Dixon, Terrell F., ed. City wilds; essays and stories about urban nature.

Univ. of Georgia Press. 311p. c2002. 0-8203-2339-X. $19.95. SA

In over 300 tightly printed pages, this anthology collects 35 previously published essays and stories about how life in American cities need not be divorced from interaction with nature. Compared to other such collections I've reviewed for KLIATT over the years, the editor's choices here seem a little drab. Nevertheless, City Wilds has many highlights. Michael Aaron Rockland's account of canoeing around Manhattan with a friend is a delight. The trip included an overnight in Tyron Park at the northern tip of the island and shooting the hair-raising rapids next to Roosevelt Island. Joy Williams, in excoriating what population growth, development, and money have done to Florida, minces no words in her despair. She also questions the value of the endless stream of nature essays published each year, including her own: "Nature writing is enjoying a renaissance. This seems to be in lieu of nature itself, which is not.... Nature is receding in many different ways at once and may in fact, in our time, be utterly subsumed by language." The other writers, for the most part, soldier on, some of them wittily. Robert Michael Pyle begins his essay on the gradual degradation of his urban environment this way: "I became a nonbeliever and a conservationist in one fell swoop. All it took was the Lutherans paving their parking lot."

The essays are arranged geographically, beginning in the Northeast, heading south, and ending up in Seattle. Thus urban readers from around the country can check in to see how their city is doing--a fishless river in Minneapolis, a rapacious sinkhole in small-town Texas, the brown recluse spiders of L.A., and so on. Overall, the news is not good. Michael P. Healy, English Teacher, Wood River H.S., Hailey, ID