New York is nature

Growing up on the other side of the world, New York was presented to me as a kind of dreamscape. Filtered through the misty lens of Hollywood films or the books at my library, New York appeared me as a land of rom-coms and sitcoms, of heroes and villains, the kind of place where artists were forged and powerful people plotted world domination. A place as mythologized as this one can’t help but loom large in the imagination, especially for artists and writers.

So ten years ago, give or take a month, I moved to New York City with nothing but what I could carry by myself up and down the subway stairs. My story is my own, but it’s also a familiar, well-worn one for a certain kind of NY transplant: someone with an elephant-sized dream and a mouse-sized bank account moves to the big city and endures absurdities (ask me about living in an apartment with no heat or gas for years at a time so I could pay off my student loans!) as they try to “make it” as a writer or musician or actor.

In a sense, I’m still living my way into some version of the dreams that brought me here: the dream of making a living as a writer (which I’ve somehow been doing, against all odds, for more than a decade); the dream of doing meaningful work that tries to carve at least some little corner of the world into something better than it otherwise might be; the dream of living in this special, maddening city and offering it something useful rather than just extracting value from it and moving on.

In the decade since I first landed here, New York has become something quite different for me than what it was when I first moved. Some of it, of course, is that the romantic mythology of a place sloughs off when you actually live there—it’s just a place full of people living and working and making love and fighting and trying to make rent, like so many other places. But something else has happened too. In the last five or so years here, New York has become less of a dreamscape to me not because I’ve lost the ability to romanticize it, but because I’ve come to see it for something more concrete: the land that it is, the landscape beneath and threading through the skyscrapers and human projections.

New York, when it comes down to it, is a physical place, an ecosystem, on particular land. It is as grounded in the ground it occupies as any celebrated forest or mountain range. The wetlands and fungi and soil are as real here as they are anywhere else.

It took me awhile to see this; in many ways, I’m still just beginning to live it. Despite having written about sustainability in some fashion for as long as I’ve lived here, I still moved through the city as dreamscape for years. The environmental topics I wrote about were on some level abstract to me, despite my best efforts. I remember going to a bunch of “soil health” themed dinners before the pandemic in which people who thought a lot about environmental issues but never got dirt under their fingernails came together to chat about soil over fancy cocktails.

This cognitive dissonance started as a minor whisper in my brain that eventually became so loud I considered leaving the city. Without realizing it, I was buying into the idea that if I loved “nature,” I might need to move somewhere like Colorado, where people went hiking every weekend and seemingly everyone loved the outdoors.

What changed that was starting to meet people who helped me see New York as land, as coastline, as ecosystem. There was my friend Lauren, a media person turned local environmental nonprofit worker, who knew about the soil profiles underneath our feet in Prospect Park and the wetlands that our city was built around and on top of. There were the urban farmers at organizations like Red Hook Farms and the Campaign Against Hunger, who let me join them in coaxing food out of the ground in between giant apartment buildings. There was the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where a close interest in plants and the bugs and birds they harbored didn’t make me an outlier, just one of the pack. And there was the mycological society, where I met people who knew how to recognize the under-studied kingdom of fungi lurking as lichens or tiny ascomycetes or surprisingly rare mushrooms in even the most citified tree pits and parks, no matter what time of year.

It has been through these people and institutions, among others, that the human/nature divide I was maintaining in my head without even knowing it began to erode. I still deeply value wildness, from the stark majesty of the Rockies to the tropical richness of Filipino coral reefs, but I am getting better at understanding that I don’t have to be in such places to get to know or foster profound connection with the more-than-human world. And I’ve dropped the notion that I have to live somewhere remote to find likeminded people who are devoted to and intimate with their local bugs or plants, wildlife or wetlands.

Whether you live in a big city like New York or Manila, in the suburbs or somewhere rural, I hope you will find ways to get to know the land on which you live on its own terms. Look up whose land you’re on, yes, but also see if there’s a way to connect with and support Native people currently living nearby. Join a birding club or mycological society or community garden; volunteer at an urban farm or wildlife rescue; look up events near you that center around bats or horseshoe crabs or shoreline trash cleanups; talk to your neighbors about what people need in the building or on the block. There’s almost certainly more ways to connect to the life of the landscape around you than you think.

At least that’s what I’ve found, what I am finding. I still have a long way to go. What I know for sure is this: the more I learn to live in this place as land, as ecosystem, the more I love it. As Wendell Berry put it, “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.”