Michael Pollan is writing bestselling books almost annually now, most recently with “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008)” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006).” Lately his explicit focus has addressed what and how we eat, where our food comes from, and how the American food and diet worldview is undermining our health and environment.

This speaks to the underlying thesis of Pollan’s career: an exploration of man’s relationship with the environment; the intersection of what we think of as culture, and what we think of as nature. This turns out to be a very busy intersection, especially when one considers how intertwined these two concepts actually are. Part of the mission of the Urban Wilderness Institute is to demonstrate that a nature/culture divide is a fallacy, and more importantly, that divorcing what-people-do (culture) from the-rest-of-the-natural-world (nature) has fundamentally handicapped the environmental movement.

Environmentalists, to be effective, need to take back the city and even (gasp) the suburbs. Most people live here – not in the remote wilderness areas where environmentalists have often concerned themselves, such as the Adirondacks, Yosemite, or the Amazon. Environmentalists have the best opportunity to engage citizens with the environment they encounter in their daily routine. The human-dominated landscape has ecological significance and is the critical component to achieving many environmental goals. By acknowledging the ecological value of the built-environment, we communicate to people that what they do in their everyday activities matters; we start to break the nature/culture barrier and situate people firmly within nature.

We’ll close with a short piece by Michael Pollan, published in the NYT Magazine in 1989, one of my favorites. Pollan examines (very personally) the relationship between Americans and our lawns. And yes, it’s all a poignant metaphor for our larger relationship with nature. Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

-robert frost