Lisa Couturier has lived her entire life along the Northeast Corridor of the United States: the suburbs of Washington DC, the City of New York, and the outskirts of Boston. “My life, my engagement with urban wildlife, and my ideas about what is wild,” she says, “were birthed in these most densely urbanized landscapes of the U.S.”

It is predicted that an astonishing eighty percent of the population of the United States will live in cities in the year 2010. “This means our urban and suburban landscapes will need to be re-envisioned as the primary places to sustain our passion for wildlife,” says Couturier. “Open, undeveloped space is essential, critical to wildlife. But I feel the need to celebrate, also, the beaver living on the city line, the urban falcon, or other urban creatures who are both a gift from the wilder world as well as a reminder that, somehow, we ultimately must not fail that wilder place.”

Couturier’s new book, The Hopes of Snakes: And Other Tales from the Urban Landscape is testament to her lifelong passion for urban nature and to the human desire to cherish, and hold close, the nonhuman world that is alive and quietly thriving in our developed landscapes.