The City as an Ecosystem of Contradiction
While the Montana Institute is rooted in vast Western landscapes, a significant branch of our inquiry deliberately turns toward the ‘urban wild.’ We reject the notion that cities are separate from nature; instead, we view them as hyper-intensive, human-dominated ecosystems undergoing constant socio-ecological flux. Our research in post-industrial cities like Butte, Montana, and expanding into other regions, investigates how wildness persists, adapts, and is strategically deployed within the concrete grid.
Key Sites of Urban Wild Inquiry
Our urban researchers focus on interstitial and liminal spaces where the boundary between the human-built environment and feral nature is most porous and contested.
- Vacant Lot Phyto-Sociology: We map and study the plant communities that colonize abandoned lots. This is not mere botany. The species composition (native vs. invasive, medicinal vs. toxic) tells a story of the neighborhood's history, current economic flows, and community values. A lot carefully tended with community gardens speaks of social cohesion; one overrun with poison hemlock and trash may indicate disinvestment and neglect. The social negotiations over these ‘weedscapes’—to develop, to beautify, to leave wild—are rich data points.
- Carnivore Cohabitation: The urban coyote, raccoon, and increasingly, cougar, are key non-human actors reshaping city life. We track their movement corridors (rail lines, river valleys, drainage culverts) and study the human social response. Neighborhood social media groups become fevered forums of discussion, fear, and fascination. The presence of a coyote pack can alter human walking patterns, pet ownership practices, and even backyard fencing trends, creating a new layer of urban social geography based on perceived risk.
- Green Gentrification and Equity: The introduction of official ‘wildness’—parks, greenways, riverfront restoration—is a powerful social force. We critically analyze who benefits and who is displaced by these projects. Does a new urban park increase community health or become an engine of rising property values and displacement? The social meaning of ‘wild’ in this context is often sanitized and commodified, contrasting sharply with the feared ‘wild’ of the vacant lot or the coyote.
The Social Life of Infrastructure
We also study how ‘natural’ systems are harnessed and managed within the city, and the social conflicts this generates. Water is a prime example. A restored, meandering urban creek (a ‘daylighted’ stream) may be an ecological victory, but it also reconfigures property lines, changes flood risks, and creates new public spaces that must be governed. The management of urban deer populations through culls or fertility control becomes a heated civic debate, pitting animal rights activists against gardeners and drivers, revealing fundamental divides in how different urban factions relate to the non-human world.
The Urban Wild as a Lens for the Future
Studying urban wildness is essential because it is the condition of the future for most humans. It reveals society not as a controller of nature, but as a participant in a constant, improvisational dance with feral forces. The city becomes a laboratory for studying adaptation, resilience, and conflict in real-time. The lessons learned here—about equity, coexistence, and the ineradicable presence of the wild—are directly applicable to understanding larger-scale human-nature entanglements. The urban fox, the stormwater pond, the community orchard: each is a node in a vast, wild social network that the Institute is dedicated to mapping and understanding.