we have made on the landscape, we might also begin to heal the conflicts within ourselves.
One of the book’s central tenets is that wilderness isn’t pristine and doesn’t exist somewhere ‘out there’ away and distinct from humans; it is a force that is perpetually integrating, adapting, and thriving in constant relation to human industrial blight, often found in “landfills and the pathways of abandoned petroleum pipelines.” Brown sees these spaces (the “urban wastelands”) as filled with possibility because they represent an “absence of human dominion” even as they are inevitably and reciprocally impacted by human action. The concept tracks throughout the book, beginning with the original lot marked by the rusted-out “TEXAS PIPELINE CO.” sign. This land becomes the stage for a “compromised redemption” that recognizes “the prairies and forests humans have killed can never really come back,” but that a different kind of future can “grow from the scars we have left.”
Brown slowly introduces readers to his own burgeoning understanding of the blurry distinction between wilderness and civilization in Part One: Finding the Wild City. Here, he chronicles his journey through the edgelands — the liminal, overlooked spaces where urban infrastructure meets the ‘wild’. It is in these edgelands that Brown comes to believe that the natural world is all the “more beautiful when it manifests in these fallen places, because of the resilience it reveals.”
Part Two: Rewilding Domestic Life shifts the focus inward, charting the construction of his East Austin home in the “Brown Lands” — those “zones of economic entropy that become almost invisible due to their removal from the dynamic commercial flows of metropolitan life” — alongside his more domestic experiences.
After tracing the changes his home experiences over the course of twenty years, Brown offers a moving linguistic lens through which to view our ecological moment: Solastalgia. He notes that this is “a more precise and powerful neologism than terms like ‘eco-anxiety’ and ‘climate grief,’ because of the way it roots the feeling in the homesickness you feel for the place you live, as it slowly and frighteningly degrades before your eyes, and you come to sense more clearly where it is going, and your limited power to influence that outcome.”
Brown’s message is both a stark warning and a call to action: the fear we feel should not make us feel “deprived of agency,” rather, it should inspire us to act out of our love for that place.
While the first two interlocking sections of the book narrate Brown’s experience in the urban wilds of Austin, Part Three: Rewilding the Future links social injustice to the legal history of land ownership, ultimately advocating for grassroots movements led by activists and Indigenous groups in Texas. It functions as a manifesto of sorts, connecting personal ecological journeys to the sweeping failures of law and policy for everyday Austinites. Brown’s advocacy for grassroots action directly challenges feelings of powerlessness in the face of political deadlock, and urges readers to “begin to bring back the balance [the world] needs—and that we need as well.”
The final chapter, “Black Witches and Other Omens—A Coda,” is the shortest chapter of the book, perhaps intentionally so, leaving space for the reader to fill in the gaps with their own action and future vision in light of all the losses that surround us. A Natural History of Empty Lots feels like a necessary testament to the idea that by learning to see the world around us through a different lens, we can reconfigure our relationship to nature and, perhaps, “turn the idea of the wasteland into a promise instead of a curse.”
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