he New York metropolitan area is not only a megacity, the global capital of finance, culture, and media. It should also be seen, say Tony Hiss and Christopher Meier, as a vast natural organism that is complex, beautiful, and utterly unique.
Last fall, the wealthy residents of 927 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan unwittingly illustrated this when they ejected a red-tailed hawk named Pale Male from the 12th-floor urban nest he had occupied for 11 years (siring 23 babies in the process). Large numbers of citizens turned out, on foot, on television, and in letters to the editor, to protest.
Many of the protesters, not to mention the tabloids, saw the situation as an allegory of greed, power, and real estate, dramatized by competing celebrity residents (Paula Zahn's husband, real estate mogul Richard Cohen, was the leader of the eviction scheme, Mary Tyler Moore an outspoken raptor fan).
As they kept a vigil with binoculars and cameras from the perimeter of Central Park, many New Yorkers seemed to realize that they live -- and moreover want to live -- in a natural place. Central Park itself, after all, was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to take advantage of the local geology and topography in ways that would create the illusion of wilderness in the heart of the city.
The Hudson River, which rises as a vodka-clear trickle from Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks and ends up, 300 miles later, in a vast natural harbor full of barges and tankers, ferries and luxury cruise ships, striped bass and blue crabs, is the central nervous system of an area that Hiss and Meier call -- rather cutely -- "H2O," or "highlands to ocean." As the authors note, the Hudson has made a stunning return to health in the past decade. Once an open sewer, the river has been transformed by deindustrialization and enlightened public management. Today, thanks to the New York City Parks Department, you can even take a kayak out on the great river -- free of charge! -- and treat yourself to entirely new perceptions of the intimate relationships among water, rock, sky, and the man-made environment.
That's really the point Hiss and Meier are making: that landscape and human settlement are of a piece, and that history, science, and a poetic sensibility are all indispensable tools for understanding how the whole thing works. Other writers have tapped into this sense of the metropolitan area as something organic, a place where the perceptive eye can look beyond the cathedrals of commerce, the palaces of Fifth Avenue, and the dilapidated streets one finds in every borough to discern older and more elemental realities. One thinks of Robert Sullivan, who explored the hidden reaches of industrial New Jersey by canoeing the Meadowlands. Or John McPhee, who walked the hinterlands of Brooklyn with geologists who not only understood, but actually seemed to see, the place as a terminal moraine as well as an urban wasteland.
In many respects Hiss, a former New Yorker staff writer, and Meier, a self-described "region builder," go further. Refusing to accept any dichotomy between the "natural" and the "human" worlds, their overarching concern is to reveal the H2O region as an integrated whole. Once we understand that, they hope, more intelligent and strategic conservation tools will follow. They propose a checklist of 14 indicators -- ranging from water quality and bird populations to asthma, sprawl, and climate -- to assess the health of the region. As I read it, the city rates a B+.
This isn't necessarily a book to be read cover to cover. Its loose structure will tend to reward the magpie reader, the kind who will enjoy dipping into a couple of pages about tracking black-crowned night herons, or a short tourist- and hiker-friendly chapter describing the region's natural areas. H2O is intended as "a guide and friend -- a 'welcome to the neighborhood' manual." In this, Hiss and Meier have succeeded admirably.
-- George Black
