Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate-Change Parable

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.

Author: David Brown Morris
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 10/07/2025
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781531511647


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2025

About the Author
David Brown Morris, writer and scholar, retired as University Professor 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.