“Here in California what you've got is an instant megalopolis superimposed on a background which could almost be described as raw nature. What we've got here is the twentieth century right up against the primitive.” Ross Macdonald, “Ross Macdonald in Raw California” (1972) / The terms urban and nature have been set up in our cultural imagination as opposites that necessarily deny each other. The average person has probably never heard them joined in the phrase urban nature, even though examples of it - New York's Central Park, Chicago's Lakefront, a Houston bayou - spring to mind easily enough. People may be especially unlikely to think of concrete-laden and smog-burdened Los Angeles in relation to a dynamic and thriving natural world. This, despite the region's well-known beaches, mountains, arroyos, gardens, and even natural disasters. Angelenos would quickly add to this list wild parrots haunting Pasadena, deer meandering through the lawns of Brentwood mansions, wild coyotes preying on pets in various gated communities, and even farm animals grazing, braying, and neighing in backyards all across different regions of the city. As I write this chapter, it's been raining for the last few days, and I just returned from hiking with my young sons in Eaton Canyon, where they learned about the sting of a yucca plant, found their feet stuck in a boglike mud pile, and crossed a rushing stream by “climbing” a downed sycamore that had fallen across the water. Clearly, it's not stretching credulity to speak of a flourishing urban nature in Los Angeles where, as Gary Snyder has written, the “Los Angeles basin and hill slopes” are “checkered with streetways.”