Christopher Brown: A Natural History of Empty Lots

Plutopia News Network

Christopher Brown is an author, attorney, and urban naturalist living in Austin, Texas. His newest book, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, blends nature writing, memoir, and nonfiction. The book explores the intersection of nature and urban spaces, encouraging readers to reconnect with the wilderness found in city edgelands and forgotten lots. Brown’s narrative examines how wildlife adapts to urban environments and offers practical advice for rewilding urban life without relying on remote landscapes. Through personal stories and reflections, he inspires readers to appreciate and act on the urgent need to preserve biodiversity within their immediate surroundings.

Chris writes a popular Substack newsletter about his adventures in the edgelands, called “Field Notes,” which we discussed in a previous podcast.

Chris also writes science fiction, including the novels Rule of Capture, Tropic of Kansas, and Failed State.

Chris Brown:

It is kind of a love story with place. It’s also a love story about nature and about the natural world and about learning to connect with nature in a way that doesn’t involve trying to inhabit some gear catalog or goofy car ad of imagining yourself in some remote depopulated landscape that probably doesn’t really exist much anymore in real life, right?

And coming to terms with it. There’s a bunch of great blue herons making their giant mess there in this trashy tree behind this dumpy old warehouse down the street. Why are they doing that there? It could have been because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

And getting excited about that and at the same time kind of saddened by that as you think about as you wonder if the presence of a lot of these animals in the city is because they’ve run out of other places to hang out.