Dan Werb's book Our Wild Familiars offers an enchanting deep dive into the ways synanthropes shape and are shaped by cities.Joe Fuda/Supplied
During the inaugural Camp Wavelength music festival on Toronto Island in 2015, I wandered from my tent around midnight seeking peace near the Gibraltar Point lighthouse. Alone, separated from the din of the city by Lake Ontario and with buoyant echoes of Do Make Say Think’s set still floating around in my ears, I spotted movement in the distance. A cautiously loping coyote stepped out from the bushes under a lamp on the path. We gazed at each other briefly, and it slunk back into the darkness.
The memory is hazy, enough for me to wonder if it ever happened at all. I was convinced coyotes could absolutely not find their way to Toronto Island. But Dan Werb’s new book, Our Wild Familiars, has assured me that when it comes to synanthropes, nearly anything is possible. Werb notes that the word “synanthrope” is derived from the Greek for “together with man,” and refers to a wild creature that has “found a way to survive and thrive in human-modified environments,” he writes.
The Vancouver-born, Toronto-based epidemiologist, policy analyst, and musician came across the word while writing The Invisible Siege (2022), about the proliferation of coronaviruses. Naturally, that book deals with unsettling developments. But in his research for The Invisible Siege, he recognized the massive influence that the movement of animals, forced or natural, has on humankind. After the insular experiences of pandemic lockdown and writing about the causes of those lockdowns, he was seeking a project that would force him out into the world. Synanthropes became the point of departure.
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“I wanted to make sure that this book was about connection rather than stoking fear or anxiety,” Werb says. “It’s really about how we can feel more intimate and connected with the places we live.”
Our Wild Familiars offers an enchanting deep dive into the ways synanthropes shape and are shaped by cities. Certainly, there’s some gloom, which descends mainly through examples of the way that climate change is sowing chaos by shifting animal behaviours and forcing all living things to adapt swiftly. But the cumulative effect of Werb’s globe-trotting efforts to get in front of a kaleidoscopic array of synanthropes is acute wonder, brought on by tales about Toronto’s genius raccoons, the breakneck evolution of New York City rats, juvenile hamadryas baboons riding dogs in Saudi Arabian trash heaps, and why, in the Sundarbans mangrove forest, encroached upon by megacity Kolkata’s creeping sprawl, tigers may have developed a taste for human flesh.
The book is anti-doom without sacrificing realistic perspectives. Of its many examples, Werb says his time searching for a giant Pacific octopus under the waves of Seattle’s Elliott Bay was particularly resonant.
“It’s a true apocalypse under the ocean,” Werb says. “It’s so polluted, there’s so much garbage, and it just seems like a world of complete devastation. And the fact that it’s not, that one of the most beautiful, intelligent creatures on earth has decided that that is where it wants to live, is incredibly helpful to me. I don’t know, it melts my heart.”
Werb deftly weaves these instances together with the requisite science to express the great connectedness of things, but that fact naturally unravels throughout. Refreshingly, he trades in practical advice and possible solutions. Cities need more “stepping-stones,” island-type habitats that can help animals move safely through them, as urban areas should be understood as fragile, diverse ecosystems that are often more biodiverse than the areas that surround them and central to conservation efforts. There will also be no one-size-fits-all solution for every city – he says hard-line expressions of conservation biology fail in the face of the tragedy of the Sundarbans “tiger widows,” for example. Wholly shifting to the other side of the spectrum and determining the value of projects based entirely on human benefit won’t work either.
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As Our Wild Familiars proves, considering synanthropes in our city planning as the world changes is only going to become more vital. It also sounds fun. There are ways to rejuvenate human relationships with synanthropes infrastructurally in ways that make the world more welcoming, like Houston’s Kinder Land Bridge and Prairie, which helps coyotes, armadillos, and opossums cross the city’s Memorial Drive and provides hiking trails for the bipedal among us. Werb’s research has given him the hopeful energy to advocate for projects like this while opposing damaging ones – for example, he says the effort to expand the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport is “slimy” and that it will have massive environmental impacts if it goes ahead.
“Where I hope this book lives is in getting people feeling like the neighbourhoods they live in, the cities and towns they live in really do matter,” Werb says. “They are important and beautiful places that should be conserved, and the animals and plants that live in them should be the subject of conservation efforts.”
The primary gift of the book is to shatter the myth that the city is separate from the natural world, and that we city-dwellers are so different from its synanthropic citizens. In the coyote section, Werb describes his own encounter with one of the skittish canids at night in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, and the bubbling up of a particular primal feeling it inspired. As his California coyote disappears into the wilderness silently the way my own Toronto Island one did, he recognizes a kinship – abstract, maybe, but one that acknowledges a shared plight – and finds a way to name the minor lament welling up in him: “the feeling of not having howled.”