When I say “nature,” the first image to flash into your mind is probably not going to be a lawn or a backyard.  And if you are one of the over fifty percent of Americans who now live in suburbs, then you are almost certainly not going to think of your own subdivision or neighborhood.   But say there is such a thing as “suburban nature.”  The very idea asks that you think again, more slowly and deliberately this time.

Take that icon of suburban living, the lawn.  We are accustomed to seeing its tidy greenery as entirely  the product of someone’s planting, mowing and dousing—perhaps also of the corporations who provided the tools and supplies.   Yet ultimately, the goal of a suburban homeowner is to make grass grow, not die.  Even the most manicured and treated of lawns retain a vitality, an independence from our own designs and intentions, in ways that asphalt and concrete cannot.  In and around every suburb, as well, these most domesticated of plants sprout alongside others whose lives remain far less controlled by people: fast-groping weeds, the chaotic vegetation of vacant or untended lots, the patches of forest on long-since abandoned farmland.  

Here's another way of thinking about it.  Consider for a moment an older downtown you know, a Manhattan or San Francisco; compare it with just about any American suburb with which you are familiar.   Like the Long Island where I live, our suburban versions of the city leave much more space for plants and animals.  Whether expressly imported, or arriving (or remaining) independent of human intent, their flora and fauna comprise a characteristically suburban nature.   These days, rather than ignoring suburbs or cities, ecologists speak of a gradient between the ecologies of city and countryside.  Along this urban-rural gradient, suburbs occupy an entire spectrum of middle grounds. Or in the older words of American Studies scholar Scott Donaldson,suburbs constitute a "marriage of city and country," albeit in widely varying blend and balance.

Over the past decade and a half, I have been studying the 20th-century history of suburban nature around America’s cities.   My investigations have ranged from the evolving ideas and perceptions of nature among suburbanites to the shifting realities of suburban ecology to the way these places spurred a new “environmental” style of politics.   My sources have run the gamut as well, from oral histories to governmental archives to GIS maps.  The first of my books in this project, Crabgrass Crucible, on the suburbs around America’s two largest cities by 1960, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2012.   A second volume, Race and the Greening of Atlanta, was published in 2023 by the University of Georgia Press.  It examines the historical connections between suburbanizing and environmentalism  around a metropolis of the American southeast, situating them within more of a whole-city history.  I’ve built this website to offer a taste of the themes of suburbanizing and environmental movement-making that both these books share.

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