"A Natural History of Empty Lots"

[fiefoe]

Christopher Brown's essay collection goes over the same ground over and over again, but with new perspectives or details each time, just like the urban wilderness walks he takes. And this reader is happy to go along, to be able to visit old but unfamiliar places vicariously.

• * The only animals that come around to eat the sweet seed pods of the mesquite trees that grow around our house now are, like my wife, immigrants from Argentina... The legend of the parakeets who build their massive multifamily stick nests in the power poles of Austin and other American cities is that they descended from birds who were imported for the exotic pet trade, broke free from a crate on the tarmac of JFK in 1967, and proceeded to colonize their way down the Eastern Seaboard
• I have no training in the natural sciences other than the unofficial one my life has given me, learning what’s what at the same time its importance to my world becomes evident to me, and a wariness of our tendency to put the naming of each object in nature before the unmediated experience of it. The call of the wild amid the manufactured unreality of contemporary life is what had me walking that empty lot, along with my weird idea that a sensible place to look for natural beauty was in the fenced-off zones behind the industrial parks.
• I was also a science fiction writer, with a particular interest in the aesthetics of ruin and rewilding, the kind of orientation that makes you think nothing would be cooler than to live in an overgrown concrete bunker that looks like the last outpost after the end of the world. And I had come to believe that places like that, where the worst of our industrial abuses of the Earth collide with wild nature, were where the essence of real life and the possibility of a better future could be found. A refuge, but also a place where, by working to harmonize the radically conflicting energies of the place, I might do the same to the conflicts in my own life.
• You learn to banish from your mind the illusory fantasy that there is some precious, intact wilderness still out there, beyond the horizon, where wildlife can eke out a healthy existence outside the realm of our dominion. You come to see how the other species we share this planet with occupy the marginal spaces we leave for them.
• * The deeper lesson that accretes as you learn to really see these places is that the damage we see in the natural world around us is a mirror, a reflection of the damage we feel inside ourselves, even on the days when we feel healthy. We, as a collective, are the ones causing the horror show of everyday life that we live in with our eyes averted. We cause it by our sometimes willing, sometimes hoodwinked, sometimes coerced participation in a system of subjugation, extraction, and accumulation that makes the Earth and each of us its slaves, training us to see ourselves as apart from nature in the same way it alienates us from each other and from ourselves.
• “mesquite” is not really Spanish, but Nahuatl, from mizquitl, a name used by the Aztecs and perhaps other Indigenous tribal groups whose cultural memories and knowledge of the world are not as completely erased as we might think. I learned that the fruit of the tree was one of many in our landscape that had evolved to be eaten by the giant mammals who disappeared from this continent not long after humans showed up, one of those factual nuggets that punctuate a truth about the deep history of the Anthropocene
• Trees: They have been rendered invisible by their subservience to the cables hanging from those poles, pruned back over decades to create a strange vision when you look straight down the lane: a blocks-long symmetrical line of trees trained into Vs as their limbs yield to the telephone poles and their ethereal cargo, locked in a dance without touching,
• Foxes—especially red foxes, but also gray foxes like the one we saw that night—thrive in ecotones: areas that straddle two very different types of habitats. And the foxes around here have figured out that the zone between overgrown empty lot and industrial streetscape creates similar opportunities for predation as the border between grassland and forest or prairie and wetland.
• Raptors love the surveillance posts dead trees provide, including those we use to line our streets and carry the power we have harvested from the Earth.
• * The city has a way of keeping us focused on feeding it, and the faces we see in its ubiquitous mirrors. Sometimes the waking dreams of our popular culture give us peripheral glimpses of the truth about how we relate to our world, but vampires can’t see their own reflections.
• It was 1999, a year after we moved to Austin, the year they opened the fancy new airport on what had been the site of an air force base... the bridge to get to the airport. It was an old bridge, a camelback truss of curved and bolted steel built in the Great Depression... built at a scale that brought you closer to the world around you.
• * Through the window, beneath the bridge, a stretch of wild shallow river meandered through a thick, green landscape devoid of any signs of human occupation. It was hazy and mysterious, atemporal and confounding, like a scene from a Romantic painting somehow inserted into the brutal landscape of the late-twentieth-century city. But there it was, so ordinary and obviously real that your conscious mind didn’t even take that much notice of it,... Or the experience life sometimes affords of great trees, trees that have somehow survived the sprawling of the human city around them but only rarely display their majesty, their near-immortality, in a way you can really see. The river I saw was the river as it was meant to be—or as close as we would let it get to that.
• the Texans called pill bugs or roly-polies... terrestrial crustaceans.
• I was a crummy fisherman but a natural born wanderer, with an innate sense of direction and an urge to find my own shortcuts to nowhere. We started to go out into the world together to see what we could find,
• We started going on weekend campouts, almost always at one of the Highland Lakes upriver from Austin, made from the series of dams that trapped the natural flows of the Colorado for flood control and power generation.
• * the thickly wooded side channels just off the spillway, where the bird life was vital. One Saturday morning we spotted a pileated woodpecker in that Anthropocene delta, which felt like finding a creature of legend, then pulled our canoe up on the far side of an island and explored the woods around a suburban water facility. There we found a powerful totem—a deer skull next to an empty can of Budweiser—that captured the essence of the wild city we were learning to find.
• where at nighttime anything goes, because the zone under the highway is within the jurisdiction of the state transportation department and therefore mostly ignored by the local police.
• we went out with a copy of Fred Alsop’s Birds of Texas and compared the multitude of species below the dam with the much smaller selection above.
• * Des Moines: But when you leave the city for the country on a beautiful summer day, seeking the wild that should be there, you find a place where everything is green but nothing seems really alive. A place where the beautifully rich soil made by glacier and prairie has been brought entirely under the plow, the marshlands have been filled, and the forests have mostly been cut... The Midwestern city, ironically, was the best place to find wild nature in that region.
• a summer guide at Aspen’s Maroon Bells told me that the North American beaver only became nocturnal after French and English trappers showed up. I don’t know if that’s true, but it tells several different truths about the American landscape and what it hides.
• When you walk where the land tells you to go, right through the often-invisible boundaries we erect to partition it, you can almost feel what it would be like to truly be free, even if you might also be hungry.
• There was a connection between that idealized pastoral world of our great-grandparents and the dark malaise lurking behind the artificial smiles of the hardworking people who filled the city’s office buildings and staffed its stores. A connection between agriculture, the absence of real nature, and the soulless drudgery of labor and urban life.
• The cult of Demeter: We have linguistic evidence, commonalities in names across different cultures that suggest a migration of gods that came with the migration or interaction of peoples. The record is free, in a way, for the intuitive divination of story. By the classical era, we know the basics of what the Mysteries involved: a procession from Athens along the ten-mile route to Eleusis. The participants wore garlands of myrtle and carried bundles over their shoulders at the end of long, thin sticks,
• Author Marta Vannucci speculated that Demeter, with a different name, must have been a historical person who came to Attica in the seventh or sixth century BCE from the matriarchal cultures of southern India, carrying with her the secrets of hexaploid wheat, the grain from which bread is made. Vannucci’s article appeared in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, a journal so obscure that when I found it, I wondered if it might be a Borgesian fiction implanted deep in JSTOR... The secrets of Eleusis, Vannucci contended, were all about the transmission of that knowledge of how to control the reproduction of plants capable of feeding large human populations... What none of these latter-day students of the Eleusinian Mysteries interrogate is whether the bargain with Demeter was a good deal.
• Everything alive, but somehow lifeless.
• * 2017 book Against the Grain: The earliest permanent human settlements, he evidences, were around biodiverse wetlands where otherwise nomadic bands of human beings found they could get everything they could want throughout the four seasons. These bands typically numbered no more than 150 persons and had little in the way of leadership hierarchies or occupational specializations... Relatively quickly, the value of cereal grains became evident—a food source that was easily manipulated, could be stored for long periods of time without spoiling, and could be used to make all sorts of more complex, pleasing, and versatile foods. These qualities also made grains function well as a store of value... With these accumulated surpluses came the need to control and protect them, to manage their accumulation and distribution, and to ensure their continued production and renewal. These needs, Scott cogently argues, led to the formation of the first systems of state power. And with that power came the idea of labor—of the state developing means to compel people to contribute to the production of surplus. The city-states... were militarized zones of new economic power that had to enslave their neighbors to provide the labor needed to work the fields,
• * As a species, the production and accumulation of more than you need is a masterful strategy for survival and advancement. But it has a design flaw. There can never be too much,... This way of living creates systems of power designed to enslave us and the entire world on which we live. The system is founded, at its essence, on control over the reproduction of others: plants, animals, and even people, as our daily debates about reproductive rights show. The only life it really values is that of the people in control.
• Even the most imaginative science fiction writers would find it challenging to envision a human society that had developed without agriculture, without the bureaucratic systems it engendered to count the accumulated wealth—the original reason we developed mathematics and written language.
• Standing in the river: A feeling that the separation I had always felt between me and other life that surrounds us had been dissolved and we were all part of the same thing, like nodes in a network or currents in the river. A momentary but indisputably real sense of ascension beyond the alienated ego, a oneness with what a more religious person would call the divine. It didn’t take my inner pain away, but it put it in perspective, connecting it with all the pains and rewards and cycles of life in the world around us.
• * Sometimes at rush hour in East Austin, I see a great blue heron flying home for the evening over the congested traffic of the city as I’m driving home. A big bird, almost too big to fly, moving with the motion of a slower world through a different dimension of time, giving the lines of cars lined up at the light a glimpse of natural grace we don’t really deserve and mostly don’t notice.
• You could walk down and stand in the busted-up parking lot, look over the edge above the decades’ worth of trash, and find yourself staring at an unlikely sight: five great blue herons in treetop nests the size of beanbag chairs, primping and socializing with the awkward grace of scaly stick-figure legs, feathered serpent necks, and wings that could wrap a human... the dam that holds in Austin’s downtown lake. Called Longhorn Dam, it was once the site of the main low-water crossing of the Chisholm Trail, where cowboys would drive semiferal cattle rounded up from deserted borderlands to be sold at faraway Midwestern railheads.
• Sitting right there, hiding in plain sight a few feet from the road, the heron roost is an uncannily beautiful thing to witness, like a green branch of Eden appearing at the edge of the dystopia we made... a Quonset hut that once housed a building contractor remade into a Munich on the Colorado biergarten owned by an actual Bavarian prince...  if you believe the bird books, in truly wild conditions a heronry can number as many as 500 nests
• Coyote: The animal stopped right there, framed by the aperture of the right-of-way, and returned our gazes.
• But when they do happen—even if only once—staring into the eyes of another predator opens up the reality of the other world that exists beyond the simultaneously illusory and impenetrable barrier between human space and wild nature.
• The first case I read in law school, and one of the first cases almost all American law students read, is about how foxes have no rights in the eyes of the law, and no real legal existence until they can be made into the personal property of a human being... The legal issue in Pierson v. Post
• The word “waste” is deeply tied up with our conceptions of the land... Dig deeper and you will find all sorts of folkloric and mythological representations of the wasteland, from the pre-Christian stories of damaged monarchs and cursed countries that lurked behind the Grail legends and still echo through our culture,.. The wasteland is the land from which human beings can extract no value to sustain their lives. It is always there in stories, if sometimes only in the negative space of the narrative. It is there in the void on the other side of Genesis and, in a way, in Eden.
• The American edgelands are different than the postindustrial peripheries of London, Bristol, and Birmingham, in part because the imprint of production agriculture and big industry on our landscape is so much more recent. When you stop mowing an American lot, there’s a good chance some of the plants that were there before we got here will start to come back up.
• Taxonomy can be the enemy of wonder, and sometimes of survival. To describe such places with human language, or to mark them on the map, is a sure way to endanger them. But learning to see such places in the landscape of our own hometowns enables us to visualize the very different world that could be, if we could learn to value them for their emptiness—which is not really emptiness, but the absence of us.
• sensitive briar: Mimosa microphylla, is sometimes called “shame vine”: The flowers are no bigger than one of your fingernails, but if you adjust the aperture of your perception to properly take them in, you’ll see little balls of fuschia petals, each of which terminates in a node of bright yellow sunshine.
• * The early bloomers come as early as February, especially evening primrose, a delicate pink cup of a flower that is as hard to grow on purpose as it is persistent in edgeland conditions. The primrose is usually the first of the full-sun wildflowers to show its colors, before the big wave comes, with bluebonnets and flowers we mostly know by the sometimes unfortunate and revealing names the Anglo settlers gave them: the orange-and-red fire wheel explosions of Indian blanket; the yellow-and-brown petals and cone-like stamen of Mexican hat; the bright red bracts of Indian paintbrush; the deep maroon unfoldings of winecup; the green-to-white-to-purple cascade of horsemint... and the astonishing white-to-pink architecture of bee blossom
• In his book-length essay On the Natural History of Destruction, German novelist W. G. Sebald documented the remarkable ways in which the aerial bombardments of German and English cities in World War II effected an unlikely rewilding of the urbanized landscape, as wild plants quickly appeared in the bombed-out quarters of the cities.
• a damaged hackberry tree had been transformed into a magical portal. In the space where the already bent tree had split, such that one of the main branches drew the third side of a triangle between trunk and forest floor, thick lengths of mustang vine had been elegantly woven into a whirlpool of wood that defined the resulting aperture and created, at its center, a perfect circle. A work of anonymous land art, so sympathetically tuned into that place that it was as if some lost druid was at work down there behind the factories.
• Walking as meditation, a practice that lets you think with the insight of the dreaming mind and lets you see things normally hidden in plain sight.
• J. G. Ballard’s 1970s novels that explored the same kinds of landscapes I had started to gravitate toward—exurban frontage roads, concrete islands, and inner-city empty lots—reframing them through a science-fictional prism, with the ingenious conceit that “Earth is the alien planet.”
• “Psychogeography”: the jargon of Debord and his fellow Situationists encoded a simple and universal idea worth wrestling with: how the physical places we go in our lives make us feel. Looking for fresh means to resist the ways the mercantile city wants to regulate your movement to serve its appetites,
• stepping off the sidewalk, going through the fence, to see how the city also hides the natural world it works so hard to erase... You can find a way free from the prison of the self, and feel your place as part of an interconnected network of life. Or at least of the wonder that exists beyond human self-absorption.
• Urban tracker: the ways of the tracker, hiding in a nature blind of his own making, exploring barefoot, mastering the narrative art of reading the land... an inventory of wildlife along the urban edges of the Balcones Escarpment, especially interested in sandy landscapes where the tracks are well-preserved... He showed the kids how to follow the tunnels with their arms. Then he told how he had gotten good enough, with patient practice, to be able to track and catch a vole by hand.
• * the basic rule Chance imparted for how to see more clearly in the woods, by always scanning an imaginary horizon line around you as you move through the landscape, because that is the distance at which most animals will let you see them.
• The boundary between human space and wild space is permeable—and mostly illusory—on a planet of sprawl... One-third of Americans make their homes in an area that is half covered with wild foliage, or within a short walk from an area that is more than 75 percent wild foliage.
• These zones have acquired an official name in recent decades, the Wildland-Urban Interface, but the term is rarely used outside of the invisible literature of fire prevention. The “WUI” (usually pronounced “woo-ee”) is where the wildfires working to make the western states uninsurable occur. That association with property damage may be why the acronym carries a clinical taint of Orwellian negativity—so successfully avoiding any evocation of the uncanny wonder wild urban places produce that you might reasonably suspect it was designed to name them as an essential predicate to their eradication.
• We sometimes even pave entire rivers, as in Los Angeles, or bury them under the pavement, as in Hartford... Creeks and river channels are the most reliable places to find wild vegetation in the city—whether weedy brush or more substantial tree cover—and to find wild animals
• * Many of our rights-of-way follow older and often more natural pathways. Broadway in Manhattan was once the Wickquasgeck trail that connected the Indigenous settlements of the island. Highways commonly follow the routes of old pioneer trails that were formerly trails of Indigenous Peoples and often have deeper origins as animal trails, like the old highway between Detroit and Chicago that was once the migratory trackway of mastodons. The main trunks most Internet traffic in the United States travels on are cables buried along old rail lines, which themselves follow some of the most ancient routeways cut into the landscape of the continent by eons of geological development and wild nature’s adaptation to it.
• Cottonwoods thrive in the ravines behind the industrial park, where the drainage pipes empty the effluent of the city. They are prodigious trees, each producing as many as 40 million seeds and growing as much as fifteen feet a year. The drainpipes’ delivery of occasional bursts of huge amounts of water lets them rise above the valley to the height of the buildings above, 100 feet or more, where their twin-toned leaves can dapple the light and quiet the world with even the mildest breeze.
• Walking regularly in woods like that... I’ve experienced how our senses are highly evolved to do things we rarely do. To sense animal motion around us, mostly with our eyes and ears, though sometimes our nose also helps.
• a community of coywolves was discovered living in the edgelands of Galveston, lurking around run-down apartment buildings near the beachfront dunes, one-third of their genetic material that of the red wolf. A survival strategy that has worked, even if it shows how marginal and tenuous their existence is... holding out in tiny bands of survivors whose way of living tells the story of how colonization works from a different vantage than we often witness.
• * I remember it was red and the size of blueberries. The perfect size for those birds, who, to my amazement, were passing fruits to each other, beak to beak, in a display of avian social grace I had never before witnessed. And the birds’ plumage was as beautiful as their behavior: sleek, the feathers as streamlined in their layered attachment to the body as a work of fine porcelain... The coloration was almost airbrushed: edgy pastels of lemony yellows and powdery browns with a black pulp-hero mask across the eyes, framed in bright white. And those astonishing spots on the secondary feathers of the wings that gave the species its common name—bright red dollops that looked every bit like drops from the wax seals that bound the ancient contracts
• Moments like that slow time and burrow in. Moments of passive communion with wild nature, in which you almost stop actively thinking and are just present.
• The crab apple tree:  a deep connection to pagan English culture, the “sour-apple-of-the-wood” that appears in the 1000-year-old invocation to Wotan known as the Nine Herbs Charm.
• The idea of ownership—an abstract right separate and apart from the land itself and the duties of its care, production, and protection—did not emerge until the end of the medieval era, around the same time as the movement toward the enclosure of land took hold early in the sixteenth century.
• The enclosure movement... That was also the period of the settlement of New England, and the laws and modes of relating to the land came over with the Puritan colonists. Theirs was a mix of private and communal property,... The commons in both regions were used for free-range animal husbandry—cattle and sheep in Mexico, cattle and hogs in Colonial America. That use of the commons, ironically, was the principal means whereby Indigenous Peoples, who had their own territorial dominions that usually included some low-impact agricultural use, were dispossessed. The interzone between colonial space and Indigenous space functioned as a kind of shared commons at the outset. But the pastoral monoculture that came from the open grazing of cattle, sheep, and hogs led to rapid ecological destruction
• The bois d’arcs: those thorned, viny branches: that the tree was used by early settlers as the original barbed wire. They trained it to fortify hedgerows and to build natural fences and livestock pens.
• * I learned that a more accurate name for Osage orange would be Mastodon Cheeto... The seeds are a living remnant of those majestic, extinct animals, in the way a key can be a remnant of the door it once opened, even if the door is long gone.
• Where the creeks cut through the soil with every flood, you can sometimes find the teeth of dinosaur sharks that swam those waters. Becoming familiar with the layers of time visible in the landscape around you, you develop a different sense of the now. Maybe the ancient river helps trigger it, in the way it embodies deep time... Finding such artifacts of the people who once lived here lets you feel their presence in a very real way.
• deer carcass: And I couldn’t get it out of my head, at the nexus of empathy, imagination, and shock. The knowledge that it was still out there, stuck in that position of total indignity, complete corporal violation... Only much later did I really digest the fact that the municipal government has a Department of Dead Animal Collection. <> Of course it does. The city is a machine that sits on top of wild nature, and every edge where they intersect is also a wound,
• Chiltepín: The discovery that the weedy little fruit that comes back every year in the unmowed edgelands behind the factories is the ur-pepper of the Americas, an ancient form of life that precedes our intervention, was a rare and wondrous gift.
• Much of our thinking about how to correct our currently disastrous climate trajectory is tied up with Restorationist Romanticism. The dream of Arcadia, of the idealized wild world that preceded permanent human settlement into city-states, echoes in our yearning for ecotopian possibility. We codify it in our policing of native versus invasive species and in our conservation strategies that focus on setting aside large swaths of land protected from active human use.
• Radagast the Brown, the nature-loving wizard Tolkien invented in his world-building but couldn’t find a place for in the story, because the character knew how to stay away from the human drama.
• * Urbanized birds of a southern clime, whose obnoxious charisma I couldn’t help but appreciate—especially when they stole someone’s French fry or tortilla chip.
• The idea of solitude in nature stands large in the romantic imagination. Not just in the West—I remember being struck as a high school student by the commonalities between Chinese paintings of small, solitary human figures in vast and wondrous landscapes
• pursuit of solitude in nature would obliterate the very idea of solitude, exposing it for the Cartesian delusion it is, a conjuring of language and the objectified self that the deprivation of human company can help you see through. <> What we experience, alone in nature, is the opposite of solitude: the revelation of our connection and community with the nonhuman life and animate elemental energy that surrounds us, infuses us, and is us.
• A tension emerges in that generation between two competing imperatives: the instrumentalist belief that the land is there for our sustenance, and that to fail to put it to work is a species of moral failure, a sin of waste; and the intuitive appreciation of the beauty of untamed nature and biodiversity, where true life can be found, from which springs the urge to preserve and restore what wilderness we can. These competing urges remain unresolved and ever in conflict in the American landscape, and in our own lives.
• the Treaty Oak, after lore passed down from the early settlers that the tree is where the Comanche and Tonkawa would hold their war and peace councils,
• allow ourselves to see how much we have ravaged the whole world to make it serve us, razing entire ecosystems, sometimes covering up the scars with manufactured landscapes designed to simulate nature without actually letting it in. Most of us can’t see that truth, if we want to get through the day. We learn to filter it out, along with all the other everyday horrors and injustices we numb ourselves to. The choice to see is also a choice to feel the pain.
• When I saw the pipeline site, I saw, against conventional wisdom, how it could be a homesite. Maybe even the most beautiful homesite you could find, if you approached it as a portal to the urban wild. As a science fiction writer, I had learned the power of narrative as laboratory, in which you can safely explore speculative permutations of the possible. This seemingly unbuildable empty lot was an opportunity for a kind of applied science fiction,
• The first wave of home mortgages, which were provided by insurance companies, were typically limited to 50 percent of the property value and a three- to five-year term with a big balloon payment at the end. Massive foreclosures resulted, leading to massive federal intervention. When the New Deal government put in place institutions to stabilize this, buying the first million defaulted mortgages, the fifteen- or thirty-year mortgage backed by insurance became the standard. Soon, in the era that followed World War II, home ownership became a middle-class entitlement.
• The modern financial model of home ownership in the United States is one of the most effective machines for the manipulation of human behavior ever invented... Ecologically, it abstracts our homes from the land, and makes it very hard for people to finance the construction of homes that innovate greener design. Economically, by tying our living place to our labor, it produces a neofeudal system of tenure well adapted to consumer capitalism,... In a nation unique for the easy availability of land over the course of three centuries, the evolution of mortgage financing has enabled a landscape of sprawling suburbia,
• In 2015, I-35 was declared the “Monarch Highway”—a zone in which six states agreed to collaboratively seed native wildflowers that would aid the eastern monarchs and other butterflies who have long followed the highway’s approximate pathway on their way south to forests north of Mexico City
• cardinal nest: how complex the construction was, with multiple layers of varying materials woven into a snug little bowl you could hold in the palm of your hand. The core structure was made from seemingly endless spools of long, thin stems of dried-out tall grass. Inside that, a layer of clear plastic that seemed to have been crumpled up by a human hand and then flattened by a boot or a tire, printed with bits of blue ink, one piece with the letters T-EXHAUST. Another layer of wider blades of grass, maybe inland sea oats. A fourth layer of white paper that looked to have once been wet and unfolded to reveal a thermal printer pharmacy receipt
• * I learned scientists had deduced that harvester ants control the comings and goings of their foragers using a method that is mathematically identical to TCP/IP, the protocol that regulates the packet switching of data on our modern digital networks. The number of new foragers sent out by the colony is directly regulated by the number coming back with food.
• When the harvester ants reappeared at the top of our stairs in the first warm season after we finished construction, it was a sign we might succeed in our crazy goal: to build a home that also provided a home for the other species that did or could live there. One where we could coexist without too much discomfort.
• The people who urge the strictest policing of invasives often, it has been my impression, do so in a way that is wrapped up with conceptions of social class and the weird way that gets expressed in supposedly classless American culture. The way it is so often highly educated middle-class white people advocating the doctrines of ecological purity makes it feel sometimes as if the eugenics many of our grandparents and great-grandparents advocated for the human race got transferred to the plants that we live around... To me the real problem with “introduced species” is when conditions allow them to crowd out the natives... They limit biodiversity at the base of the food chain, and when you change that, the benefits are immediate, profound, and wondrous.
• * The only solution, when that happens, is to start over, resolarizing the soil under plastic; or deploying the technology Indigenous Peoples used when they wanted to dial up the biodiversity of the land on which they lived: fire.
• Urban farming: That is not to deny how essential agriculture is to the rich lives we lead, nor the joys that come from tending one’s own garden and eating food you have grown from the dirt where you live. It is to interrogate whether the practice of it really brings you closer to nature, or just to a greener variant of human instrumentalism.
• Megaphasma dentricus: these walkingstick bugs are most often seen with the diminutive male on the back of the female, usually for many days, as the insecure inseminators try to block any potential competitors long after the main work has been done.
• Or you might find yourself in the weirdly quiet yet mechanically humming everyday dystopia of the municipal infrastructure facility, whose fence you can somehow end up inside of without ever crossing a barrier.
• you see history unfolding before your eyes, in the backlots of American reality and in the vignettes that accrete as you move through the world, planting in your memory with an object permanence similar to the way the wildlife encounters stick. A black limousine motorcade with police and Secret Service escort roaring down the boulevard. Riders on horseback traversing the concrete desert. A mariachi at rest, carrying his big guitar and waiting for the bus.
• * The animals that love the twenty-first-century city best may be the vultures... defecating and sometimes puking on themselves to keep cool in the concrete heat of the Anthropocene landscape... you might be able to see that the first thing they eat is the eyes. Then you can witness their design for disembowelment: how they use their entire heads and necks to insert themselves through the hole where the skin stretches tight across the abdomen, using that hooked node at the end of their beak to pull out the long, soft organ tissues inside.
• the seeming ubiquity of vultures in the American landscape is directly related to our highways and roads—the roadkill they generate and the way our paving of the land generates intense thermal updrafts the vultures can ride all day long.
• we live in a system that ties your right to live in your home to your labor just as effectively as did the feudal system it purports to have replaced.
• “There’s always a grieving process,” said Austin’s preeminent lawyer for real estate developers,... There’s always a grieving process, but for you, not for him. A process that becomes more complicated as you reckon with your own role in the change you see around you.
• * It’s a strange process, whereby you ruin a place by moving to it. The term “gentrification” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s colonization. No matter how ethically you try to do it—even if you undertake the crazy idea of doing it in a way that amps up the wildness rather than domesticating and destroying it.
• Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to describe the emotional pain we feel as we witness the deterioration of our natural environment. It’s a more precise and powerful neologism than terms like “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief,” because of the way it roots the feeling in the homesickness you feel for the place you live, as it slowly and frighteningly degrades before your eyes, and you come to sense more clearly where it is going, and your limited power to influence that outcome.
• The group of people behind the murals were originally known as the Red Guards, a movement with affiliates around the country—from Los Angeles to Kansas City to Pittsburgh—that started in Austin. The Austin Red Guards were said to have disbanded at the end of 2018, according to Wikipedia. Then I saw them on a Saturday afternoon in January 2019, operating under the new name of Defend Our Hoodz,
• like some borderland variation on The Bonfire of the Vanities: liberal, highly educated white folks trying to do something self-expressive and cool with their talents and money and the world they find themselves in, confronted with the uncomfortable truth that they are agents of what we call gentrification, but is really just the twenty-first-century continuation of the colonization of the Americas by European settlers.
• And in Texas, the idea of the right of revolt, coupled with the right to bear arms and the right to occupy and exploit this land, is so integral to the way of thinking and the existence of the state that they mandate its teaching to all fifth graders—and, just to make sure it sticks, a second time around for all seventh graders. They call it Texas History,
• * In the way nature reframed my experience of the city, and blurred the barriers between the two, I started to see how the social and economic injustices that characterize contemporary American life are rooted in the damaged relationship we have with the land on which we live. Slavery and its legacies, the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous Peoples, wealth inequality, imperial war, borders, and the use of force by the state were all tied up with the systems whereby society extracts surplus from the Earth to maintain human dominance and prosperity.
• * The case of Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh was decided in 1823 by the US Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by Chief Justice Marshall, one of the vaunted founders of American jurisprudence all law students learn about, creator of the doctrine of judicial review that is at the heart of our constitutional system. In Johnson v. McIntosh, the court was faced with the question of who owned much of the land that became Illinois and Indiana: the developers who had bought it from the tribes who once occupied that land, or the other developers who later bought it from the US government. After a lengthy and elegiac discussion of the self-evident sovereignty of the Indigenous nations and their freedom to contract regarding the property they clearly owned by the standards of Anglo-American property law, Marshall acknowledges the pragmatic reality that must trump the result that legal reason would otherwise compel: “Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.” All property, in other words, is really grounded in theft. And the legal system, behind the black robes and statues of blind justice, is really a mechanism for the legitimization and perpetuation of that theft,
• When Tesla announced its new plant downriver, just outside the city limits, we were able—after a lot of work—to get the company to the table and lay out plans to restore the riparian portion of their land, as the company’s CEO had declared he would do, only to show no follow-through.
• The more we achieved, the more you could see how small the victories were and how rigged the game is. You can rarely stop a bad project.. The members of the City Council and all their appointed boards were, and are, dominated by people funded by real estate interests
• * Municipal governments—as you learn if you try to influence their decisions—do not function like democracies. They function like quasi-public companies, because that’s really what they are in the law: municipal corporations chartered by the state to govern local land use, infrastructure, and public safety.
• we ultimately live at the mercy of nature. And it always has the capacity to reduce us to primitive efforts at mediating its temper through sympathetic magic. <> It is said that the popular children’s rhyme eeny meeny miny mo, the ubiquitous sorting game, was passed down to us from ancient Wales, where it was used to choose which child would be pulled from the group for the druidic sacrifices designed to appease nature and keep the rest of us alive.
• Real change comes through collective action—through the chorus of the community, however dissonant it may be—not through the voice of a single speaker, however well-spoken or persuasive they may be.
• * But when we got to the hearing, after all the people who had missed work to come down to testify were done with their speeches, we found out our representative had been silenced. The developer had managed that by entering into an agreement to provide certain community benefits with a housing nonprofit the council member had worked for before his election, thereby creating a conflict of interest that precluded him from voting on the matter. A clever and ethically astonishing maneuver that succeeded in disenfranchising all the residents of a district designed to represent the oldest Hispanic neighborhoods in town. No one on the council blinked,
• Quincy MA: Thomas Morton, a lawyer and trader who had taken over his company of early American entrepreneurs after encouraging the indentured servants to rise up against their boss. Morton advocated a different approach to intercourse with the American continent—a hunter who loved the wilderness more than feared it, built relationships with the Indians more like the French trappers, and, most heretically, armed them with guns, in part to secure superior trade. He managed, through his success at cultivating his vision, to piss off the Pilgrims so badly that they dispatched Myles Standish to cut down the maypole, disband the colony, and arrest Morton and ship him back to England. As retribution, Morton got the Plymouth colony’s charter revoked and wrote a popular book ridiculing the Puritans
• Maybe we can trade it for some of the other surplus we are so blindly squandering, like the three-quarters of the Earth’s fresh water stored in our rapidly melting glaciers and the groundwater we have sucked up so fast it has changed the tilt of the Earth.
• Bats: realize how ephemeral their current presence is, as photographers and conservationists who have been watching them since the beginning report that their emergences get shorter every year—a fifth now of what they once were.