Country Meets City: Incompatible?

This past Tuesday I found myself driving a ten-foot box truck around Manhattan, through Times Square no less. I was accompanied on my tour by the truck's standard double decker column of sideview mirrors and the jarring clank of boxes shifting around the back storage unit. At one point, as I turned down East Twelfth street, full-on into road construction that had me maneuvering between a cement truck and the hardhats of men whose bodies were hidden beneath the pavement, all I could think was – thank god I grew up in the country.

Other city-dwellers have the environmentalists’ dilemma: how to live a sustainable, eco-friendly lifestyle in a materialistic, growth-focused society. But my quandry is none so noble. While living in the city, I struggle with holding onto my country roots. How do I stay “of the earth”—a person comfortable dealing with dirt, bugs, hard labor, and solitude—as I adjust to a life sauntering in and out of shops on Fifth Avenue, or settling into ‘parks’ that are mostly paved? I fear that I’ll become so accustomed to cement and following the city masses that I’ll lose my appreciation for the outdoors, and what that appreciation brings with it: a passion for preserving and exploring nature, as well as educating others about the environment. Not only would that loss mean something very personal—a disconnection from my upbringing—but also it indicates the ease at which people living in suburban and urban centers lose touch with the environment, and thus forfeit any urgency they may have to protect it.

I’ve watched people of my variety abandon the cities for more earth friendly places—Texas, Virginia, Maine. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I just can’t do it. Surely there’s a way to combine these two existences; the worlds needn’t be at odds. Finally, what I realized as I drove the truck around Manhattan is that there are ways for the country to come to the city, for these two seemingly disparate elements to blend. In my case, personal experiences tie these two worlds together. If it hadn’t been for summers spent holed up in the Ohio countryside working at Boyert’s, the greenhouse and farm that had me driving a delivery box truck full of flowers down windy country roads, I can safely guarantee I would have crashed five feet from the U-Haul company on Manhattan’s west side. If it hadn’t been for at least one spring spent building owls out of cardboard cutouts and aluminum foil, to scare the birds out of our barn, I never would have known how to keep the ever-cooing pigeons off my East Village windowsill. Years of planting and weeding acres of gardens prepped me for landscaping NYC rooftops, and a summer spent camping in Vermont readied me for a post-eviction life sleeping on couches. As I share all of these experiences with the people around me, I'm bringing the country to them, and that's important. In a recent conversation, Dan Tishman, now chairman of the board of trustees at NRDC, said that while he found pleasure in fighting local battles near his home in Maine, there’s perhaps a greater pressure to live and breathe the environment in some of the most environmentally unfriendly places of all: cities. Part of our job, as nature lovers, protectors, and educators, is to bring the environment to urban communities, so these areas, too, will fear for its loss. While it seems I may have easily given up cherished summers of watering mums and lazily meandering around soy fields for a smelly subway and crowded beaches, the decision was neither hypocritical nor trite. My contribution to the fight for nature is bringing a little bit of country with me wherever I go. I haven’t chosen one life over the other, and I don't have to. The two existences are unlikely bedfellows in a tale of survival for myself, and the planet.