Blue Corn

In one of the digital photos we can no longer access, the blue corn stalks are as tall as our six year old daughter. The seeds were second generation from two ears we were able to grow with kernels planted as part of a public protest in 2016. We donated five bucks to the nonprofit FreeSeeds for a packet of organic heirloom corn with drought-tolerant gene sequences patented by Insanto. The corporation more or less ignored this performative flaunting of patent infringement as thousands of backyard farmers got to feel radical while learning that corn is pretty hard to grow.

Last night I was thinking about Insanto's fate and strange rebirth. The first mysterious GM corn and soy field meltdowns were exciting. As thousands of acres of crops withered almost overnight, people thought "nature" was finally retaliating against Insanto's will to control. BT-resistant corn rootworms were winning the arms race. But the bombing of Insanto's corporate headquarters in St. Louis made it clear that the dead fields were also terrorist attacks. Then arsonists started torching the dried up fields. Another drought year.

The self-declared Organic Militia's attacks forced a sudden, glaring clarity on what Insanto had been doing all along: weaponizing food. The armed rent-a-soldiers on hire from Nergal LLC (formerly known as Academi, Xe Services and Blackwater USA/Worldwide) stationed around Insanto's HQ and various test sites were just the human analog to the weaponized food itself, life forms of mass destruction aimed at multitudes of micro- and macroorganisms. Whereas the corporation could kill targeted plants and insects with impunity, the militia had blatantly crossed the line into a categorically different form of violence by killing Insanto employees. Insanto's undeclared war against nature had blurred into an undeclared war between a corporation and a citizen-militia.

In contrast, Organic Militia's first press release was quite open and rabid in their declaration of war against Insanto. There were spies and saboteurs on both sides, comparisons to the French Revolution -- peasants trying to take down a monarchy with organic seeds, mushrooms species, and flames and drought conditions as weapons. They compared Insanto to the East India Company of the 19th century, widely hated while still touting its benevolence in "improving agriculture" and gifting food security to the masses. Both corporations enjoyed paternalistic fantasies of development and state sanctions on their virtual monopolizations in international trade. Organic Militia cast backyard middle class gardeners in the US as peasants, urging them to take up arms and get militant along with some of the laborers in the Global South demonstrating against GM agriculture by burning Insanto seed. Groups like Occupy Insanto committed to non-violent protest and civil disobedience condemned the Organic Militia while still leveraging new images of Nergal troops with rifles protecting HQ and fields.

GMOs were inescapable, showing up in non-GM labeled food, slipped into recipes at supposedly "all organic and locally grown" restaurants. For every fraud caught passing off BT corn or flounder-tomatoes as the natural thing, there were dozens undetected. Government regulators with the FDA or USDA just helped Insanto push through more GM quasi-species. Of course everyone was shocked and saddened by the St. Louis bombing, but we all kind of expected it after a decade of public frustration over foodflation and fundamentalist outrage over landscape impurity and genetic pollution. A speaker at the second GMO-Free Midwest conference in 2013 even predicted the attacks. Strapped state police forces remained surprisingly impassive, as if to say "this fight is between you guys." (Or the '17 Crash caused their non-intervention; the National Guard was far too busy with emergency response on the eastern seaboard to get involved). Multiple court cases ruling in favor of plaintiffs -- organic farmers, people with cancer, etc. -- crippled the corporations' profits with billions of dollars in ongoing settlements. But the clincher was evidence that Insanto labs had engineered a bacteria into corn and soy specifically targeted at degenerating human liver function at the same time one of their biopharming subsidiaries developed medication to help the resulting condition (splicing the same bacteria into fungi). Like a dream, a landmark Supreme Court ruling shut down the company and blockbusted it into little subsidiaries, with a harsh ten year moratorium on planting GM seeds in the US and territories.

Millions of acres of GM landscape patches with dead dirt and thriving superweeds needed remediation. Volunteers cropdusted them with fungal spores that are natural herbicides also capable of breaking down glysophates in the soil. Manure spreaders fertilized the fields with raw human poop. The alien acres of mushrooms seemed to glow at dawn and dusk.

Ultraviolet rays from the rising and setting sun also made our blue corn glow when we peeled back the silk. The stalks grew twice as tall as me. We babied the plants, picking off worms, carefully fertilizing, as if the few ears we might grow could feed the world. But the third year our seed wouldn't come up. We haven't tried growing corn since.

Now Insanto is back with odd new benevolent products. Nanotech waterbeads that manufacture water from soil air. Anti-depressant and anti-psychotic GM corn and soy. Pesticide resistant carabid beetles that eat rootworms. Insanto has realigned itself with the World Peace Council, the UN Peacekeepers, and other international organizations and publicly apologized for its long history in weapons manufacturing (from Agent Orange to glysophates). Strangest of all, Insanto open sourced its entire patent library. Everyone's skeptical: could they really be good guys now?

2028

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/).

Pyrolized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2018

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

**Quoted in ibid., 288.

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.

Fertilized

Ephemerata Gardens is localizing its own manure compost production in a closed loop. We have always thrown the hay and poop from our combination chicken hutch/rabbit coop into the compost heap. But the two bunnies and two or three chickens only make so much nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich manure. The perfectly round, oderless brown balls dropped by the rabbits can be added directly to the mulch around fruit trees and tall food plants like okra. The chicken crap, with its whitish urine and grayish digested feed, ends up all over the yard as the birds scratch around all day. The dried poops are like dirt clods, easily crushed into dust. We harvest the manure and soiled bedding hay from the coop and throw it directly into the compost to age for a half year or so. But the animals' poop was never quite enough to meet our compost needs every fall and spring. This year we finally broke down and built an outhouse to start saving our poop, too.

Shit has become so valuable that people have been hijacking sewer mains to suck out the sludge. Even with its low phosphorous content, urban fecal matter is much cheaper to harvest than operating the phosphorous mines that have become depleted anyway. Farmers and warmongers alike cry "More phosphorous!" But with bat populations (and their amazing guano) so low from white nose syndrome and the coprolites all mined out, where can they turn? Coprolites are mineralized feces of ancient animals, including dinosaurs--important to paleontologists as trace fossils that offer direct evidence of diet. In the 1850s coprolites were mined near Cambridge, England as a source of phosphates for farming. When the mines reopened during WWI the phosphates went into gunpowder instead of fertilizer. Last year, still scraping by to stay open, the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge sold its entire coprolite collection to a Chinese fertilizer manufacturer.

Our new toilet is a small version of the Rhizome Collective's brownfield commode. As a volunteer at the Radical Urban Sustainability Training workshop in 2008 I helped hand-build Austin’s first city approved, code compliant public composting toilet engineered by David Bailey. It took four years of review for the City to permit the structure. We built the toilet's walls with over a hundred bags of concrete mixed in wheelbarrows, poured into a plywood form along with demolition rubble gathered from the land. The design is divided in half so that humanure in one side can cure for a year while the other side is in use. The resulting pathogen-free nightsoil feeds the garden downhill from the toilet. The system produces free fertilizer while saving water (and the energy consumed in water’s production and treatment: "Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined"*).

In two years we will be able to use our humanure in the garden as compost. Meanwhile we are experimenting with a compost tea liquid fertilizer made of chicken and rabbit poop that has cured for a month, with some of our urine thrown in for good measure. If it sounds disgusting, wait till you bite into one of our huge, juicy tomatoes.

*Asher Price, "Green toilet wins city approval: Composting commode is first to gain official stamp," Austin American-Statesman, June 18, 2009.

2018

The Symbiont

The teaspoon of Ephemerata Gardens soil I mailed to the lab tested positive for the Toxoplasma tinkerans brain parasite. I haven’t tested myself, but I’m sure I’m infected. The team of soil ecologists that discovered T. tinkerans last year hypothesize that the endosymbiont alters its host’s behavior by stimulating an obsessive collecting and arranging of objects, generating a landscape patch cluttered with rusty metals. Like the bacteria in early biobattery experiments, T. tinkerans eats iron oxide in soil solutions by prying off oxygen and metabolizing the freed up protons, giving the ground a mild electrical charge. The parasite reproduces solely in human temporal lobes. Hoarders, scrap metal collectors, and people with art yards simultaneously cultivate and are cultivated by the symbiont.

Inside each yardist’s brain is another small garden where the yardist symbiont dwells. Like its close relative Toxoplasma gondii, a transpececific brain parasite that co-evolved with cats, T. tinkerans makes its hosts do things and behave certain ways. Most notably, yardists begin to feel unsettled and uncomfortable anywhere but their yard. They must constantly tinker, becoming part of a living machine. They grow curiously affectionate towards certain kinds of trash, attracting it to them as if by arcane magnetism. The yardist symbiont cultivates secret powers in its hosts that range from an attunement to particular objects in roadside junk, to a dreamy state of awareness or sense of timelessness in which garbage gleams with promises of what it might become. Hosts become overly sensitive to a space's aesthetic saturation, in particular an atmosphere's maintenance needs and patterns of decomposition. Perhaps the oddest and most dangerous symptom is a nascent sense that money isn't everything which, untreated, can grow over the years into an acute dislike of accumulating capital in favor of blatently wasting time. Affection for the valueless eclipses the desire to amass set forms of value -- as if currency, not trash, was dirty and polluted.

How does the yardist symbiont spread? At first I imagined a mycelial matt camouflaged as ordinary sewer pipes and fiber-optic cables creeping out from the Cathderal of Junk beneath the rest of Austin. Working in the garden one day, the yardist-to-be extracts a small twist of wire from the soil and contracts the symbiont. More realistically, the vectors are not underground, but the environments themselves. Just setting foot there you run the risk of contracting the symbiont. It even seems to transmit over TV -- an invisible microbe that infects through visual media. Perhaps it spreads through tainted gifts, like the doll arm, head on a stick, and mullein pups Scott Stevens trasnplanted from Smut Putt Heaven to live in Ephemerata Gardens. Before you know it, an art environment takes over your yard and life. Over the course of a decade, structures like the East/West Gate to the Garden of Eden at Further Farms coagulate from a multitude of rusty taproots emerging directly from the yard. You start eyeing roadside junk piles, compulsively collecting body parts for the yardist symbiont to assimilate into its ever-creeping form.

T. tinkerans' discovery not only lets us better understand the psychobiogeophysical entities that have stimulated the growth of the City of Living Garbage. More importantly, we can propagate the City by inoculating human populations with the T. tinkerans endosymbiont. 

2021

Microscopic Cities

When you step into Ephemerata Gardens, right beneath your feet is a densely populated urban population, the sprawling megalopolis of Soilandia. Of all "Do-It-Yourself" activities, perhaps DIY soil is the one you do least by yourself. Compost heaps are buslting microscopic cities of macroinvertebrate mansions, amoeba apartments, and fungal factories. They say a teaspoon of good soil is home to 100 million to 1 billion bacteria. And the Archaea! Strange to think human food security depends on this galaxy of microbes. So much for doing it yourself -- only we can make soil in an ongoing collaboration with life forms that know just what to do with dead things.

In the drought/recession fall of 2008, Carol Ann Sayle's tour of Boggy Creek Farm opened with an invocation of threat to this we. “I know why you’re here. Things are tough, and we’re all worried. We need true homeland security.” Around sixty people gathered for the tour, most of them in their later years unlike the twenty-somethings drawn to the Rhizome Collective's RUST workshop.

Carol Ann addresses the crowd from her front porch. The house is one of the three oldest structures in Austin, built in 1840 in the bottomlands of the Colorado River with its rich alluvial soil (back when all farming was "organic"). Farms have surrounded the house for most of a century and a half. Carol Ann and her partner Larry Butler bought the place in 1992 and gave it its current name in honor of the creek with concrete banks a block away. Now three other organic farms share the neighborhood. The landscape patch's memories keep popping out of the soil in the form of wild amaranth and horseshoes. Archaeologists from the University of Texas at Austin have come to dig for 19th century debris like kitchen garbage, pottery shards, bones. On the Farm’s website, Carol Ann recognizes the house itself as “a physical testament to the labors of the African slaves who undoubtedly had a hand in its construction, and who worked the fields of this antebellum plantation. This page is dedicated to their memory.”

Our tour meanders from the porch to the front garden, where the gravel driveway and rocks in the soil soak up heat and keep the field a few degrees warmer than the back garden. Carol Ann's tour isn't about plants, but topsoil. “Focus on the soil and forget about the plants.” We linger around the compost heaps, twenty-foot long rows as tall as a person. Every few days they need to be turned with a front-end loader to keep the temperature right and replenish the oxygen inside. On cold days they steam when turned. Carol Ann describes soil production as “not an exact science ... more of an art or common sense.”

The art of composting involves science labs that analyze soil samples. Based on lab results, they add molasses, green sand, sulfur, and other amendments to the compost before putting it in the gardens. Getting the right ratio of 1 part nitrogen to 20 parts carbon begins in the compost heaps. Green plants and chicken manure make for good nitrogen, while fallen leaves, twigs and branches, dry grass, and other brown and brittle trash bulk up the carbon. Carol Ann sees the compost heaps as a form of carbon sequestration, as if they've trapped part of the sky.

Boggy Creek Farm used to collect the neighborhood’s curbside bags full of leaves. Sanitation workers appreciated their free labor. Now landscapers drop off their trash. The compost heaps need to be kept moist as a wrung out sponge to “keep the microbes happy.” Carol Ann pictures them in their giant home, “eating and pooping, mating and going on vacations.... there’s animals in there!” People stick their hands into the warm heaps as we walk by to the back garden beds.

Behind the 200-foot long beds is a small orchard of fig and citrus trees, and some random heaps of slowly decomposing rhubarb stalks. Because the bottomlands’ high clay content causes bad drainage, the beds are raised, but not by building them up in containers. Instead, paths have been dug down between the rows of plants. Before seeding new crops, the farmers walk the rows with a machine that gently fluffs the top few inches of beds that had gone flat over the growing season -– the no-tilling method.

Carol Ann cautions not to do this with a shovel because the beds are home to thriving civilizations. “Those civilizations die when you throw them up in the air like that. That’s what’s happening in Iraq and the Gaza Strip.” Carol Ann points to the chicken coop next to her house. The egg hens seem to know they won’t be killed, so they have “a sense of peace about them” that harmonizes with the microbe civilizations in the raised soil beds. Sometimes this sense of peace rubs off on visitors to the farm. Kids play in a shallow dirt hole near the coop, pushing around battered plastic dumptrucks in the pecan shade.

While soils amended with chemical fertilizers are composed of only .3% organic matter, the labs say 3-4% of Boggy Creek’s soil is rotting plants, manure, worms, fungi, microbes, and the like. To disturb the beds as little as possible, the farmers harvest plants by cutting them off at the stalk. Their nutrient-rich roots can decompose in the soil, and bacteria, nematodes, mycorrhizae, and other organisms are not yanked out of their civilizations. Then the machine fluffs the top few inches of soil, and people use hoes to pull decomposing mulch in the footpaths up onto the beds. Finally, they add an inch of revitalizing compost. A mulch of dry leaves or hay laid down on the paths holds in moisture and marks where to step. Now the rows are ready for planting seeds.

The cultivation of trash into soil takes time, machines, and knowledge. Without people an inch of topsoil forms in 300 to 1000 years, while with people's help, a tree can turn into compost in 1 to 100 years. To get an idea of the labor involved, replace the front-end loader that turns compost heaps with human-powered pitchforks, or the mulching machine with a hand-axe. But the ancient soil civilizations do all the essential work of transforming death into life. Soil is living dust, forming in geological time.

Ephemerata Garden's soil is a probiotic liquid, oozing to the landscape patch's low spots, churned by chickens scratching for earthworms and grubs. It is a vast seed packet, a surprising mycelial network with mushrooms that manifest overnight. The soil gets loamier every year. We build new beds with bag-it-yourself dirt from Natural Gardener, revitalize with locally-produced compost sold at Home Despot. We discover garbage pits of glass bottles and shards, a little walkway of paving stones. The soil city is a random museum where rusty nails, batteries, a pocket watch, half a pair of novelty hillbilly dentures, and other flotsam bob to the surface. The City of Living Garbage is built on this dense subsurface civilization. A restless churning of life forms and their layered traces of inhabitation.

2012

Slow Trash

One of the yard's back corners is our slow trash landscape patch. Five foot circle of food grade compost. Six foot tall brush pile with lazy anoles. One circle of wire mesh holds in pine kitty litter, and another, unbleached baby diapers. Taking up about a hundred square feet, this garbage collector leisurely breaks down our household biodegradable waste into soil and mulch for the yard. Who knows how long it will take?

The word trash (originally Old Norse for "fallen leaves and twigs") litters the English language with all kinds of referents, from broken objects to undervalued people. It shares in a dirty ontological category of stinky, rotten, untouchable things, dangerous with polluting powers. Trash is also an action. Mulch comes from the Proto-Indo-Eurpean base "to grind up," while litter’s etymology indexes how life forms lie down to sleep, reproduce, and shed waste. "Litter" referred to straw strewn on the ground for beds, but also all the animals born to a mother in a birthing bed. By the 1900s, "litter" had become a synonym for an undifferentiated mass of trash, garbage, waste, refuse, and rubbish clotting urban areas. In 1948, Ed Lowe marketed a clay-based product called Kitty Litter to replace the sand used in cat bathrooms. The name stuck as a generic one for all brands of litter box fill.

Like many other commodities, cat litter has a worrisome ecological life-cycle. Around 2 million tons of kitty litter enters landfills every year to join an estimated 3.4 million tons of diapers in a geological lump. Because the clay-based litter we used couldn’t be composted, we put it in plastic bags and threw it in the trashcan, the heaviest part of our household wastestream. By switching to pine litter that we compost in the yard, we cut the weight of our garbage roughly in half (but we still bag and toss the toxoplasmosis-laden feces).

The problems with kitty litter’s final resting place only add to its troubling origins in clay and bentonite strip mines. In 2001 the Oil-Dri Corporation (makers of Cat’s Pride and Jonny Cat brand litters) proposed new strip mining operations in Nevada’s Hungry Valley to save on shipping 140 thousand tons of litter to the western US. Their mine would be located 100 yards from the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, prompting Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe to fight the project with nonprofit environmental groups like Earthworks and the Sierra Club. Their concerns include respiratory illnesses caused by dust blowing in from the mine, potential groundwater contamination from arsenic used in processing, increased traffic, noise and light pollution, and irreversible violence against the land. In the words of colony resident Diana Coffey, “I want my grandbabies to have this land, and a lot of this has remained untouched for thousands of years ... Our people never had written language, so everything was handed down from showing and telling in stories. That means it needs to be quiet.”* The Washoe County Commission denied Oil-Dri the right to mine, but the corporation is suing for damages in federal court based on an outmoded 1872 Mining Law.** The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony remains poised to fight the kitty litter strip mine.

Our kitty litter and diaper composters are cylinders of wire mesh leftovers from garden fencing. Cardboard and green glass bottles stuck through the mesh keep the kitty litter in place. Plates, napkins, forks, and food from our wedding form the diaper column's bottom strata. Two-and-a-half year old diapers on the second layer are decomposing nicely, almost ready to become mulch. Very few of the diapers are poopy. Some agave and prickly pear cactus on top seem to be surviving. We never stir these piles to speed up the mulching process, because we have all the time in the world.

Once in a while I fluff the food-grade compost with a pitchfork and throw in some water. Maybe next spring it will be ready to use as a soil ammendment. Meanwhile we buy bags of "triple power compost" locally produced by Organics By Gosh. In 2011 the Keep Austin Beautiful program arranged a tour of Organics By Gosh's composting facility. Giant machines work among twenty-foot tall compost mounds – valleys of death full of vegetable scraps, meat, and bones. Dillo Dirt is also bagged here.*** Giant composting facilities like these are the very large intestines of the City of Living Garbage.

On the tour we learn that landscaping companies, grocery store chains, and large public events all contribute organic waste to the composting facility. The prison nearby is the biggest supplier of food waste: the worse the food, the more waste. Hospitals are finally getting on board. Organics by Gosh is one of only two facilities in Austin permitted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality regulatory agency to process meat, bones, fat, and dairy. Their compost piles are so large they form valleys around you that steam when mixed with the front-end loader. Microbial digestion inside the piles pushes their temperature up to 160˚ F, killing off pathogens and slowly cooking non-vegetative trash.

To keep the microorganisms happy, the piles should be moist, so in the summer they spray water from a rain and well water retention pond on the low side of the property. Rainwater coming off the piles picks up microbial life, making the pond an accidental vat of compost tea. When it gets too hot, they do not water the piles since moisture soaks up solar heat and would cook the life forms inside.

As the front-end loader stirs up a pile, wafts of manure and carrion float by. Biomass ages in the piles for 9 months to two years before being ground up in a Dr. Seuss contraption with a long rotating tube and conveyor belt that churns out finished humus. It falls in a perfect cone that no longer stinks. Mo, one of three Organics by Gosh employees leading the tour, says “that’s how you make dirt look good.” It also looks good on my baby’s face. He’s been clambering up the foot of the mounds, digging his hands in and smearing it all over.

At whatever scale, making soil out of trash puts us in the position of running a science experiment. Hands-on, self-taught ecological knowledge comes through slow learning over the years in close collaboration with microorganisms. It also puts you into daily relationships with nasty trash. In response to concerns about soil loss and overfull landfills, or localizing organic food production to cut out oil and petrochemicals, people proudly and affectionately hoard strange trash like my kitty litter and diapers. There's the guy who discovered that pine mulch breaks down into great soil in about a year. "The following January, and every year since, I have obtained all of the Christmas trees that my city collected."**** And the visitor to Ephemerata Gardens who collects hair from eight salons every month. Organics By Gosh wants your rotten meat.

Something happens to slow trash even before it becomes good compost, as if the untouchable category itself had decomposed. I find myself liking garbage, wanting to get to know it a little better, spend some time together. Curious about the life forms it attracts, like the giant zipper spider that spins its web right over the compost, or the seeds that slow trash sprouts after a good rain.

*Nancy Wride, “Plan to Mine Clay for Litter Boxes Stirs Cat Fight in Desert,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2002, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/apr/06/news/mn-36559. Also see Scott Sonner, “Nevada Balances Economy, Environment in Cat Litter Fight,” The Berkeley Daily Planet, December 14, 2001, http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-14/article/8969?headline=Nevada-balances-economy-environment-in-cat-litter-fight.
**Ann Ronald, Oh, Give Me A Home: Western Contemplations, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (2006), 129.
***Dillo Dirt is a product of the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant. Sludge from Austin’s two wastewater treatment plants is pumped to the Hornsby Bend facility where it is mixed into mulched leaves and branches from curbside pickup and allowed to age long enough to ensure all pathogens in the sludge have been cooked out of existence.  If you buy Dillo Dirt in Austin, chances are you are purchasing your own shit.
****Tom Clothier, "Making Your Own Soil," http://tomclothier.hort.net/page24.html. Clothier's site is a proto-gardening blog that started in the 1990s, a repository of experience-based, self-educated ecological knowledge. Clothier's interests range from biological pest control to the packets he has recieved by "trading seeds around the world." Over the years Clothier carefully tests the theories of experts while advancing his own Fortean concepts: "I have a theory that seeds are living breathing entities that appreciate a bit of air exchange" (http://tomclothier.hort.net/page45.html).

2012

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?"

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.