warehouses grow in brooklyn.

alongside daisies by the thousands.

Not far from my apartment, under a highway that cleaved the neighborhood in two, there’s a complex of impossibly green athletic fields. The fields are the stage for soccer and baseball, football and rugby games. They’re covered with synthetic turf, which is to say, plastic. People who know about this kind of thing call the fields state-of-the-art, and they do look it, all fresh and orderly and impressive in their expansiveness. They’re new, relatively, the result of a years-long environmental remediation project that abruptly closed existing ball fields in 2012 and is still lumbering its way toward completion today.

The story goes like this: In the 1930s, this site built on former marshland like so much of this city, was home to both a Hooverville called Tin City, and a smelter. The smelter spewed lead dust across the neighborhood, contaminating the soil. In the 1940s, after the tent city was cleared and the smelter demolished, the city turned the vacant space into ball fields, exposing generations of neighborhood children and their parents to harmful levels of lead. For decades toxic dirt and dust were disturbed daily, kicked up during afternoon baseball games and rugby matches and breathed directly into lungs at work and play.

To the east of the fields there’s a positively gigantic grain elevator—twelve stories high and 429 feet long with 54 cement silos—a hulking vestige of industry and agriculture built at the mouth of the Gowanus Canal in the 1920s. It was obsolete nearly as soon as it was completed. It’s sat empty since 1965.

Everywhere, there are wildflowers. Not just a few scraggly specimens growing miraculously along chain link fences, but riotous swaths of wildflowers. Seeded in beds that snake around fields rigid with right angles and crisp white lines, the flowers are unruly and audacious. They bend over concrete sidewalks and stand tall against graffiti-covered cement walls.

There are daisies by the thousands and white, pink, and magenta yarrow. There are bachelor’s buttons and tall stalks of regal white and blue delphiniums. A smattering of coreopsis lend a flash of yellow. Blue flax splay their feathery stalks through daisy stems. Red and pink poppies flutter and nod in the breeze from the harbor. The borders have been so aggressively seeded that the flower heads form a canopy over their stems. There’s no visible soil, only a tangle of petals and pollen.

The flowers are not obsolete. They play host to bees and birds and butterflies. Next to the perfect plastic turf they are a defiant, shining examples of biodiversity and symbiosis. I watch a bee, its corbicula full to brimming with pollen, visit the center of a red poppy over and over again until finally it takes off to deliver its golden haul to the hive. It’s a marvel of life out here, smack in the middle of a former industrial wasteland.

Across the street, though, there’s a different kind of buzz, an incessant high-pitched whine from one of three vast last-mile warehouses in the neighborhood. Blue-grey trucks pull out of the driveway like a line of ants marching. An endless stream of smugly smiling vehicles pollute the air in a neighborhood whose residents—largely low-income, largely people of color—already suffer disproportionate levels of asthma.

I pluck a few wind-damaged stems that have sent flower heads plummeting to the cement walkway. Turning a battered spray of pink yarrow between my fingers, I wonder about this cycle of damage and neglect and repair. More than ten years spent to make lead-laden ball fields playable again, tens of thousands of wildflower seeds planted to host pollinators and encourage life-sustaining beauty on this spit of overburdened land, all of it now surrounded by warehouses that fill idling trucks with more than anyone needs. These giant warehouses, bastions of rampant American consumerism, are only predicted to grow.** More of them are already slated to be built on the other side of the fields, hundreds of thousands of square feet constructed to satiate an endless demand for more stuff, more quickly.

Satiation, of course, isn’t the goal of those warehouses. They leave us starved of satisfaction, unhappy and wanting more even when our baskets are full to brimming. Over and again we act against our better instincts, without our own best interests at heart. Then we grow wise and work to repair what we’ve failed to prevent, while turning a blind eye to the next disaster of our own making. The bees don’t waste this kind of time, cleaning up messes. They work with the flowers, taking and giving in equal measure, ensuring their own survival by entangling it in the flowers they depend on. Would that we could learn to do the same.

**There is some good news on this front. Just last week the City of New York announced a new commitment to regulating last-mile warehouses and to prevent the clustering of them through a special permit process.