Pyrolized

Our experiment with pyrolizing the poop was a total flop. It just took too much heat, logs and coals blazing over four hours to bake a measly week's worth of three cats' and three humans' manure in a sealed metal gallon can. DIY biochar is one of those homemade things that aren't worth the effort, unless you have a pyrolizing unit that can more effectively cook waste at 1500°F than logwood.

Biochar is organic matter burned in an anaerobic atmosphere. Mixed into soil, this porous carbon offers  tiny housing to microorganisms. It also functions as a sponge for nitrogen and phosphorous, preventing them from washing away. You can make it by incinerating any kind of organic trash--agricultural waste, manure, bodies and bones. Controlled pyrolizing processes also yield bio-oil that can be burned for heat or to generate electricity. Climate change geoengineers believe the biochar "miracle substance" to be an extremely stable form of carbon sequestration, while organic farmers hype its productivity as a soil amendment.* Archaeologists say the terra preta (black earth) in ancient tracts of agricultural land in the Amazon are still fertile after thousands of years. Biochar gives even James Lovelock a little hope in human survival: "There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste--which contains carbon that the plants spent the summer sequestering--into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil."**

But isn't there another massive flow of organic trash to burn? The Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant processes 1 million gallons of sewer sludge a day, which is only 1% of the total sewage water treated daily in Austin. The grounds are beautiful and a little stinky, located right along a bend in the Colorado River. 

The sludge water treated here settles out of sewage in the first stage of processing at Austin's two wastewater treatment plants, and is then pumped to Hornsby Bend. Here, the treatment process begins by passing sludge over conveyor belt screens that allow solids to settle out. Sludge then enters anaerobic digesters--six huge pressurized floating domes--where it is metabolized by bacteria kept warm by gas combustion. The gas itself is methane farted out by bacteria in these digesters. In 2012 the domes were retrofitted with "co-gen"--electricity generators that run on gas combustion, such that burning methane from the digesters simultaneously heats the domes and generates electricity sold back to Austin Energy. The treatment facility's 112 acres are also an agriculture research facility that experiments with fertilizing alfalfa and hay fields with biosolids and irrigating with wastewater. Current research focuses on the persistence of emerging contaminants (from pharmaceuticals like birth control and viagra) in treated biosolids. 

After the digesters, biosolids are mixed with mulched leaves and sticks from curbside pickup and composted for several weeks. Compost then ages up to three months and is screened and trucked to Organics By Gosh for bagging. It winds up in Home Despot as DilloDirt for all your landscaping needs. And this year Hornsby Bend's new product DilloChar hit the market--bioslids and mulch, pyrolized in a methane-powered furnace. 

Once most of the biosolids are removed from the raw sludge in the conveyor belt stage of processing, wastewater flows to three pools that draw bird populations and recreational birders. When I visited in the winter, koots and shovel bill ducks paddled around, picking through the pools' banks. Migratory herons, painted buntings, and swifts nest in the summer. Red shoulder hawks and osprey also hunt here, likely drawn to rodents that live in the hay fields and topsoil hills from gravel mines that surround the treatment facility. The pools are divided by raised levees that are open to the public year round during daylight hours. Public sludge is remediated into a park for urbanature--ecosystems that thrive in the world only because of highly technical large scale human-made systems, in this case, collective intestines of post-poop.

After percolating through the three pools, the water flows into narrow ponds inside a football field-sized greenhouse. The ponds were once stocked with water hyacinth plants for further treatment (to draw out metals) until the water hyacinth babies clogged up the aeration pumps. Next they tried duckweed, which was recently all washed away when the water flow rate went too fast. Now algae have taken over the ponds, and management are throwing around ideas on what to do with the greenhouse. The banks of the ponds have little holes dug out where turtles have been laying their eggs.

Hornsby Bend and other municipal facilities in the US have succesfully transformed sewage--the ultimate worthless garbage--into commodites, energy forms, and urbanature. But biosolids can also start backing up in some kind of megacity-scale hoarder scene: in 2006, Kern County outlawed Los Angeles' dumping of its processed biosolids as agricultural fertilizer. As sludge piled up, LA responded with an experimental geothermal anaerobic digester at Terminal Island. EPA permit in hand, they inject biosolids into five thousand foot deep wells that tap depleated oil and natural gas tables. The earth heats these pits of hell to 150°F. The wells are filled with briny wastewater (from a desalination facility or fracking?). Like the domes at Hornsby Bend, bacteria digest the biosolids, producing CO₂ sequestered by the water (turning it into carbonated water) and methane gas collected at a second well's vent.

Of course, some people are just waiting for some mutant bacteria to evolve in the pits, infecting LA with a pandemic. Others say demons will crawl out. Or the deep wells will activate fault lines, mega-volcanoes. Meanwhile the methane vents power whole neighborhoods and the biosolids facilities themselves.

This summer Ephemerata Garden's DilloChar test patch yields dinner plate poppies. The sunflowers grow fifteen feet tall, absurdly propping up the sky, sequestering carbon. Curbside pickup accepts diapers, pet poop, and meat for pyrolization. The crumbly biochar could have been somebody's shit, or dinner bones, or just branches from a dying hackberry. Smells like burned dollar bills.

2018

*Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, New York and London: Viking, 2009, 240-1.

**Quoted in ibid., 288.

Pits

When we pick the last fruits of the season from the peach tree near the shower water wetland, it's time to make jam. We eat the little oranges raw, cook with and juice limes, sun dry palm dates and figs and tomatoes on the car dashboard. Cold winter morning peach jam has the smell of the white blossoms that always bud a few weeks before the last freeze, a gift for the bees in spring. The little water well at the tree's trunk is filled with hundreds of peach pits the texture of brain folds. The ground thinks peaches into being, but no peach trees from the pits--I guess the flowers aren't self-fertilizing and there's no other trees nearby. 

Ephemerata Gadren's little orchard is a slow boat to food security. The peach, orange, and lime trees have taken ten years to reach maturity (while the avacado has yet to fruit and the apple tree died one summer). Two female and one male date palms live in a polygamous circle near the olive tree in a sunny, dry part of the yard. Now that they're established, even the freezing dips of winter can't kill these generous life forms. We weather the droughts with our surplus shower water. The pecan towers over us all with dappled shade. In a good year we can make three or four pecan pies, entranced by shelling for hours. We share with friends and neighbors, and squirrel away some nuts, dried fruit, and jam for winter. Sometimes we trade these luxury items, homebrew kombucha, or eggs for a chiropractic adjustment. The trees, edible weeds, and other seasonal foods we cultivate in the City of Living Garbage double as fun foodie pleasures and deadly serious preparations for food shortages or catastrophe scenarios that have yet to hit at a national scale. 

Right around Y2K and its menace of complete computer failure leading to economic collapse, people calling themselves Preppers started getting ready for something. Practicing "survivalism lite,"* Preppers are part of a shadow movement, a public vaguely stitched together from online forums, talk radio shows, and events like Self Reliance Expos. The affective fact of a future catastrophe--be it a local disaster or complete economic collapse--animates their preoccupation with getting ready for tomorrow's survival mode. Checklists help organize ways to prepare, and stockpiling seeds and guns (for both hunting and defense) is a good place to start. Every day you need to scrimp and save and equip your bunker a little more so it is a managable process. Try not to let disaster preparedness become an obsessive way of life. 

Preppers are ready to bug out (with provisions stashed in some secret forest hideout) or bug in (the home fortified and stocked with props for the next earthquake or Snowpocalypse). According to Prepper blogs there are millions of self-identified Preppers in the US, and perhaps millions more who secretively store up the means for nuclear family surival. They share a social aesthetic or collective emotional expression that has lost faith in forms of group agency like "government" or FEMA to instead hole up in self-preservation of the individual or family (or perhaps a community of "prepper networks"). This retreat is fortified by anxieties over real and imagined vulnerability, sadness and frustration with what feels like a never ending recession, or mysanthropic fear of the rioting, murderous masses who will surely manifest when catastrophe hits. This fringe way of life is mainstreamed with its own National Geographic show, lavish disaster response kits available for sale, and encouragement from FEMA and the American Red Cross for citizens to get ready for emergencies. 

Some suburban Preppers prepare for modest 48 hour shut-downs, while others are getting ready for massive changes that will leave the world as we know it undone. The God's Gardeners are a millenarian religious sect that preaches and prophesies the Waterless Flood, a pandemic that will wash away urban populations.** The Gardeners are non-violent vegetarians who make do with their Edencliff Rooftop Garden, tending its vegetables, beehives, mushroom beds (in the celler), and humanure toilets called violet biolets. Everything is driven by fanatical self-reliance, from herbal remedies to treat disease, to "maggot therapy" that clears necrotic flesh from bad wounds (107). The Gardeners hoard stores of food like dried soybeans, honey, and prepackaged protein bars. Although "they [have] the idea that turning into compost would be just fine"(59), they struggle hard to preserve their repetitive, austere lifestyles.

Like Margaret Atwood's novel The Year of the Flood, some Prepper blogs narrate fraught life after the catastrophe. When the Waterless Flood finally comes, it leaves just a few survivalists and a freed menagerie of bioengineered animals like liobams (spliced to "fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy" [94]), or pigs with human brains (made for medical testing) to scrounge among ruins. Human monsters roam outside compounds, taking what they want with guerrilla maneuvers. The website PrepperNation.com serializes a nightmare encounter with "Mutant Zombie Bikers," a.k.a. "looter, brigand, scavenger, opportunist or even neighbor," who violently invade bug in bunkers to steal food and women. Narrated as a kind of macabre choose your own adventure story in which you are the central character, you must not only stock up on your provisions, but defend them against ex-military, ex-cons, and ex-civilized humans. In some Prepper fantasies these potential monsters are "very low socio-economic demographics" who are just waiting for something--an earthquake or austerity cuts to social programs--to tip them into frenzy. Zombie movies are just rehersals for the coming urban masses crazed by catastrophe, thirst, hunger--you better be prepared!***

The Preppers are all about planning, practicing disaster response for tomorrow's catastrophe, and not so much about improvising, gleaning, and scavenging to survive (or just enjoy) today. I wonder about the teen sons and daughters of Preppers learning how to shoot and clean rifles--do they take their parents seriously, or too seriously? Gardener children have cruel nicknames for their teachers, make fun of the hell on earth they foresee. On "Young Bioneer scavenging [days]" they glean soap from hotel trash cans, wine from bar and strip club garbage to make vinegar. Some of these "recycled materials crafts" are sold "to tourists and gawkers at the Gardeners' Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange, along with the bags of worms and the organic turnips and zucchinis and the other vegetables the Gardeners hadn't used up themselves" (68). Sometimes the kids hide the wine to drink. 

The sweetness of peaches and date palms and figs! They are luxurious gifts from the yard when this kind of produce in organic markets is twenty bucks a pound. Ephemerata Gardens is partly a prepper landscape patch, the always imperfect means for future survival, but also (sharing in the God's Gardeners' ecological ethos) a form of awe or joy in emergence and improvisation. Stuck in the pit of an austere survival mode, the garden's colors and tastes and unfurling life forms provide a frivolous circus of sensory excess. 

2019

*Jessica Bennett, "Survivalism Lite: Rise of the Preppers," Newsweek December 2009. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/12/27/survivalism-lite.html

**Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, New York: Doubleday, 2009. 

***Thanks to Shaka McGlotten for his writing on the zombie figure in Bruce LaBruce's films. Zombies embody "fears of capitalist exploitation" and the deadening effects of consumption, but also homosexuality as a metaphorical contagion ("Zombie Porn: Necropolitics, Sex, and Queer Socialities," unpublished manuscript). LaBruce's movies play with this ambivalence by jumping between identification with zombies and the erotics of their gleefull, brutal slaughter.