Close to Home by Thor Hanson
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Close to Home:
The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door
By Thor Hanson
Basic Books 2025
The point at the heart of conservation biologist Thor Hanson’s new book Close to Home has been made in over a dozen recent books as humanity is increasingly drawn to urban sprawls: this doesn’t necessarily mean a divorce from the natural world. Anyone lucky enough to have yard space of any kind can attest to this, provided they’ve taken the time to go and examine that space. Even in the heart of cities, nature abounds.
Hanson’s account naturally springs from the COVID-19 lockdowns. With people confined to their homes for weeks or months at a stretch, wildlife of all kinds rebounded. The canals of Venice became clear enough to see the fish returning to their water; wild boars went viral on Instagram strolling the streets of Barcelona; humpback whales in Alaska altered their songs because they were no longer competing with human noise. And as Hanson rightly puts it, humans not only caused all this natural resurgence but they also noticed it. The pandemic had few upsides, but that was one of them.
This book is a celebration of that kind of noticing. It’s full of black-and-white illustrations (including, charmingly, some of Audubon’s great bird illustrations), with many photos of the humble creatures going about their business right there amidst our sidewalks and track houses. Hanson adopts this local approach himself, digging into the wild lives around his own home, including some digging that’s going to strike his more squeamish readers as a bit on the fanatical side:
Peeling back the greenery, I immediately spotted a shiny brown spider, scuttling for cover, and then something small, dark, and curled that I took to be a springtail when it suddenly uncoiled itself in an explosive leap, vanishing from sight. There were more spiders as I probed the zone where rotting vegetation mixed with soil, and then I uncovered a bronze-colored burrowing bug, plodding along like an insect rhinoceros.
He can occasionally allow his enthusiasm to get the better of him, as when he makes over-arching claims like “Virtually any patch of habitat contains something little known or mysterious, even in one of the most densely settled urban landscapes on the planet.” But the most persistent joy of this book is Hanson’s marvelous ability to capture the marvel of little nature moments. “Birds vary in their spring habits, but few are more optimistic than the brown creeper, a tiny woodland dweller for whom any sunny day in February is worthy if full-throated song,” he writes for instance. “Bird books describe the creeper’s voice as ‘thin’ and ‘sibilant,’ but it might as well be a fanfare of trumpets when the forest is otherwise hushed with winter calm.”
Given his profession, Hanson also weaves discussions of conservation and biodiversity into his broader setting of finding nature in the interstitial places of our urban lives. And the elaborate end notes and bibliography are a wealth of suggestions. And at the bottom of it all, there’s the simple call to sit outside and listen.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News