Read Online Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett - Free Book Online
Authors: Alastair Bonnett
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and to have a number of emergency exits. All of which meant that if the hole in front of me was a fox den, it wasn’t a very good one. There was a scrabbled, gloomy entrance about a foot across at the base of one of the trees, but I could see the faint light of water from inside the hole. I squatted and reached down; my hand dipped into a cold pool. This den had been flooded by the winter rain, and the animal must have moved on.
There are few things more thrilling than finding an animal’s home, even when it is empty. Who doesn’t want to pick up a fallen nest, to know its weight and peer inside and touch its bedded center? Even if our intent is to destroy them, the intimate care of the wasp’s nest and the ant’s miniature tunnels draws in our eye. It’s not just the intricacy of these places that is absorbing but their indefatigable energy. My search for a fox’s den in the hidden, marginal land of the park initially felt like a hunt for something fragile and rare, but if we didn’t keep pouring on concrete and tarmac, all the places we call home would soon succumb to a quiet colonization. For a place-loving species, watching our place being overrun and turned into their place is a common fantasy. It’s a possibility that is both appalling and fascinating. In
The Drowned World
J. G. Ballard argued that there is an atavistic desire for this kind of submergence lodged in the deepest, oldest parts of the human brain and based on a genetic memory of life’s kindred emergence. Ballard’s thesis could be mapped onto biologist Edward O. Wilson’s notion that humans are programmed to be “biophiles” and have an evolutionarily determined love of living things. I would add that our dark fantasies of nature’s revenge can also be seen as a byproduct of our suppression of nature. It’s because we keep pushing other species down that the idea of their return haunts us.
We want to share the city even as we insist it is ours alone. The fact that the urban fox’s habitat is spreading delights and alarms us. They have been living in British cities since the 1930s and have achieved a population density of up to five family groups per square kilometer. It was thought for many years that urban foxes were a uniquely British phenomenon. But in the 1970s they began appearing in cities as far apart as Oslo, Århus, Stuttgart, Toronto, and Sapporo in Japan. Wildlife ecologists who have been tracking them have found that rural and urban foxes have become markedly different, to the extent that one study discovered that “the border between the city and the surrounding grassland and forest was hardly ever crossed” by the two breeds. Another researcher discovered a “reduced gene flow between urban and rural populations.” The urban fox also has a different diet and a different relationship to humans and its landscape. There have been at least two substantial projects on what ecologists call urban foxes’ “daytime harborage.” One, from 1977, was carried out in London and tracked down 378 foxes. Nearly 60 percent of them bedded themselves down in “gardens, sheds, cellars, houses”; the rest were found in sewage stations, in builders’ yards, on vacant land, and in parks. Cemeteries and railway lines also proved popular. It is surprising that more people don’t trip over them.
A second, more recent study carried out in Melbourne found a preference for “exotic weed infestations.” The removal of these exotic weeds, the Australian experts concluded, will “assist in reducing the abundance of urban foxes.” In Australia, foxes are often seen as a destructive alien species. This is the direction that a lot of academic ecology seems to gravitate toward: identifying habitats is all about finding better ways of stopping animals from spreading. In continental Europe the latest research on urban foxes has been driven by the discovery that they sometimes harbor a parasitic disease called alveolar echinococcosis, or small
There are few things more thrilling than finding an animal’s home, even when it is empty. Who doesn’t want to pick up a fallen nest, to know its weight and peer inside and touch its bedded center? Even if our intent is to destroy them, the intimate care of the wasp’s nest and the ant’s miniature tunnels draws in our eye. It’s not just the intricacy of these places that is absorbing but their indefatigable energy. My search for a fox’s den in the hidden, marginal land of the park initially felt like a hunt for something fragile and rare, but if we didn’t keep pouring on concrete and tarmac, all the places we call home would soon succumb to a quiet colonization. For a place-loving species, watching our place being overrun and turned into their place is a common fantasy. It’s a possibility that is both appalling and fascinating. In
The Drowned World
J. G. Ballard argued that there is an atavistic desire for this kind of submergence lodged in the deepest, oldest parts of the human brain and based on a genetic memory of life’s kindred emergence. Ballard’s thesis could be mapped onto biologist Edward O. Wilson’s notion that humans are programmed to be “biophiles” and have an evolutionarily determined love of living things. I would add that our dark fantasies of nature’s revenge can also be seen as a byproduct of our suppression of nature. It’s because we keep pushing other species down that the idea of their return haunts us.
We want to share the city even as we insist it is ours alone. The fact that the urban fox’s habitat is spreading delights and alarms us. They have been living in British cities since the 1930s and have achieved a population density of up to five family groups per square kilometer. It was thought for many years that urban foxes were a uniquely British phenomenon. But in the 1970s they began appearing in cities as far apart as Oslo, Århus, Stuttgart, Toronto, and Sapporo in Japan. Wildlife ecologists who have been tracking them have found that rural and urban foxes have become markedly different, to the extent that one study discovered that “the border between the city and the surrounding grassland and forest was hardly ever crossed” by the two breeds. Another researcher discovered a “reduced gene flow between urban and rural populations.” The urban fox also has a different diet and a different relationship to humans and its landscape. There have been at least two substantial projects on what ecologists call urban foxes’ “daytime harborage.” One, from 1977, was carried out in London and tracked down 378 foxes. Nearly 60 percent of them bedded themselves down in “gardens, sheds, cellars, houses”; the rest were found in sewage stations, in builders’ yards, on vacant land, and in parks. Cemeteries and railway lines also proved popular. It is surprising that more people don’t trip over them.
A second, more recent study carried out in Melbourne found a preference for “exotic weed infestations.” The removal of these exotic weeds, the Australian experts concluded, will “assist in reducing the abundance of urban foxes.” In Australia, foxes are often seen as a destructive alien species. This is the direction that a lot of academic ecology seems to gravitate toward: identifying habitats is all about finding better ways of stopping animals from spreading. In continental Europe the latest research on urban foxes has been driven by the discovery that they sometimes harbor a parasitic disease called alveolar echinococcosis, or small
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