ABSTRACT
Environmentally themed publishers such as Sierra Club Books and the National Geographic Society have a long tradition of producing lavish coffee-table books that combine lush nature photography with natural history prose in celebration of places like national parks and other scenic wilderness landscapes. In addition to their aesthetic and educational purposes, such publications have the obvious agenda of calling attention to the uniqueness and beauty of wilderness areas in the hope of persuading the reader of the conservationist message that these areas should be preserved in an unspoiled state. A recent publication is a unique variation on this theme: in 2009, Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Eric W. Sanderson produced Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, the culmination of a ten-year research project in which he and fellow researchers reconstructed the ecology of New York City as it was when Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor in 1609. Along with the book, an interactive website and an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York together made up what Sanderson and the Wildlife Conservation Society called the “the Mannahatta Project,” which was featured prominently in the September 2009 issue of National Geographic . The book, the website, and the magazine article feature photographs of present-day Manhattan juxtaposed with “visualizations” by Markley Boyer, illustrations of the island as it might have appeared four hundred years ago—when, the website claims, “the concrete jungle of New York City was … a vast deciduous forest, home to bears, wolves, songbirds, and salamanders, with clear, clean waters jumping with fish”—an ecosystem with “biodiversity [that] rivaled that of national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Great Smoky Mountains!” After chapters that catalogue, narrate, and describe the physical ecology, the plant life, the wildlife, and the indigenous people of Manhattan island circa 1609, the book ends with a vision of the island in 2409, four hundred years in the future, when—inspired and informed by the knowledge of “the green heart” of the island—New York City will be a sustainable urban civilization of green-roofed buildings powered by renewable energy, a populace moved about by streetcars and bicycles, and local agriculture in New Jersey, in Staten Island, even in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.
