Concrete Jungle

New York City and Our Last Best Hope for a Sustainable Future

By Niles Eldredge, Sidney Horenstein

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Niles Eldredge and Sidney Horenstein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9780-520-27015-2

Contents

Preface: The Yin and Yang of Cities,
1. Regarding Broadway: The Urban Saga and the New York Microcosm,
2. Forest Primeval,
3. Landscape Transformed,
4. Growth of the Concrete Jungle,
5. Fouling, and Cleaning, the Nest,
6. Invasion and Survival,
7. Resilience, Restoration, and Redemption,
8. Cities, Globalization, and the Future of Biodiversity,
Notes, References, and Suggestions for Further Reading,
List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Regarding Broadway

The Urban Saga and the New York Microcosm

Times Square pulses twenty-four hours a day. Flashing neon signs light up the night sky as crowds of New Yorkers and tourists dodge cars and buses, despite occasional crackdowns on jaywalking. We may find similar displays in the streets of Shanghai, London, Paris, and Tokyo, but somehow it is New York, with its Forty-Second-Street-and-Broadway anchor point for Times Square, that seems more than any other to be the crossroads of the world.

The new millennium brought a sanitization effort to the tawdrier side of Times Square, with sex shops, streetwalkers, and X-rated movies shunted downtown or to peripheral streets and avenues. Who knows how long this “Disneyfication”—with its spate of glass-and-steel hotels, and its theaters proffering “wholesome family entertainment”—will last before it too is replaced by the next wave of change, whether this means still-newer forms of entertainment or the lapse back into sleaze that would reflect yet another economic downturn.

Whatever happens, one thing is sure: nothing stays the same. Cities are in constant flux. When George M. Cohan wrote “Give My Regards to Broadway” in 1904, he followed the first line with “Remember me to Herald Square. Tell all the folks on 42nd Street that I will soon be there”—a reminder of the days when the theater district was in the act of pulling up its roots at Thirty-Fourth Street (that is, Herald Square, home to Macy’s) and about to reinvent itself in the Times Square neighborhood, since known simply as the theater district.

Beyond recognizing the flux of a city’s normal growth and change, we can also see that cities, like people, have births, lifetimes, and inevitably declines and demises. What is more, there simply was no such thing as a city just ten thousand years ago. Back then, there were roughly 5 million people on the planet—maybe 10 million at most. By 2011, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, New York City alone had some 8,175,133 residents, and millions more if you count all of Greater New York. What’s more, those 5 or 10 million human souls on earth ten thousand years ago were thinly distributed around the globe, all the way from present-day Cape Town in southernmost Africa, up through the environs of modern Paris and Berlin, east over to where Calcutta and Beijing now stand, then on down to the future sites of Bangkok in Thailand and Jakarta in Indonesia, and all the way to where Australia’s Adelaide, Perth, and Sydney were to be built many millennia later. People had also reached the Western Hemisphere, but just barely. By then, they might already have traversed what would someday become Manhattan Island. And while some bands had reached as far south as modern-day Brasilia, people hadn’t yet made it to Kingston in the Caribbean islands.

Only small, temporary villages held any concentration of people, for humans, scattered around the globe as they were, still lived the seminomadic life that is the lot of all folk who hunt, fish, and gather wild plants to stay alive. The relatively few hunter-gatherers who survive today generally cluster in small groups of between 40 and 70 people. These bands live in temporary encampments with hide tents or simple thatch or wooden huts, migrating seasonally or as environmental conditions dictate. It cannot be otherwise, for all their water and food supplies come from their surrounds, the natural ecosystems of which they are an integral part.

Think of a hunter-gatherer, a San person (a “Bushman”), say, living in the Kalahari Desert that sprawls across large sections of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. The distinction between life in a semidesert and life in millennial New York may seem obvious: Aboriginal San, documented by anthropologists, had few material goods beyond their simple clothing: bows and poison arrows, gourd bowls, and a few other products fashioned from the minerals, plants, and animals that came to hand. New Yorkers of all social strata, however, have televisions, computers, cell phones, electricity, hot and cold running water, and so on, an almost limitless list of material goods inextricably linked to modern life. New Yorkers live in brick-and-mortar, steel-and-concrete, wooden, or granite or brownstone buildings, all of which exude an aura, at least, of permanence; San, in contrast, lived in easily constructed and dismantled one-room huts.

More crucially and tellingly, San men were often out on the hunt, while San women were constantly collecting tubers, melons, and other plants to prepare their meals. All members of the group were highly aware of where their food and water came from. In stark contrast, New Yorkers go shopping for their supplies at the corner market, the big supermarket, or upscale food emporia. New Yorkers in general think no more of where their food comes from (other than “da store”) than they think about where their electricity, running water, or heat comes from.

But below the surface differences between the San way of life and a New Yorker’s lies a profound gulf of radical change. The New York mode of getting food from the store (much less takeout delivery) did not somehow evolve gradually from the constant search for food that was the human condition until around ten thousand years ago. Instead, regular food supplies represent a major revolution in the economic (or ecologic) affairs of humanity, the first agricultural revolution.

Think what agriculture means: taking the production of your food into your own hands. No longer do you sally forth with your compatriots, carefully stalking game or scouring the environs for edible fruits and veggies. Instead you go out to the fields nearby, cut the trees, remove large boulders, scrape some furrows in the land, plant your millet, wheat, or sorghum seeds—and pray for rain. Every day you go out to check the progress of your crop, for if it fails to thrive, the winter will be harsh. You learn to remove the native plants that forever try to regain their lost foothold in your fields. You scare away, trap, or kill the animals that still think your fields are their lands to graze and hunt on.

Before agriculture, there were neither “weeds” nor any animal “pests.” Only after we took over the lands, declaring all plants off-limits except the one or two crops we were intent on growing, did we start competing with Mother Nature rather than viewing ourselves as parts of the local ecosystem, careful to take only what we needed to keep ourselves going. Suddenly we needed that land for our own exclusive use. It is as if people had declared war on the natural ecosystems with which they had peacefully coexisted throughout all former human history.

This giant step was an extremely bold and immediately successful move: we abandoned the natural world of the ecosystem to take life into our own hands. With that step, we became the first species in the entire 3.7-billion-year history of life to try something different. For the first time, we chose to live not off the natural fruit of the land, according to our tastes, needs, and ability to wrest a living from the natural world, but rather according to our wits and emerging skills at farming and animal husbandry.

So far, it has proved to be a successful experiment. Although famine has stalked the enterprise since its inception (every bit as much as it still haunts us today), those crops have yielded plenty for us more often than not. Ecologists measure success by the rate of expansion of a population, and if we apply this simple yardstick, the invention of agriculture and the simultaneous abandonment of life in the natural ecosystem has been a howling success. At the very dawn of agriculture only ten thousand years ago, we were a few million; we now number in the billions—6 billion at the dawn of the new millennium, nearly 7 billion a decade later, and still very much in the explosive, expansionist phase.

The agricultural way of life had other immediate effects on the way people lived their lives. Most hunter-gatherers are at least seminomadic, wandering a wide range as they move on to fresher fields. Some follow migrating herds; others track emerging fruits and vegetables in different areas as the seasons progress. Nearly all temporarily deplete what nature has to offer, and most move on to richer areas, giving the places they most recently occupied a chance to recover and once again become an attractive place to live.

But to farm is to plant your feet firmly in one place. True, soils lose their nutrients and harvests dwindle if fields are constantly used and replanted with the very same crops. Some early farmers, particularly in regions with wet tropical forests, developed a slash-and-burn approach, felling a section of forest, burning the cut brush and timber to enrich the soils, then planting yams or manioc for years until the soil weakened and it was time to repeat the process in an adjoining stretch of woodlot. Eventually, all tall timber in that neck of the woods would be felled, and then it would be time to either relocate the settlement or start the cycle all over again right there.

Farmers today still let their fields lie fallow to recover, or they plant a rotation of crops that lends a chemical balance to the land. They fertilize their fields—at one time with manure or perhaps fish (as native Americans, including the legendary Squanto, a member of the Pokanoket tribe, taught the pilgrims to do when they planted corn), but now, increasingly, with chemicals that, along with pesticides, have had alarmingly negative effects on life outside those farm fields.

But whatever tricks farmers across the ages have devised to keep their fields productive, our point is that farming literally keeps you close to home. Throughout history, farming has led to increasingly permanent settlements. Long gone are the days when small villages of farmers could simply pull up stakes and find some new locale in which to set up their enterprise, for as human numbers have grown, available land has proportionately shrunk. And these settlements have of course grown—to the point where no one thinks of a city like New York as a place where farmers live and go out every day to tend to their crops in adjoining fields. Never mind that until around 1900, Brooklyn (the third-largest city in the United States until 1898, when it became a borough of the city of Greater New York) supplied much of the green groceries that reached the dining tables of New York City—meaning, for the most part, the denizens of Manhattan Island. Truck farming was a vibrant feature of the landscape of the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens, not to mention a feature of what later became, after World War II, the rural suburbs of Westchester and, increasingly, of New Jersey’s coastal plain. (New Jersey’s nickname, “the Garden State,” pays tribute to its former role in provisioning “the Empire State.”)

Agriculture first arose in several different world regions at once, apparently independently, as if it were an idea whose time had come. The earliest records are from the Middle East, where the Natufian peoples of the Levant region (bordering the eastern Mediterranean) seem to have been the first to master the rudiments of isolating kernels of primitive wheat (traditionally called “corn” by Europeans, a source of great confusion to speakers of American English) and sowing them for next year’s crop. This was about ten thousand to eleven thousand years ago. The famous Fertile Crescent, now largely the site of Iraq—a land bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—was another early locus of farming, as was the incredibly fertile Nile Valley, whose fields were replenished every year by the floods that rise up deep in the heart of the African continent. With the floods came nutrients and a thin yet rich layer of new soil—no crop rotation necessary in Egypt!

No one supposes that these several, separate sites in the Middle East all reflect independent invention of farming know-how. Though warfare was common among the early states, so was diplomatic contact that fostered the spread of knowledge. Even warfare brought innovation, as conquering peoples brought with them new ideas. Probably the most famous example was the introduction of the wheeled vehicle to Egypt by the mysterious Hyksos invaders. (This in contrast to records of the potter’s wheel seen in Egyptian tomb pictures from about 2500 B.C.) The Hyksos, also referred to as Hyk-Sos or as “shepherd kings,” defeated the Egyptians and closed the pages of history on the “Middle Kingdom,” largely by dint of their use of horse-drawn chariots, which until then had been wholly unknown to Nile Valley dwellers. The Hyksos invasion came at about 1650 B.C., after some two thousand years of successful Egyptian life, when cities like Memphis flourished and the huge pyramids were built, all without the aid of wheels.

There was plenty of communication to spread the word about farming around the Middle East (and eventually around the entire Mediterranean basin, and later into western Europe). But people elsewhere, seemingly independently, were also discovering the advantages of taking control by planting crops and domesticating animals for food and other uses, as hunting aids and home protection, not to mention as friendly household pets. Along the Indus River in what is now Pakistan, the city of Mohenjo-daro sprang up, along with the first flickers of what was to develop into the vast, rich Indian culture. Agriculture also fueled the early fires of Chinese civilization, at first especially along the banks of what Anglophones now call the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers.

The people of the New World, who had first arrived from Asia in significant numbers starting around 12,500 years ago (though some evidence suggests earlier arrival dates for the very first immigrants), also developed several farming nuclei. Most famous are the Mayan and Aztec city-states of Central America and Mexico, as well as the cities of the Incan peoples of Peru. But agriculture soon developed virtually everywhere in the Americas, as the pilgrims and other early settlers of the east coast of North America quickly discovered.

One thing is clear: although we tend to think of farming as a purely rural activity, far removed from the inner workings of major cities, it is certain that without agriculture there would be, indeed there could be, no cities. True, many agricultural peoples have lacked a major settlement you would call a city. And many rural areas, even in technologically advanced nations like the United States, are far away from anything remotely resembling a true city. But the reverse is not true: there never was a city unless there was agriculture.

Looking at any map reveals another major feature of cities: by far the great majority of them are close to water, situated either along riverbanks, on the shores of major lakes, or—among those founded somewhat later—on harbors opening to the sea. Today, eight of the ten largest cities in the world are adjacent to, or connected to, the sea (the exceptions are Delhi and Mexico City). Most fertile farming areas, after all, are in the floodplains of rivers, so it was only natural that the earliest agriculturalists would be living where they had the best chance to succeed at this grand experiment in cultivation. And of course, farmers need water for their fields. The annual flood of the Nile brought more than nutrients and a thin rime of fertile new topsoil: it brought water itself, which the early Egyptian farmers learned to trap in a system of canals and dams. During the dry season, the Egyptian farmers would lift the water up to the level of the fields with a number of clever devices—including a simple clay pot on a counterbalanced pole (the shadouf) and, somewhat later, the Archimedes screw, a large screw inserted inside a cylinder that drew water upward when the screw was rotated. Still later, the Egyptians were bequeathed the ox-driven water wheel by their Roman conquerors.

Water is so important to the agricultural enterprise that some scholars have insisted that control of the waterways was the key to political control (“unification”) of large areas, typically along the course of major rivers such as, once again, the Nile. There’s a lot to this argument: consider the political troubles over water rights that continue to beset the American West. Much of the water of eastern California and western Nevada was long ago earmarked for thirsty Los Angeles; with urban growth outstripping even these supplies, Los Angeles has turned to the waters of the Colorado River—which now no longer reaches the Gulf of California.

Nor are New Yorkers immune from political hassles over water, as we shall see in greater detail in chapter 5. New York’s water supply lies well to the north, and while New York City might own the land around its upstate reservoirs and along the rights-of-way of its pipelines in order to protect the drainage basin and control sources of pollution, there has been friction over water use over the years, mitigated in recent years by cooperative policies. Restrictions on reservoir usage is but one of the prickly issues that constantly erupt in this situation. The water issue for New York and all other cities is in itself a microcosm of the reach of cities—and the sometimes negative impact of the sheer existence of cities on surrounding regions many miles distant from a city’s core.

Water has always been a touchy issue. Who controls the water coursing from the interior uplands in progressively widening rivers as it nears the sea has always been a source of contention; people downstream are constantly worried about water being diverted farther upstream. The rise of cities is in no small measure the story of the successful political control of waterways. The political unification of Egypt—of the primordially separate fertile delta near the Mediterranean (Lower Egypt) with the four hundred miles or so of broad and fertile Nile Valley (Upper Egypt, stretching from Cairo south to the first cataracts of Aswan)—was accomplished, legend has it, when King Narmer seized control of this vast expanse of river and land.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Concrete Jungle by Niles Eldredge, Sidney Horenstein. Copyright © 2014 Niles Eldredge and Sidney Horenstein. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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