Wild in the Streets
Q&A with Christopher Brown
Christopher Brown is an attorney and the author of A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and Other Wild Places, as well as the novels Tropic of Kansas (nominated for the John W. Campbell Award), Rule of Capture and Failed State (nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award). He lives with his family in Austin, in the edgeland woods between the river and the factories. He’s taken two companies public, restored a small prairie, worked on two Supreme Court confirmations, rehabilitated a brownfield, and reported from Central American war zones.
Anthony J. Mohr: Welcome Christopher Brown. One of the things you say is that anybody can maintain or even create a natural area where they live, even if they live near a Superfund site. Is that correct?
Christopher Brown: Not only do we have the ability to do so, but we need to start thinking about doing things like that in order to combat the biodiversity crisis, which is pretty severe if you believe the World Wildlife Fund. According to their most recent Living Planet Report, which came out in October 2024, the planet’s vertebrate wildlife population has plummeted by 73% since 1970. There are scientific debates around how accurate those numbers are, but even if they’re half that, it's still a sobering statistic. And when you look at the geographic distribution of those statistics, it's even more shocking. It's like 18% in Europe, 87% in Africa, and 67% in Asia. And then in this hemisphere, it's something like 20% in North America, but 95% in Latin America and the Caribbean. These are pretty good barometers, I think, of trends we know in our hearts are going on.
Those of us who took our fair share of cross-country road trips and are old enough to remember the sixties or the seventies – I was a little kid then – know that you don't get as many bugs on your car when you drive. The biodiversity crisis seems very real when you pay closer attention to little things like that. It doesn't get as much airtime in our public discourse as the atmospheric climate crisis. But it's a stark and severe situation that we need to think creatively how to address. And we can start with people becoming more cognizant of wild nature as it exists around them, even in the cities, and then doing things to cultivate wild nature in and around where we are.
Mohr: You have a word in your book called “rewilding”.
Brown: I mostly use the term “rewilding” simply to mean efforts to bring back more biodiverse ecologies within areas that have been significantly altered by human development and use. Often that involves restoration strategies that are focused on bringing back native plants, and with the native plants providing food sources for native wildlife. But I'm not super theologically strict around the question of native versus naturalized species because I think we're living in a dynamic system.
Rewilding is also used in certain circles as a term that touches up against what some people call “eco-fascism,” which is the school of thought that the only way to save the planet is through sort of compulsory human population reduction. I'm advocating a more humanist approach to rewilding – trying to find a balance between human needs and the needs of other forms of life that we share the planet with.
Mohr: You talked about the Ballona Creek wetlands Los Angeles County. Do you consider that a rewilding success story? And if so, what did they do right?
Brown: The creek itself is an engineered flood control canal with LAX on the one side and Marina del Rey on the other. The rewilding has focused on the lands around the creek. It's a great example of restoring an area that had been largely used for petrochemical extraction. Howard Hughes had a little airport there. The idea is to take these zones that were spared from heavier, more dense human structural development because they were being put to use for some industrial purpose, then preserve them as wild urban spaces and cultivate urban biodiversity through a mix of municipal, county and support from nonprofits, neighbors and communities. I went to Ballona Creek early on a January morning and saw coyote tracks, all manner of wild birds, and all kinds of beautiful native plants starting to come up. You could see that it was biodiverse. But for the planes flying overhead and the sound of traffic in the distance, you could forget for a moment that you were in the hustle and bustle of one of the greatest cities of the world.
Mohr: You mentioned a couple of other places – in Munich, in Seoul.
Brown: Cheonggyecheon in Seoul is a great example. They used the pathway of this creek in the twentieth century as the route of an elevated highway, an overpass. The creek was just buried under concrete and starved of water. They had the idea to “daylight” the creek, so they tore out the overpass, figured out how to reroute it, and then down in it they performed a variety of different kinds of landscape restorations that brought back remarkable biodiversity in an intensely urban setting, significantly reduced the urban heat island effect, and created a tremendously popular and aesthetically pleasing refuge for residents and visitors.
The Isar River restoration in Munich is a more authentically rewilded example. The Isar River used to be a classic urban river turned into an industrial canal. It had concrete banks, not that different from Ballona Creek or most of the Los Angeles River. Starting in the nineties, they conceived a project to take six miles of that river and turn it back into its wild and natural condition. They figured out how to control the cleanliness of the water flowing into the river. They tore out all the concrete banks, and they restored natural banks on both sides of the river. They put in native plants. I was there two years ago on a weekday afternoon in September, and people were running out of their offices with their swimsuits in their briefcases and jumping in the river to take a swim on their lunch break. It was a pretty astonishing thing, a way of showing how excited people can be by the opportunity to feel like they're really in an authentically wild and natural environment in the city.
Mohr: if somebody wants to make this kind of social impact, how do they start?
Brown: I think there are three elements. The first is just learning to see how much wild nature already exists in a city and actively finding the places where it can be found. And having interactions on a small or large scale with wild nature in your everyday life.
Second, there's a lot you can do in your own domestic life to participate in this kind of undertaking. If you're lucky enough to have a yard, you can typically – subject to whatever weird local ordinances and homeowner association rules may apply – undertake all manner of rewilding and native plant restorations. It's really astonishing how quickly, when you put in a biodiverse array of native plants, all the other life seems to come back.
Third, at the broader level in terms of trying to achieve impact on a larger scale, there are huge opportunities to fight the biodiversity crisis one zoning case at a time, as it were, and to advocate for giving some priority to habitat for other life as we develop our urban milieu.
Mohr: Your book talked about the fun you can have at city council meetings. Is that the way to go?
Brown: That game is pretty rigged. Municipalities and counties are charged with growth, jobs, tax base, etc. But it's also the most local form of politics we have, and while the rules may tend to favor growth and development, the political mechanisms are very accessible and pretty darn responsive to community action. Even a small group of people can almost always get some kind of seat at the table, and a large group of people can often have a huge impact.
There are successes and failures. Austin is a place that has gone through different political cycles during the time I've been here. It had been very pro-environment and protective of green spaces and heritage spaces in the eighties and nineties. Now it’s a very growth-oriented tech boom town, canyoning the creeks with high rises. But we had a huge movement last year that organized to fight a plan to make over a popular large local park that has, at the heart of it, Barton Springs, one of the largest spring fed pools in America. They wanted to turn that into a big concert venue with grass. There was a lot of money from concert organizers behind it. And they were going to build a bunch of parking – literally, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, to pave paradise and put in a parking lot. The opponents organized and went downtown. And the mayor and the council said, okay, I guess we better back off on this one.
You have to have people show up at a city council meeting. Usually every citizen has the right to get up and talk, and sometimes the members will table the item as soon as they see a crowd rather than go through that exercise. At the other extreme, you have examples like the “Cop City” development at the edge of Metro, Atlanta, where there's a project underway to build this big police training facility and to take down a lot of native old growth forest to do it. People from all over the country went to that city council meeting, including descendants of the Indigenous peoples who’d lived on that land and were forced to relocate to Oklahoma. They got up and said, “My ancestors fertilized this soil.” A protester had been shot and killed trying to fight the project. Despite this daylong series of speakers – law professors and jurists and neighbors, a really diverse group of people – the council by a substantial majority voted to do it anyway. So, you never know how it's going to work out.
Over the past fifteen or so years, I’ve worked closely with a group of environmental justice activists here in Austin. It’s called PODER, the Spanish word for power. It’s an acronym for People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (there's a Spanish version as well). PODER was organized by a group of Mexican American women here in Austin, the daughters of immigrants who in the early nineties organized to fight a big above-ground petroleum storage tank farm.
And we've had good luck in making conservation of wild urban spaces a priority. A simple trick is to engage early with the developers and with the policymakers on these projects. For example, big legacy industrial properties often have a buffer zone of undeveloped land around the property, so we advocate that redevelopment projects include set-asides of some of that land for landscaping strategies that will help create habitats as part of the new mixed use.
if you learn the rules and know what matters to the developers, you can cut a deal before they even go in to get their zoning variances and whatever permits they need. That's often the easiest strategy, and then if you can't work it out, you have a pretty good chance of brokering some kind of a compromise.
When I moved into the neighborhood, I was excited about the possibility of living in a pocket of wild nature hidden in the urban edges, but was embarrassingly ignorant of the social context. I had a general idea of the demographic character of the neighborhood, and I knew some of the history. I bought this empty lot on the banks of an urban river, next to a pocket of urban woods behind an old zone of industrial land uses that were becoming obsolete, and I thought I'd found my little secret paradise. The lot was bisected by an abandoned petroleum pipeline, and that was why it was empty. As a lawyer I thought: I could get Chevron to take that pipeline out. It's in their interest. I'll pay them. The numbers will work out. And then I learned the pipeline was abandoned because these women at PODER had managed to organize and fight the major oil companies and win. And I'm the beneficiary of that work. I got to know them when they had a little fight going on around an unlicensed commercial concession on the river. And so, they said, “Well, since you're a lawyer and you seem kind of connected in the normal legal community, maybe you can help us.” And I said, “Yeah, that sounds fun.”
We had tremendous success with that little fight, then went on to others, and so we organized a separate project to advocate for the conservation of the urban river corridor here in the eastern half of Austin. Now we're spending a lot of time engaged with companies like Tesla, which built a new Gigafactory just downriver from where we were at the beginning of the Covid lockdown. Even there, with a very big and powerful and, by reputation, ornery and not necessarily super socially responsible company, even in a place like Texas, where there's almost no land use control by the legislature or the local governmental authorities, you can get them to make investments in restoration and the rewilding of the land they took. While on the one hand Tesla built a giant factory, they also put a lot of money into restoring the riparian corridor behind the plant and making improvements to what had been a big gravel pit.
If more people were engaged in that kind of work, figuring out how to make restoration of biodiverse habitat and biodiversity generally a priority, they might have a lot more luck. As I noted in a recent Los Angeles Times Op-ed, the United Kingdom last year (before the elections, under the Conservative government) adopted legislation and then final rules to require that any real estate project of significant size has to show, after completion, a ten percent net gain in biodiversity on the site or in off-site projects. If that can be politically viable in the United Kingdom, something like that could be viable here.
We have a lot of notable restoration programs, like the Freshkills landfill in Staten Island and the wetlands conservation program that have been around in the U.S. since the eighties. The Agriculture Department has been providing financial incentives for farmers and ranchers to set aside some of their land to put in place biodiverse native prairie types, and even the farmers love this. It enriches life to have a little diversification of their land use.
There's also the path of guerilla gardening. If somebody doesn't have the time or the courage to walk into a zoning board meeting or a city council meeting, this is something one can do to have an impact. I have a friend, a writer, who has rewilded a little patch of dirt under an M Train stop in Queens. Now every spring it explodes with these tall native wildflowers and grasses.
Mohr: You wrote in your book, there are small decisions: an acre here, a hundred feet there. Just put the seeds out where the municipalities don’t tend to the dirt.
Brown: There are a lot of people who take on the task of saving native plants that are about to be bulldozed on sites. They'll go onto the site, sometimes with the permission of the landowner, sometimes not, and take some seeds or entire live plants. A patch of native sunflowers or goldenrod. There are lots of places that are reliable sources of quality native seed, often premixed in biodiverse batches of different species, sometimes as many as seventy. You can buy those seeds and scatter them.
Mohr: Like Johnny Appleseed.
Brown: Look for the best strategy, depending on the specific characteristics of the place, to bring back as much biodiversity as you can. In places like the railroad right of way at the edge of town, which already often gets repurposed as human trailways.
Mohr: There are places right under our noses, as you wrote, for example, the empty lot, the old road. The zones between phone poles.
Brown: There are all of these interstitial spaces within the urban realm of human dominion. Like zones along the rights of way. They're all over the place. And the restoration possibilities of those kinds of places are obvious. Even back alleys. Back alleys are a land use anachronism. They were there to hide certain infrastructure uses associated with private residences that we don't need anymore. They don't really serve us. So they're an easy opportunity to rewild, like community gardens. In a way, they're the last vestige of the Commons.
Mohr: What do you recommend we do to make those zones amenable to rewilding? Leave them alone to allow the people to come in and cultivate there, or put native seeds there, and then cultivate and nurture them?
Brown: Couple their development with enhanced standards for their ecological impact. On the economic side, there's an emerging field of economists who are developing mechanisms to price in the costs of biodiversity loss – what they call “ecosystem services.” There was a study widely reported in 2024 about the population loss of vultures in India and how it could be directly correlated with the loss of some 500,000 human lives, because the vultures were eating carcasses that spread disease and preventing automobile accidents by keeping those kinds of obstacles off the road. A similar recent study focused on the impact the loss of native wolf populations in the northern parts of North America had on human welfare.
Mohr: Thanks for your time. I recall a cartoon many years ago, which I loved. You see a huge series of skyscrapers and a vast concrete plaza. No trees, no plants, no nothing. But then in the middle of the plaza, a man with a pail is watering a little tendril of weed that’s sprouting through a crack in the concrete.
Brown: That's where I'm coming from.
About the Author:
Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow. For almost twenty-seven years, he was a judge on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. He still serves on a part-time basis. On two occasions, Anthony sat for several months as judge pro tem on the California Court of Appeal. Among his numerous professional affiliations, he served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s Ethics Review and Response Committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He sits on the Regional Board of Directors for the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region and the ADL’s National Commission. With another judge, Anthony has authored two legal textbooks. In 2023, his memoir Every Other Weekend – Coming of Age With Two Different Dads was published.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.