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. 

Rust

Iron oxides grow like lichens on Ephemerata Garden's cast-iron bathtub ponds, bottle cap snakes, cat food tins, and other metal detritus. Rust is an agent of collapse that can take out bridges and buildings. In our yard it has an aesthetic presence, something beautiful about its deep red flakiness breaking up painted surfaces. Iron molecules give both rust and blood their red, and both reveal themselves as wounds.

In 2008 I attended the weekend-long Radical Urban Sustainability Training (RUST) workshop at the Rhizome Collective’s live-in warehouses. Taught by Rhizome Collective co-founders Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew,* ecological engineer Lauren Ross, and assorted guests, RUST showcased the warehouses' permaculture systems like composting toilets, pedal-powered machines, rain catches, and gray water wetlands. RUST reimagines sustainability from a community-based DIY perspective, developing new practices that improvise with the richness of urban wastestreams. The workshop is a hands-on introduction to "autonomous technologies" that locally produce food, water, shelter, energy, waste management, health care, and the bioremediation of urban toxins. RUST also doubles as a crash-course in environmental and climate justice issues, with a critique of contemporary sustainable urban development as a new form of gentrification. Because “sustainability” had already been co-opted by neo-liberal capitalists, Scott used the term “radical sustainability” to insist on the entwined radix or roots beneath social and environmental injustices. The RUST workshop is an informal education in how to build the City of Living Garbage out of a world that's falling apart.

When the Rhizome Collective moved in to the warehouses, they depaved the asphalt loading bay, tearing up impermeable cover to make a thriving food garden where bees, butterflies, and migratory birds came to eat. They salvaged mulch from landscaping companies and added homemade compost tea. The compacted soil grew rich, shot through with white threads of mychorrhizal networks. In just a few years the landscape patch became productive and healthy. They free ranged chickens in the junkyard next door until the neighbor complained. They grew shitake and oyster mushrooms on logs, raised tilapia fish, practiced vermiculture, composted humanure – anything for food! They dreamed of gradually transforming the warehouses into an off-the-grid homestead – a zero-waste, closed-loop life support system.

In March 2009, the building was condemned by the Code Compliance Department. Eviction came after nine years of the City supporting and praising Rhizome Collective projects while officially overlooking their code violations. Building inspectors cited a dozen violations including exposed gray water, illegal composting toilets, and a second story addition built on the warehouse roof without a permit. Homespun electrical wiring didn’t help. Code gave a two-week notice of eviction to the nonprofits that operated out of the warehouses—Bikes Across Borders, Inside Books, and Food Not Bombs. The Rhizome Collective fought to extend the eviction to a month, then everybody moved out, struggling to find new homes for the bike shop, prisoner’s library, and kitchen. It was the traumatic end of an experiment in post-petroleum collapse urban futurism. The experiments continue on the south Austin brownfield deeded to the Rhizome Collective as part of an Environmental Protection Agency cleanup grant, now being turned into a recycling center by Ecology Action. Scott and Stacy moved on to Albany, New York, to found the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, where current RUST (renamed Regenerative Urban Sustainability Training) workshops continue.

During the workshop I attended, Scott led participants around to aquaculture ponds full of tilapia, duckweed, and shrimp, a scavenged satellite dish arrayed with mirrors that focuses sunlight to ignite cardboard (or boil water), and a homemade wind generator that needed some work. The tour’s tableaux let you picture doing the various DIY projects, living the urban homestead life. Round the corner of the “microlivestock” pen and see Scott posing on a milk crate with the beautiful turkey. Dim the lights and watch him demonstrate igniting a torch of homemade methane gas produced by rotting water hyacinth. One by one, a slew of little projects, performed and described, kick-started a self-educated learning process that might not ever stop (or start). One thing blurs into the next as we run through far too many DIY projects to cram into one weekend.

Dogs, a turkey, chickens, machines, and all sorts of other nonhumans swarm at RUST. I hear roosters and someone playing piano while Lauren talks about water security. While learning about a Tupperware worm box that makes “black gold” for the garden, Scott’s daughter tries to feed the dog worms. Ignacio from Bikes Across Borders demonstrates a bike-powered blender driven by a modified roller skate wheel against the back tire, and offers us to taste the smoothie. RUST learning happens with multisensory events going on as parts of the scene. Whistling volunteers make lunch in the kitchen at the back of the big room where another presenter, Rafter Sass, extols “liberation ecology” – a mode of production that moves from extraction and exploitation to intense cultivation and connectivity. Having a kitchen without walls at the back of the lecture room complemented his ideas, keeping you in touch with the smells and sounds of cooking. What might be considered interruptions are nurtured by how spaces overlap, the kids playing in the nursery somehow adding to a multifaceted sensory education.

The ecological home improvement projects that RUST enacts are not as simple as replacing a filament light bulb with a fluorescent – something you can do and forget about. Instead, they fold the individual into the processes that make houses work, amplifying and refraining the house and city as a living ecosystem, inviting new species into the mix of machinic components. Appropriate technologies, animals, plants, and microbiological life forms serve as the technical means for collective security. Since you are their keystone species, these systems of beings require you to do things like tending water gardens or worm boxes. Rather than promising a final emancipation, altering the house with patchworks of DIY sustainability pulls you into relationships of dependency, as if parts of your house had become pets. Your garbage disposal turned into chickens. The compost heap needs fluffing again. But you also depend on these entities to keep the house going. Cultivation becomes the sharing of vulnerability, the individual body and its habits redistributed among interdependent life forms in a living machine. The RUST workshop teems with dreamy possibilities of an emergent probiotic urbanism – a sort of DIY superorganic bioindustrial revolution.

The DIY projects and community organizing taught at RUST are ways to mitigate fear by tinkering with the material contours of catastrophe, to get a grip on something in the midst of a world that seems to be falling apart fast. Crucially, their small-scale solutions to big problems draw individuals into new social networks and ongoing relationships of caring for living things. Fear, anxiety, and the gloom of future catastrophes might give way to other emotions, like the surprises and pleasures of habitats bursting with life. DIY tinkering opens up a slowness that "begins to reduce the anxious rush" of the time-is-money world.**

RUST also attunes the imagination to the scientific-invisible. Illustrations in the workshop handouts zoom in on earthworms with bacteria in their digestive tracts clutching napkins, forks, and knives, eating decomposition – a giddy scaling of beings within beings. Using a backlit microscope we peer in on nematodes, bacteria, and fungal mycilia in a slide of worm box dirt. Lauren Ross lectures on chemicals in urban water and soil, bioremediation using wetlands or compost tea, and the microbe agents in healthy soil ecologies. She warns us about the bad health effects of chemical pollutants in the food and water cycling between our bodies and urban landscapes. Chlorinated tap water sterilizes the soil in your garden, so we should all use rainwater. But you need to ensure that your rain catchments are not contaminating the water. Be suspicious of urban soil toxicity: homegrown organic veggies could carry loads of lead or heavy metals. Lauren promoted testing water and soil to mitigate these risks.

Rust is not necessarily bad for food-growing soil -- a little extra iron for your blood. Just below Ephemerata Garden's surface is a layer of burned timber and rusty nails. A little house in our backyard got struck by lightning and burned down. They just flattened it out across the ground and added a few inches of dirt. Building the City of Living Garbage involves major multispecies labor in remediating landscape patches from the ground down. Everything depends on the soil, and living soil depends on water.

2012

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.

*Kellogg and Pettigrew’s book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-it-ourselves Guide (South End Press, 2008), wonderfully illustrated by Juan Martinez, goes into many of the environmental justice arguments and sustainable systems featured at RUST.

**In "Grassroots Modernism as Autonomous Practice" (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 8, 2011), Meg Wade ponders critiques that DIY's little solutions are defeatist pitfalls of parochialism. "If what we need is in fact a change in the scale of our focus – a refusal to expand ourselves to the global reach and pace at which the persisting systems of exploitation encourage us to operate – what then?"

Honda - Made In Japan

A teardrop mirror floats around our garden. The Honda hood ornament is bashed in on the bottom so the reflection ripples. Mortar seals the back, some of it smooth and flecked with rust, the cast of some missing metal bar, but most of it cracked crosswise off a larger body of concrete by a sledgehammer blow. A holy fragment of the Cathedral of Junk that came to live at Ephemerata Gardens in 2010, when Vince Hannemann and helpers tore down around 40 tons of Cathedral to satisfy the Department of Code Compliance.

The Cathedral of Junk is a world class DIYsneyland, a do-it-yourself roadside attraction/art environment pilgrimage site. People have gotten married there, put on plays and concerts, celebrated birthdays and anniversaries. It has been captured on film by Japanese tourists, documentary film makers and photographers, and a Bank of America film crew. Suddenly after twenty years the Cathedral is no longer invisible to the Department of Code Compliance. Someone called in a complaint (not that it hadn’t happened a half dozen times before), and for whatever reason, this time the event activated the little bomb that had been imbedded in the Cathedral all along.

Overnight the giant sculpture becomes an unpermitted structure, well within the 5-foot no-build easement along the property line. Also, the property is zoned residential, but it is being treated as a public space, with 10,000 visitors in 2009. Vince is forced to close for a painful half-year, a limbo of back-and-forth with the Code people. Tear more down; not good enough; tear more down. Once the dust settled he could host no more than 30 carloads of tourists a week (so walk, bike, or bus to the Cathedral). Vince mortars in glass bottles to buttress the lower part of the sculpture/structure, and rumor has it he is working on making it levitate.

After surviving Code, the Cathedral’s body of living garbage is shifting from a kind of bird nest of salvaged metals to the magically contradictory medium of concrete light, better known as “bottle walls.” Cement's common use in large-scale built environments “secretly [deploys] malign alchemical forces to make consumerism into the dominant ideology, concretize the imaginal, and … oppress the masses with the heavy hard time of rationalized labor.”* Vince plays with cement's alchemical magic to build a vessel for luminous atmospheres. From inside, the holey walls glow blue, green, and brown, illumination puncturing the solid world. Mortar envelopes the bright windows and the metal skeleton, making a single, strong block of masonry work that is equally light and airy. Before this mode of composition, the Cathedral was mostly held together by gravity and wire, long pieces of metal puzzled into each other like twigs in a nest. Now Vince feeds an amoeba of masonry and glass, one eighty-pound bag at a time. Bring him some nice bottles if you visit, and you can return a few decades from now to find them.  

The singularity garbage can accrue depends on our relationship of care and attention. Imagine all the anonymous Japanese car parts that have settled like mist in global landfills and scrapyards, only a select few salvaged for homemade Kami shrines to machine gods. The carbon dioxide exhaled by the Honda while alive joins all the rest of the emissions in the atmosphere. By now a few motes of radioactive dust made in Japan have settled in the Cathedral and Ephemerata Gardens. The reactor meltdowns change the dust everywhere, adding another layer to the Anthropocene sky.

*Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Black Pyramid/Concrete & Cement,” Cabinet 27 (2007): 17-19, p. 17.

possibility city

Following the City’s bankruptcy in 2038 and the Code Compliance Department’s official dissolution, more and more Austin citizens start making their backyards into art environments/recycling centers/permaculture gardens. By the 22nd century, most of Austin looks like the Cathedral of Junk – thousands of overgrown sculptured landscapes that feed over half the population in an informal economy. Plumbers, electricians, and musicians trade their services for food. It is estimated that 45% of the city’s solid waste is diverted into the City of Junk, and 15% of homeowners have taken to squatting in handmade buildings in their yards while renting out their houses.

But we're getting far ahead of ourselves. The gas and water have yet to run out. Poop is still some kind of public secret that vanishes from houses without effort, and eating food fertilized by it is unimaginable. Cooked meals appear like magic when you flash money around. And the City of Living Garbage is still a fragmented dream that crops up in private backyards without hinting that it's an overarching future. Little glimpses of the possible City still look like the whimsical fantasies of crackpots and hoarders, not a collective strategy for survival.

Junk, litter, trash, refuse, and all manner of polluted, unvalued, and forgotten things compose this City. Garbage is a vast cultural category of entropic things, decomposing forms, and abjections that have crossed the threshold of being discrete objects or entities. The post-mortal world. Broken machines, shattered toys. Metabolic byproducts: urine, feces, and other biohazards. Moldy, melted vegetables. Dust as the ultimate steady-state attractor. Garbage threatens as a polluting substance that has fallen out of economic value to become a harbinger of ecological collapse at various scales. Every accumulation of capital has its accumulation of waste that might clog and overwhelm the moneyed world. Garbage is a dangerous and valuable substance, riotous with threats and promises, that we must regulate or vanquish. Toilets and trashcans suck it out of existence – someone else's problem. This rotting world we send off to landfills – our very bodies and thinking are a part of it; we might come to think of it as worth preserving, repairing, and keeping among the living.

And just what is this living that something like garbage does it, too? Living is a word or music of uncanny intelligences, senses, bodies, and forms caught up in loving and fighting and killing and dying with each other. But living is sadly and inevitably mortal, the flash in the dark before the dead remains become the food or home for some other life form. Living is about the mortal arc of presence and dissolution, and nothing lives without being in an atmosphere, affecting and being affected by other beings. Living is intensely relational, like when you only feel really alive when a certain person's around.

The quality of vivaciousness depends on a politics of attachment (over emancipation) whereby beings become dependent on one another, or even use each other as components in “living machines.” But these machines are unpredictable, articulating at unknown scales, growing through accidents and auspicious, unplanned unfurlings. “Living garbage” animates a thinking and language oriented away from trying to control how life forms, atmospheres, systems, or patterns should be, towards caring for and preserving their self-emergent vivacity in processes of symbiotic survival that are never finished and thereby eternal, for the moment. 

This 22nd century gambit for survival posed by the future City of Living Garbage might be the grim kind of survival that lives off boiled dandelion greens and beetle grubs. But it just might be the survival that glorifies in calling out, "We're still here! We survived!" while joyfully improvising ways to make a living. If the luxurious present gets yanked away from all around us, what is left but garbage? Under these conditions the residual and the ruins take on the presence of gifts. Then improvisations that transform death and decay become ordinary, humble, and thankful. The dusty, rotten world becomes fertile soil, and that's the ground for the City of Living Garbage. It is growing in my backyard.