Is it “natural”?

As cities grow greener and the urban frame­work works to max­i­mize its envi­ron­men­tal gifts like water­ways and parks, cer­tain ques­tions must be asked. Cities in their begin­nings were founded in nat­u­rally advan­ta­geous places such as near water­ways, har­bors, and fer­tile val­leys among oth­ers. Today how­ever, the most nat­u­rally gifted cities have fallen behind those places where human inge­nu­ity has fos­tered a desire to con­stantly rein­vent the urban fab­ric such that the once pow­er­ful con­nec­tion between the city and nature has been bro­ken. Mod­ern con­sumers in urban areas choose largely to ignore where their pro­duce, meats, con­struc­tion mate­ri­als, and other non-urban items come from. Fur­ther­more, we also largely choose to ignore the fact that what we per­ceive as “nat­ural,” or from nature, is quite often the prod­uct of human beings.

The terms “first nature” and “sec­ond nature” were first coined by William Cronon in his sem­i­nal work on Chicago, Nature’s Metrop­o­lis. Cronon uses “first nature” to define the purely nat­ural aspects of cities, espe­cially those god-given advan­tages that give some cities a leg up on oth­ers. A prime exam­ple of this is New York’s deep, one-of-a-kind har­bor. “Sec­ond nature,” how­ever, is used to describe those advan­tages that humans have cre­ated within the urban frame­work. Pub­lic trans­porta­tion, street sys­tems, and, most impor­tantly, parks, are all “sec­ond nature” advan­tages in cities.

Take a moment to think about this. Many things that we con­sider most nat­ural about our cities and our coun­try (the green­belts, the park sys­tems, the green grass of the sub­urbs) would not exist in the true sense of “first nature.” In fact, the orig­i­nal grid plan for New York included one large park that was laid out so that the city would not totally over­ride the nat­ural state of Man­hat­tan Island. That park, which was then mil­i­tary parade ground, would ulti­mately become Tomp­kins Square Park (and its cur­rent iter­a­tion is far from “first nature”). As the city grew out­ward towards uptown, it took “sec­ond nature” human efforts by city offi­cials and urban land­scape archi­tects Fredrick Law Olm­stead and Carl Vaux to cre­ate, rather than nec­es­sar­ily pre­serve, green­ery in the form of Cen­tral and Prospect Parks.

While these parks impart a sys­tem of “nat­ural beauty,” it is impor­tant to remem­ber that they are as much the prod­uct of human inge­nu­ity as they are prod­ucts of nature. The tall leafy trees were care­fully planted, the grass prop­erly main­tained at con­sid­er­able cost, the man­made lakes (yes, they are not all nat­ural) and count­less other land­scap­ing fea­tures were all designed to give New York and its res­i­dents yet another advan­tage, another way of solid­i­fy­ing the city’s place at the top of the urban hier­ar­chy. Even the sub­urbs, which rep­re­sent a com­pro­mise between rural and urban, were care­fully laid out and land­scaped. Cer­tainly New York City, and Man­hat­tan in par­tic­u­lar, has changed greatly since its true “first nature” hey­day in the early 17th cen­tury at the begin­ning of the Dutch set­tle­ment era. Because of this, we can­not truly con­sider today’s pock­ets of urban green­ery as being the same “first nature” as the orig­i­nal Man­hat­tan Island.

It’s a rad­i­cal way of rethink­ing nature and the envi­ron­ment within cities. Is any­thing in the urban frame­work still truly “first nature”? Obvi­ously there are some pock­ets where mother nature shines through in her true form across all five bor­oughs, but the over­all lack of true “first nature” fea­tures in cities forces us to recon­sider what we think of as nat­ural within the urban land­scape. In fact, some of the only places left largely untouched directly by man are in dan­ger of pol­lu­tion from the sec­ond­hand effects of urban­iza­tion. We must rec­og­nize that the things that we con­sider lit­tle oases of green­ery are not nat­ural. Rather, they are human prod­ucts of an era in which small islands of nature could be actively placed within cities to make the urban habi­tat more liv­able. Fur­ther­more, this real­iza­tion forces us to rethink how we explore “nature” in an urban context.

The next time you go to a park, con­sider the human input required to main­tain it, the care­ful plan­ning of its undu­lat­ing path­ways and changes in ele­va­tion, the pres­ence of thick green grass. This acknowl­edge­ment of the human ele­ment in “sec­ond nature” green­ery does not nec­es­sar­ily have to decrease your enjoy­ment of such spaces. Instead, we must be cog­nizant of the fact that when we canoe down the Bronx River, our abil­ity to do so is not nec­es­sar­ily a “first nature” abil­ity, but rather the prod­uct of tremen­dous human inge­nu­ity to restore, pro­tect and main­tain a quasi– “first nature” state. When we revel in the long bike path and the breeze bik­ing down River­side Park, we must remem­ber that it took tremen­dous human effort for that pos­si­bil­ity even to occur.

While we can­not and should not for­get Mother Nature, it would be a dis­ser­vice to urban envi­ron­men­tal­ists past, present, and future to assume that these nat­ural ele­ments were sim­ply the prod­ucts of “first nature”.  To ignore the human ele­ment would be to for­get how far we’ve come in mak­ing our cities organic and more con­nected to nature, and sim­i­larly to for­get our tremen­dous abil­ity to con­tinue this trend towards a brighter, greener urban future.

Inter­est­ing links on the topic of NYC’s first and sec­ond nature states:

To see what New York City’s parks looked like before they became the islands of green that we know them as today, peruse the “Before They Were Parks” web­site pro­vided by the Depart­ment of Parks and Recreation.

If you would like to explore Man­hat­tan Island in its orig­i­nal “first nature” state at the time of the ini­tial Dutch set­tle­ment, check out The Welikia Project, or pick up a copy of Welikia Direc­tor Dr. Eric C. Sanderson’s book Man­hatta: A Nat­ural His­tory of New York City.

Enjoy Dr. Sanderson’s inter­view with City Atlas as well!