The Thing in the Garden

Billows of white flesh erupted from the ground. At first the mass doubled daily, then slowed down but kept unfolding. It absorbed other plants, leaving them alive but trapped in its form. It dusted a glass light fixture scavenged from the Cathedral of Junk with its powdery spore. After a few weeks it was a yard across, with shelves of tissue in ripples like a small, solid cloud, an uncanny thing sprouting between the figs and roses in the front garden where the cats poop.

The fruiting sex organs of other fungi have popped up in Ephemerata Gardens. Bird Nests with their tiny cups of spores. Brown umbrellas that open up and rot in a day, bright yellow ones in potted plants and the kitty litter compost. What other cthonic aliens live invisible in the soil? Bondarzewia berkeleyi, the huge Berkeley's polypore, is an edible fungus best cooked when the flesh is young. I learn this on Google and see pics of fungi in dense forests that look like the one in our yard. A museum visitor has a distrubed reaction like the thing scared him, and I realize how fond I am of the mushroom. Something about its unlikely visitation in a "human dominated ecosystem." In a restaurant I overhear a guy reminiscing about his irises. "They died back after we put the fungicide in the yard. Now they're saying iris patches need certain kinds of fungus. They're learning so much about that."

Living soil and its suprises seemed to be endangered. There were reports in peer reviewed journals like Current Microbiology (1) that glysophates, the key ingredient in Roundup and its Chinese knock-offs, were decimating non-targeted soil microbes and mycelia in agriculture fields. Controversy whirled around these texts -- allegations that Monsanto was actively blocking scientific research on its many products' unintended toxic effects while falsifying their own reports, or that the biotech giant was purposefully destroying the biosphere and food security just to maximize its own endless growth, or worse, to kill everyone but "the one percent." Scientific paranoiac visions charged court hearings, public protests, and Occupy Monsanto actions as people tried to get a grip on exactly what the corperation's products were doing to landscapes and bodies. Scientists on both sides of the debate reasoned that lab testing of glysophates and genetically modified plants were always suspect, since things don't work the same in the agricultural fields (e.g., varying in dosage amount, humidity, and the like). Meanwhile the fields themselves were the real experimental labs; the world itself had become the life-size lab.

Like the polypore in our yard this Monsanto worlding turned up in unexpected places. The US Geological Survey isolated glysophates in Mississippi rain (2). Doctors in a hospital in Quebec discovered BT toxin (produced by a soil bacteria's transgenes in GM corn) in the blood of pregnant women(3). In 2009 President Obama appointed former Monsanto lobbyist and VP Michael Taylor as senior advisor to the head of the FDA. Glysophates and GM seeds drifted to neighboring farms, and GM rice cross-pollinated patented Monsanto gene sequences into organic wild rice in a case of genetic pollution. Because there was no mandatory labeling for GMO ingredients you could hate Monsanto and unwhittingly eat its spawn at the same time unless you can afford all organic. Even then Monsanto corn or cotton might be in everyday objects you touch. You could become obsessed with purging Monsanto, get politically active in an international movement "building a world without Monsanto"(4). Like Climate Change, Monster Monsanto became one of those conspiratorial things you could wrap your life around researching and fearing -- its mafia capital built of commodites that kill, first Agent Orange (to kill people, a commissioned product sanctioned by the state military's monopoly on violence), then DDT, now Roundup and corn (to kill pests, no state sanction required). The corporation's living garbage, polluting the minutia of ordinary life, is facilitating cosmopolitan publics of concern, outraged people who could only come together around a trashed world and its remediation.

Besides their ability to manifest in unlikely spots, mushrooms and Monsanto have another thing in common: they eat the death of other beings. They cultivate certain kinds of landscapes by kickstarting a chain of ecological relations by tinkering with forms of death. Mushroom species are living machines, medicinal or toxic to certain life forms. A few lots down from Ephemerata Gardens they might be cutting back oak trees to build a new house. I need to buy some oyster and shitake mushroom plugs and beeswax. The rainbarrels are full of (glysophate?) rain to keep the logs sodden. Maybe a year from now we'll be eating succulent stir fry.

The polypore's mass has yellowed and is no longer tender. I couldn't dismember and eat the thing anyway. Its mysterious autonomy. Plus it's growing in cat poop.

2012

(1) Clair E, Linn L, Travert C, Amiel C, Séralini GE, Panoff JM. "Effects of Roundup(®) and glyphosate on three food microorganisms: Geotrichum candidum, Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris and Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus." Curr Microbiol. 2012 May;64(5):486-91. Epub 2012 Feb 24. Also, researchers in Portland found that BT toxin in GM corn has lethal effects on a non-target species of beneficial fungus. 

Tanya E. Cheeke, 

Todd N. Rosenstiel,

and Mitchell B. Cruzan. "Evidence of reduced arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal colonization in multiple lines of Bt maize."Am. J. Bot. April 2012 99:700-707.

(2) Chang, F. C., M. F. Simcik, et al. (2011). "Occurrence and fate of the herbicide glyphosate and its degradate aminomethylphosphonic acid in the atmosphere." Environ Toxicol Chem 30(3): 548–555.

(3) Aris A, Leblanc S. "Maternal and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods in Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada." Reproductive Toxicology (2011), doi:10.1016/j.reprotox.2011.02.004.

(4) Combat Monsanto website (http://www.combat-monsanto.co.uk/). See also GMWatch (http://www.gmwatch.eu/).

Hot Cold

Early September the temperature drops ten degrees from the summer's unbroken triple digits, falling down with scorched leaves. The feeling of winter coming on, when stars look brighter and sounds carry further in cold air. Early sunsets, less light in a day. In January, twenty-five degrees for five days, snow on the garden greens. When the weather is perfect, it is only shifting from one extreme to the other, a little window stuffed with feelings of anticipation for spring’s seedburst or the cozy melancholy of long winter nights.

We have been ricocheting between ever warmer summers and colder winters. This summer with the water blackouts the ground cracked open like it did in the middle of last winter's long freeze. The cracks are wide enough to shove down hay and manure. The ponds freeze six inches thick, goldfish and gambusia hibernating beneath the ice. Fleas and mosquitoes vanish. We weatherproof the chicken and bunny coop with shower curtains and heat lamps. In the summer a standing fan circulates the hot, stagnant air.

Sometimes we burn chopped up fallen branches in the chimenea, more for atmosphere than warmth. Compost heaps radiate free heat, warm enough to keep seedlings happy if you set them on top in the spring and rig up a plastic cover.* On hot days you can make a simple evaporative cooler by sticking your feet in a bucket of water. Wear as little clothes as possible.

We used to run an A/C that cooled the bedroom while shooting hot air at the pond. On the hottest stretch of days the A/C became useless with electricity blackouts. The big ice storm last winter knocked out the power but we still had water and gas. People are learning to conserve water and electricity not only because they got too expensive, but because they become unavailable to most for days at a time in peak use weeks. The cold isn’t bad because we have surprisingly cheap gas, but there’s not much you can do about summer heat.

Which is more inescapable and miserable, extreme cold or heat? Conditioned by air conditioners and heaters, bodies sweat and shiver outside. So vulnerable without our coolers and heaters, not to mention clothes. We get heat stroke, or body heat wicks off into freezing air. What are bodies, what is life, but this fragile balance of heat and cold?

2018 

* Gene Logsdon details his sheep manure heater for seedlings in Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing [2010], 132-133). "I keep wondering, nevertheless, if I am taking as much advantage of this free heat as I should. Red Cat Farm in Germansville, Pennsylvania, is testing an idea to use that heat in one of its greenhouses." 

Tunnels

Stray animals seem drawn to Ephemerata Gardens. Don't get me started on the cats. One morning a young black and white bunny hops around the morning glory patch. The neighbors were raising rabbits for food, had too many babies, and let a few go in the alley. We put the bunny in our chicken coop, along with another we find the next morning. They seem to be sisters; we never see them mate. A few weeks later we lift up the cat carrier top that serves as their makeshift hutch to find a dozen squirming furry bean-shaped babies. The father digs his way out of the coop and vanishes.

The local feed store buys some of the babies to resell as pets, and we give a few away. The two we keep--the mother and her albino baby--can't stand each other, so I build a new hutch with a wire mesh floor. The albino tunnels through the chicken coop's floor. Excavated soil mixed with hay and manure maddeningly blocks the door. Every few months I hawl out around fifty pounds of dirt to throw in the compost. Another poop chore, like the kitty litter boxes, often overwhelming. Keeping furry animals requires daily feeding and watering, cleaning up their excreta, sometimes feeling guilty of neglect or resentment at the extra work. Anxiety that a dog could break in and kill again.

We keep the bunnies more for their poop than as pets. In a pinch they could become food for starving vegetarians. The hand-me-down rabbits are our belongings, living objects with an instrumental value that serves our consumption habits. They are little solutions to the agriculture crisis of the loss of fertile topsoil. I try not to think of them as prisoners, vulnerable in the coop. Much more than means to ends,* they desire to tunnel and escape. They want to eat lamb's quarters, amaranth, and sugary carrots. They're so soft, except for kicking back feet, and completely silent.

2012

* "Ecological crises ... present themselves as generalized revolts of the means: no entity--whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood--agrees any longer to be treated 'simply as a means' but insists on being treated 'always also as an end.' This in no way entails extending human morality to the natural world, or projecting the law extravagantly onto 'mere brute beings,' or taking into account the rights of objects 'for themselves'; it is rather the simple consequence of the disappearance of the notion of external nature. There is no longer any space set aside where we can unload simple means in view of ends that have been defined once and for all without proper procedure... 'No one knows what an environment can do,' 'no one knows what associations define humanity...'" Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 155-6.

Garbage Collectors

"Ephemerata Gardens collects all kinds of objects and life forms... It is a miniature version of the North Pacific Garbage Gyre (or Garbage Patch), a museum of plastics gathered by the clockwise vortex of oceanic currents. "

Posted on FlowTV.org.

Wheelflowers

Wheelflowers, wheeldomes, wheelwalls, wheelarbors, wheelbarrow shrines, welded-wheel bike racks, wheelgardens, and wheelmachines bloom everywhere in the patchy landscapes of the City of Living Garbage. There are bicycle-powered tablesaws and foodblenders, bike rim domes at Biosquat hunkered over hand-dug clay quarries and another at the Cathedral of Junk that incorporates a cosmic satellite dish and whirling A/C turban. Rubber tire planters, sometimes cut into fanciful bird forms or spiky crowns, grace yards and sidewalks. Earthship dwellers inhabit rammed-earth car tires. You enter Ephemerata Gardens through a wheelarbor of bike rims with an arced PVC/metal pole/guardrail skeleton that hosts moonflower and heavenly blue morning glory. In the backyard, three wheelflowers sway over our fig trees. White wing doves pause on them to survey the cats hunting on the ground below.

The wheelflowers bloomed when some side-of-the-road hubcaps, junk bike rims from the Yellow Bike Project, and PVC and metal pipes abandoned in our backyard met a little bit of wire and earth. They are doubled overhead by car and bicyclist emissions, with the small hubcabs centered in the web of bike spokes having a bigger share in the atmosphere's composition. The circles make a pattern with the sun's arc, the bottles stacked as retaining walls for raised bed gardens, and an arch of bent rebar with cut metal letters spelling out our garden's name.

Wheels compose landscapes of circular repetition and movement. Cars and bikes are so different -- the moods they stir up in traffic, their repair costs, the ways they spend time and energy, their relationships to the sky or hills (not to mention soil: cars are heavy and compact earth; they have to drive on non-permeable cover; food-powered machinery runs on agricultural fields and cars run on drilled land- and seascapes; you could go on and on). Car wheels, chained to machine engines, don't have the DIY flexibility of muscle/food-powered cyborgs like the bike or shoe. People are walking or biking into livable futures past junkyards of electrified and corn-fed automobiles. They build signposts out of vehicular debris, fenders welded into a huge gateway that reads "BIKETOPIA." The Nowhere City of Velocipedopolis.

Biosquat started out as a summertime homestead for outdoor living, with wintertime dwellings somewhere south. Their living experiment was to become bike nomads following bird migrations through a seasonal city stretched out across what David Santos calls “the New World Twilight Zone” in his onscreen epic, Wheeliad. The Zone is a north-south flyway for migrating monarch and snout nose butterflies, Mexican free-tail bats, hummingbirds, and hundreds of other beings of the sky who teach nomadic survival. The Zone's hourglass shape hosts supernatural anomalies at its tapered heart – “a geographic singularity of weirdness centered loosely on Mexico." Austin, Oz-Town, “a prime node in the twilight zone,” incubates mutations for survival in the ecological catastrophes wracking the early 21st century.

Biosquat's caretaker, Ed Sapir, leads us along paths winding through this edible landscape dotted with salvage architecture. The hillside gardens can be irrigated with rainwater caught in a homemade 600 gallon cistern that runs on a solar powered pump Ed designed. We visit the little egg-shaped dugout “hobbit hole” with a dome of welded bike wheels and curvy benches made of red clay mixed with sand. Climb up into the wheelegg treehouse, with its pointy end north and its wide side south, open-ended to the sun’s arc and cooling wind. Wired with electricity, but built for open-air, A/C-free summer sleeping, the treehouse lets you slumber in the sky. The treehouse’s rough cedar plank floor comes from a factory outside town. The egg’s pointy end is half of a satellite dish with an over-arc of bike rims wired to aluminum sailboat spars bought cheap – surplus junk. Political candidate signs make up the roof, but Ed wants to replace them with metal tiles. He envisions an elegant vernacular architecture akin to Finca Exotica's "tiki modernism" where the makeshift political signs, crumbling in the sun, no longer fit in. A beautiful curvy wheelbanister is held together by strong wire running in a circle surrounding the balcony in a structural hug. Ed says you could charge at it and just bounce off, it’s so strong. It’s the tension.

Everything at Biosquat is just hatching, all the time. Ed imagines the bike wheel domes
and red clay mortarwork as archaeological sites – readymade ruins or follies, overgrown with flora. While we sit and talk he plucks weeds in an ongoing shaping of the landscape. Like Santos’ online writing, Biosquat is devoid of any illusion of closure, permanently in progress, and alive. Half-born wheelforms accumulate for however long it takes for them to come together. Salvage architecture takes patience in a slow accretion of puzzle pieces. There are finished and inhabitable projects like the treehouse, and there are things in more elementary stages of coming through the pipedream bottleneck. Everything is many things at once, and nothing is what it was.

Biosquat plays out how cities might finally catch on to the ecstatic bounty of the post-industrial age – the trashed world. Beautiful houses have been built of waste. This radical tinkering revels in the surplus of decomposition, experimenting with new and unanticipated forms and landscapes out of mobility machines that are falling apart. Like a circus of scrappy novelties, it is an alternative, temporary urban zone that gets on with celebrating life in the face of ecochaos. Rolling with the cyborg bicyclist/bike body, it keeps human muscle power and feats of endurance like bicycle migrations at the center of possibilities. Carnival sustainability is “victory-in-advance,” as David Santos puts it – “victory-in-the-attempt” to bike out of peak oil collapse into the paradise of the City of Living Garbage.

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.