Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate-Change Parable

by David Brown Morris

Overview

A visionary look at Central Park’s creation as an urban success story inspiring bold climate action

Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. With extreme heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods displacing millions, many wonder: What can I do? Ten Thousand Central Parks challenges the despair of inaction, using the history of Central Park as an unlikely yet urgent environmental parable.

Created in the years immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, Central Park is a radical experiment in urban renewal, transforming a chaotic and polluted terrain into an 843-acre refuge. More than a scenic landmark, it was a visionary public project that provided jobs, green space, and a lasting environmental legacy. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park was America’s first large-scale public works project, undertaken at a time of national crisis and built almost entirely by immigrants. Its creation offers a powerful lesson: Even in turbulent times, cities can be reimagined, and large-scale ecological transformations are possible.

With over half of the world’s population living in cities today, predicted soon to reach nearly 70%, urban green spaces are more crucial than ever. Morris argues that Central Park is not just an artifact of the past but a model for the future. Its 18,000 trees sequester nearly a million pounds of carbon dioxide annually, proving that ambitious, nature-based solutions can improve the quality of life while addressing environmental challenges.

Written with urgency and optimism, Ten Thousand Central Parks offers a fresh perspective on the climate crisis, rejecting doom in favor of possibility. We need projects on the scale of Central Park— thousands of them—to meet today’s environmental challenges. This book—a boundary-crossing work of narrative nonfiction—is an invitation to think big, act boldly, and embrace radical hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781531511647
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Brown Morris, writer and scholar, retired as UniversityProfessor at the University of Virginia from a position split between English and the School of Medicine. His book The Culture of Pain (1991) won a PEN prize and led to multiple lectures and essays in pain medicine. It also initiates a trilogy that includes Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998) and Eros and Illness (2017). Earlier work includes two prizewinning books in eighteenth- century studies, The Religious Sublime (1972) and Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984). In addition to numerous essays and articles, he has written three books of narrative nonfiction: Earth Warrior (1995), about an anti- driftnet mission with environmental activist Paul Watson; Civil War Duet (2019), an intergenerational dialogue with his great- grandfather, Newton Brown, who served with the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry; and the wide- ranging Wanderers: Literature, Culture and the Open Road (2021). He held several distinguished professorships and has received yearlong grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Society of Learned Fellows, and (awarded jointly with NEH) the National Science Foundation.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Central Park? | 1

1. Once Upon a Time in 1857 | 8

2. Olmsted Seeking Olmsted | 18

3. Paperback Writer | 25

4. A Young Snowy Owl | 33

5. An Unpractical Man | 42

6. Enter Calvert Vaux | 49

7. The Weeping Time | 59

8. The Greensward Plan | 67

9. The Wiping Out of Seneca Village | 77

10. An Escape from Buildings | 87

11. Sideways Time Travel | 97

12. A People’s Park | 107

13. Imagination & Machinery | 116

14. Big Artwork of the Republic | 124

15. Decline & Renewal | 134

Conclusion: The Fullness of Life | 145

Notes | 157

Index | 175

Editorial Reviews

A multifaceted exploration of one of the first great public works projects in America.—Kirkus Reviews

A lovely history—with a profound twist. David Brown Morris makes an intriguing argument that climate change turns the notion of 'park' into a necessity.—Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Ten Thousand Central Parks is a brilliant exploration of the cultural and environmental changes that have shaped our nation’s most celebrated urban park. Offering a fascinating combination of insightful perspectives from horticulture, landscape architecture, literature, and the visual arts, this exemplary work of environmental humanities scholarship demonstrates the power of looking closely at how we shape nature, and how nature in turn shapes us. A gifted storyteller whose thoughtful, curious, well-informed approach is matched by the precision and grace of his prose, David Morris has achieved a tour de force multidisciplinary appreciation of how a deep understanding of our local natural spaces can illuminate planetary concerns.—Michael P. Branch, author of Raising Wild and On the Trail of the Jackalope

I am a strong admirer of David Morris’s work, from the beginning on Pope, to his swerve into writings that are like no others, utterly his, original, beautifully written, and profound, narratively driven with moments of such fine attention that they become lyrical. I think his writing on Central Park is perhaps his best and most important book.—Peter Weltner, Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State, author of The Risk of His Music and Old Songs Replayed

David Morris has written another vitally important book! Ten Thousand Central Parks—like his PEN award-winner The Culture of Pain—cuts to the heart of a dark, epoch-defining dilemma. The mind-numbing perils of climate change, understood against the Civil War origins of Central Park, yield a compelling parable of radical hope in this adventurous, boundary-crossing, innovative work.—Gerald L. Bruns, author of Heidegger’s Estrangements and Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature

This book is not a conventional guide to Central Park's landscape features. It is something rarer and richer: a guide to the Park's deep meaning and potentially global significance. Weaving scrupulous historical research, biographical empathy, and autobiographical ardor, David Brown Morris creates a story as engaging as engaged. Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate-Change Parable is a beautifully compelling narrative that could not be more 'central' to our current environmental and ethical needs.—John Sitter, professor emeritus, University of Notre Dame and Emory University

Ten Thousand Central Parks is many things: history, biography, meditation, social polemic, ecological prose poem, and documentary, delivered with a time-lapse precision that lives somewhere between cinema and lyrical verse. It is also Morris’s most powerful case to date for the importance of a workable metaphor: the Park that is both the object and the ideological aspiration of this book. He documents his subject along two planes—as a geographical artifact, its 840 acres drained, leveled, planted, and developed across nearly two centuries through the painstaking efforts of a cast of magnetic characters; and as an idea, something to inhabit, think with, and multiply into every space where there is need for a patch of green and a project to galvanize behind. Central Parks is at once a Hail-Mary offering to environmentalists racing against the clock of climate change, and a much-needed argument for restoring imagination and art to the heart of American innovation and entrepreneurship.—Kiera Allison, Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

From the Publisher

2025-06-13
An examination of New York’s Central Park and its history, set in the context of global climate change.

Any history of Central Park necessarily spotlights Frederick Law Olmsted, who (with Calvert Vaux) did much of the design work for the park and was its first superintendent. Olmsted’s early career as a farmer, travel writer, and magazine editor gave no hint of his eventual calling. But when Vaux recruited him to enter an open competition for designing the park, the two men shared a vision of a park open to all the city’s people, mixing meadows, woodland, and more formally designed parkland. Their “Greensward” design was selected, and today’s park still strongly reflects its origins. In addition to the park’s early history, the author explores its role in the city as a whole. Despite its designers’ intention to make it a place for all classes of New Yorkers, it was necessary to expel an established community of largely Black homeowners from Seneca Village, which sat on land designated for the park. In the early years, access was easiest for upper-class residents, but the park soon became everyone’s playground. Brown, the author ofThe Culture of Pain (1991), includes anecdotes from his own walks in the park, tales of the wildlife that has made it a home—including the occasional exotic bird such as Flaco the owl—and snapshots of historical events that have taken place there. As the subtitle indicates, he sees the park as a model for municipalities nationwide to emulate—creating green space to help offset carbon emissions and other environmental problems. The author too often starts on an interesting bit of lore only to go off on a tangent—a distraction in an otherwise enjoyable book.

A multifaceted exploration of one of the first great public works projects in America.

Kirkus Reviews