Posted for Emma Marris

Thomas Lovejoy of the Heinz Center, founder of the biodiversity concept, gave the opening plenary for the meeting. After a few preliminaries, he proceeded to chant a litany of environmental cataclysm, from invasive species to climate change and all its depressing effects, to disappearing frogs. At this point, I felt like bolting. I had heard this speech before, as, undoubtedly, had everyone else in the room, and I didn’t feel a particular need to be driven to the hotel bar by despair. But I hung in there. Lovejoy went on to predict the future—bleak naturally, and culminating in “assemblages that are relatively hard to envision.”

Funny thing was, I had just spent the whole day in a workshop on “novel ecosystems” where people talked about their research doing just that, studying the new ecosystems that spring up after human disturbance, and moving towards predicting them. It was an optimistic session, in a way, and it made me think again about Milwaukee as an ecosystem. What weird and interesting species interactions were afoot in the city?

This led me to photographer Eddee Daniel. Daniel’s new book of photographs of the urban wilderness of Milwaukee came out recently, and photographs are on display at the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee’s Riverside Park. These beautiful pictures make clear that what are sometimes called “trash landscapes” are as worthy of landscape photography as they are of scientific inquiry.