REBOOTING CONSERVATION IN THE URBAN BADLANDS - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 107

toxic brew. The piles have now weathered to limey soils where vast swathes of orchids grow at places
with splendid local names like Mucky Mountain and Lower Hinds. Shaw's favorite site, Nob End, har-
bors rare plants like carline thistle and blue fleabane, and it has eight species of orchids, including sev-
eral hybrids that do not fit textbook descriptions. 4
I was pleased to discover that another of Shaw's haunts is the Brockham lime works in the Surrey
hills south of London, a favorite picnic haunt of my family for decades. I knew about its orchids and the
rare silver-spotted skipper butterfly but not the twenty-four species of Collembola springtails, including
one, less than a millimeter long, that Shaw discovered there back in 1999. It is found at just one other
place in Britain. It lives on. But no such luck at Gargoyle Wharf, an oil depot less than a mile from where
I live in South London. After the depot shut, botanists found more than three hundred species of flower-
ing plants there. Nick Bertrand from the London Wildlife Trust told me it was “one of the most fantastic
sites I've ever been to.” But big-league conservation groups said it was a brownfield site and left it to
developers, who built apartment blocks and replaced the unique flora with “award-winning landscaped
gardens.”
This environmental philistinism has come about because all of us—townies and country-dwellers,
planners and environmental campaigners, developers and nimbies—have come to believe that cities are
environmental deserts, while the countryside is the only proper place for wildlife. The truth is often the
opposite. Many greenfields are plowed-up, pesticide-soaked ecological deserts. Many urban sites are
unique, extreme, novel ecosystems that are refuges for nature's rare, bizarre, and itinerant.
Postindustrial landscapes are helping turn our picture of nature on its head—or they would if we
were taking more notice of what is going on in their nooks and crannies. In Great Britain, most of the
lowland countryside is now prairie farmland and monoculture pasture, and wildlife is being squeezed
out of where we expect to find it. By contrast, when industry abandons land, the open spaces and niches
it leaves behind are full of unusual chemical and physical habitats and ripe for colonization. Everything
is up for grabs, and wildlife grabs it. Similarly the prairies of the United States may be wide open, but
they are frequently devoid of nature, which has often moved into the cities and industrial borderlands.
British entomologist Peter Harvey of the Essex Field Club says that England's brownfield sites are
messed-up places that have “much more in common with the historic wildlife-rich countryside than
the intensively farmed modern version.” They “routinely support more scarce wild species than farmed
land.” 5 That is why Europe's largest population of great crested newts ( Triturus cristatus )—about thirty
thousand of them—is happily ensconced in ponds that now occupy old brick pits outside Peterborough
in the East of England. And why Britain's top site for nightingales ( Luscinia megarhynchos ) is a milit-
ary junkyard on the Thames estuary in northern Kent, littered with abandoned munitions stores, sentry
boxes, and an antiaircraft gun emplacement. Amid the junk, where trainees from the Royal School of
Military Engineers once practiced driving bulldozers, are patches of scrubby woodland where ninety
pairs of the beloved birds sing their hearts out. 6
This Cinderella ecology isn't so new in Britain. The last windfall of sites for rare natives and exotic
invaders happened after bombs dropped on London and elsewhere in World War II. The profusion of un-
expected species that populated the craters was so great that it was rumored they had been dropped with
the bombs as biological weapons of war. 7 The Moroccan poppy and the American willow herb were
both first spotted in Britain in the remains of bombed-out buildings in the City of London and subse-
quently spread across Britain. Those were good times for thorn apple from North America and rosebay
willow herb from the Yukon, which was nicknamed “bombweed” by Cockney Londoners. Some were
newcomers, but many were old arrivals. The daisy-like gallant soldier, its common name a corruption