if you see it, squish it
This summer and fall, New York City has been admonishing its citizens to kill. The NYC Parks website reads: “Harming our city’s wildlife is prohibited, but in an effort to slow the spread of this troublesome species, we are putting out a one-time call: if you see a spotted lanternfly, please squish and dispose of this invasive pest.”
The spotted lanternfly is a planthopper native to Southeast Asia that has recently been seen in the US. It looks like a radioactive moth or a reincarnated cicada, gray and translucent with black spots and red hind wings. It has no natural predators in the US and can decimate vineyards and orchards. Pennsylvania, which saw its first lanternfly in 2014, is worried enough that dozens of counties are under quarantine (no, not that kind).
New York City, home to spotted lanternflies since at least last July, quickly joined the effort. That bright, unfriendly voice of counterterrorism—If you see something, say something—now extends to citizen-science vigilance: If you see it, squish it. And you should: lanternflies have recently been found as far west as Kansas, where a student entered a competition at the state fair with a dead specimen, not knowing what it was or the havoc a live one could wreak.
Lanternflies likely came to the US in shipping containers from Asia. In this, they are not unlike brown rats, which originated in Mongolia and made their way westward, eventually arriving in North America in the 1750s. There are now some 2 million brown rats in New York City. In fact, much of New York’s urban fauna is non-native. The common starling and the house sparrow—the birds I see most aside from pigeons—were introduced in Brooklyn in the 19th century: sparrows in 1851 in an attempt to control pests, and starlings in 1890 by the American Acclimatization Society, a group of eccentric and Anglophilic men who wished to bring European species to North America, perhaps simply because Shakespeare wrote about them. Invasive red-eared slider turtles were introduced by pet owners releasing them into the City, likely after realizing they can live for up to 60 years.
When NYC Wildlife says “Harming our city’s wildlife is prohibited,” presumably they mean the animals we actually think of as wildlife, thanks to their size, charisma, or protected status: red-tailed hawks, foxes, songbirds, and so on. But many of those animals live in Staten Island and the forests of the Bronx, and are restricted to the few large Parks of the City. Would wildlife best describe the dun denizens I see on Brooklyn sidewalks: the house sparrows and brown rats, the silverfish and fruitflies, the carpet beetles and bedbugs? Is it wildlife if you’re constantly at war with it? Is it wildlife if it crawls beneath your desk at work? If it moves, like you, through sidewalks strewn with dirty recyclables and dog shit, if it lives in your trash bags and pantries and potted plants?
Sure it is. One shouldn’t gatekeep or discriminate against the ickier-looking animals. Ecosystems are changing and complex; roles are rarely fixed; even mosquitoes pollinate. Still, our city’s wildlife is a strange phrase to me. It belies the messy categories of native species and invasive species, pets and pests. There is wildlife that preceded us and that came along with us or after us, wildlife we want to save and wildlife we wish to destroy, wildlife we destroy regardless. Far from some pristine or separate kind of nature, urban wildlife is a great entanglement of natural and human environments, of imperialism and accident, of conservation and contempt, of misguided attempts at pest control and Anglo-Saxon world-building.
At the same time, it’s hard not to want wildlife to be something else, something more precious and meaningful. The new cockroach that I will find again and kill again, the lanternfly that I will crush and report to the authorities, the rock pigeons that gust about me as I stand waiting at the crosswalk—these are one kind of wildness, a synanthropic sort. It includes the species that have best adapted to us. Climate change will likely only improve their fortunes. It is hard to find wildness in the things we squish and squash because they’ll still be here once we’ve trashed the rest.
And so I insist—foolishly, perhaps—on another kind of wildness. Of omens and augury, of things the City wasn’t made for. Wildness in the City is not the thrilling sublime of the black bear’s approach or the breaching whale; the grand spectacles here are all manmade. Nor is it really the crushed cockroach, the annihilated rat on the curb. Wildness is the moment when the natural world reflects back its imperilment, as if to acknowledge its plight even though it cannot. As if to bare its mystery. It’s in the way the robins stop their skipping to look at you, in the peregrine falcons plummeting down the skyscrapers, in the black squirrels that sit on fenceposts in the Park, dark ambassadors from some earlier, irretrievable fall.
ben tapeworm