Lisa Couturier - Reviews

(University of Georgia Press, 2002)
Esssay: "Reversing the Tides”

NRDC - On Earth
Considering that just 2 percent of the United States is sanctioned wilderness, it's probably a fair guess that the 80 percent of Americans now living in cities imagine a daily relationship with nature as wholly impractical. Perhaps the problem, however, is one of perception. City Wilds revises our traditional view of what nature is, locating it in less obvious places. The majority of the works collected here, including pieces by talented writers such as bell hooks and Joy Williams, find in even the most heavily concretized environs the sort of beauty and peace normally associated with pristine natural habitats.

I confess that I was prepared to dismiss City Wilds as some sort of attempt to put a new, and extraneous, spin on the themes already explored by early American nature writers. Instead, the book opened my eyes to the urban nature around me. Since reading Lisa Couturier's ”Reversing the Tides,” I now take a deep breath on my morning runs over New York City's Williamsburg Bridge, and perceive the East River stretching below me as a privilege to behold, and not, as I habitually saw it, a polluted, unfortunate waterway.

Perhaps I was a victim of what Robert Michael Pyle describes, in ”The Thunder Tree,” as a ”diminished regard for nature” and ”the extinction of experience.” In a plea for city denizens to recognize the life around them, [Couturier’s] essay quotes James Hillman, the Jungian psychologist: ”The Greek word for city, polis . . . locates city in the wet regions of the soul. . . We need but remember that the city, the metro-polis, means at the root a streaming, flowing, thronging Mother. We are her children, and she can nourish our imaginations if we nourish hers.”

--Amy Hughes