Chapter 11 - Urban Narrative and the Futures of Biodiversity

Summary

Cities have traditionally been neglected settings in environmental writing and ecologically oriented literary criticism, but have played a central role in the thought and writings of the environmental justice movement. Recently, they have also come into focus as “novel ecosystems” of their own in fiction and nonfiction. This chapter surveys two thematic emphases in environmental literature that portrays cities at risk from either toxicity or climate change, both of which continue to emphasize the antagonism between urban landscapes and the forces of nature by describing cities as either sources or targets of environmental risk. It then focuses on a third and less explored approach to the city as a multispecies community to outline four recurrent templates: the awareness narrative in which individuals or communities discover urban species; the narrative of urban return in which wild species reclaim the city; narratives about cities as sites of newly emergent species through evolution or technological modification; and narratives of urban bonds between humans and nonhumans. All of these narratives shift the emphasis from the city as an ecological wasteland to a new understanding of novel urban ecosystems and novel biological habitats that need to be understood in terms of multispecies justice.