Published by HarperCollins. #1 Amazon bestseller. Shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo 2025 Emerging Writer Prize. Now available in paperback.
We built our cities to keep nature out. Concrete replaced forest floors, pipes buried rivers, manicured parks substituted for the wild. We called it progress. But what if our estrangement from the natural world isn't just making our cities unlivable — it's making us unwell?

This book is about the people already fixing it:
- A scientist who couldn't sleep after a deadly heat dome — and built a community mapping program that revealed his city's hottest neighborhoods were also its sickest
- A forestry grad five days into her first job who launched what became the world's largest urban tree census
- A father in California who built AI-powered robots to carry out the prescribed burns that could prevent the next wildfire
- A theater director in Amsterdam who gave six ancient trees a voice — and made their isolation mandatory listening for city planners
- Thousands of children in La Paz who shattered every wildlife documentation record on Earth with a smartphone app
- A startup founder who built a tool that measures nature access like a credit score — and used it to show which neighborhoods carry the heaviest burden of heat, flooding, and poor health
A deeply reported journey, part memoir, part investigation — and finds the same urgent question in every city: can cities learn to live with nature before they can't live without it?














