Audubon Magazine
September/October 2000
By Keith Klure

FOR NEARLY 20 YEARS, NEW York City's Central Park has served as Steve Brill's personal grocery store and classroom. The environmental educator knows how to connect with nature and eat off the land-without leaving the city.

Each weekend from March through November, Brill conducts a four-hour ecology tour of city parks for about 15 students. They learn how to identify a cornucopia of edible plants, roots, nuts, berries, and mushrooms. Brill can point out the beauty of dandelions and expound upon their nutritional value-and share a recipe for sautéing them with garlic and olive oil. Although the foods change with the seasons, Brill knows where to find them all, ensuring that when the class is over, everyone leaves with a knapsack full of tasty treats. Brill keeps his classes small to minimize the impact on the landscape, and he cautions students to wash their wild foods before eating them.

In 1994 Brill wrote a guidebook for hardy foragers, called Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places. "He gets people interested in learning about nature and plants," says Brian Boom, a plant scientist at The New York Botanical Garden. "He's entertaining, irreverent, and very knowledgeable." Teachers enlist Brill, who refers to himself as "Wildman," to lecture at schools and botanical gardens.

A strict vegetarian and a selftaught naturalist, Brill is not your garden-variety environmentalist. His interest in nature stems from a desire to eat healthier foods. He was inspired back in the 1970s by the sight of several Greek women picking grape leaves at a park near his Queens home. "I was very surprised to find that the same things that grew in the country could be found in the city," he says. Soon after, Brill in- immersed himself in botany, studying plant biology and the historical uses plants as food. His kinship with nature deepened with his understanding and appreciation of plants. "Now I teach people about plants and the ecosystems that support them so that people will become more involve with protecting them," Brill says.

In the mid-1980s unexpected publicity jolted Brill's career. While he was leading a tour in Central Park, undercover park rangers arrested him for eating a dandelion, citing a city law that prohibits anyone from picking flowers or other plants in the park. The local tabloids had a field day, dubbing Brill "the man who at Manhattan." The New York City Parks Department dropped the charges after a media outcry and even employed him as a park naturalist for four years. These days park rangers are more likely to give Brill a casual wave as they pass by his tours.