James Barilla in My Backyard Jungle pieces together his own wildlife boundaries in his backyard and compares it those of other parts of the world. I will examine Barilla's struggles with creating wildness in his backyard in comparison to how different cities of the world manage to live side-by-side with the wild animal population. I will also discuss how Barilla notices and investigates peoples' abilities to coexist. Furthermore, I will review the education, training, and career of James Barilla in hopes to better understand the purpose of his work, My Back Yard Jungle. His struggle for coexistence is made even harder as he begins to realize that there is no perfect balance and that he just needs to deal with things as they happen in his yard. The birds, the bees, and the fruit trees all work together and function now he must figure out how to do the same.
In the beginning of his novel, Barilla describes how he began to analyze the coexistence in his backyard, and relates it to his travel experiences and observations worldwide. He inspects his home city of Columbia, South Carolina, alongside other places in the in the United States such a Massachusetts, New York, Mississippi, Florida, as well as locations of the world such as Brazil and India. He travels from place to place and discusses the interaction of "wildness" of different regions with local people. Throughout his novel, Barilla examines how different species manage to coexist, how society lives with nature as a whole, and how each culture manages to live with each species. He does this by comparing the places he travels to, to his own backyard.
In an effort to find an answer to his many questions, he ends the first chapter of his novel by posing those exact thoughts. He says, "I wonder how people in other corners of the world are dealing with his challenge. What can we learn from each other? How can we imagine these spaces so that we can maximize their potential as habitats in an urban future?" (Barilla, 21).
