“Maybe not actually incalculable, but it doesn’t rain any less now than before the city was built. Once, Manhattan was 27 square miles of porous ground interlaced with living roots that siphoned the 47.2 inches of average annual rainfall up trees and into meadow grasses, which drank their fill and exhaled the rest back into the atmosphere. Whatever the roots didn’t take settled into the island’s water table. In places, it surfaced in lakes and marshes, with the excess draining off to the ocean via those 40 streams which now lie trapped beneath concrete and asphalt” (The City Without Us).

I really enjoy the description and imagery contained in this passage. Nevertheless, I do not entirely agree with it especially because it compares the environment now to what it was without civilization. The first line in particular is something that does not to take into account climate change and the perception that humanity has altered the climate for the indefinite future. The longevity of humanity’s actions will last a lot longer then what people realize and I think its worth thinking about when reading “The City Without Us”.

“The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind (Mus leucopus) not found in the village” (Thoreau 216).

Currently, I am taking Conservation Biology and in many case studies, the greatest problem facing an ecosystem is an invasive species. If you do not know what an invasive species is, it is a species of organism that is non-native to a given area and has the potential to cause harm to either an ecosystem, or towards humans. That definition is very anthropocentric in its definition especially based on the fact its with “or towards humans”, but in this instance its safe to say Thoreau has been in some way harmed by this mouse, or invasive species. Additionally, I find it very interesting to know that biological problems such as invasive species were well documented so long ago because it recently only has reached the mainstream media like in the cases of pythons in the everglades, or snakeheads inhabiting waters throughout the US.