The United Nations has predicted that an astonishing 80 percent of the population of the United States will live in cities in the year 2010. Lisa Couturier, who has worked as an environmental journalist and a magazine editor, asserts that our urban and suburban landscapes will need to be re-envisioned as the primary places to sustain our passion for wildlife. In this well-written collection of thirteen essays, she demonstrates a sensitivity to animals that should become the standard for those who live in cities and the regions that ring them. These creatures deserve the reverence and respect that is given to their kith and kin in wilder terrains.
With polished prose and a soaring imagination, Couturier writes about peregrine falcons flying between skyscrapers in Manhattan, crows trying to find perches in suburban Maryland, and a group of foxes who have been given the responsibility for ridding a golf course of geese and rats. She models an urbane appreciation of the natural world with salutes to the East River in New York City and the fabled Potomac in Washington D.C., which she can now enjoy regularly with her family.
Couturier developed a love of animals when she was young. She recalls stroking the feathers of birds and imagining them in flight. It is this feeling of empathy and closeness that enables her to extend her sympathies to pigeons and mice who reside in the city's "blacker sea of outcasts." Two of the best essays are on taking the side of a six-foot snake who slithers out of the woods at an Oktoberfest celebration and of a coyote watch with her husband. Whereas Native Americans viewed the resourceful coyote as intelligent, cunning, and joyful; somewhere between 75,000 - 90,000 are killed every year in seventeen Western states.
Couturier peppers these essays with juicy quotations from poets, philosophers, and naturalists. She succeeds in making a good case seeing animals not as inferior creatures but as spiritual teachers and fellow travelers on the adventure of life in urban America.
