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A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places
A Natural History of Empty Lots is a genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect. To do this, we must challenge our assumptions of nature itself.
During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—a brownfield site bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash—was an unlikely site for a home. Along with his son, Brown had explored similar empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment as Austin became a 21st century boom town. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards, and discovered that, by working to heal the wounds we have made on the Earth, we can also heal ourselves. Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.
During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—a brownfield site bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash—was an unlikely site for a home. Along with his son, Brown had explored similar empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment as Austin became a 21st century boom town. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards, and discovered that, by working to heal the wounds we have made on the Earth, we can also heal ourselves. Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published September 17, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
October 14, 2024
I love how creative and insightful this is, and more books and writers should absolutely take inspiration from this, but it’s too wordy. It’s one of the few books I’ve been really upset that I didn’t fall in love with it, but I’m sure some people will.
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September 29, 2025some really lovely stuff in here. will def revisit this one in years to come.
September 9, 2024
After his divorce and the 2008 market crash, Christopher Brown purchased a vacant lot in Austin, Texas. Not a vacant residential lot, which wouldn't have been too far out of the ordinary, but a vacant lot in an industrial area. Littered with trash and concrete and even an old petroleum pipe, the site needed plenty of cleanup before he could build a home there. And in the years it took to accomplish all this he started a new family and explored the area and river running through Austin, finding more wildlife than he had expected, and chronicled it in this memoir.
Brown, a lawyer and science fiction writer, has built a truly amazing house - I looked it up online and it's really cool. It's not an embarrassing mansion but rather a modern concrete and glass structure that incorporates its design into nature - the roof is covered in native soil and plants, practically hiding it from certain angles. He even has a triangular pool out front that complements the house beautifully. And the high point for me really was when he discussed the house itself and the way it invites nature - sometimes in unpleasant and unplanned ways, such as the snakes that found it to their liking.
But while I applaud his admirable accomplishment, there's a profound sense of ennui from Mr. Brown's writing which saturates the book with weariness and cynicism. He continually refers to pretty much everything as polluted, destroyed, and even brutalized by us. He seems to have such a deep disdain for humanity, especially the white "colonists" of the US, that everything about us is a plague. It's so pervasive that I found little joy in his descriptions of seeing foxes, owls, and hawks. He even describes the trash along the river in great detail. Of course, environmentalist that he is, he complains when the real estate crowd starts looking at the area for redevelopment after he sets in motion the gentrification of his neighborhood by publicizing his beautiful home in the dumps. The optimism (or at least the small measure of joy) I hoped to find in the book was too weighed down by Brown's pessimism, and I had to force myself to finish. In the end, I found the book simply 'meh' - nice in a few parts, but mostly not an enjoyable read. (I received an advance electronic reviewer copy from NetGalley and the publisher.)
Brown, a lawyer and science fiction writer, has built a truly amazing house - I looked it up online and it's really cool. It's not an embarrassing mansion but rather a modern concrete and glass structure that incorporates its design into nature - the roof is covered in native soil and plants, practically hiding it from certain angles. He even has a triangular pool out front that complements the house beautifully. And the high point for me really was when he discussed the house itself and the way it invites nature - sometimes in unpleasant and unplanned ways, such as the snakes that found it to their liking.
But while I applaud his admirable accomplishment, there's a profound sense of ennui from Mr. Brown's writing which saturates the book with weariness and cynicism. He continually refers to pretty much everything as polluted, destroyed, and even brutalized by us. He seems to have such a deep disdain for humanity, especially the white "colonists" of the US, that everything about us is a plague. It's so pervasive that I found little joy in his descriptions of seeing foxes, owls, and hawks. He even describes the trash along the river in great detail. Of course, environmentalist that he is, he complains when the real estate crowd starts looking at the area for redevelopment after he sets in motion the gentrification of his neighborhood by publicizing his beautiful home in the dumps. The optimism (or at least the small measure of joy) I hoped to find in the book was too weighed down by Brown's pessimism, and I had to force myself to finish. In the end, I found the book simply 'meh' - nice in a few parts, but mostly not an enjoyable read. (I received an advance electronic reviewer copy from NetGalley and the publisher.)
August 21, 2024
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who lives in a city but yearns for the country, or thinks that somehow people have removed themselves from nature and into an unnatural world. The natural world is in you and around you, just waiting for you to notice and connect, and the masterful writing of Christopher Brown can show you how through the example of his recent life.
September 18, 2025
This has taken me what seems like an age to finish.
I think this took me a while to get into as it was slow going at the start. Brown chimes in with far too much superfluous information about his divorce and his son (I get it, you love your kid and love spending time with him but it isn't necessary to tell us that every 5 minutes!)
I was expecting something in the realms of Richard Mabey but Brown has a business/lawyer background so the nature writing doesn't seem to flow naturally from him.
I was tempted to give up after the first few chapters as the style got a bit repetitive (talking about buying his plot of land and outdoor visits with his son), but then the actual nature writing seemed to kick in and it got a whole lot better. The species discussed are interesting from a UK perspective, as much of the wildlife we don't encounter here. It's nice to hear the reverence he shows towards these animals/insects/birds.
All in all, if you can get past the first few chapters and let Brown get the "fam" thing out of his system, it turns out to be very interesting reading.
I've gone from definitely wanting to give the book away to keeping it to delve back into at some point.
A solid 3.5-3.75 stars
I think this took me a while to get into as it was slow going at the start. Brown chimes in with far too much superfluous information about his divorce and his son (I get it, you love your kid and love spending time with him but it isn't necessary to tell us that every 5 minutes!)
I was expecting something in the realms of Richard Mabey but Brown has a business/lawyer background so the nature writing doesn't seem to flow naturally from him.
I was tempted to give up after the first few chapters as the style got a bit repetitive (talking about buying his plot of land and outdoor visits with his son), but then the actual nature writing seemed to kick in and it got a whole lot better. The species discussed are interesting from a UK perspective, as much of the wildlife we don't encounter here. It's nice to hear the reverence he shows towards these animals/insects/birds.
All in all, if you can get past the first few chapters and let Brown get the "fam" thing out of his system, it turns out to be very interesting reading.
I've gone from definitely wanting to give the book away to keeping it to delve back into at some point.
A solid 3.5-3.75 stars
July 21, 2025
“The urban wild has a way of helping you see the truths you work to hide from yourself.”
Christopher Brown doesn’t live life the way you and I do. Exploring on foot the less visible and less traveled areas of Austin, he stumbles on a non-residential, post-industrial empty lot and decides to purchase and build a home on it. Interested in these edgelands, he uses this experience to challenge everything we know about the intersection of nature, the city, and human life.
“The psychogeographers understood a truth we rarely acknowledge: that the city is a machine designed to make you believe you are free, when its real aim is to control you…The landscapes we move through are manufactured ones, shaped by us, even when they are green. Maybe because the city knows that if we encountered an authentically wild and natural space, we might try to disappear into it.”
I’ve recently become somewhat of a hiking girly, tailoring the few vacations I take to traversing the land, and am always on the hunt for interesting trails in my area. I have a pretty intense anxiety about getting lost and going on hikes has mostly been a euphoric and all-around beneficial activity for my health and well-being (there was that one time I got lost in Oklahoma and thought I was going to die, but other than that, 10/10!).
Something that doesn’t sit right, though, is that as much as one can immerse themselves in nature, such trails and paths are still created by man, keeping you just one step away from Actual Natural Nature. Brown steps over that obstacle when he explores the hidden areas of Austin, taking his children and dogs on long walks that aren’t paved or trail-marked or meant for human occupation, really. And he discovers all kinds of creatures, insects, and plant life he wouldn’t have seen otherwise, many of which persevere through industrialization and other human interferences.
“None of the native wildflowers that appear in the drainage ditches and empty lots of our neighborhood grow from seed we spread or from any effort to encourage them. They have persisted despite our efforts, intentional or reckless, to eradicate them…their emergence every spring is a reminder that the erasure of the biodiverse wilderness that was here before American colonization was recent and incomplete.”
The book does a lot to decenter humans because Brown’s discoveries are a reminder that nature isn’t eradicated by human construction and capitalism. It’s often still there, and even outlasts whatever structures and lives we construct around and on top of it (“wild nature is always ready to come back, to adapt to the opportunities we give it, to reclaim the territory we destroy. But they also remind us how much biodiversity we have erased from the world.”). We don’t really give nature enough credit because we’re too busy celebrating human achievements, ignorant to the fact that wildlife achievements trump anything man can create.
I love the intersections of man and nature. On one of his walks, Brown stumbles onto an old Chevy Impala and returns to it day after day, watching it sit in the same place while nature changes around it. Plants grow, water rises and falls. The awe and the art of nature persisting, despite man’s intrusions.
“What we experience, alone in nature, is the opposite of solitude: the revelation of our connection and community with the nonhuman life and animate elemental energy that surrounds us, infuses us, and is us. It is best experienced without other people, because that’s when the channel opens widest.”
I was frustrated with the first portion of the book because it was just Brown exploring by himself. No interactions with other people, just his descriptions of wildlife findings on his excursions. Again, my frustration seems to be a result of a human-centric worldview. Why do we need people in the narrative for it to be interesting?! Thoreau wouldn’t think so!
In any case, this touches on some of my issues with the book. It’s not well organized, and you move from one chapter to the next not knowing where you’re going or what to expect. Brown goes on philosophical and socio-political tangents that I’d be more accepting of in a better-organized book. There is a loooooot to unpack in just the nature of Brown’s work and act of buying a lot not meant to live on, and maybe it’s just hard to do all that justice?
Admittedly, I went into this expecting more of an infrastructure slant…reader error on my part (the cover depicting more concrete than greenery and ‘Lots’ in the title was not giving ‘wildlife book’). This is a very nature-heavy book, and I recommend you heed the subtitle because it is definitely a lot of field notes. As in, a bit of a notebook dump of all the creatures and plants Brown came across on his weird walks. I don’t mind nature-heavy, but the endless descriptions are tedious, especially without accompanying pictures (the lack of color photos with captions seems like a huge missing piece from the book - I do recommend looking up photos of Brown’s house, a remarkable structure that seems to merge nature and human city life the way he wanted).
I’ve seen this referred to as a memoir and it is…decidedly not that. There is very little about Brown himself, other than necessary inclusions of his family that lives in the house with him. While I don’t wish to know much about his life, I wanted more about the human challenges of building a house like this, maybe obstacles they ran into (there was a matter of removing an industrial pipe and at some point, fighting not to displace a huge ant colony - I need more of these stories!). The house has a whole biome growing on the roof and a time-lapse account of that would have been cool to read. It gets interesting towards the end when Brown discusses the various creatures that more or less make themselves at home in the house (at which point I would nope TF out of there!). There is clearly a lot of privilege involved in being able to take on this kind of project, and I wanted to know more about all the times it wasn’t smooth sailing.
“It’s a strange process, whereby you ruin a place by moving to it. The term “gentrification” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s colonization. No matter how ethically you try to do it…By making a place “fit” for human habitation, you pave the way for others to follow.”
Brown is not preachy about his environmentally conscious life, and though he is clear about the ways capitalism and colonialism are destroying the planet, this isn’t meant to be a manifesto for changing your life to save the planet. You don’t have to live with arachnids, I promise. A very simple takeaway from this book is to open your eyes in your own surroundings, whether you’re walking downtown through a city or driving through your suburban neighborhood. The wildlife isn’t just in undeveloped spaces, it’s everywhere, and being more mindful and aware of it could help our understanding of nature and ourselves.
“In a world governed by human reason, we experience an abundance of surplus and a poverty of meaning. We believe ourselves to have banished magic and superstition from the world. But the magic is still there, all around us. The trick is learning to see it, for what it is…Even in the most urbanized human terrains, those wonders can still be found - most often at the edges where the pavement ends and the wild is allowed to express.”
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May 28, 2024Somehow, just from the title and cover, I'd assumed this was British nature writing - and that despite 'empty lot', now I think about it, being more of an American term. But the Americans... surely they don't need to write about edgelands? They have all those vast open spaces, don't they? It's only on this old, crowded little island that the Anglosphere needs to grub around in the neglected corners for some tiny sliver of wildness, right? Well, apparently not. Inevitably, this means that there are times when a UK reader who pays the least attention to this stuff will be tempted to gentle condescension: aw, bless, he's seen his first urban fox and he's treating it like a big deal! But it's always good to have people on side, and the differences are fascinating, right down to little stuff: they do have feral parakeets too, but a different species to England. More broadly, though, the wild that's itching to come back is different; under their crumbling light industrial units, the earth still remembers being a prairie, and there's a wider selection of decent-sized fauna ready to slip into the gaps too. On the human end of the equation, the myth of the frontier still lingers, its roots troubling and its persistence easily hijacked by the automobile industry among others - but also potentially useful to naturalists, if they can just find the right handholds. The overall effect is oddly optimistic, at least early on, a welcoming eye on the way the world reclaims even the territory humanity appears to have most thoroughly mucked up - albeit always with a countervailing awareness that capitalism, just as opportunistic as any weed though a good deal uglier, will often be ready to grab those derelict spaces right back. And as the book goes on that's exactly what happens, Brown's own wild house project part of the gravity that makes his neglected corner of Austin an appealing prospect after all, bringing with it the usual hideous developments that kill precisely what made an area attractive to them in the first place: "The signs promised the coming of a complex that called itself The Eclectic, even as they and you knew it would be anything but." The book tries to retain at least a note of bittersweet hope, talk about allying with your neighbours to fight City Hall - but it's too aware of how rigged the game is to feel like more than a faint gleam in the darkness. Still, at the same time as he has the eye of a lawyer (which he is) for the way systems twist to maintain control, he also has the knack of a science fiction writer (which he also is) for the powerful image; the husk of the Chevy in the hidden wetlands, in particular, feels like something out of a story by Jeff Vandermeer (who provides a blurb), offers a promise that one day some approximation of the wild will win this thing, with or without us.
Running in parallel with all this, though, there's a strand of what I'm pretty sure would have been played at least slightly for comedy in a British equivalent, but is possibly even funnier for being delivered with an entirely straight face. I think I was primed for this simply by his son being called Hugo, a name which in Britain I only ever encounter on absolutely terrible people, and yes, by his father's account this Hugo is very different, but parents always feel that way, don't they? Meaning I was already prepped to read on two levels before Brown started talking about the desire to make a home which breaks down the conventional Western division between inside and out, our space and nature's. A green roof is mandatory, of course - which entails shipping barrels of special sealant from halfway across the world (much to the interest of Homeland Security), heavy watering during a drought, and of course a flamethrower. Sharing the house with large ants is already a step more wildlife-friendly than I'm prepared to go, but that's as nothing compared to the immortal line "The architects who designed our house did not intend to create an optimal habitat for deadly serpents between the bedroom and the kitchen. But that's what they did." Most of us might rethink at that point, but not Brown, who even after a litany of other lethal housemates, and a reluctant admission that he might occasionally need to kill something posing an immediate threat to his dogs or infant daughter, nevertheless cheerily concludes "But the revelation that you can coexist with the full ambit of the food chain down in the postindustrial hobbit hole you have made your home is potent affirmation of the possibility of cultivating biodiverse life in a little corner of our urbanized world." To which, fond as I am of just vibing in the various semi-rewilded spaces around my own home, I can only reply, rather you than me, mate.
(Netgalley ARC)
Running in parallel with all this, though, there's a strand of what I'm pretty sure would have been played at least slightly for comedy in a British equivalent, but is possibly even funnier for being delivered with an entirely straight face. I think I was primed for this simply by his son being called Hugo, a name which in Britain I only ever encounter on absolutely terrible people, and yes, by his father's account this Hugo is very different, but parents always feel that way, don't they? Meaning I was already prepped to read on two levels before Brown started talking about the desire to make a home which breaks down the conventional Western division between inside and out, our space and nature's. A green roof is mandatory, of course - which entails shipping barrels of special sealant from halfway across the world (much to the interest of Homeland Security), heavy watering during a drought, and of course a flamethrower. Sharing the house with large ants is already a step more wildlife-friendly than I'm prepared to go, but that's as nothing compared to the immortal line "The architects who designed our house did not intend to create an optimal habitat for deadly serpents between the bedroom and the kitchen. But that's what they did." Most of us might rethink at that point, but not Brown, who even after a litany of other lethal housemates, and a reluctant admission that he might occasionally need to kill something posing an immediate threat to his dogs or infant daughter, nevertheless cheerily concludes "But the revelation that you can coexist with the full ambit of the food chain down in the postindustrial hobbit hole you have made your home is potent affirmation of the possibility of cultivating biodiverse life in a little corner of our urbanized world." To which, fond as I am of just vibing in the various semi-rewilded spaces around my own home, I can only reply, rather you than me, mate.
(Netgalley ARC)
November 4, 2024
I have such mixed feelings about this book. I really do need to remember that these nature-themed memoirs are still, you know, memoirs. This isn't a pop science book at all, even though I would really love to read one on the exact topic the title implies.
Brown details a lifelong fascination with "edge habitats" and urban wildlife/nature, including the house he and his second wife carefully designed for coexistence with their nonhuman neighbors in Austin, Texas. It's interspersed with quite a lot of philosophical statements about nature and humanity's place in it, some of which I found highly relatable and some which I found teeth-grittingly frustrating. Since it's his memoir, Brown is well within his rights to state his own feelings and opinions about "truth" and "real" life, etc, but his perspective can be awfully myopic. (Credit where it's due: he does sometimes incorporate the perspectives he's encountered from native people/traditions, and just as I was feeling inclined to compare him to Thoreau, he lambasted that gentleman's famously faux self-reliance.)
There's also a much larger dose of pessimism and negativity than is to my taste right now, though it's relatable and not unjustified. A streak of contrarianism also leads to uncomfortable moments where he appears to potentially endorse, or at least entertain, some very dubious biotechnological methods, for example - and to resist the idea of invasive species (without, at least textually, considering the ecological basis for said concept), at least until he starts actively working to craft a small ecosystem of his own. Which is of a piece with a general tendency to give more weight to his personal experiences than to anything more broadly evidence-based, much of the time.
I'm not sorry to have read it; Brown has some good ideas, and I really enjoyed visiting an ecological region I'm largely unfamiliar with, through his eyes. And sometimes I was nodding along emphatically with certain of his philosophical comments and his frustration with our species. All that said, I'd prefer something that engages much more deeply with actual scientific research.
Brown details a lifelong fascination with "edge habitats" and urban wildlife/nature, including the house he and his second wife carefully designed for coexistence with their nonhuman neighbors in Austin, Texas. It's interspersed with quite a lot of philosophical statements about nature and humanity's place in it, some of which I found highly relatable and some which I found teeth-grittingly frustrating. Since it's his memoir, Brown is well within his rights to state his own feelings and opinions about "truth" and "real" life, etc, but his perspective can be awfully myopic. (Credit where it's due: he does sometimes incorporate the perspectives he's encountered from native people/traditions, and just as I was feeling inclined to compare him to Thoreau, he lambasted that gentleman's famously faux self-reliance.)
There's also a much larger dose of pessimism and negativity than is to my taste right now, though it's relatable and not unjustified. A streak of contrarianism also leads to uncomfortable moments where he appears to potentially endorse, or at least entertain, some very dubious biotechnological methods, for example - and to resist the idea of invasive species (without, at least textually, considering the ecological basis for said concept), at least until he starts actively working to craft a small ecosystem of his own. Which is of a piece with a general tendency to give more weight to his personal experiences than to anything more broadly evidence-based, much of the time.
I'm not sorry to have read it; Brown has some good ideas, and I really enjoyed visiting an ecological region I'm largely unfamiliar with, through his eyes. And sometimes I was nodding along emphatically with certain of his philosophical comments and his frustration with our species. All that said, I'd prefer something that engages much more deeply with actual scientific research.
September 26, 2024
I live in a suburban sprawl. People keep their grass nice and streets are lined with parked cars. And yet, we have seen skunk, raccoon, opossum, deer, turkey, vultures, hawks, Red-winged Blackbirds, Canada geese, Mallard duck, Killdeer, a multitude of bird species, and rabbits, along with the expected squirrels, rats, and chipmunks. Area parks have been home to coyote, which are regularly spotted in yards and along streets.
A block away is a park filled with oak trees. A few people leave a patch of yard go wild, with native flowers. Our yard regularly filled with violets in spring, and other flowers that thrived here before 1965 when our street was developed. A neighbor once told me that her son caught pollywogs in the swamp that was here.
A few more blocks away is a park that, in the late 50s, was noted as the best preserved site in the state for wildflowers. A mile down the road is a deer proofed Arboretum that is carpeted with trillium every spring.
You don’t have to move to the country to experience nature. And Christopher Brown shares the wonders he found in urban pockets of wastelands and alleys over decades. His memoir is a reminder of nature’s power to survive, to surprise us, and the joy and beauty that we can find all around us, if we only look.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
A block away is a park filled with oak trees. A few people leave a patch of yard go wild, with native flowers. Our yard regularly filled with violets in spring, and other flowers that thrived here before 1965 when our street was developed. A neighbor once told me that her son caught pollywogs in the swamp that was here.
A few more blocks away is a park that, in the late 50s, was noted as the best preserved site in the state for wildflowers. A mile down the road is a deer proofed Arboretum that is carpeted with trillium every spring.
You don’t have to move to the country to experience nature. And Christopher Brown shares the wonders he found in urban pockets of wastelands and alleys over decades. His memoir is a reminder of nature’s power to survive, to surprise us, and the joy and beauty that we can find all around us, if we only look.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
October 13, 2025
When you recognize your own experiences and perspective every few pages, you know you've come across a keeper. Brown writes about Austin's urban wild spaces and marvels at what he finds in empty lots, along abandoned railroad tracks, and hidden in decrepit industrial parks. By the end of the book, you're cheering him on as he fights city hall with his neighbors to enforce existing development codes and preserve as many wild spaces as he can in a rapidly growing city. Recently, I've enjoyed watching the foxes, armadillos, and other remarkable wildlife with my backyard trail camera. Brown takes our shared interest in urban fauna to the next level, cataloging and marveling at the animals he encounters along the Colorado River just beyond his backyard, in his neighborhood, and throughout the central city. He wrestles with important issues of land ownership, ecodiversity, development priorities, and his own personal relationship to his lived environment. Sometimes the book veers into memoir mode, when we could have been reading more about what he, his son, and his dog encounter on their morning walks. But that's a minor quibble with a book that will stay with me for a long time.
January 12, 2026
This book gave me something valuable which is a reminder to tune in to my surroundings even more than i already do! It also made me feel lucky to have a job where I get to spend a lot of time in urban “natural” spaces. However, this author was such a rich white man sometimes it annoyed me! Some of his word choices when discussing colonization felt off and also like sorry Mr. Big tech lawyer I don’t care about your divorce just write about Austin and it’s river and wildlife thanks!
January 29, 2025
More memoir than explicit action steps but provides inspiration to rewild yourself.
Also, do yourself a favor and look up this man’s house because it’s beautiful.
Also, do yourself a favor and look up this man’s house because it’s beautiful.
December 12, 2025
eh…. It’s poorly organized and filled with a pretty dour tone that’s pretty difficult to get through. I don’t know if nature writers owe us hope but I personally do believe that a better world is possible and books that feel mired in a place of despair don’t do it for me. Some parts of it were fascinating and I did enjoy getting to explore a bit about a region of the country different from my own. Another disconnect for me came from not looking more closely at what the actual content of the book would be - this is very much not a “natural history of empty lots”, it’s a memoir blended with natural history that focused on one specific guy’s life. Which…. I mean there’s some segments that try to be broader but it doesn’t hit the balance of memoir and nature writing that something like the last fire season does. It feels very limited in scope.
Lastly, not a fan of the audiobook which is read by the author in this deeply disaffected and bored tone throughout.
Lastly, not a fan of the audiobook which is read by the author in this deeply disaffected and bored tone throughout.
March 4, 2025
A love letter to the fringe.
July 29, 2025
Overall I really liked it but I was a little surprised towards the end at the author’s sense of NIMBYism with new development. He bought an empty lot and made it a home, but then becomes an activist to prevent developers from building sorely needed high-density housing on top of abandoned commercial lots. I understand his concerns for nature, but he doesn’t really provide any rigorous reasoning to justify why his development is okay and those developments are not okay.
Also, as someone who truly lives in a city, I have seen photos of his house and property, and I feel a little ripped off that he describes it as urban. If you back into 20 acres of empty land and a section of river, I don’t really think you know what you’re talking about when it comes to urban nature. His insistence that nature is all around us falls a bit flat if you actually live in a downtown area.
Lastly, the descriptions of exploring edge lands were so tantalizing, I decided to get out more and see what I could find in my area. I quickly remembered why I don’t do that when I took a few steps into a right-of-way and discovered ample signs of human habitation. In Toronto, I can pretty much guarantee that any of these so-called interstitial wildernesses will in fact be someone’s home - tread with caution, not just as a show of respect but also for your own safety.
And lastly - I echo other reviewers, I want an actual pop science book about brownfields!
Also, as someone who truly lives in a city, I have seen photos of his house and property, and I feel a little ripped off that he describes it as urban. If you back into 20 acres of empty land and a section of river, I don’t really think you know what you’re talking about when it comes to urban nature. His insistence that nature is all around us falls a bit flat if you actually live in a downtown area.
Lastly, the descriptions of exploring edge lands were so tantalizing, I decided to get out more and see what I could find in my area. I quickly remembered why I don’t do that when I took a few steps into a right-of-way and discovered ample signs of human habitation. In Toronto, I can pretty much guarantee that any of these so-called interstitial wildernesses will in fact be someone’s home - tread with caution, not just as a show of respect but also for your own safety.
And lastly - I echo other reviewers, I want an actual pop science book about brownfields!
February 27, 2025
First of all, look up pictures of the author's house because it is beautiful. I know he talks about how it was featured in some architectural magazines and stuff but he really doesn't do it justice despite it being a major part of the story. I'm not usually into super-modern architecture but I would make an exception for this beauty.
Anyway, I thought this was a really nice love letter to urban nature. I know I often fall in to the trap myself of thinking that anything that looks rural is automatically "good" nature-wise and that urban life is incompatible — something I've learned to question since living in Ireland where so much of the endless "green space" is pasture land for grazing livestock rather than a biodiverse emerald paradise (huge shoutout to the farmers who are putting the work in to change that for the better!) and the percentage of native forest pales in comparison to the Coillte-planted non-native Sitka spruce.
I enjoyed the author's wonder in finding the ways that nature has managed to find its place in concrete jungles. As they say, "life, uh, finds a way." It's a nice reminder that we all have the opportunity to connect and engage with nature, wherever we live. And that we should. I've only been to Austin once and I haven't spent much time in the south/southwest in general, so I'm mostly unfamiliar with the ecological region where the author lives, so I enjoyed his descriptions of the natural world he sees around him.
Obviously I also appreciated the call to action for not only engaging with nature and urban biodiversity but also protecting it. While the author's outlook is fairly pessimistic he does offer some hopeful messages in the conclusion about how nature can be safeguarded through its own legal rights and standings, giving some examples of cases in New Zealand and elsewhere in which rivers and mountains have been given legal personhood. The author's background is as a lawyer, and I found his explanations of these conclusions clear and informative, although as a layman they're probably not too actionable.
I listened to this on audiobook, narrated by the author.
Anyway, I thought this was a really nice love letter to urban nature. I know I often fall in to the trap myself of thinking that anything that looks rural is automatically "good" nature-wise and that urban life is incompatible — something I've learned to question since living in Ireland where so much of the endless "green space" is pasture land for grazing livestock rather than a biodiverse emerald paradise (huge shoutout to the farmers who are putting the work in to change that for the better!) and the percentage of native forest pales in comparison to the Coillte-planted non-native Sitka spruce.
I enjoyed the author's wonder in finding the ways that nature has managed to find its place in concrete jungles. As they say, "life, uh, finds a way." It's a nice reminder that we all have the opportunity to connect and engage with nature, wherever we live. And that we should. I've only been to Austin once and I haven't spent much time in the south/southwest in general, so I'm mostly unfamiliar with the ecological region where the author lives, so I enjoyed his descriptions of the natural world he sees around him.
Obviously I also appreciated the call to action for not only engaging with nature and urban biodiversity but also protecting it. While the author's outlook is fairly pessimistic he does offer some hopeful messages in the conclusion about how nature can be safeguarded through its own legal rights and standings, giving some examples of cases in New Zealand and elsewhere in which rivers and mountains have been given legal personhood. The author's background is as a lawyer, and I found his explanations of these conclusions clear and informative, although as a layman they're probably not too actionable.
I listened to this on audiobook, narrated by the author.
October 2, 2024
I was really interested in this book and the material within was very interesting. It's just the organization wasn't there for me. I found it a bit scattershot it went from here to there and it didn't really have a cohesiveness that I was wanting until the very very end
September 18, 2024
Christopher Brown is an attorney and author of several science fiction books, and this book covers his journey looking for a property in Austin, Texas to build a unique home that would be affordable and use land that was overlooked. He choses a property in East Austin and builds a home that is triangular shape, is partially underground, and has plants growing on the roof. Having lived in Austin for more than 40 years, I was amused by Brown's romanticism about living in this location, and his response to the wildlife that would appear near his home. Austin is full of wildlife including deer, coyotes, foxes, and birds including the owls that live on the University of Texas campus. I currently live near the Llano River on Lake LBJ, and we have deer as well as owls that hoot to either in the evening. Brown uses a lot of buzz like brownfield and intersectional space, but when he starts claiming that gentrification is a form of colonization, he has me laughing out loud. I heard this complaint both in Austin and Santa Fe, and its just a response to the lack of ability to accept change. Brown tries to spin the story like he is a struggling artist, but the house he build is valued at more than $2 million and is in a very sketchy neighborhood. Not the best investment decision.
Read
November 10, 2024Vivid writing. A topic that is interesting because I remember being a kid and searching out these half wild places... going into the strip of woods (maybe 8 yards worth?) behind my house, eating the huckleberries that grew on the edge of the school playground even though it got me sent to timeout regularly, biking around and stopping to rest in these overgrown lots, encounters with deer, etc.
Nature really does do its best right up against our cities.
Also a topic that is difficult, because we can see how harmful and exploitative we continue to be as people, and the mass extinctions that we are causing.
Nature really does do its best right up against our cities.
Also a topic that is difficult, because we can see how harmful and exploitative we continue to be as people, and the mass extinctions that we are causing.
November 15, 2024
I am absolutely floored by this book! Brown has a remarkable grasp of natural history, political and world history, nature and the animal kingdom, and climate - but is also a gifted enough writer to meld those disciplines into a fascinating examination of these places where different worlds overlap in ways most people overlook.
From an editorial standpoint it might appeal to a broader readership if Brown discussed the house and its details somewhere on the first half of the book. But for someone who is interested in cities, urban planning and politics, this is a truly unique piece of work.
From an editorial standpoint it might appeal to a broader readership if Brown discussed the house and its details somewhere on the first half of the book. But for someone who is interested in cities, urban planning and politics, this is a truly unique piece of work.
January 16, 2025
"And I had come to believe that places like that, where the worst of our industrial abuses of the Earth collide with wild nature, were where the essence of real life and the possibility of a better future could be found." He poetically articulates the kind of activity I have engaged in most of my life.
March 6, 2025
Overall great audiobook. Sometimes a little repetitive but I will definitely look at nature in the cracks and margins of urban landscapes differently now
April 20, 2025
This was more of a memoir than I would have guessed from the title. It was good, but not the nature book about edgelands that I was looking forward to.
July 13, 2025
Cool house man 😄 Unfortunately I didn’t like your tone 😔 It was Edward Abbey-esque 😨
February 9, 2025
3.5 stars. It’s possible as I think about this book and digest it, I’ll bump up my rating, but for I’ll let it sit here. I do think the author talks about environmentalism in an important way, and engages with racism, colonialism, and the structures that led us to our current path. There were a few parts where it lost me: one where the author insinuates that chupacabras are real, which I think may have been a joke (or an exaggeration for poetic effect) but it had me raising an eyebrow. Also, it didn’t recon with the fact that exploring unmarked, “abandoned” lands is dangerous, especially for women and bipoc. Much of my interactions with the book looked like that scene from True Detective where Woody Harrelson’s character says, “I need you to stop saying odd shit.”
December 13, 2025
This book is largely about Austin, Texas. It was interesting to me because I live in Austin. As a result I could overlook the book's shortcomings. It may not be so interesting for people who do not live here.
This book received a very complimentary review (maybe paywalled – sorry) in the Austin American-Statesman, the city's last remaining daily newspaper. This caused me to place it on the shortlist of books for the bookclub that I lead, because I want to encourage reading locally. For reasons unconnected to the quality of the book (the book club wanted more fiction), it didn't get picked. Now that I've read the book, I feel that it's fortunate for me that it worked out that way. The book is too ill-tempered. There's too much preaching to the choir. It’s like listening to one of those tedious people who can’t stop complaining to people who agree with them about how bad everything has got to be.
I enjoyed this book at times because I live near many of the places mentioned in the book (e.g. the tower that the fire department uses for practice). It told me some things about these nearby places. It may motivate me to get out to these places on my bicycle someday soon. However, if you don’t live within a 30-minute bicycle ride of downtown Austin, I don’t see how much of this information will have the same effect on you.
One of the things that aggravates me most is when people who seem to have good ideas write in a way which is as impenetrable and reader-unfriendly as possible. I assume this is because the author is influenced by the many, many people who want the world to be a fairer, better place, but somehow can’t seem to express this point of view without an impenetrable smokescreen of jargon-filled prose. Let’s name names: Guy Debord, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Piketty, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson.
Also annoying: the sudden unannounced appearance of lectures of the negative effects of capitalism and/or moaning about the damage that we are doing to the environment. If we, the readers, have made the effort to pick up your book and read it, you, the author, can assume that we have knowledge of this information already. If you are going to present fresh, personally-researched information about some particularly appalling bit of environmental degradation and/or abuse of power, then great – tell me about it. Otherwise, assume that we, the readers, are on your side.
The humorless authorial finger-wagging in this book is not so difficult to endure, but something about this attitude makes me want to point out an obvious error of fact that should have been corrected prior to publication. It occurs on page 104, when the author writes “[c]onsider the coast of Florida, inhabited by more than 20 million people – close to 10 percent of the US population.” There are two obvious errors of fact packed into these 20 words. (This book was published in 2024, so I will use publicly-available population statistics for the year 2023 in the following, rounded to the nearest million.) First of all, according to the website of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the population of coastal Florida is 16 million, not 20 million. That’s a difference of more than twenty percent. For the sake of argument, let’s say that you are the sort of person who says that the government is deliberately minimizing the population of coastal Florida for its own nefarious reasons. Let’s accept 20 million as the “real” population of coastal Florida. The population of the entire US in 2023 was 334 million. So, the population of coastal Florida is actually less than six percent, not ten percent, of the US population. That’s a 40 percent mistake at least. (The size of the error increases if you accept NOAA’s population figure.) In order for 20 million to be 10 percent of the US population, the US population would have to have been 200 million. The last time 200 million was the population of the US was 1967.
While I’m being a great big meany, let me also poop all over the author’s assertion on page 139 that “our ancestors always ascribed intelligence to the owl.” I guess my gripe is with the word “always” here, and also the vagueness of the term “our ancestors”. I suppose if the author is referring to certain of his European forebears, then, OK, maybe they did. But many, many cultures in the world – often, but not always, outside northern Europe – feel that owls were evil, malevolent, harbingers of death, messengers of witches or death, or some combination of the above. (I come at this knowledge from personal experience, but I found confirmation thanks to a very entertaining web page called ”World Owl Mythology”, which also will let you know that, in Inner Mongolia, it is believed that owls enter homes to gather human fingernails, although how and why, sadly, are not explained.)
I posed myself the following question while reading this book: How often is an author permitted to use an unexplained reference that forces a reader to stop and consult a reference work before proceeding? I’d just say once every 25 pages, but that’s just a figure I picked out of the air. So, for this 320-page book, thirteen occasions of puzzling references might be excusable. But this book has more.
I'll admit that it's tricky to decide which references need explaining. For example, if you say that a structure resembles the Eiffel Tower, I think it's safe to say that you don't have to say or show what the Eiffel Tower looks like. But, as in the case of this book, you say that a structure resembles the Giotto Cathedral, you have to describe or show what you mean. Similarly, when you say that a painting is "more Salvador Dali than Pablo Picasso", then you can quickly move on, but (as in this book) if you say a painting is "more Gerhard Richter than Caspar David Friedrich", sorry, you have to tell or show us what this means.
There are also many references that I, personally, have run into before, but I think that a fully educated person might have missed, because it's the 21st century, and there's a lot to know in the world. The rest of this paragraph is a list of such references: Situationalist, Balcones Escarpment, Echo and the Bunnymen, Heironymous Bosch, Oxymandias, Prometheus, Carlos Castaneda
From this point to the end of the review, I have made a list of words, phrases, and references that I had not heard of before reading this book. I often make and post lists, partly to help those who come after me, but also because researching them, writing about them, and posting them help me attempt to commit them to my long-term memory.
Page 26: pentachlorophenol – “Pentachlorophenol (PCP) is an industrial wood preservative used mainly to treat utility poles and cross arms. … Use of PCP is being phased out over five years beginning in 2022.” (from the website of the US Environmental Protection Agency)
Page 30: more Gerhard Richter than Caspar David Friedrich – I guess I am insufficiently educated, but I did not recognize the names of either of these painters immediately. When I put their names alone into Google Images, the result was not sufficient to get me a clear idea about how they differed. So I got the idea to search images using the painter’s name and the word “sunset”, and I think it yielded a clearer picture of how the two differ. See Gerhard Richter’s sunset here and Caspar David Friedrich’s sunset here.
Page 32: gabion – “a basket or cage filled with earth or rocks and used especially in building a support” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 35 (and many other places): riparian – “at the edge of a river, or relating to this area” (Cambridge Dictionary)
Page 38: Demeter – Greek Goddess of Agriculture (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 42: Maroon Bells – “a series of distinctively bell-shaped, wine-colored peaks rising to over 14,000 ft. above sea level” (Aspen Chamber of Commerce)
Page 49: “a primitive imitation of Giotto cathedral” – this reference is easier to understand if you know what Giotto Cathedral looks like – see this picture from Wikimedia Commons
Page 54: zazen – “Zazen means 'sitting meditation'. It is being oneself, with nothing extra, in harmony with the way things are.” (Soto Zen Buddhist Association)
Page 67: crepuscular – “relating to or like the time of day just before the sun goes down, when the light is not bright” (Cambridge Dictionary)
Page 68: DMT – Dimethyltryptamine – “... a potent hallucinogenic drug that can dramatically alter a person's perspective, consciousness, and sensory experiences.” (Medical News Today)
Page 77: Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Wikimedia)
Page 94: Dunedain – From the universe of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, “... the Dúnedain were lords of long life, great power, and wisdom …” (Tolkien Gateway)
Page 97: psychogeographers – I had never heard of this before, I thought the author had made it up. However, it is a real thing. “Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it.” (The MIT Press Reader)
Page 117: retama – a small tree “deciduous and fast-growing, with abundant thorns, ribbon-like leaves and yellow paloverde flowers in spring” (Garden Style San Antonio)
Page 120: cryptid – “an animal … that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 130: Navasota accent. Navasota is a town about 80 minutes’ drive northwest of Houston. A Google search of “Navasota Accent” yields no information about what a Navasota accent (if it exists) may sound like. All prominent links are to a type of chair called “Navasota Accent.”
Page 130: huisache – a type of tree native to the southern US and tropic regions, picture here. (Texas A&M)
Page 134: sauropods – one of many types of dinosaurs, this one of the members of this family of dinosaurs is the picture that I (and most people, I think) create inside the head when someone says the word “dinosaur”. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Page 141: Tarkovsky Park – apparently a place in Austin, although the author does not make this clear in the book. This place does not appear on Google Maps. The only appearances of these two words together on the internet are mentions in a Bluesky post and two posts on Substack, all by the author of this book.
Page 149: Matagorda Bay – a major bay in Texas on the Gulf of Mexico (yes, Mexico), 100 miles southwest of Houston, site of a state park. (Texas State Historical Association)
Page 160: Saint Onuphrius as painted by Tzanes (Wikimedia)
Page 161: topos – I think that the author means “topographical maps” – why not just say what you mean?
Page 171: theophany – a direct communication or appearance by God to human beings (Catholic Culture)
Page 178: Vitruvius – a military engineer, architect, and theoretician under Caesar Augustus in the first century BCE (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Page 180: brujo – a male practitioner of witchcraft (female = bruja) (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 193: coroplast – corrugated fluted plastic. This phrase might not bring up a picture in your head, but this image from the Guinea Pig Cage Company shows a material that will be familiar to most people.
Page 208: rhizomatic – The noun “rhizome” is defined as a horizontal underground stem, per Oxford Reference. The correct adjective form, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, when referring to actual grass (as is the case here), is rhizomatous. The adjective “rhizomatic” has a less literal meaning and apparently was created when philosophers became interested in the rhizome as a metaphor for non-traditional ways of thinking and organizing, see for example here.
Page 219: vitrine – a glass display case (Collins Dictionary)
Page 229: the Venus of Willendorf – a Paleolithic female figurine found in 1908 at Willendorf, Austria, more than 25,000 years old, see image here. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Page 234: sacerdotes – Spanish for “priest”. (SpanishDictionary.com)
Page 239: BMX – Bicycle Motocross (USA Cycling)
Page 242: tasajillo – a cactus-like plant with many other names (Texas Master Naturalist)
Page 256: buteos – a genus of hawks. All buteos are hawks, not all hawks are buteos. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 259: Camarada Norah – I try not to use Wikipedia, but there doesn’t seem to be any other English-language sources for information for this Peruvian Communist revolutionary, born Augusta La Torre, see photo here. She was the wife of Shining Part founder Abimael Guzman. (Wikipedia)
This book received a very complimentary review (maybe paywalled – sorry) in the Austin American-Statesman, the city's last remaining daily newspaper. This caused me to place it on the shortlist of books for the bookclub that I lead, because I want to encourage reading locally. For reasons unconnected to the quality of the book (the book club wanted more fiction), it didn't get picked. Now that I've read the book, I feel that it's fortunate for me that it worked out that way. The book is too ill-tempered. There's too much preaching to the choir. It’s like listening to one of those tedious people who can’t stop complaining to people who agree with them about how bad everything has got to be.
I enjoyed this book at times because I live near many of the places mentioned in the book (e.g. the tower that the fire department uses for practice). It told me some things about these nearby places. It may motivate me to get out to these places on my bicycle someday soon. However, if you don’t live within a 30-minute bicycle ride of downtown Austin, I don’t see how much of this information will have the same effect on you.
One of the things that aggravates me most is when people who seem to have good ideas write in a way which is as impenetrable and reader-unfriendly as possible. I assume this is because the author is influenced by the many, many people who want the world to be a fairer, better place, but somehow can’t seem to express this point of view without an impenetrable smokescreen of jargon-filled prose. Let’s name names: Guy Debord, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Piketty, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson.
Also annoying: the sudden unannounced appearance of lectures of the negative effects of capitalism and/or moaning about the damage that we are doing to the environment. If we, the readers, have made the effort to pick up your book and read it, you, the author, can assume that we have knowledge of this information already. If you are going to present fresh, personally-researched information about some particularly appalling bit of environmental degradation and/or abuse of power, then great – tell me about it. Otherwise, assume that we, the readers, are on your side.
The humorless authorial finger-wagging in this book is not so difficult to endure, but something about this attitude makes me want to point out an obvious error of fact that should have been corrected prior to publication. It occurs on page 104, when the author writes “[c]onsider the coast of Florida, inhabited by more than 20 million people – close to 10 percent of the US population.” There are two obvious errors of fact packed into these 20 words. (This book was published in 2024, so I will use publicly-available population statistics for the year 2023 in the following, rounded to the nearest million.) First of all, according to the website of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the population of coastal Florida is 16 million, not 20 million. That’s a difference of more than twenty percent. For the sake of argument, let’s say that you are the sort of person who says that the government is deliberately minimizing the population of coastal Florida for its own nefarious reasons. Let’s accept 20 million as the “real” population of coastal Florida. The population of the entire US in 2023 was 334 million. So, the population of coastal Florida is actually less than six percent, not ten percent, of the US population. That’s a 40 percent mistake at least. (The size of the error increases if you accept NOAA’s population figure.) In order for 20 million to be 10 percent of the US population, the US population would have to have been 200 million. The last time 200 million was the population of the US was 1967.
While I’m being a great big meany, let me also poop all over the author’s assertion on page 139 that “our ancestors always ascribed intelligence to the owl.” I guess my gripe is with the word “always” here, and also the vagueness of the term “our ancestors”. I suppose if the author is referring to certain of his European forebears, then, OK, maybe they did. But many, many cultures in the world – often, but not always, outside northern Europe – feel that owls were evil, malevolent, harbingers of death, messengers of witches or death, or some combination of the above. (I come at this knowledge from personal experience, but I found confirmation thanks to a very entertaining web page called ”World Owl Mythology”, which also will let you know that, in Inner Mongolia, it is believed that owls enter homes to gather human fingernails, although how and why, sadly, are not explained.)
I posed myself the following question while reading this book: How often is an author permitted to use an unexplained reference that forces a reader to stop and consult a reference work before proceeding? I’d just say once every 25 pages, but that’s just a figure I picked out of the air. So, for this 320-page book, thirteen occasions of puzzling references might be excusable. But this book has more.
I'll admit that it's tricky to decide which references need explaining. For example, if you say that a structure resembles the Eiffel Tower, I think it's safe to say that you don't have to say or show what the Eiffel Tower looks like. But, as in the case of this book, you say that a structure resembles the Giotto Cathedral, you have to describe or show what you mean. Similarly, when you say that a painting is "more Salvador Dali than Pablo Picasso", then you can quickly move on, but (as in this book) if you say a painting is "more Gerhard Richter than Caspar David Friedrich", sorry, you have to tell or show us what this means.
There are also many references that I, personally, have run into before, but I think that a fully educated person might have missed, because it's the 21st century, and there's a lot to know in the world. The rest of this paragraph is a list of such references: Situationalist, Balcones Escarpment, Echo and the Bunnymen, Heironymous Bosch, Oxymandias, Prometheus, Carlos Castaneda
From this point to the end of the review, I have made a list of words, phrases, and references that I had not heard of before reading this book. I often make and post lists, partly to help those who come after me, but also because researching them, writing about them, and posting them help me attempt to commit them to my long-term memory.
Page 26: pentachlorophenol – “Pentachlorophenol (PCP) is an industrial wood preservative used mainly to treat utility poles and cross arms. … Use of PCP is being phased out over five years beginning in 2022.” (from the website of the US Environmental Protection Agency)
Page 30: more Gerhard Richter than Caspar David Friedrich – I guess I am insufficiently educated, but I did not recognize the names of either of these painters immediately. When I put their names alone into Google Images, the result was not sufficient to get me a clear idea about how they differed. So I got the idea to search images using the painter’s name and the word “sunset”, and I think it yielded a clearer picture of how the two differ. See Gerhard Richter’s sunset here and Caspar David Friedrich’s sunset here.
Page 32: gabion – “a basket or cage filled with earth or rocks and used especially in building a support” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 35 (and many other places): riparian – “at the edge of a river, or relating to this area” (Cambridge Dictionary)
Page 38: Demeter – Greek Goddess of Agriculture (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 42: Maroon Bells – “a series of distinctively bell-shaped, wine-colored peaks rising to over 14,000 ft. above sea level” (Aspen Chamber of Commerce)
Page 49: “a primitive imitation of Giotto cathedral” – this reference is easier to understand if you know what Giotto Cathedral looks like – see this picture from Wikimedia Commons
Page 54: zazen – “Zazen means 'sitting meditation'. It is being oneself, with nothing extra, in harmony with the way things are.” (Soto Zen Buddhist Association)
Page 67: crepuscular – “relating to or like the time of day just before the sun goes down, when the light is not bright” (Cambridge Dictionary)
Page 68: DMT – Dimethyltryptamine – “... a potent hallucinogenic drug that can dramatically alter a person's perspective, consciousness, and sensory experiences.” (Medical News Today)
Page 77: Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Wikimedia)
Page 94: Dunedain – From the universe of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, “... the Dúnedain were lords of long life, great power, and wisdom …” (Tolkien Gateway)
Page 97: psychogeographers – I had never heard of this before, I thought the author had made it up. However, it is a real thing. “Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it.” (The MIT Press Reader)
Page 117: retama – a small tree “deciduous and fast-growing, with abundant thorns, ribbon-like leaves and yellow paloverde flowers in spring” (Garden Style San Antonio)
Page 120: cryptid – “an animal … that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 130: Navasota accent. Navasota is a town about 80 minutes’ drive northwest of Houston. A Google search of “Navasota Accent” yields no information about what a Navasota accent (if it exists) may sound like. All prominent links are to a type of chair called “Navasota Accent.”
Page 130: huisache – a type of tree native to the southern US and tropic regions, picture here. (Texas A&M)
Page 134: sauropods – one of many types of dinosaurs, this one of the members of this family of dinosaurs is the picture that I (and most people, I think) create inside the head when someone says the word “dinosaur”. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Page 141: Tarkovsky Park – apparently a place in Austin, although the author does not make this clear in the book. This place does not appear on Google Maps. The only appearances of these two words together on the internet are mentions in a Bluesky post and two posts on Substack, all by the author of this book.
Page 149: Matagorda Bay – a major bay in Texas on the Gulf of Mexico (yes, Mexico), 100 miles southwest of Houston, site of a state park. (Texas State Historical Association)
Page 160: Saint Onuphrius as painted by Tzanes (Wikimedia)
Page 161: topos – I think that the author means “topographical maps” – why not just say what you mean?
Page 171: theophany – a direct communication or appearance by God to human beings (Catholic Culture)
Page 178: Vitruvius – a military engineer, architect, and theoretician under Caesar Augustus in the first century BCE (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Page 180: brujo – a male practitioner of witchcraft (female = bruja) (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 193: coroplast – corrugated fluted plastic. This phrase might not bring up a picture in your head, but this image from the Guinea Pig Cage Company shows a material that will be familiar to most people.
Page 208: rhizomatic – The noun “rhizome” is defined as a horizontal underground stem, per Oxford Reference. The correct adjective form, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, when referring to actual grass (as is the case here), is rhizomatous. The adjective “rhizomatic” has a less literal meaning and apparently was created when philosophers became interested in the rhizome as a metaphor for non-traditional ways of thinking and organizing, see for example here.
Page 219: vitrine – a glass display case (Collins Dictionary)
Page 229: the Venus of Willendorf – a Paleolithic female figurine found in 1908 at Willendorf, Austria, more than 25,000 years old, see image here. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Page 234: sacerdotes – Spanish for “priest”. (SpanishDictionary.com)
Page 239: BMX – Bicycle Motocross (USA Cycling)
Page 242: tasajillo – a cactus-like plant with many other names (Texas Master Naturalist)
Page 256: buteos – a genus of hawks. All buteos are hawks, not all hawks are buteos. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Page 259: Camarada Norah – I try not to use Wikipedia, but there doesn’t seem to be any other English-language sources for information for this Peruvian Communist revolutionary, born Augusta La Torre, see photo here. She was the wife of Shining Part founder Abimael Guzman. (Wikipedia)
June 18, 2025
This is a book that I hated to be disappointed by. I grew up in Austin, and lived in a suburb that shared a border with the Balcones Canyonlands Nature Preserve, an urban edgeland that I imagine would turn Brown green with envy. This is all to say that I was more than perfectly primed to enjoy this book. However, I found that the reading experience was bogged down by two reoccurring flaws: a tendency to endlessly repeat himself, and lack of real scientific content.
This first problem is the one I bumped up against most, and also the one that caused me the greatest frustration. I found the structure of the book to be wandering, choppy, and lacking the organization a book of this size needs to flow properly. This disjointed structure rears its head in the form of a long series of brief essays masquerading as field notes. This combined format weakens the strength of both types of writing. Its editorial inclinations prevent the glut of unfiltered information that field notes provide, while the insistence on describing vaguely related natural experiences gets in the way of the lofty ideals he wishes to attach to them. Additionally, this stop-and-go structure means that Brown must write a conclusion for every five-ish page section. This begins to cause issue around the midpoint of the book, as you realize Brown only has so much to say about all of these broadly similar encounters with wildlife. While these concluding ideas are often insightful, well written, and genuinely moving the first time around, the author beat them like a dead horse until I was truly unable to care about what he had to say. This book would be vastly improved with some serious restructuring to how the ideas within are presented. If the author were to combine the ideas that he scatters across the myriad essay-fieldnotes into a couple longer, more cohesive chapters, he would be able to express his thoughts without needing to constantly retread the same ground in his book. I wish this book would've played more to its strengths, broadly abandoning the memoir angle, as I found those sections trite and uninteresting. This book is at its best when it is not talking about Christopher Brown's life, which is a pretty damning criticism for what amounts to a gussied-up autobiography.
My other issue with the book may mostly be one of misplaced expectations. I was sorely disappointed to find almost no natural history of empty lots, the book only offering a single (expectedly short) chapter on the subject, as if to justify the the title to itself, before hastily abandoning the subject. Infact, the book contains little scientific discussion at all, which I suspect is due to Brown not having any sort of scientific background, a fact I was not aware of before picking the book up. While I found his musings on capitalism and isolation from the natural world interesting, it left me wanting for so much actual discussion of the beautiful hill county ecology I love so much. I can't help but feel falsely advertised to when all he really offers are a couple anecdotes about a time he saw a fox, or some vultures, or that time he saw some vultures eating a fox. He also waffles around with the idea that invasive species may have a place in native ecosystems for far longer than I had any patience for. This book generally left me with a bit of an empty stomach when it came to new information, only managing bits of natural science trivia here and there.
A Natural History of Empty Lots left me wanting more while wanting Brown to say less. I found his structure to sabotage his ideas, while any true natural history lacked depth or extrapolation. This book has left me still on the hunt for a truly great natural history of Texas, only really managing to undermine my expectations.
This first problem is the one I bumped up against most, and also the one that caused me the greatest frustration. I found the structure of the book to be wandering, choppy, and lacking the organization a book of this size needs to flow properly. This disjointed structure rears its head in the form of a long series of brief essays masquerading as field notes. This combined format weakens the strength of both types of writing. Its editorial inclinations prevent the glut of unfiltered information that field notes provide, while the insistence on describing vaguely related natural experiences gets in the way of the lofty ideals he wishes to attach to them. Additionally, this stop-and-go structure means that Brown must write a conclusion for every five-ish page section. This begins to cause issue around the midpoint of the book, as you realize Brown only has so much to say about all of these broadly similar encounters with wildlife. While these concluding ideas are often insightful, well written, and genuinely moving the first time around, the author beat them like a dead horse until I was truly unable to care about what he had to say. This book would be vastly improved with some serious restructuring to how the ideas within are presented. If the author were to combine the ideas that he scatters across the myriad essay-fieldnotes into a couple longer, more cohesive chapters, he would be able to express his thoughts without needing to constantly retread the same ground in his book. I wish this book would've played more to its strengths, broadly abandoning the memoir angle, as I found those sections trite and uninteresting. This book is at its best when it is not talking about Christopher Brown's life, which is a pretty damning criticism for what amounts to a gussied-up autobiography.
My other issue with the book may mostly be one of misplaced expectations. I was sorely disappointed to find almost no natural history of empty lots, the book only offering a single (expectedly short) chapter on the subject, as if to justify the the title to itself, before hastily abandoning the subject. Infact, the book contains little scientific discussion at all, which I suspect is due to Brown not having any sort of scientific background, a fact I was not aware of before picking the book up. While I found his musings on capitalism and isolation from the natural world interesting, it left me wanting for so much actual discussion of the beautiful hill county ecology I love so much. I can't help but feel falsely advertised to when all he really offers are a couple anecdotes about a time he saw a fox, or some vultures, or that time he saw some vultures eating a fox. He also waffles around with the idea that invasive species may have a place in native ecosystems for far longer than I had any patience for. This book generally left me with a bit of an empty stomach when it came to new information, only managing bits of natural science trivia here and there.
A Natural History of Empty Lots left me wanting more while wanting Brown to say less. I found his structure to sabotage his ideas, while any true natural history lacked depth or extrapolation. This book has left me still on the hunt for a truly great natural history of Texas, only really managing to undermine my expectations.
April 16, 2025
Have you “put the naming of each object in nature before the unmediated experience of it”? Is there “always a reason that empty lots are empty”? Do you fall again and again for that “atemporal album-cover vista” as you cross the Montopolis bridge? If you dig underground authors and are inclined to agree that “Earth is the alien planet,” unearth the blended eco-memoir A Natural History of Empty Lots by Austin author and business lawyer Christopher Brown. Tunnel into Brown’s burrow and emerge with new eyes. Celebrate the liminal, the dreaming mind, the owl, Treaty Oak. Observe and honor that that’s hidden in plain sight.
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