Zoom the image with the mouse
Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City
Supplier:
PRH Premium
Author:
Ben Wilson
Format:
Hardcover
Pages:
304
Publication Date:
03/07/2023
Language:
English
Reading Level:
Adult
Publisher:
Doubleday Books
Product Name:
Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City
ISBN:
0385548117
Share:
Buy Now
We can help you leverage the power of books
Customer Service
Connect with a dedicated account manager who is there every step of the way.
Price Match Guarantee
If you see better pricing elsewhere on your desired quantity, we will price match so you can be sure to get the best pricing.
Free Shipping
Enjoy free ground shipping on your order of $95 or more!
Brand New Guarantee
We only sell books that are brand new and protect that with a guarantee.
Customization
From author signatures to marketing inserts, custom packaging to brand stickers, we can help take your book marketing to the next level.
Details
In this exhilarating look at cities, past and future, Ben Wilson proposes that, in our world of rising seas and threatening weather, the natural world may prove the city's savior
"Illuminating...Wilson leaves readers with hope about the future of efforts to preserve the ecosystems that surround us, as well as a new perspective that looks beyond the concrete and asphalt when walking along a city’s streets."—Associated Press
Since the beginning of civilization, humans have built cities to wall nature out, then glorified it in beloved but quite artificial parks. In Urban Jungle Ben Wilson—the author of Metropolis, a seven-thousand-year history of cities that the Wall Street Journal called “a towering achievement”—looks to the fraught relationship between nature and the city for clues to how the planet can survive in an age of climate crisis.
Whether it was the market farmers of Paris, Germans in medieval forest cities, or the Aztecs in the floating city of Tenochtitlan, pre-modern humans had an essential bond with nature. But when the day came that water was piped in and food flown from distant fields, that relationship was lost. Today, urban areas are the fastest-growing habitat on Earth and in Urban Jungle Ben Wilson finds that we are at last acknowledging that human engineering is not enough to protect us from extremes of weather. He takes us to places where efforts to rewild the city are under way: to Los Angeles, where the city’s concrete river will run blue again, to New York City, where a bleak landfill will be a vast grassland preserve. The pinnacle of this strategy will be Amsterdam: a city that is its own ecosystem, that makes no waste and produces its own energy. In many cities, Wilson finds, nature is already thriving. Koalas are settling in Brisbane, wild boar may raid your picnic in Berlin. Green canopies, wildflowers, wildlife: the things that will help cities survive, he notes, also make people happy.
Urban Jungle offers the pleasures of history—how backyard gardens spread exotic species all over the world, how war produces biodiversity—alongside a fantastic vision of the lush green cities of our future. Climate change, Ben Wilson believes, is only the latest chapter in the dramatic human story of nature and the city.
"Illuminating...Wilson leaves readers with hope about the future of efforts to preserve the ecosystems that surround us, as well as a new perspective that looks beyond the concrete and asphalt when walking along a city’s streets."—Associated Press
Product details
Need Books? Bookpal makes it easy
Connect With Us
Customer Reviews
Products related to this item
Related Products
