Eggshell Violation

Our two chickens have been laying about an egg a day. We got them as pullets from the feed store Callahan's: a Barred Plymouth Rock named Sal and a golden girl--maybe an Orpington?--we call Mango. Lately Sal runs around with two roosters and a rogue black hen who appeared in the spring and has taken to laying her eggs in our coop. Sal and Mango lay brown eggs, but this hen's are a beautiful blue. Mango got broody on her nest all day. Those six eggs must be fertile. I mark them with pencil so I can harvest the newly laid ones.

We spoil the hens and ourselves with organic feed, about three times more expensive than conventional, but the eggs taste three times better, their luminous amber yolk so bright.  The hens leave craters in the gravel scratching for seeds and insects like earthworms and fleas with their microscope eyes. They help themselves to whatever garden greens they can peck through the fence, hopping up to pluck snow peas. Lamb's quarters and other seedlings that volunteer around the yard in spring become wild sprout salad. Penned chickens are lawnmowers, decimating groundcover like goats.

For years we've put our cracked eggshells in the garden by the sidewalk as an interesting pattern among the pansies, snapdragons, and bamboo shoots. People say the shells make earthworms happy. They take a year to decompose. One morning right after the first Austin Art Yard Tour I'm up front watering and a Code Enforcement truck pulls up. The officer snaps some pictures of our yard and asks about the eggshells. He is inspecting some of the art yards for potential violations, and he's very friendly and smiling. Scott Stevens, who organizes the annual tour with Robert Mace, said they got a call from Code the day before tour weekend asking if they had a permit for the event. No, it is very informal and many of the sites are just drive by. The officer asks me, "Is this all there is--just the front yard?" Yes, just hundreds of egg shells in the garden and thousands of bottle caps strung up as garlands, stars, moons, and chains on the front of the house. (Never mind the museum inside.)

City councils work with code departments to set up ordinances that regulate whether or not having chickens is permissible in your city. Austin has lax laws about urban livestock. There's even an annual Funky Chicken Coop Tour. "Are you interested in raising chickens? Do you need coop design ideas? Do you enjoy talkin' chicken w/folks? Do you want to show your kiddo's where eggs actually come from? Do you own chickens now and need a few new ideas to spruce up their coop?" Chicken coops are unpermitted structures improvised out of chicken wire and often resused wood. Some are mobile and you can mow your yard by moving them about once a week. Coops must be fortified against predators like racoons, possums, and dogs, making them one part prison, one part fortress.

The main arguments against backyard chickens are noise and poop. Neighbors driven insane by 3AM rooster crows. Allegations that chicken poop runoff is eutrophying urban creeks with phosphorous. These kinds of complaints are also leveled against dogs, but imagine if your city said "No more dogs allowed--you will be ticketed if you have one, and the dog will be euthanized." More annoying to me is when the neighbor's chicks scratch in our food patch, its fence mesh just big enough for them to squeeze through. Now a layer of expensive chicken wire keeps them out. An inch gap at ground level lets gulf coast toads slip beneath the screen when the hens try to eat them.

Backyard eggs are food security, easy high protein, sustainable food so local you step in chicken poop. Chickens are at the center of new markets in chicken stuff (prefab coops, feed, even chicken diapers for indoor fowl), and all kinds of little communities of chicken people gather around them to enjoy the birds, trade tips, or mobilize for a common cause like revising city code. Every few months the New York Times runs an article on the "backyard chicken trend [sweeping] the country," sometimes chalking it up to the 2009 recession and desires for Depression-era self-reliance.

The eggs/unborn lives are part of an omnivourous whirlwind of consumption going on in the landscape patch. Like the compost pile, the chickens eat pretty much every living thing, but prefer scraps from our plates. As vegetarians, we eat their eggs and poop (via compost pile via garden bed via vegetables), but not them. But everybody else wants to eat them. We have lost five hens to animals and only one to sickness. A little massacre--a dog or something broke into the back of the first coop I built and tore apart all three hens. Then the neighbor's dog caught Aya, a golden rogue hen we adopted and tamed, and she died on a little bed of hay from a punctured lung or broken neck. Sometimes I forget to coop the hens and one morning find just feathers around the yard and our second hen in the fig tree--probably a raccoon. She never got over the shock, caught some kind of virus, and withered away.

Our neighboors across the alley don't coop their chickens, and we're never quite sure which of the free roaming hens and roosters belong to them, and which are rogue. At dusk the birds gather in the hackberry branches clucking to each other in a rural refrain. The roosters crows day and night, with their glossy regalia of white, umber, and iridescent blue-black intensities. In Miami, free roaming and feral chicken populations become so large--"numbering in the thousands"--that Code Enforcement officers and firefighters dedicate time each month to rounding them up. "Captured chickens are sold to farms in Homestead and the proceeds go to charities in the City (including the Mayor’s Holiday Celebration)." So far they've raised over ten thousand dollars.

In February all six eggs hatch. The chicks hide under Mango's hot, fluffy body. One is blonde with two brown stripes down its back, and the others are black with white spots. Like magic our two hens trippled themselves. In a few months we'll know if the babies are hens or roosters.

Sometimes in the backyard I lapse into a naive state where I'm struck by the oddity of chicken money--buying and selling life itself. You can order chicks online for around $3 each. Then the market logic settles on me again. Of course you can buy chicks--you can buy chicken meat raw or cooked. The chicken factories chug away with their industrial egg and broiler machines all across the southern US. Seeking more flexible low-wage labor to supplement a largely African American workforce,  they now hire migrant laborers from Central and South America.* The broilers with burned off beaks are commodity life forms bred and engineered into being. So different from raising chickens yourself, the chores of provisioning them and cleaning out the coop, the responsibility for your food/pet, killing and plucking and eating the birds, or burying them when they die--the living commodity organizes parts of your life's textures and feelings in a complex relationship, adding to your qualia of life.

I crack our hens' unfertilized chicks into a bowl and whip with a fork to make breakfast tacos in the skillet. The shells go in an old plastic yoghurt container so we can later put them in the garden.

2012

*Angela C. Stuesse, "Poultry Processing, People's Politics: Industrial Restructuring and Organizing across Difference in a Transnational Mississippi," In Mexican Immigration to the U.S. Southeast: Impact and Challenges. Mary E. Odem & Elaine Cantrell Lacy, eds. Atlanta: Instituto de México, 2005. http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/members/congress-papers/lasa2004/files/StuesseAngela_xCD.pdf

The Once White House

Maybe when it was first built it was bright white. Now the little house in our backyard has chipping paint, burn marks, wasp nests. Leaves from yard plants stenciled in green spraypaint overgrow one corner. The building is a construction in decomposition, the original structure cut apart and added to in layers. The tacked-on bathroom's tub pipe snaps one night and floods the yard. We cap the water main and lug the tub to the front courtyard as a pond. The once white house could be made livable again, but most people would just tear it down and start over, send the house to the landfill. The wood floor pitches like a funhouse. Two tiny rooms under the leaky roof glow with potential, waiting to be lived in or gussied up as a micro-tourist destination. Maybe we could transform it into the Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata's new space for community exhibitions (since we're turning the old space in our house into a bedroom). Or fortify the structure and add a roof garden.

Did the house's first, tiny incarnation--before its last owners extended both its ends, doubling its floor space--have a bathroom and kitchen at all? It must have, since there's a sewer main. Across the yard concrete steps lead nowhere and a sewer pipe opens to the underworld, traces of another little building that got struck by lightning and burned. Small houses like these dot east Austin. They are being torn down one by one, or refurbished, additioned. Their abscences trace changing habitation patterns of extended families in humble houses giving way to McMansions, shifts in racial demographics that fit familiar gentrification stories. The pair of backyard bungalows were added by the family that bought our house when it was new in 1950--part of the Chestnut neighborhood constructed for segregated Austin's growing Black middle class--when their son returned from the war. The Hispanic family who bought the property in the 80s concreted over the front yard rose garden to make a courtyard, planted fig trees, and modified the bungalows as well as the main house, extending its kitchen and adding a bathroom and an odd, narrow bedroom with rough plank floors.

Their handmade additions are cobbled out of wood and fixtures from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. The corners don't quite meet at right angles. They did the wiring and plumbing, too. They knew how to make do. This capacity to make things like housing work without means has long been racialized and maligned as underclass. Hispanic improvisations are derided as rasquache--cheap, ghetto, bootleg. Use of the censored saying “n-word rigging” persists in online rants, trade unions, and even among public council representatives.* Poor whites improvise "hillbilly fixes"** or "white trash repairs,"phrases that mix derision with amusement or even endearment. These terms point to improvisation as something those people do. In this pejorative mode, improvised engineering and construction practices take on the qualities of a bad aesthetic style by which middle class or licensed experts (racially) differentiate themselves.

But the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and self-reliance behind improvisation can become a point of pride. Rasquachismo is an aesthetic sensibility celebrated as a style in both domestic interiors and homemade shrines, as well as the high art world. "In its broadest sense, it is a combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity. The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors."*** Self-taught arts of making do circulate in wider publics and the formal economy not only as bad examples or failures, but as a particular kind of rough beauty.  Lovingly repurposed and repaired things can become valorized as "outsider art" or "vernacular architecture" and marketed as do-it-yourself. Their idiomatic singularity expresses a learning process and a way of living outside of the standardized, routinized, and formalized.

Making and repairing houses in the rasquache mode might not always be permited and up to code. Structures are never finished, always in process. Buildings might take form by the grace of cast-offs and decay, an urban waste stream of construction debris that only comes into being because something else was torn down. But these informal ways and means are held together by something new like wires, nails, 2x4s, concrete, or duct tape, relying on Home Despot-style do-it-yourself supply retail stores. 

While retail workers in the formal economy wait smiling at their registers to fill the informal architect's needs, code inspectors at municipal regulatory departments wait by their phones for call-in violations. "My neighbor's building some kind of second story on this old house in his backyard. Looks like he's gardening up there." When Dan Phillips first started building small houses out of recycled and salvaged materials in Huntsville, the code inspectors scratched their heads. His methods are experimental, trying things that have never been done, learning what materials and trash can do, assembling landfills into housing: wine bottle cork floors, bathtubs and towers of caulked 2x4 stubs, glass dinner plate windows, license plate shingles! 

The mission of Dan's design/build company Phoenix Commotion is to construct "aftermarket housing" out of scavenged materials, catering to "single parents, artists, and families with low incomes." By hiring "unskilled laborers at minimum wage," he trains apprentices in all aspects of construction so they can move on with marketable skills. This tactic, along with using free and recycled materials, keeps costs low for an affordable mortgage. Working with Houston's Code Department, Dan helped to pass "Appendix R," a set of guidlines that formalizes the use of recycled materials in code compliant construction.  He hopes it will "be a model of how large metropolitan areas can respond to the social issues of affordable housing and overburdened landfills" (and resource depletion, high unemployment and foreclosure rates, and disasters that leave thousands homeless). 

When people who could afford McMansions started asking him to build their homes, Dan joked that his formalization of informal, improvisational building was "gentrifying icky." While Dan's mission is "to prove that constructing homes with recycled and salvaged materials has a viable place in the building industry," this kind of improvisational construction is the norm in shantytowns, squatter settlements, favelas, and slums in megacities like Karachi, Pakistan; Mumbai, India; São Paulo, Brazil; and Mexico City. Stewart Brand writes,**** "Squatters are now the predominant builders of cities in the world" (42), their enclaves criss-crossed with a welter of "do-it-yourself infrastructure" in the absence or abandonment of state-regulated urban services (45):

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community. To a planner's eye, squatter cities look chaotic. To my biologist's eye, they look organic. (42)

To my quack scientist imagination, they are living machines. The once white house is an atmospheric anomaly that yearns for solidarity with these informal survival modes, learns from them another way to live the good life. It is part of an urban future constructed of aftermarket materials and little, local improvisations and self-taught knowledges. The magic of the City of Living Garbage lies not in bourgoise bohemian romanticism (or not only), but instead, in an aesthetic of working within limits, doing the most with the least, finding value even in trash. Some kind of optimistic humility, learning to be happy with less in response to financial and environmental meltdowns.   

2012

*See Bass, Holly, “Union Bias: Black Members Blast Local 1110’s Record on Race,” Washington City Paper 15, no. 31 (1995), Frank Donze, “N.O. Council Ends Deal After Racial Slur: Spokeswoman Loses Her Job,” The Times-Picayune, December 15, 2006, and Jonah Owen Lamb, "Questions raised about councilman's conduct after discovery of racist e-mails," Merced Sun-Star, July 17, 2009. 

** Hartigan, John. Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1999, 102.
***Mesa-Bains, Amalia. “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache.” http://sparcmurals.
org/ucla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=129&Itemid=74 (accessed March
23, 2010).
****Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, New York and London: Viking, 2009. Thanks to Amanda Jones for my copy of this book. 

Backwaters

The water smells good, like a creek. It cascades from one cast-iron bathtub into another, then into a ground level Jacuzzi, aerating along the way. Gambusia devour mosquitoe larva while goldfish and koi eat algae. Papyrus, elephant ear, pickerelweed, duck potato, duckweed--no end to the aquatic weeds useful for remediating not-so-dirty graywater.  Every time we shower ten to twenty gallons of the Colorado River flows into this bathtub waterfall, displacing water to the peach and avacado trees and soaking into the Boggy Creek watershed that feeds back into the Colorado River. Just how big is this backyard living machine? 

To jury rig these plumbing backwaters I severed the tub's drain pipe before it joined the outgoing toilet line for the South Austin Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant. Black plastic tubing delivers tub graywater to the sunken backyard Jacuzzi. I inoculated the new ponds with bacteria-laden sludge from the kitchen wetland. Searching for aquatic plants on Craigslist, I found some floating water hyacinth indigenous to South America and water lettuce native to North Africa to spread across the pond surfaces and kick start remediation. Their feathery roots catch drifting biosolids for bacteria to metabolize, keeping algal blooms in check by eating up nutrients. Invasive elephant ear collected from Town Lake unfurl rhizomes and colonize the tubs.

That winter raccoons who lost their homes when the City buried a neighborhood creek raid the wetland and eat most of the elephant ear tubers. This gives the native arrowroot (pickerelweed) from the Rhizome Collective a chance to spread in the spring. Hummingbirds sip nectar from their arrays of bright blue flowers. Dragonflies dip eggs into the water, and the growing nymphs eat mosquito larva. In the spring, hundreds of tadpoles hatch, and fingernail-size baby toads hop out to all corners of Ephemerata Gardens. At dusk the Gulf Coast toads' trilling sounds overlay bubbling water.

DIY wetlands take form through aesthetic improvisations--hands-on encounters with things that push back and teach as they emerge, laying down patterns and habits in sensory refrains. When Nigel Thrift visited Ephemerata Gardens after giving a talk at UT, he was enthusiastic about our backwaters as a form of hopeful urban resiliance through nonstandardized “underground knowledges” of repair and maintenance.* Improvisation involves ad hoc engineering, making it up as you go along or making due with all kinds of idiomatic solutions. We talked about how the improvisations are not at all limited to what do-it-yourselfers decide to do, but also what plants, animals, and bacteria fiddle around with in the self-emmergent landscape patch. Thrift talked about the wetland as an aesthetic form--something that “generates sensory and emotional gratification” and “shared capacity and commonality”**--the pleasures of being around lively habitats, teaching people about graywater remediation, and sharing water plants by giving them away. I had to remind him that these aesthetic forms are not just all rosy, but risky, subjecting you to abject encounters with rat-tailed maggots and invisible pathogens, or the stress of wondering when the Department of Code Compliance is coming to get you.

Wastewater reuse in wetlands and urban agriculture is slowly becoming accepted by departments of code, as well as a formalized strategy in international development projects. Too many people are tapping wastewater as a more dependable water source than rain for municipalities to realistically police and enforce wastewater use prohibitions. Remediating shower water with decentralized, user-maintained systems may be riskier to public health than the big wastewater treatment plants dealing with poop-laden blackwater. But it is much cheaper, conserves energy and potable water, and delivers nutrient rich water to local crops. Despite prohibitions against using wastewater for agriculture, farmers in the global South have been informally using it for irrigation in urban farms for decades. "Urban agriculture cannot be seen separately from wastewater use."*** Efforts to formalize wastewater use focus on experimental systems that provide a basic level of treatment through screening out solids and allowing sludge to settle in basins.

An experimental constructed wetland in Cameroon treats sewage from a population of 650 people by streaming it through a series of eight lagoons. Seven of these are stocked with water lettuce that can double its biomass within a week (giving it the status of a dangerous invasive species in waterways around the world). The researchers who built the system suggested maximum phytoremediation is only achievable by removing one quarter of the plants every fifteen days. All kinds of beings are waiting to highjack this living water with their aesthetic improvisations: "Emanation of foul odours, mosquitoes and flies proliferation and appearance of aquatic snakes are some of the nuisances recorded. These problems become acute when the system is left unattended to for long periods."**** Such systems require hands-on human labor to manage the labor of plant species; but they do not require electrical energy, endless chemical inputs, machine maintenance, or massive municipal funding to be built in the first place.

A similar experiment in Dakar, Senegal (built for a half million dollars in research monies) institutes a community run and owned sewage treatment plant that uses water lettuce to produce nitrogen-rich water for irrigation of urban agriculture.***** The system utilizes a permaculture model that approaches multiple issues (public health, employment for youth and women, and water and food security) with a single integrated solution. Likewise, a development project in Palestine (built for about 200K USD) treats sewage with duckweed, a tiny floating plant with high protein content and extremely fast growth rate. The duckweed is harvested twice a week and used as feed for chickens, so that the chemical-free sewage treatment plant serves as a stable source of income.****** These experiments seek to demonstrate that probiotic sewage treatment using aquatic plants as remediation technologies--a different kind of solar power--are both epidemiologically safe and economically effective alternatives to conventional sewage infrastructure development.

Imagine floating over a city of these DIY wetlands, a graywater oasis. Self-emergent communities of people and ecological beings are puddling around wastewater. Somewhere out there, an old bathtub is waiting to become your DIY wetland!

2015

*Nigel Thrift, 2005, “But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers 30:2 (June 2005), 133–150, p.136.

**Nigel Thrift, 2010, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour.” In The Affect Theory Reader Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 289–308, p. 292.

***Mark Redwood, Wastewater Use in Urban Agriculture: Assessing Current Research and Options for Local Governments, International Development Research Centre, Cities Feeding People Reports Series (2004), p.18, http://www.bvsde.paho.org/bvsaar/fulltext/redwood.pdf.

****Fonkou, Théophile, Philip Agendia, Ives Kengne, Amougou Akoa, and Jean Nya. Potentials of water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) in domestic sewage treatment with macrophytic lagoon systems in Cameroon. Proceedings of International Symposium on Environmental Pollution Control and Waste Management, January 2002, Tunis, 709-714, p.711-12, www.geocities.jp/epcowmjp/EPCOWM2002/709-714Fonkou.pdf.

*****Niang, Seydou. "Wastewater Treatment Using Water Lettuce for Reuse in Market Gardens (Dakar)." International Development Research Centre website, web.idrc.ca/es/ev-6339-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html.

******Al Khateeb, Nader. "Duckweed Wastewater Treatment and Reuse for Fodder (West Bank)." International Development Research Centre website, web.idrc.ca/es/ev-6314-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html.

Note: Parts of this entry were first published in Scott Webel, “Free Water! DIY Wetlands and the Futures of Urban Gray Water,” Anthropology Now 3(1): 13-22.

Tublands

Of all forms of waste flowing into the City of Living Garbage, wastewater is most potentially vivacious.  Not "water" in the abstract--the concept of atoms composing a pure molecule--but this water, a liquid palace polluted or graced with living and abiotic forms, many invisible. Any H₂O can be cultivated as living water, stored up to hydrate plants. How can you have a garden without water, much less a body or anything else?

We were thinking and worrying about water all the time. Summer after summer, little catastrophes crossed the Texas sky. Not tornadoes or floods, but nothing--no rain. Austin's Lake Travis, the reservoir formed by damming the Colorado River to supply the city with water, fell over fifty feet below average levels. Trees turned brown and died. Newspapers mourned the death of six hundred thousand cattle, the inferno that burned up over a thousand houses and half of parched Bastrop State Park. The environmental group Save Our Springs sent out panicked mass-emails: "We can no longer take water for granted." Lance Armstrong apologized for using 333,000 gallons of water in a single month. The City of Austin pushed conservation by restricting automated watering to one day a week and creating a dozen new Code Compliance jobs--water cops--to enforce restrictions with $500 fines. Austinites helped police their neighbors’ water use by calling 311 if sprinklers were running on the wrong day. There were rumors if the droughts continued the City would restrict all landscape watering, unless you had a permit for a food garden.

As the drought years pried open the taken-for-granted form of urban water, its consumption took on moral tones. Simple things like fast showers became ways to do something good for both the city and “the environment.” Little differences were supposed to add up--drops that fill the bucket for the good of the collective. As with oil consumption and other environmental issues in the public sphere, a messianic, salvational ethic began to course through everyday practices, charged by ominous weather events attributed to global climate change. Suddenly the city’s water security felt vulnerable, caught in the tenuous future of apocalyptic discourses.

Following the droughts our kitchen sink stopped draining. I'd learned about DIY wetlands at the Rhizome Collective's RUST workshops and read about them in the Greywater Guerrillas' book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground,* and thought, “This is free water! Why pay the City to take it away? I can reuse it for plants, instead of the hose.” The licensed plumber couldn't fix the sink drain without replacing everything, so I asked him to just put a pipe out of the back of the house. He was dubious. Every few days for half a year, I hauled buckets of bad water from beneath the drainage pipe to a feed trough full of pea gravel and elephant ear. The plants withered and mosquito larvae infested the water. The galvanized metal tub killed the gambusia minnows introduced to eat the larvae. Rat-tailed maggots thrived; their breathing tubes tangled in the electric pump used to aerate the water, stopping it up. The bad water’s rotten-egg smell stuck to my hands after cleaning dead rat-tails from the pump. My wetlands learning curve arced through an abject realm of decaying organisms.

Eventually I installed pipes connecting sink to wetland. No more hauling buckets.  After rereading my notes from the RUST workshop about hiding the water's surface under pea gravel to stop mosquitoes from breeding, I transformed the tubland into a closed-surface system like a gastrointestinal tract. If architecture mimics human bodies and metabolic processes, the kitchen-sink tubland extends my intestines. Such cyborg living machines can be uncanny and abject, to be sure, but also fascinating, surprising, and loveable. Constructed wetlands invite species into emergent microecologies that regenerate urban ecologies. The resulting landscape patches do much more than function or survive: they tinker, bloom, and flourish. Cannas introduced from the yard explode into giant stalks with droopy orange flowers. Every day about five gallons of incoming gray water displaces remediated water to a fig tree, rose bush, and salvias with violet-blue flowers. Hummingbirds visit the salvia, and butterflies and wasps eat overripe figs on the tallest branches. As an alternative solution to wastewater management the tubland implicitly criticizes status quo sewers that unnecessarily mix human excreta with not-so-dirty water. 

Before the droughts, Austin had started building an $849 million treatment plant to draw 50 million gallons a day (mgd) from the Colorado River by 2014, assuming that the reservoir's water levels would hold. The City also tried to reduce water use by spraying pretreated  gray water on municipal lawns, giving away low-flush toilets, and offering rain-barrel rebates, paying for up to half of the big thousand gallon systems. Customers could install new toilets and rain catches with DIY skills or hire experts, thereby reducing their use of manufactured water.

To produce tapwater Austin pumps up to 285 mgd from the Colorado River to two treatment plants where it goes through technical stages of “screening, disinfection, coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, and filtration.”** The Colorado River then flows through 3,600 miles of pipes into houses, where multiple forms of bad water are produced. As soon as treated water leaves showerheads and washing machines, it becomes  gray water. In kitchen sinks and toilet bowls it turns into black water. It all muddles together in sewers as wastewater mixed with sludge: an abject collection of excreta, toxic household cleaners, pharmaceuticals, skin and hair, gold rings, and anything else that goes down the drain.

Gravity and pumps then pull Austin's wastewater through 2,600 miles of sewers to two plants that together treat 150 million gallons each day. Screens and grit basins remove trash, sticks, and stones that are trucked to landfills. Organic solids settle out as sludge in sedimentation basins. Pumps suck sludge to a biosolids management plant to be mixed with yard debris from curbside pickup. After months of composting, it is bagged and sold as DilloDirt—a product partly made of the consumer's own excrement. Meanwhile, wastewater enters aeration basins full of microorganisms that metabolize the last traces of sludge. Finally, it flows into chlorine basins where bad water is officially killed. More chemicals remove the chlorine before the City delivers the inert water back to the Colorado River. The pumps involved at multiple stages in these processes require large-scale electricity production. Squadrons of workers tend power lines, pumps, pipes, roads, and all the rest of the subsystems. Although it seems monolithic, this water network is full of cracks and leaks that can be altered at various scales. Partial solutions like catching rain or selectively disengaging from sewers begin to patch together urban water futures in the present system’s gaps.

In DIY wetlands, urban waste becomes the habitat for little worlds of non-human agents—populations of plants, animals, and microorganisms cultivated by humans for wastewater management that also thrive as lives of their own. In the 1970s, permaculture architects John and Nancy Todd started designing what they called “living machines” that mimic ecological processes and structures by organizing multi-species in linked greenhouses. While most machines are designed to meet a single purpose, living machines “can be designed to produce food or fuels, treat wastes, purify air, regulate climates, or even to do all of these simultaneously.”*** As “both garden and machine,” the Todds' designs run mostly on sunlight that feeds plant and bacterial assemblages responsible for metabolizing sludge.

As living machines take on lives of their own, multi-species create beautiful sensory worlds through aesthetic improvisations. Water management on microscales involves practices that are time, labor, and attention intensive--so much for “free” water--but the non-humans that call wetlands home do most of the work. Inside the living machine,  gray water and I became part of a long-term process in collaboration with plants, microbes, and animals. These symbioses make a strange collective “we” out of the individual consumers promised freedom from labor and disease by modern sewerage. As Bruno Latour writes (or hopes), “We no longer expect from the future that it will emancipate us from all our attachments; on the contrary, we expect that it will attach us with tighter bonds to more numerous crowds of aliens who have become full-fledged members of the collective.”****

With water no longer taken for granted, we step into a dry future-ordinary of global climate change, racked with drought, famine, resource wars, and you name it. DIY wetlands and other improvised forms of living garbage shift the gloom of future catastrophes from fear and anxiety to the laborious, playful pleasures of habitats bursting with life. While the threat of a dehydrated world can settle into fantasies of scarcity and doom, the messianic side of the apocalyptic sensibility illuminates urban wastewater as a surplus full of utopian potential. The future-ordinary of water scarcity projected by the droughts served as a vantage point into a post-apocalyptic world that survived the end of water as we knew it. Impelled by the future threat of water scarcity, household gray water becomes an untapped form of surplus, opening up an ethical opportunity to reimagine the relationship between house-cities and the landscapes they occupy.

2014

Note: Parts of this entry were first published in Scott Webel, “Free Water! DIY Wetlands and the Futures of Urban Gray Water,” Anthropology Now 3(1): 13-22.

*Allen, Laura, July Oskar Cole, and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, eds. 2007. Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Illustrated by Annie Danger. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press.
**Austin Water. 2010. “Wastewater Treatment Plants,” http://www.austingo.org/department/water-treatment-plants.
***Todd, John and Nancy Jack Todd. 1993. From Eco-Cities to Living Machines. Rev. edition of Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming. 1984. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, p. 167
****Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 191.