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A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places Hardcover – September 17, 2024
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An "instant classic", this genre-bending blend of naturalism, memoir, and social manifesto is a fascinating study for rewilding the city, the self, and society (Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author).
During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—abandoned and full of litter and debris—was an unlikely site for a home. Brown had become fascinated with these empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, and how we can heal ourselves by healing the Earth. Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.
“Brown lives far from any conventional battlefield, but he is surrounded by the wreckage of a different war, and he, too, finds hope in cultivating the ruins of nature…A Natural History of Empty Lots is less a departure from the nature writing tradition than a welcome addition to its edgelands.” —New York Review of Books
"The nature writing we need now." —Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts
"Incredible" —Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTimber Press
- Publication dateSeptember 17, 2024
- Dimensions6.35 x 1.06 x 9.35 inches
- ISBN-101643263366
- ISBN-13978-1643263366
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Founded in 1978, Timber Press is internationally recognized as the leading gardening publisher.
Dedicated to sharing the wonders of the natural world, we publish books from experts in the fields of gardening, horticulture, and natural history.
Our books and authors have received awards from the American Horticultural Society, the Garden Writers of America, the Garden Media Guild, and the National Garden Club of America.
From the Publisher
A Natural History of Empty Lots is the record of my twenty-year experiment exploring, living in and documenting the edgelands where human cities and wild nature collide.
It’s nature writing, but not by a professional naturalist—I am a dystopian novelist, a lawyer, and a dad whose children helped him rediscover the outdoors without leaving the city. As a consequence, the book is simultaneously infused with the sense of wonder that characterizes both youthful exploration and speculative fiction, and with the lawyer and the dystopian’s clear-eyed understanding of what the human animal is capable of. It’s a record of personal experiences in a very particular place, but its research and material range much farther across time, space and subject matter, endeavoring to provide fresh perspectives on how we got to this juncture in the climate and biodiversity crisis, and how we might find our way out. The narrative is redemptive, especially in the incredible resilience of wild nature it documents, showing a path to a healthier future we each can help achieve from the grassroots, while recognizing the incapacity of human power structures to get us there.
The book tries to break through conventional ways we experience and think about nature, starting with language and narrative inversion. It seeks out the wild in landscapes marred by human industry, marrying the lyrical beauty and romance of nature writing with rich and inclusive description of the everyday details, often ugly, of our own imprint on the land. The damage we see in our natural environment, the book contends, is a mirror of the damage we can feel inside ourselves—both of which can be remedied by a rediscovery of the wild that exists outside our doors, and within us.
It’s a book about a house, but it’s not a design book. It’s the chronicle of an experiment in rewilding the home, and reconsidering house as nature.
The book is a journal of the author’s observations in the field, but it is also a book of ideas—not just about nature, but also about how experiences of urban nature help illuminate the ways that social and economic justice are inextricably intertwined with environmental justice.
It’s a kind of nature writing whose influences come from very different literary traditions—writers like J.G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Walker Percy, and Samuel R. Delany. Its field notes and extrapolations draw not just from natural history, but also mine folklore, law, economics and political philosophy. At its narrative core, the book sets out to repurpose the stories of exploration, colonization and settlement that are in many ways the literary roots of American identity, in an effort to show paths to decolonization of the land, the community, and the self.
This is the most personal work I have written, a distillation of a lifetime of outdoor exploration, reading and living into a memoir of life outside the self that tries to accrete into a manifesto for rethinking how we live in and care for the world and each other. It aims to equip the reader with simple and actionable tools to re-connect with the wild wherever they are, discover new things about their own nature, carve out pockets of more authentic fulfillment in the interstices of everyday life, and get agency in the future.
The book should be of interest to a diversity of readers—those who enjoy reading about nature and the outdoors, climate and biodiversity, landscape, design and urbanism, speculative fiction and futurism, creative nonfiction, memoir, and even self-help. In its simple accumulation of one person’s memories of living in the world, and learning just how inclusive that world can really be if you open your mind to it, it aims to provide a palliative, and maybe even a cure, for eco-anxiety. An ambition that is fully bounded by the understanding that I don’t have the answers—just some ideas on how the nature we ignore and abuse can help us find them.
Christopher Brown’s debut novel, Tropic of Kansas, was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year. Rule of Capture was published in 2019, followed by 2020’s Failed State, a nominee for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. He also writes the popular urban nature newsletter Field Notes.
Chris has also taken two companies public, restored a small prairie, worked on two Supreme Court confirmations, rehabilitated a brownfield, reported from Central American war zones, washed airplanes, co-hosted a punk rock radio show, built an eco-bunker, worked day labor, raised two amazing kids, and trained a few good dogs. He lives in Austin with his family, in the edgeland woods between the river and the factories, where he works in a 1978 Airstream trailer.
All images by Christopher Brown. Not found in book.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
―Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist, MacArthur Fellow, and award-winning author of The Book of Love
"A Natural History of Empty Lots is the best and most interesting book I’ve ever read about the spaces we often overlook. Christopher Brown comes to these places with a deep curiosity and understanding of both human and nonhuman history. An instant classic."
―Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author
"Too often, what we call ‘nature writing’ is nostalgic for what never was. Thank goodness for Christopher Brown, who sees the wonder in what is and what might be. A Natural History of Empty Lots is the nature writing we need now."
―Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
“Instantly hypnotic, A Natural History of Empty Lots invites you to see the ‘waste’ spaces of the Anthropocene for what they are: a resource that contains more than itself. Christopher Brown is a complete and literate denizen of these zones. His calm, clever writing shows a real care for the natural world, and a real feel for the deep worth of the brownfield liminal.”
―M. John Harrison, Goldsmiths Prize-winning author of Wish I Was Here and Climbers
“A marvelous and wonderfully wide-ranging account of learning to see how wild nature infiltrates the interstices and abandoned places of the Anthropocene.” ―Paul McAuley, author of Beyond the Burn Line, and winner of the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards
“A Natural History of Empty Lots is a book about the inbetweenlands, the sacrifice zones, the feral strips — landscapes shocked by humanity, quietly healing. The book pads unbotheredly across the barrier between “urban” and “rural”, “wild” and “industrial”, and the one doing the padding, Christopher Brown, is an ideal guide: wise and ironic, observant, and sensitive.”―Robin Sloan, author of Moonbound and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
“Like flowers from broken asphalt this book is a surprise joy—in a time of anxiety, this is a meditation on how, to paraphrase the fictional Ian Malcolm, life finds a way."
―Chuck Wendig, author of Wanderers and Black River Orchard
“An astute observer and deep thinker, Brown celebrates edgelands and “nature’s resiliency” even as he states that the wild is “mostly losing” the battle against voracious human consumption. A vivid, many-faceted, and provocative ecological inquiry.” ―Booklist
“Come for the reflections on edgelands and cryptids, stay for the exquisite prose style. Christopher Brown writes with ecstatic accuracy and appealing curiosity about the Anthropocene and its discontents.” ―Ed Park, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams
“Brown examines urban nature from the sides of highways to empty lots to traffic islands and how animals and plants thrive in these areas humans aren’t allowed. We often think that one must leave the city to see nature, but Brown’s writing illuminates the wonder all around us.” ―Arlington Magazine
"Meandering between the specifics of his land, the history of the region and the ideas of how humans interact with nature is by design, fitting for someone so committed to wandering as a way of finding truth....But we can all start to see how the wild is all around us, just by taking a walk."―Los Angeles Times
“Brown lives far from any conventional battlefield, but he is surrounded by the wreckage of a different war, and he, too, finds hope in cultivating the ruins of nature…A Natural History of Empty Lots is less a departure from the nature writing tradition than a welcome addition to its edgelands.” ―New York Review of Books
“With A Natural History of Empty Lots, Brown rises to a level of acute observation and analysis that bears comparison with the works of Michael Pollan, Jared Diamond, Rachel Carson and Edward O. Wilson.” ―Austin American-Statesman
“Brown tells the immensely gripping story not only of his discovery of wild, urban places but of the opportunities we each have to track, forage and wander if we so choose."―The Masters Review
“A meditation on the wildness found in the most overlooked parts of our urban landscape… Brown translates what he sees into evocative field notes that point toward a future rewilding.” ―Landscape Architecture Magazine
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Secret History of Empty Lots
Introduction
Requiem for a Muscle Car
I found the Impala by accident, on a hot Saturday morning in the summer of 2009. It was not long after capitalism had collapsed, or so we thought at the time, making the discovery of a vignette from some end of the world movie unexpectedly plausible, even though you could still hear the cars on the nearby highway mixed in with the insect chorale of the swamp. And the minute I saw it, I knew it was not a sign of the end, but a window into a new beginning. An abandoned car is not the sort of thing you are supposed to be excited to find next to a piece of real estate you have just bought with borrowed money. But for me, in that moment, it was a sign that I had found a way to escape. A landmark that beckoned across time and space from a version of the world you would actually want to live in, instead of the misery masquerading as affluence that I saw everywhere I looked, including in the mirror. The old Chevy was way off trail, in the back part of a wetland I had stumbled upon walking the secret woods hidden between an urban river and a factory. They were the kind of woods no one is really meant to roam, made from volunteer trees grown up between the busted-up curb cuts and demolition debris dumped in a downzoned stretch of interstitial wilderness at what once was the edge of town. The negative space of the metropolis, where nature fills in the gaps we leave and wild animals feel free to roam in the absence of human gazes.
I had spent most of my life exploring those kinds of places, and now I had managed to buy a little slice of one, where I had the half-baked idea to build a home for my broken family. When I first saw that old car as I bushwhacked through the tall water grasses, it looked like it might have been there for thousands of years. But I could also remember when cars like that cruised the streets, cars with Batmobile lines forged from Rust Belt steel, sometime after the assassination of JFK and before the resignation of Nixon. The sun had baked it down to the color of primer, speckled with fungal green. Aquatic plants grew up out of the seats and the engine block, watched over by the big herons perched on the branches of the tall sycamores that ringed that secret sanctuary hidden by the drone of the old highway.
You couldn’t tell how it had gotten there. It might have washed downriver in a big flood, or been driven down there at some time when the river channel was different. I would go back and look for it once in a while, and it was always there, but every time you went you needed to intuit a different path through the impenetrable vegetation and knee-sucking muck. It manifested different forms with changes in the river, sometimes almost completely submerged, at other times almost ready to fly off, with its steel hood and trunk popped out like asymmetrical gullwings. A mystical motorhead Ozymandias that transported you in ways its designers never intended.
It disappeared in the fall of 2013. I never knew whether it had been washed away in that October’s dam-busting deluge, or hauled out by the municipal stewards charged with cleaning up the edgeland and turning it into a park. Sometimes it still shows up on the digital maps, a ghost in the machine. In my memory, it persists as a glimpse of how beautiful the end of the world could be.
Even after the Impala was gone, I found myself drawn to the spot where it had been. Partly because the power I had found in that apocalyptic landmark lingered on, and also because I began to better appreciate how wondrous was the wetland where I found it. It was a kind of urban oasis—a little backwater that on dry days was a wide marshy creek bed and on wet days a green lagoon that filled with the overflowing waters of a rising river. The wild aquatic plants gave it a primordial feel, and you could sense that it was full of animal life. The dense cover made it so you rarely saw the terrestrial critters on the move, but when you did, they were usually magnificent, like the mysterious coywolf I spotted at the marsh’s edge one morning in 2015, or the pair of huge snapping turtles I caught making roly-poly aquatic love in the highwater creek on a spring day in 2012. In the liminal seasons, crazy flowers would bloom in the most remote parts of the swamp, and you got the sense this was the kind of spot where a botanist might find a species long thought extinct. Even as you also would always find flotsam trash down in there, like the metal folding chair that has spent the last decade being slowly sucked back into the earth, right by the spot where I found those turtles mating.
Taking it in, I came to see what a rare thing I had discovered—an intact remnant of what this area along the river had been like in the period before European settlement, somehow preserved by a mix of intention and inattention, an accidental byproduct of the industrial land uses on the streets above it and the way they kept other human activity out. Or so I thought. In the summer of 2018, I walked the area with a guy named Lanny. Lanny is a serious amateur historian, an oil field services engineer by day who spends his weekends searching for evidence of the past in the contemporary landscape. We met through an email thread I had somehow ended up on with Lanny, a group of like-minded searchers, and a reporter from the local paper, documenting forgotten places, and Lanny reached out to me to come investigate some of the sites I had mentioned. Like a lot of such buffs, Lanny seemed disturbingly interested
in ghosts of the Confederacy, but as we walked down in the riverine woods looking for remains of old ferry landings I think he could tell where not to go with me in our conversation. He reminded me of some of the guys I had once gone on a Bigfoot hunt with, the sort of fellow whose search seems to be about something else entirely, and prone to rationalized confirmation of theories that fit his preferred narrative (something I was learning I was also prone to). But he knew a lot about the land, and had a patient obsessive’s knack for documentary research. Not long after our walk, Lanny sent me an email with links to Google Earth files on which he had overlaid a series of historic aerial photos of the area. It showed that the wetland I had indisputably declared an antediluvian remnant had, as recently as the 1930s, been the site through which a major road passed, ferrying passengers over a temporary bridge that had been constructed when the old wooden bridge had washed out and the new steel bridge was under construction. After the new bridge was completed, that spot became used for several decades as a gravel pit where aggregate companies would dredge river rock to make building materials. In the mid-1980s, the city finally banished the mineral operations to the other side of the bridge, which more or less marked the eastern edge of town, and it was only since then that the dumpsite had become a wetland. It was not a remnant of what was here before, no matter how much it felt like a place where you would be as likely to see a Tonkawa forager or a stray Sauropod. It was a place that had, in two decades or so, transformed from a scar made by humans into a biodiverse wonderland, right there below the highway to Houston and the flightpath of the airport. Living proof of nature’s resilience and capacity for self-healing, if we just leave it alone to do its thing. In time, over a chunk of a lifetime spent here at the edge of these urban woods, it taught me how to do the same thing for myself. And to see how the real path to building a greener future goes through the windows such places provide us into the deep past, where we can come to understand and then learn to express our own true natures, as individuals, as communities, and as participants in an ecosystem with which we have developed an abusive relationship.
In the seasons since I first discovered that Impala gone wild, I made a home here in the American edgelands, building a little house in the trench left behind by a petroleum transmission pipeline and restoring the land around it into an urban pocket prairie. Healing the land, I learned to heal myself, and build new family, navigating my way out of the many small failures, everyday traumas and overclocked burnout that characterize life on the American treadmill, aided by new relationships and new understandings. I came to know the animals that live inside the city—coyotes and foxes, ospreys and owls, armadillos and snakes, vultures and hawks, opossums and raccoons, waxwings and warblers, majestic deer and wily skunks, and the infinite bounty of bizarre insects that move in with you when you make your roof into a wild green garden. I witnessed the ways in which those animals have adapted to survive in the realm of our dominion, and experimented with making our own home a habitat we share with our animal neighbors. I got to know my human neighbors, some of them the descendants of people who walked these lands before Europeans arrived, others men who live outside or in abandoned buildings and exist off the city in ways that may be more in touch with the truth of human nature than they or we know, and came to see how much of the American experience of nature and the outdoors is wrapped up with the privileges of race and class. Through my neighbors, and the land, I learned to see more clearly the extent to which I was living in colonized space, and how the everyday gentrification battles here in the fastest-growing city in America continued the violent history of our taking of this continent and displacement of the peoples and ecosystems our ancestors found here.
I learned to experience deep time, picking up the traces of Cretaceous bivalves and neolithic wanderers that sometimes wash up on the banks of the ancient river as it flows from downtown Austin to the Gulf of Mexico. I channeled these experiences into three novels that viewed the America I learned to see through a dystopian mirror, all in an effort to find my way to the utopia I could see lurking in our popular visions of apocalypse. As a lawyer, I came to better understand the ways in which our legal system, behind its aura of dispassionate reason, legitimates a millennia-long history of conquest and a civilization founded on control of
land, water and the reproduction and labor of others, be they plants, animals or other humans. I read widely about the anthropological roots of our Anthropocene dilemma, and the mythology and folklore that encodes much of the secret history of how we got here. And I learned I had agency over our ecological future, or at least my little place in it—through learning to better see and find connection with the natural world as it exists in our shadows, by working to restore and
rewild the parcel of land on which my family and I live, and by joining my neighbors in their ongoing fight to protect our natural inheritance and the planetary future. The aim of this book is to distill those experiences and learnings into some field notes that might help others make their own similar discoveries, without presuming to be more than one guy’s journal of what he saw while out for a walk in the urban woods.
Product details
- Publisher : Timber Press
- Publication date : September 17, 2024
- Language : English
- Print length : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1643263366
- ISBN-13 : 978-1643263366
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.35 x 1.06 x 9.35 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #204,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #51 in Urban & Land Use Planning (Books)
- #196 in Human Geography (Books)
- #3,809 in Memoirs (Books)
About the author

Christopher Brown is the Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy and John W. Campbell Award-nominated author of the novels Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture and Failed State. His newest book A Natural History of Empty Lots, which combines nature writing, literary nonfiction and memoir in an exploration of the wild spaces of cities, is forthcoming from Timber Press in October 2024. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he also practices law.






