Wildness in the City

Inviting Nature into Urban Areas

An Iowan named Roger Gipple, a retired farmer and environmentalist who lives in Des Moines, established “The Agrestal Fund” a few years ago. The fund is managed through the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation and was created for purposes of instigating a conversation about wildness in Iowa. (“Agrestal” means “not domesticated or cultivated; growing wild in the field.”) Gipple’s seed money has sponsored essay contests about wildness and has co-sponsored interdisciplinary conferences on the wild at Iowa State and the University of Iowa.

I interviewed Gipple couple of years ago for an article I was working on; he told me that as our landscape continues the shift toward fewer large tracts of unspoiled nature and more urban areas, we will need to learn to value those small places of “wildness” in the city, like flowers growing between the cracks of sidewalks and raptors dwelling in urban trees.

Since that conversation I’ve become even more sensitized to intentional invitations from cities toward nature and even the stylized, artificial echoes of nature. For instance, I love the new Millenium Park in downtown Chicago – especially the concrete and steel stream meanderings through the park along a prairie stand of native plants. You could see this creation as almost a parody of the miles of tallgrass prairie that used to blanket the Midwest. I choose to see it as an homage to what once existed – and maybe a blueprint or archetype for nature, should she ever have the chance to prevail again. There’s a similar stream near the new Des Moines Public Library; it too touches my heart.

And then there are those larger, wilder areas within or close to cities, like the lovely Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and my most recent find: the pristine Crystal Springs Reservoir near San Mateo that my husband and I discovered while in California last November. Our trip to Yosemite during that trip west was fabulous and grand, but it’s those natural areas close to our urban areas that serve us on a more daily basis. They certainly feed my soul, anyway, as a writer. I try to get into some kind of natural space, however wild or tamed, on a daily basis because that’s where the muse visits me most often.

In Iowa, there are many spaces on the fringes of towns and cities. A couple of my favorites are the Woodpecker and Squire Point trails near the Coralville Reservoir in Iowa City and the River East trail on the eastern edge of Ames.