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man & earth ‘impossible’. Wilding them, on the other hand – now that is doable. Across seven main chapters – looking at suburbia, parks, the ‘crack in the concrete’ (think demolition sites, empty lots and so on), trees, water, food and animals – Wilson provides an array of fascinating examples of urban ecology through the ages. Take the citadel of Tikal built by the Mayans. For over six centuries, these newcomers to the Yucatán peninsula sustained a megalopolis thanks to a sophisticated system of terraced farms, irrigation channels and underground reservoirs. Similarly, in Angkor Wat, in forest-strewn Cambodia, low-density housing was built on mounds amid rice paddies. There, city and countryside were one, Wilson notes: ‘Angkor was like an overgrown, continuous village in a wet landscape.’ More recent examples include Singapore, a pioneer of urban nature retrofitting. The early expansion of Singapore was a natural disaster, as coral reefs and mangrove forests gave way to cityscape. ‘As much as 73 per cent of the island’s native flora and fauna has been driven to extinction,’ Wilson writes. But since attaining independence, it has become a model of urban biodiversity (founding father Lee Kuan Yew dubbed himself ‘the chief gardener’), a ‘City in a Garden’ in which 56 per cent of the surface area is covered in vegetation. Wilding our cities does not even need a top-down push. Ripping up our lawns and allowing wildflowers back in can do wonders. Back gardens, after all, can count for around one quarter of a city’s total area. ‘Think of all those barren flat roofs, all that idle space between buildings and along roads, and the immense acreage dedicated to the driving and parking of cars,’ Wilson declares. ‘Nature is capable of insinuating itself almost anywhere in the built environment if we only allow its growth.’ In that ‘if ’, though, lies the sticking point. Just because we can green our cities doesn’t mean we will. Centuries of urbanisation have led us to be suspicious of the nature on our doorstep. The source of yesterday’s nutritious nettle soup is now a ‘weed’ to be nuked with herbicide. Such sentiments are not new. In a notorious legal case in 1900, a court in St Louis, Missouri, convicted Sometimes bad things happen to good writers. If you are a professionally published writer . Established by writers for writers, the Royal Literary Fund could Visit www.rlf.org.uk . a prominent resident for allowing ‘uncultivated vegetation’ in his front yard. The offending plants in question? Sunflowers. Thistles, burdocks, nettles: meet the ‘immigrants and opportunists’ of the floral kingdom, the uninvited hobos who lurk where they shouldn’t, spreading disorder and portending chaos. In a sweeping overview that takes us from the Colosseum (an overgrown ruin until the early 19th century) to the abandoned streets of Detroit (an example of ‘post-industrial picturesque’), Wilson reveals the historical roots of today ’s city– nature divide. He also reveals the stories behind many of our man-made green urban spaces – what the author, who is never shy of a well-placed pun, refers to as ‘urbane nature’. New York’s Central Park, for instance, was cooked up in the late 1850s, with topsoil trucked in from New Jersey and plants shipped over from Europe. Its design is an ‘arcadian fantasy ’ of aristocratic hunting parks in merry olde England. In 2007, as many as 60 per cent of the plant species in America’s most famous park were non-native. For all mankind’s meddling, nature is obdurate. It didn’t stop evolving just because humans tried to keep it out. Wilson asks us to imagine our cities from the perspective of certain plants or animals. If you’re a seaside goldenrod or a strip of Danish scurvy grass, then the sodium-enriched verges created by winter salt trucks are a dream habitat. For a peregrine falcon, the difference between a twenty-storey skyscraper and a hundred-foot cliff is minimal: the divebombing potential is equally great. Nonetheless, not all natural species can adapt. As Wilson admits, our cities as they currently stand are the ‘site of eco-apocalypse’. Even putting the rights of nature aside, wilding our streets is in our self-interest. Just ask a psychologist or a physician. We’re happier, healthier and safer with nature near at hand. Written in an author i ta t iv e yet accessible style, Urban Jungle contains a range of intriguing insights. Despite its non-hectoring tone, the book offers a clear warning. We continue to live out of kilter with nature at our peril. Look at Tikal and Angkor Wat. They went from being temples to human accomplishment to ruins in the rainforest. Nature will live on. But our cities: who knows? Let’s rip up our lawns first and then try to answer the question. Literary Review | march 2023 12
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philosophy julian baggini In Man We Trust Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope By Sarah Bakewell (Chatto & Windus 464pp £22) The Festival of Reason in Notre Dame, 1793, as painted by Charles-Louis Müller To be a humanist in the early 21st cen- tury might seem to require as least as much faith as to be religious. Belief in either a benevolent deity or the fundamental goodness of humankind does not sit well with knowledge of what we have done over history to ourselves and the planet. The hor- rors of colonialism, Nazism, Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution, the mass abuse of animals in factory farms, the destruction of the natural environment, indifference to the coming catastrophes of climate change – all these and more could be cited as evidence against the idea of humanity’s progress. This dim view of humanity has become the new common sense, at least among those who fancy themselves to be intellectuals. As Sarah Bakewell says, ‘The idea that humans somehow oozed evil took up residence in the cultural atmosphere. Any seemingly civilised or cultured behaviour … now looked like a mendacious veneer.’ Ye t i n Humanly Possible, Bakewell sets out to show that this fashionable pessimism is deeply misguided. She argues that for seven centuries, the humanist values of freethinking, enquiry and hope have inspired the best that European culture has had to offer. Humanism is such an amorphous idea that Bakewell’s project risks a lack of focus. But she embraces the concept ’s heterogeneity, arguing that humanism’s diverse forms are ‘ linked by multicoloured but meaningful threads’. For her, the key criterion for being a humanist is that you focus on human well-being, not on any kind of transcendental good. Bakewell identifies three main families of humanism, the adherents of which have all pursued this goal with different emphases. First, there is ‘humanities-humanism’, most closely associated with the Renaissance, which emphasised the importance of literature, history, philosophy and other humanistic studies. At a time when theology dictated the terms of most learning, this was revolutionary. Then there is the ‘meliorist humanism’ of the Enlightenment, which emphasised the possibility of improving human welfare through the reform of society and the advancement of knowledge. Finally, there is ‘scientific humanism’, which came to prominence in the 19th century and posited that natural science provided the best basis for social, political and ethical progress. Bakewell’s humanist tent is more accommodating than most of today’s equivalents. The term ‘humanism’ has been capitalised and claimed by various secular humanist organisations around the world as their exclusive property. Humanism is, in their view, inherently atheistic, or at least agnostic, and its historical mission is to smash the follies of faith. Bakewell certainly has numerous examples of those. One of the most absurd is that the parents of the great Renaissance humanist Erasmus lived together happily but could not marry because his father was a priest. But Bakewell is much more ecumenical. The only difference between religious humanists and secular humanists is that the former’s focus on human well-being comes ‘within the context of a faith’. For instance, many philosophers of the Islamic golden age, although devout, refused to allow religious dogma to distort what their reason and observations told them about the world. The ninth-century Islamic thinker al-Kindi, Bakewell says, ‘has every claim to be a considered a humanist ’. Bakewell’s book is not a dispassionate history of humanism, but nor is it a love letter, written in blind infatuation. Hers is a more mature affection; she sees all the flaws in the beloved and accepts it nonetheless. This generosity of spirit is largest when it comes to the widespread misogyny found among humanists. Women rarely got to participate in the humanist project, and for all their love of wisdom and learning, few of the men were enlightened enough to encourage them to do so. Rousseau was an all too typical case in point. His Emile espoused the virtues of a humanistic education but he didn’t think girls should study philosophy or science because all they needed to learn was how to please their husbands. Bakewell shrugs this off, sighing, ‘On the whole, these Enlightenment authors were just carrying on an older tradition of mixing brilliance about some matters with daftness about others.’ As a woman, Bakewell has licence to laugh at such follies. She does not have march 2023 | Literary Review 13

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man & earth

‘impossible’. Wilding them, on the other hand – now that is doable. Across seven main chapters – looking at suburbia, parks, the ‘crack in the concrete’ (think demolition sites, empty lots and so on), trees, water, food and animals – Wilson provides an array of fascinating examples of urban ecology through the ages.

Take the citadel of Tikal built by the Mayans. For over six centuries, these newcomers to the Yucatán peninsula sustained a megalopolis thanks to a sophisticated system of terraced farms, irrigation channels and underground reservoirs. Similarly, in Angkor Wat, in forest-strewn Cambodia, low-density housing was built on mounds amid rice paddies. There, city and countryside were one, Wilson notes: ‘Angkor was like an overgrown, continuous village in a wet landscape.’

More recent examples include Singapore, a pioneer of urban nature retrofitting. The early expansion of Singapore was a natural disaster, as coral reefs and mangrove forests gave way to cityscape. ‘As much as 73 per cent of the island’s native flora and fauna has been driven to extinction,’ Wilson writes. But since attaining independence, it has become a model of urban biodiversity (founding father Lee Kuan Yew dubbed himself ‘the chief gardener’), a ‘City in a Garden’ in which 56 per cent of the surface area is covered in vegetation.

Wilding our cities does not even need a top-down push. Ripping up our lawns and allowing wildflowers back in can do wonders. Back gardens, after all, can count for around one quarter of a city’s total area. ‘Think of all those barren flat roofs, all that idle space between buildings and along roads, and the immense acreage dedicated to the driving and parking of cars,’ Wilson declares. ‘Nature is capable of insinuating itself almost anywhere in the built environment if we only allow its growth.’

In that ‘if ’, though, lies the sticking point. Just because we can green our cities doesn’t mean we will. Centuries of urbanisation have led us to be suspicious of the nature on our doorstep. The source of yesterday’s nutritious nettle soup is now a ‘weed’ to be nuked with herbicide. Such sentiments are not new. In a notorious legal case in 1900, a court in St Louis, Missouri, convicted

Sometimes bad things happen to good writers.

If you are a professionally published writer . Established by writers for writers, the Royal Literary Fund could Visit www.rlf.org.uk .

a prominent resident for allowing ‘uncultivated vegetation’ in his front yard. The offending plants in question? Sunflowers.

Thistles, burdocks, nettles: meet the ‘immigrants and opportunists’ of the floral kingdom, the uninvited hobos who lurk where they shouldn’t, spreading disorder and portending chaos. In a sweeping overview that takes us from the Colosseum (an overgrown ruin until the early 19th century) to the abandoned streets of Detroit (an example of ‘post-industrial picturesque’), Wilson reveals the historical roots of today ’s city– nature divide.

He also reveals the stories behind many of our man-made green urban spaces – what the author, who is never shy of a well-placed pun, refers to as ‘urbane nature’. New York’s Central Park, for instance, was cooked up in the late 1850s, with topsoil trucked in from New Jersey and plants shipped over from Europe. Its design is an ‘arcadian fantasy ’ of aristocratic hunting parks in merry olde England. In 2007, as many as 60 per cent of the plant species in America’s most famous park were non-native.

For all mankind’s meddling, nature is obdurate. It didn’t stop evolving just because humans tried to keep it out. Wilson asks us to imagine our cities from the perspective of certain plants or animals. If you’re a seaside goldenrod or a strip of Danish scurvy grass, then the sodium-enriched verges created by winter salt trucks are a dream habitat. For a peregrine falcon, the difference between a twenty-storey skyscraper and a hundred-foot cliff is minimal: the divebombing potential is equally great. Nonetheless, not all natural species can adapt. As Wilson admits, our cities as they currently stand are the ‘site of eco-apocalypse’. Even putting the rights of nature aside, wilding our streets is in our self-interest. Just ask a psychologist or a physician. We’re happier, healthier and safer with nature near at hand.

Written in an author i ta t iv e yet accessible style, Urban Jungle contains a range of intriguing insights. Despite its non-hectoring tone, the book offers a clear warning. We continue to live out of kilter with nature at our peril. Look at Tikal and Angkor Wat. They went from being temples to human accomplishment to ruins in the rainforest. Nature will live on. But our cities: who knows? Let’s rip up our lawns first and then try to answer the question.

Literary Review | march 2023 12

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