City songs for loving the Earth

By Lindsey Fenner

As a new master naturalist, I have started to study Minnesota’s major biomes or biological communities, especially the native grasslands that I love. But as I’ve studied, I’ve wondered when I would start reading about places like Phillips. I realized that the way Minnesota is divided up into the three major biomes: prairies, hardwood forests, and conifer forests, ignores one major distinct landscape: cities. Most people in Minnesota live in cities, in urban or suburban areas. This sprawling human development, after all, is why we are facing the painful loss of so many species.

But people are a natural part of landscapes and ecosystems. And we have been living in cities for more than five thousand years. We have shaped our ecosystems, and have been shaped by them in return, whether we have lived close together in cities and villages or spread out in the prairies and forests. Right here in Phillips, we have our own ecology in an ecosystem that has its own fierce beauty.

We are surrounded daily with trauma and violence. It can be hard through those eyes to see the beauty in the volunteer trees in our fence lines, the weeds in our alleys, our soil laced with heavy metals and our air laden with pollution.… Read the rest “City songs for loving the Earth”