Glow Rose

For about an hour after dusk the rose glows softly like ghost flowers. A gift from Janice Washington's GMOasis to Ephemerata Gardens, we had to strategically plant it to catch the sun's last rays, and it only works in the summer and fall. You can also zap it with a blacklight any time at night to see it phosphoress.

Janice is a former Monsanto employee who lost her lab job when the Supreme Court blockbusted the corporation. She wound up teaching at UT Austin and started her own little garage lab as a hobby. Everything she modifies winds up in her garden, from aphid-resistant arugula to vine borer-immune zucchini. She also practices organic gardening and biocontrol, and insists on irrigating only with rain water. This indiscriminate melding of natural and artificial made the GMOasis one of the most befuddling gardens in this year's Austin Art Yard Tour.

The rose garden features carefully bred miniature black roses, "GM  heirlooms" with green petals, roses that smell like rotten meat, and the famous glow rose that expresses a mushroom species' phosphoresence. Turning away from instrumental modifications for insect resistance, Janice likes tinkering with plants' sensate aesthetics, their shapes, colors, and odors. Her fig has perfectly heart shaped fruit. The lemons are cubes. Purple San Pedro, magenta and albino mother-of-millions. Oak leaf lettuce that smells and tastes like marzipan.

Then there are bacteria that devour plastic. She sprays them on her fence of decaying dolls and trucks. She shows you the microphotographs of polymer chains that break down completely. Janice is most proud of this innovation and is working with her grad students to develop commercial application in ecological restoration projects. She gushes about the bacteria like they're her kids: "They're such great learners and hard workers! I'm so happy they have plastic to eat."

The neighbors are organic gardening purists. Their food patches just happen to back up against each other, divided by a chain link fence in the sunny part of the yard. When an almondy-tasting oak leaf lettuce sprouted in their garden, the neighbors lost it. They jumped the fence in the night and went at GMOasis with shovels and clippers, killing all the monsters while Janice secretly watched from her darkened window.

As far as I know our glow rose is now the only one in the world.

2020

Trilling

After quiet winters, trilling begins again around the time yellow-crowned night heron fly back into town. Gulf coast toads come out of hibernation to talk at dusk around the pond with chirps and burbles. Our two year old knows the sound and says "night toad," sensing not just a being, but being-in-time. You can hear them over the A/C. When they spawn they chorus. Sometimes a few days later we find strings of white eggs, then hundreds of tadpoles thriving in our shower greywater.

Why does this soundscape make me feel happy and relaxed? Maybe it cues remembered feelings of our two tropical vacations to St. Croix and Costa Rica. We stayed in open-air bungalows with no A/C surrounded by amphibian choruses. All night multirhythms lulled us. Our getaways were romantic couple vacations melded with a desire to support sustainable economies. We were nature-loving eco-tourists experiencing the beauty and force of the tropics. Then there was the bed and breakfast on the way to Grandpa’s in Missouri, where a couple had built a two story waterfall out of local rocks surrounded by a deck, and tree frogs that moved in serenaded you all night. The sounds conjure atmospheres of the Global South—swampy regions, jungles, islands, humidity.

Maybe toad sounds tap what biologists like E.O. Wilson claim to be a hard-wired human biophiliac response. Amphibians are indicator species that index a healthy ecosystem, and hearing them lets my body know "the environment" is okay, at least in the backyard. But "we need not naturalize [the love of nature] as a universal biology in order to appreciate its global spread."* In an ethnographic account of environmentalisms set in Indonesia, Anna Tsing argues that loving nature expresses a nascent cosmopolitanism, an ethical sensibility and self-building project that steps out of a parochial blindness to one's environment to appreciate local peculiarities in a global context. Cultural and national modes of nature loving have their regional flavors, but share the sense of “the environment” as a human-free thing out there, to be protected against a different kind of objectification of nature that destroys its object.

So maybe it is just a US middle class environmentalist/nature lover response, delight in a lively nonhuman atmosphere that is supposed to be the opposite of urban. The pond is what landscapers and Home Despot call a “water feature.” Aquatic habitats are key parts of “wildlife gardening” design schemes that try to attract urban animals and maintain their eating and mating habitats. Our pond fits into biophiliac markets that include bird keying guides and hiking gear, the pet world, perhaps even the vast formal economic sector of the food industry (for those who express their love of living things by eating them). My qualia of life is enhanced by this nature soundtrack** of toad jazz.

Something else in the sound itself moves through my body. The trill's texture, like rapidly rising flute notes, and the response from another part of the yard, is a musical composition offset by a deeper range of wet growls. Sometimes the splash of a diving toad, and always the sound of the pond's waterfall. The sound itself is compelling, regardless of where it comes from.

Sounds are one of the sensory modes through which toads live in our yard. The texture of their seasonal refrains conjures synaesthetic impressions of their molten bronze eyes and dried leaf patterns on the backs of their heads. The toads and I indulge in the pleasures of feeling and seeing sounds, the work of listening, acknowledging talk, exercising sensitivity. I would miss these sensory habits attached to the toads if they went away. They live in cracks, unintended spaces in anthropogenic landscapes that provide an atmosphere where autonomous things can take care of themselves. Caves accidentally formed when I dug out a pit for the Jacuzzi shell that serves as the pond’s lowest pool, in the hollows under the front courtyard’s juniper tree, under logs around the garden with stripe-backed walking sticks. They inhabit a captivating little world of their own that has nothing to do with us, except that we assembled the junk art yard they call home. Despite the toads’ autonomy, I suspect we need each other.

Inside the museum, silent toads play pool. These taxidermy bufos are notorious for a hallucinogenic excrescence from glands on their backs that poisons dogs and makes teen toad-lickers trip. Cane toads, a bufo species introduced to Australia to control beetles eating sugar cane crops, are invasive nuisances that eat everything. In the Monstrosities exhibition, we displayed a gaff “Flesh Eating Toad from Madagascar” doctored out of a bufo with a set of piranha teeth. The pool players enjoyed a toad mariachi band with a horn section, drummer, and guitar players near the toad bartender. But their eyes are dead unseeing black orbs. Small nails through their feet and hands give them a crucified effect. Their bodies look bloated, overly stuffed, and their mouths are sewn shut. Somewhere in Mexico someone is preparing them, right now.

While bufo species like the gulf coast toads (Bufo valliceps) that inhabit our yard are not particularly endangered, since the 1980s, ecologists and biologists have documented rising vulnerability and extinction of amphibian populations. Suggested causes include habitat destruction and fragmentation, lethal funguses introduced from non-native frog species, climate change, and increased anthropogenic noises that drown out the sounds of amphibian mating calls.*** Industrial pollutants, insecticides, and herbicides also contribute to these population crashes. Controversial research on the widely used herbicides glysophate (first engineered for Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide) and atrazine have found that the chemicals cause changes in amphibians ranging from nervous system disorders to hermaphroditism. Amphibian die off joins bee colony collapse and bat white nose syndrome as troubling and mysterious ecological crises.

Publics gather around these vulnerable life forms to mitigate crises and preserve biodiversity. In Great Britain and Scotland, the nonprofit Froglife works to rebuild wetland and pond habitats in urban areas and help frogs and toads cross roads during spawning season. For twenty years volunteers with the Toads on Roads project have documented crossing sites, pushed road builders to install “wildlife crossings,” and manually hauled over 60,000 animals a year in buckets during “toad patrols.” The Living Water project “is creating and restoring prime wildlife habitats in gardens and parks throughout London and Glasgow.”**** They do this partly by using a chemical called rotenone to kill invasive stickleback fish that prey on tadpoles and newt larvae.

Bruno Latour tells a story about toad ethologists who “transformed the mores of these creatures into indisputable essences, and this in turn obliged highway builders to hollow out costly ‘toadways’ in their embankments, so that the toads could get back to their birthplace to lay their eggs.” But the toads rejected the “costly and dangerous tunnels” in favor of the new ponds on the road embankments. “After the experiment, the location of the egg-laying site was thus transformed from essence to habit: what was not negotiable became negotiable.”*****

These little toad worlds are different than approaching “the environment” as a pre-human thing out there that becomes perceptible through its decimation or conversion into resources (whether sustainable or not). The capacities of ecological beings to act on and in the world have become less about timeless essences and more of a set of problems in engineering and behavior modification within a common world -- problems to which nonhumans sometimes find their own surprising solutions in excess of objectifying knowledge that claims to know how things should be. The learned and shared behaviors of toads and humans change. Landscape patches emerge through these collective behaviors, through extended or collaborative bodies like the toads-in-human-carried-buckets living machines.

Intimacies and couplings are taking shape here. People are helping toads mate, and toad sounds wrap couples in romantic soundscapes. Children learn to talk, listen, and love nature by relating to toad vocalizations. Teens experiment with toad secretions. Scientific and conservationist communities gather. Friendships and careers are made. “We”s and worlds firm up.

2015

* Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 154.

** “Qualia” are sensations or feelings (not meanings) in response to aesthetic forms like sounds, colors, or gestures. Conservation and habitat restoration efforts can be driven by desires to preserve nature or the environment as an asset for quality of life in urban areas, and/or by an ethical orientation that protects species for their own sake, in political support of their autonomous existence. The latter orientation has to deal with questions of who belongs and how to control unwanted/invasive populations. Despite being the major ecological source of habitat destruction, humans are, of course, excluded from consideration in invasive species eradication programs.

*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations

**** http://www.froglife.org/habitats/ponds.htm

***** Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press (2004), 87.

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. 

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.

Mangled Plastic

Raccoons are the anti-engineers in our backyard pond living machine. Thermodynamics incarnate, they thin wetland habitat by snapping stalks, ripping out roots to eat, and stirring everything up hunting goldfish. The dead plants rot and eutrophy the water if not vigilantly removed while cursing. I wake up after midnight to splashing and peek out to see them destroying everything. Worse yet, scratching or savage fights in the attic in the dark, silent hours.

The large trap catches cats as often as raccoons. In the morning the hissing raccoon has transformed the plastic dish for food bait into an unrecognizably mangled, flattened shred. The local wildlife rescue grudgingly accepts the raccoon for relocation. "Next time just let them live in the yard. If you catch a nursing mom, the babies will die." But the pond is wrecked the next day by one of the disappeared's family members, and there's a clear message in the little crossed logs of scat beneath the figs.

Horrible things happen. One night I forget to coop the two chickens, and in the morning our Plymouth Rock has become patches of feathers scattered around the yard. Too busy to clean out the pond, goldfish die, their oily decay further poisoning the water. The raccoons demand response; the pond must be defended. You can buy fox urine to sprinkle around and scare them away, but the cats would evacuate, too. Time for some vigilanty wildlife relocation?

Raccoons are experts in garbage-making, master artists in the urban aesthetics of nature's irreversible demolition and gleeful mutilation. Their excess makes people snap, like the guy who "heard the coons in his attic again, after months of coon-proofing strategies... He got a shotgun and shot big holes in the living room ceiling. Blood and guts dropped out and fell onto his wife's new white carpet."* You can legally trap and kill raccoons on your property, but you can't release them somewhere. They have broken into urban landscapes and attics permanantly, generations of squatters who come back no matter how many times evicted.

Destructive characters like raccoons or monk parrots can cause a dilemma for people trying to decide who lives here and how to remove or eradicate those who don't. If the problem is defending human territory, the dilemma is deciding how to engineer (temporary) eviction. People outdo raccoons in the destructive arts, with hordes of chemicals designed to decimate certain pests and weeds available at your local Home Despot. But the problem of protecting habitats, native species, and the like makes a double bind. After finding an eagle nest raided by egg-smashing raccoons, Gerald Wykes fantasizes about violent opportunistic revenge:

Should I happen upon this eagle nest robber when I'm behind the wheel next time I will swerve toward it.  I will not carry it further than that because I can't blame the raccoon. I can hate 'em, but I can't blame 'em. People, you see, are the single most destructive agent when it comes to ... nest destruction. We have destroyed so much native nesting habitat over the decades that it makes the exploits of one raccoon pale in significance.  I would be running over myself if I carried out that vehicular varmiticide.**

Redemptive violence is marred by the recognition that we are mega-raccoons.

Contrary attachments to destructive characters can also take hold. Ephemerata Garden visitors tell stories about the crazy lady who fed raccoons in her attic for fifteen years until neighbors complained about the smell of aggregated feces, or the couple who finds and raises a baby that gets into everything and winds up tangled in yarn. They offer excessive tips for adapting to the raccoon's presence, like electric fencing around ponds. Some become endeared to the raccoon's bandit mask and baby-like hands, love the sound the infants make, or admire the sheer tanacity of raccoon inhabitation. It's as if we built all this and keep our garbage cans filled with food just for them.

*Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Durham: Duke University Press (2007), p.85.
**Gerald Wykes, "Why I Hate Raccoons," Naturespeak blog, http://www.blogsmonroe.com/nature/2008/05/why-i-hate-raccoons, accessed July 8, 2011. Even environmentalists set aside a special hatred for raccoons. The blogosphere seeths with tales of tipped trashcans, trashed ponds, butchered koi, and rabid acts of human revenge (shot through with pathos for the babies).

2015

Monk Refrains

Throaty heron caws, bluejay songs, monk parrot squawks. Heron fledglings fall through the fig trees into the yard. Six pack rings drop from the pecan where junkitect bluejays build a nest with plastics and frayed rope scraps. They call out beautiful two note whistles and mad barks at the cats. Monks vibrate the sky with their racous chatter, calling it down to your sensorium. Look up and see them in the busy blue nonhuman city among red cardinals, starlings, little migratory birds, vultures, butterflies, dragonflies, airplanes, longings, nothingness. The monks' calls are only one aspect of a multisensory art project that crosses the sky over Ephemerata Gardens.

Monk parakeets are native to extreme climates of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where their communal nests can weigh up to a ton. They prey on human crops, colonizing tall, non-native Eucalyptus trees cultivated on plantation borders as windbreaks – perfect aeries from which to launch pirate raids on grids of crops below! In the 1970s, Argentina launched an eradication program against the pests. Although a government bounty “resulted in a return of over 400,000 pairs of monk feet in two years” and 64,000 birds were exiled to the US as pets, native monks are still at large in Argentina.¹ Ornithologists consider them an invasive species to North America (where European settlers made the continent's only indigenous parrot, the Carolina Parakeet, extinct by the 1920s). Naturalized colonies of escaped and released monks have popped up in California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Connicticut, New York, and other states. One ornithologist who visited Ephemerata Gardens said monks might be like pigeons in a hundred years, flourishing in every city. Todd S. Campbell with the Institute for Biological Invasions remarks, “monk parakeets are probably not beyond control from a biological or logistical standpoint, but they are likely beyond control from a public sentiment standpoint” thanks to human guardians who mobilize against their eradication.¹ Urban monks construct communal nests on cell phone towers and electricity junction boxes. In winter 2005 public protests broke out when Connecticut’s United Illuminating (UI) dismantled monk nests on electricity poles. In addition to rallying at nest removal sites and launching a press campaign against UI, people from neighborhoods where nests were being removed built fake nests installed in their backyards. Not many monks moved in.

Monk nests remind me of yardist David Lee Pratt’s description of his interlaced arcs of mangled rebar and other scrap metal at Further Farms: architectural forms that use no nails, no concrete, just intuitive balance to puzzle together a structure that gravity keeps from falling apart. Monks sharpen one end of a stick with their beaks, then jimmy it into the other sticks. Each mated pair builds four or so rooms. They defecate inside, then use their waste as stucco so the house interior becomes sealed against wind and rain. The nests are constructed using the improvisational principles behind the Cathedral of Junk and the open-air rooms at Biosquat. They are composed by weaving things together; they are never finished being woven; they are all built of trash (especially Monk nests, given trash’s etymology of “fallen leaves and twigs”); they are all "beyond control." Like Austin junkitects, monk parrots build something out of nothing, and in the process, pull together communities through their semi-public homes.

As immigrant settlers or refugees from South America, the monks haul tropical sounding atmospheres north in advance of global warming. Like the sonic envelopes of TVs, sirens, and traffic, birds give atmospheres trembling contours, making them moodily alive through repetitions of sounds and colors. Monk parrots alter what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call refrains, “an act of rhythm that has become expressive, ... become qualitative... Not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode, ... the chancy formation of a domain” through synaesthetic labor” (315-16).² Monk refrains crystallize as chatter, green flashes, and patterns of sticks. The concept of refrains does not approach aesthetics as symbolic arts limited to people, but rather, as embodied expression or distributed somatic intelligence that communicates directly through the senses, literally making sense, sustaining life. Refrains double as a vocabulary for describing patchy landscapes, but also as a compositional methodology. We cannot talk about refrains without making and sensing them. This non-representational approach to built environments recognizes the aesthetic agency of plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing sensations of unison.

Deleuze and Guattari elaborated the concept of aesthetic-ecological refrains by mining natural history and behavioral ecology to illustrate how nonhuman artists throw out “planes of composition,” design territories that improvise homes out of chaos. They love “the magic bird,” the bowerbird (331), that flies into their writing to perform refrains.³ These natives of Australia and Papua New Guinea create elaborate nests to dance around inside, their patterns of color and gesture resounding with songs, including those of other birds. Bowerbird refrains are made of synaesthetic “sounds-colors-gestures” that shuttle between bird and forest (333). In this way, “landscapes are peopled by characters and the characters belong to landscapes” (320). Refrains fly away, a nonorganic life of sounds coexisting in the forest with bowerbirds that is open to becoming something independent of them.⁴ Refrains are the becoming-forest of the bowerbird, the becoming-sky of the monks.

Music, melodies, and refrains breath life into regions, landscapes, houses, and other atmospheres. They are alternative energy forms that power the City of Living Garbage under the banner "The Survival Circus Marching Band!" Try it: whistling and humming when hungry or tired can recharge you. The affects of sound are strong sensory forces that jump between and vibrate sentient beings as their medium. Katherine Hayles notes, “researchers in virtual reality have found that sound is much more effective than sight in imparting emotional tonalities to their simulated worlds” (219).⁵ Lawrence Grossberg explores music's “unique and striking relationship to the human body, surrounding, enfolding, and even invading it within its own rhythms and textures” that open up feelings of possibility, freedom, and belonging with such force that it can hold together social movements (152).⁶ Refrains are collective  improvisations that express Ornette Coleman's harmolodic musical theory. “Harmolodics is the use of the physical and mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group” (43).⁷ Coleman grasps sounds as belonging to landscapes (e.g., in regional musical styles), but also as expressions of individual intelligence released into refrains that recompose minds and moods. The collective song is its own form of life or "unison" that endlessly doubles back into and out of the musicians that colaboratively release its expression. This form of life needs musicians and instruments to shape its refrain, but the harmolodic refrain becomes the aural house where musicians live and that gave them life and instruments in the first place.

So the monk parrots' chatter and green feathers expressed tropical Southerness even as they refrained a tentative inhabitation: is this the South? Can we live here? Can we enter the fossil record and become native to this new place? 

2012

1 Campbell, Todd S. “The Monk Parakeet.” The Institute for Biological Invasions, posted December 2000, http://invasions.bio.utk.edu/invaders/monk.html (no longer accessible).
2 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
3 They also fly into Jill Noke’s description of the Cathedral of Junk’s domes as bowerbird nests (Yard Art and Handbuilt Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home. Austin: UT Press, 2007, p.99).
4 While researching Kaluli ornithology in Papua New Guinea, Stephen Feld asked his informant Jubi to match up bird sounds with species until Jubi clarified things for him. “Listen – to you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest” (Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1990, p.45). Jubi’s remark helped Feld to understand why the birds and their sounds require separate taxonomies among Kaluli ornithologists: they are distinct beings. The bird artists of Papua New Guinea sing and dance refrains, the sounds of which become nonorganic life forms captured by Kaluli songs and dances. The birds’ sounds and colorful feathers enter into a becoming-human through Kaluli ritual practices of “becoming a bird” or “man in the form of a bird” (236).
5 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
6 Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
7 Quoted in Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

a guidebook to Ephemerata Gardens

“The City of Living Garbage” is a guidebook to my backyard, a holographic catalogue of a whole city/world crammed into a quarter-acre of land called Ephemerata Gardens. Parts of other Austin yards are grafted into Ephemerata Gardens through flows of things – windows, doll heads, morning glory – and practices – building junkitecture, cultivating tiny wetlands, excavating rain catches, making soil. Each piece of living garbage takes us to another site in Austin, vernacular art environments around the US, or global sites that practice informal accumulation and recycling of urban waste. Each thing comes into being through trash, decay, or pollution, transformed into unanticipated life forms and landscape patches. Each is sustained by the creative labor of human and nonhuman agents in long-term relationships of mutual education and full-bodied sensory labor. Together they make habitats that thrive on urban waste, a utopian resistance to the ecological apocalypticism that permeates global climate change and other environmental discourses. They are post-apocalyptic in that they start off with the substances of the trashed world and end up in relationships of care and repair.

Like Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Gardens of mosaics on South Street in Philadelphia, the City of Living Garbage inhabits a dream of junk art environments seeping out of their backyard confinement and taking over the city. Zagar moved to South Street in 1968 and began what became a lifelong project to mosaic everything--first walls of alleys, then entire buildings. Zagar stockpiled ceramic shards of all kinds, then composes mosaics out of the beautiful fragments. Each fragment resolves into a busy composition at the scale of the mosaic, and then up a scale to the city itself – a mosaic of mosaics. Zagar wrote on some of the tiles, and signs pop out of swirling fragments: “art is the center of the real world,” names of jazz musicians or the builders of art environments, and prophetically, "All wars ended on planet earth 2038." At Zagar’s Magic Gardens, a vacant lot transformed into a multilevel labyrinth, mosaic stairs take you down into an underworld of body parts and mirrors dancing across surfaces. Zagar spoke of art like a quack ecologist: “No one can predict where art will emerge. It’s like a mushroom, with roots that extend for miles and miles underground, unseen. If the climactic conditions are right, the fruit will emerge.” It might emerge without recognition as aesthetic, in the sculptures of monk parrot nests, jerry-rigged home plumbing, or the decompositions of compost heaps.

Here, art is an aspect of ecology, and vice versa. Rather than being the special purview of trained people, aesthetics are something that just happen, infusing places with patterns and possibilities of inhabitation. Aesthetic improvisations strive to make a living and a home for their practitioners. Sometimes they break codes and magically cross categories and borders, becoming something else. They transform thermodynamic matter in mysterious ways, into rhythms of color or flashes of sounds.  Wind in leaves and falling water compose a different-feeling atmosphere than the sounds of desertification or traffic. The patina of aging bottle walls feels different than rusty galvanized sheet metal. We may not know exactly what bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and macroinvertebrates enact the art of composting, but the collective works its magic, offering up the conditions in which the intensity of gleaming purple eggplant and bright yellow crookneck squash might dot the garden.

Seasonal colors amplify time or mortality; they enter us through the eyes and then the mouth, then find some way out, too. The vibrant colors get lost as little pixels in a screen flood of colors washing over urban senses, propelled by electricity, satellites, fiberoptics. Color grays when screens fail or the power goes out. Mosaics last much longer in color transmission time, while the bloom and fade of garden hues depend on our coordinating multispecies and elemental labor--saving seeds, cultivating soil, tending with water, primping dead leaves, managing sunlight. This guidebook collects and preserves some of these ephemeral practices. The City of Living Garbage is a chancy refrain laid out across Austin's futures, a place to inhabit and wander inside, a place to build. The writing is a form of bricollage or gardening that cultivates improvisational aesthetic expressions, a mosaic of places and moments that could only happen thanks to trash. A public dreaming of possible real worlds caught up in the catastrophic mess of this one.

2038