Trilling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015

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

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

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

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

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

Backwaters

The water smells good, like a creek. It cascades from one cast-iron bathtub into another, then into a ground level Jacuzzi, aerating along the way. Gambusia devour mosquitoe larva while goldfish and koi eat algae. Papyrus, elephant ear, pickerelweed, duck potato, duckweed--no end to the aquatic weeds useful for remediating not-so-dirty graywater.  Every time we shower ten to twenty gallons of the Colorado River flows into this bathtub waterfall, displacing water to the peach and avacado trees and soaking into the Boggy Creek watershed that feeds back into the Colorado River. Just how big is this backyard living machine? 

To jury rig these plumbing backwaters I severed the tub's drain pipe before it joined the outgoing toilet line for the South Austin Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant. Black plastic tubing delivers tub graywater to the sunken backyard Jacuzzi. I inoculated the new ponds with bacteria-laden sludge from the kitchen wetland. Searching for aquatic plants on Craigslist, I found some floating water hyacinth indigenous to South America and water lettuce native to North Africa to spread across the pond surfaces and kick start remediation. Their feathery roots catch drifting biosolids for bacteria to metabolize, keeping algal blooms in check by eating up nutrients. Invasive elephant ear collected from Town Lake unfurl rhizomes and colonize the tubs.

That winter raccoons who lost their homes when the City buried a neighborhood creek raid the wetland and eat most of the elephant ear tubers. This gives the native arrowroot (pickerelweed) from the Rhizome Collective a chance to spread in the spring. Hummingbirds sip nectar from their arrays of bright blue flowers. Dragonflies dip eggs into the water, and the growing nymphs eat mosquito larva. In the spring, hundreds of tadpoles hatch, and fingernail-size baby toads hop out to all corners of Ephemerata Gardens. At dusk the Gulf Coast toads' trilling sounds overlay bubbling water.

DIY wetlands take form through aesthetic improvisations--hands-on encounters with things that push back and teach as they emerge, laying down patterns and habits in sensory refrains. When Nigel Thrift visited Ephemerata Gardens after giving a talk at UT, he was enthusiastic about our backwaters as a form of hopeful urban resiliance through nonstandardized “underground knowledges” of repair and maintenance.* Improvisation involves ad hoc engineering, making it up as you go along or making due with all kinds of idiomatic solutions. We talked about how the improvisations are not at all limited to what do-it-yourselfers decide to do, but also what plants, animals, and bacteria fiddle around with in the self-emmergent landscape patch. Thrift talked about the wetland as an aesthetic form--something that “generates sensory and emotional gratification” and “shared capacity and commonality”**--the pleasures of being around lively habitats, teaching people about graywater remediation, and sharing water plants by giving them away. I had to remind him that these aesthetic forms are not just all rosy, but risky, subjecting you to abject encounters with rat-tailed maggots and invisible pathogens, or the stress of wondering when the Department of Code Compliance is coming to get you.

Wastewater reuse in wetlands and urban agriculture is slowly becoming accepted by departments of code, as well as a formalized strategy in international development projects. Too many people are tapping wastewater as a more dependable water source than rain for municipalities to realistically police and enforce wastewater use prohibitions. Remediating shower water with decentralized, user-maintained systems may be riskier to public health than the big wastewater treatment plants dealing with poop-laden blackwater. But it is much cheaper, conserves energy and potable water, and delivers nutrient rich water to local crops. Despite prohibitions against using wastewater for agriculture, farmers in the global South have been informally using it for irrigation in urban farms for decades. "Urban agriculture cannot be seen separately from wastewater use."*** Efforts to formalize wastewater use focus on experimental systems that provide a basic level of treatment through screening out solids and allowing sludge to settle in basins.

An experimental constructed wetland in Cameroon treats sewage from a population of 650 people by streaming it through a series of eight lagoons. Seven of these are stocked with water lettuce that can double its biomass within a week (giving it the status of a dangerous invasive species in waterways around the world). The researchers who built the system suggested maximum phytoremediation is only achievable by removing one quarter of the plants every fifteen days. All kinds of beings are waiting to highjack this living water with their aesthetic improvisations: "Emanation of foul odours, mosquitoes and flies proliferation and appearance of aquatic snakes are some of the nuisances recorded. These problems become acute when the system is left unattended to for long periods."**** Such systems require hands-on human labor to manage the labor of plant species; but they do not require electrical energy, endless chemical inputs, machine maintenance, or massive municipal funding to be built in the first place.

A similar experiment in Dakar, Senegal (built for a half million dollars in research monies) institutes a community run and owned sewage treatment plant that uses water lettuce to produce nitrogen-rich water for irrigation of urban agriculture.***** The system utilizes a permaculture model that approaches multiple issues (public health, employment for youth and women, and water and food security) with a single integrated solution. Likewise, a development project in Palestine (built for about 200K USD) treats sewage with duckweed, a tiny floating plant with high protein content and extremely fast growth rate. The duckweed is harvested twice a week and used as feed for chickens, so that the chemical-free sewage treatment plant serves as a stable source of income.****** These experiments seek to demonstrate that probiotic sewage treatment using aquatic plants as remediation technologies--a different kind of solar power--are both epidemiologically safe and economically effective alternatives to conventional sewage infrastructure development.

Imagine floating over a city of these DIY wetlands, a graywater oasis. Self-emergent communities of people and ecological beings are puddling around wastewater. Somewhere out there, an old bathtub is waiting to become your DIY wetland!

2015

*Nigel Thrift, 2005, “But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers 30:2 (June 2005), 133–150, p.136.

**Nigel Thrift, 2010, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour.” In The Affect Theory Reader Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 289–308, p. 292.

***Mark Redwood, Wastewater Use in Urban Agriculture: Assessing Current Research and Options for Local Governments, International Development Research Centre, Cities Feeding People Reports Series (2004), p.18, http://www.bvsde.paho.org/bvsaar/fulltext/redwood.pdf.

****Fonkou, Théophile, Philip Agendia, Ives Kengne, Amougou Akoa, and Jean Nya. Potentials of water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) in domestic sewage treatment with macrophytic lagoon systems in Cameroon. Proceedings of International Symposium on Environmental Pollution Control and Waste Management, January 2002, Tunis, 709-714, p.711-12, www.geocities.jp/epcowmjp/EPCOWM2002/709-714Fonkou.pdf.

*****Niang, Seydou. "Wastewater Treatment Using Water Lettuce for Reuse in Market Gardens (Dakar)." International Development Research Centre website, web.idrc.ca/es/ev-6339-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html.

******Al Khateeb, Nader. "Duckweed Wastewater Treatment and Reuse for Fodder (West Bank)." International Development Research Centre website, web.idrc.ca/es/ev-6314-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html.

Note: Parts of this entry were first published in Scott Webel, “Free Water! DIY Wetlands and the Futures of Urban Gray Water,” Anthropology Now 3(1): 13-22.

Tublands

Of all forms of waste flowing into the City of Living Garbage, wastewater is most potentially vivacious.  Not "water" in the abstract--the concept of atoms composing a pure molecule--but this water, a liquid palace polluted or graced with living and abiotic forms, many invisible. Any H₂O can be cultivated as living water, stored up to hydrate plants. How can you have a garden without water, much less a body or anything else?

We were thinking and worrying about water all the time. Summer after summer, little catastrophes crossed the Texas sky. Not tornadoes or floods, but nothing--no rain. Austin's Lake Travis, the reservoir formed by damming the Colorado River to supply the city with water, fell over fifty feet below average levels. Trees turned brown and died. Newspapers mourned the death of six hundred thousand cattle, the inferno that burned up over a thousand houses and half of parched Bastrop State Park. The environmental group Save Our Springs sent out panicked mass-emails: "We can no longer take water for granted." Lance Armstrong apologized for using 333,000 gallons of water in a single month. The City of Austin pushed conservation by restricting automated watering to one day a week and creating a dozen new Code Compliance jobs--water cops--to enforce restrictions with $500 fines. Austinites helped police their neighbors’ water use by calling 311 if sprinklers were running on the wrong day. There were rumors if the droughts continued the City would restrict all landscape watering, unless you had a permit for a food garden.

As the drought years pried open the taken-for-granted form of urban water, its consumption took on moral tones. Simple things like fast showers became ways to do something good for both the city and “the environment.” Little differences were supposed to add up--drops that fill the bucket for the good of the collective. As with oil consumption and other environmental issues in the public sphere, a messianic, salvational ethic began to course through everyday practices, charged by ominous weather events attributed to global climate change. Suddenly the city’s water security felt vulnerable, caught in the tenuous future of apocalyptic discourses.

Following the droughts our kitchen sink stopped draining. I'd learned about DIY wetlands at the Rhizome Collective's RUST workshops and read about them in the Greywater Guerrillas' book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground,* and thought, “This is free water! Why pay the City to take it away? I can reuse it for plants, instead of the hose.” The licensed plumber couldn't fix the sink drain without replacing everything, so I asked him to just put a pipe out of the back of the house. He was dubious. Every few days for half a year, I hauled buckets of bad water from beneath the drainage pipe to a feed trough full of pea gravel and elephant ear. The plants withered and mosquito larvae infested the water. The galvanized metal tub killed the gambusia minnows introduced to eat the larvae. Rat-tailed maggots thrived; their breathing tubes tangled in the electric pump used to aerate the water, stopping it up. The bad water’s rotten-egg smell stuck to my hands after cleaning dead rat-tails from the pump. My wetlands learning curve arced through an abject realm of decaying organisms.

Eventually I installed pipes connecting sink to wetland. No more hauling buckets.  After rereading my notes from the RUST workshop about hiding the water's surface under pea gravel to stop mosquitoes from breeding, I transformed the tubland into a closed-surface system like a gastrointestinal tract. If architecture mimics human bodies and metabolic processes, the kitchen-sink tubland extends my intestines. Such cyborg living machines can be uncanny and abject, to be sure, but also fascinating, surprising, and loveable. Constructed wetlands invite species into emergent microecologies that regenerate urban ecologies. The resulting landscape patches do much more than function or survive: they tinker, bloom, and flourish. Cannas introduced from the yard explode into giant stalks with droopy orange flowers. Every day about five gallons of incoming gray water displaces remediated water to a fig tree, rose bush, and salvias with violet-blue flowers. Hummingbirds visit the salvia, and butterflies and wasps eat overripe figs on the tallest branches. As an alternative solution to wastewater management the tubland implicitly criticizes status quo sewers that unnecessarily mix human excreta with not-so-dirty water. 

Before the droughts, Austin had started building an $849 million treatment plant to draw 50 million gallons a day (mgd) from the Colorado River by 2014, assuming that the reservoir's water levels would hold. The City also tried to reduce water use by spraying pretreated  gray water on municipal lawns, giving away low-flush toilets, and offering rain-barrel rebates, paying for up to half of the big thousand gallon systems. Customers could install new toilets and rain catches with DIY skills or hire experts, thereby reducing their use of manufactured water.

To produce tapwater Austin pumps up to 285 mgd from the Colorado River to two treatment plants where it goes through technical stages of “screening, disinfection, coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, and filtration.”** The Colorado River then flows through 3,600 miles of pipes into houses, where multiple forms of bad water are produced. As soon as treated water leaves showerheads and washing machines, it becomes  gray water. In kitchen sinks and toilet bowls it turns into black water. It all muddles together in sewers as wastewater mixed with sludge: an abject collection of excreta, toxic household cleaners, pharmaceuticals, skin and hair, gold rings, and anything else that goes down the drain.

Gravity and pumps then pull Austin's wastewater through 2,600 miles of sewers to two plants that together treat 150 million gallons each day. Screens and grit basins remove trash, sticks, and stones that are trucked to landfills. Organic solids settle out as sludge in sedimentation basins. Pumps suck sludge to a biosolids management plant to be mixed with yard debris from curbside pickup. After months of composting, it is bagged and sold as DilloDirt—a product partly made of the consumer's own excrement. Meanwhile, wastewater enters aeration basins full of microorganisms that metabolize the last traces of sludge. Finally, it flows into chlorine basins where bad water is officially killed. More chemicals remove the chlorine before the City delivers the inert water back to the Colorado River. The pumps involved at multiple stages in these processes require large-scale electricity production. Squadrons of workers tend power lines, pumps, pipes, roads, and all the rest of the subsystems. Although it seems monolithic, this water network is full of cracks and leaks that can be altered at various scales. Partial solutions like catching rain or selectively disengaging from sewers begin to patch together urban water futures in the present system’s gaps.

In DIY wetlands, urban waste becomes the habitat for little worlds of non-human agents—populations of plants, animals, and microorganisms cultivated by humans for wastewater management that also thrive as lives of their own. In the 1970s, permaculture architects John and Nancy Todd started designing what they called “living machines” that mimic ecological processes and structures by organizing multi-species in linked greenhouses. While most machines are designed to meet a single purpose, living machines “can be designed to produce food or fuels, treat wastes, purify air, regulate climates, or even to do all of these simultaneously.”*** As “both garden and machine,” the Todds' designs run mostly on sunlight that feeds plant and bacterial assemblages responsible for metabolizing sludge.

As living machines take on lives of their own, multi-species create beautiful sensory worlds through aesthetic improvisations. Water management on microscales involves practices that are time, labor, and attention intensive--so much for “free” water--but the non-humans that call wetlands home do most of the work. Inside the living machine,  gray water and I became part of a long-term process in collaboration with plants, microbes, and animals. These symbioses make a strange collective “we” out of the individual consumers promised freedom from labor and disease by modern sewerage. As Bruno Latour writes (or hopes), “We no longer expect from the future that it will emancipate us from all our attachments; on the contrary, we expect that it will attach us with tighter bonds to more numerous crowds of aliens who have become full-fledged members of the collective.”****

With water no longer taken for granted, we step into a dry future-ordinary of global climate change, racked with drought, famine, resource wars, and you name it. DIY wetlands and other improvised forms of living garbage shift the gloom of future catastrophes from fear and anxiety to the laborious, playful pleasures of habitats bursting with life. While the threat of a dehydrated world can settle into fantasies of scarcity and doom, the messianic side of the apocalyptic sensibility illuminates urban wastewater as a surplus full of utopian potential. The future-ordinary of water scarcity projected by the droughts served as a vantage point into a post-apocalyptic world that survived the end of water as we knew it. Impelled by the future threat of water scarcity, household gray water becomes an untapped form of surplus, opening up an ethical opportunity to reimagine the relationship between house-cities and the landscapes they occupy.

2014

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.

*Allen, Laura, July Oskar Cole, and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, eds. 2007. Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Illustrated by Annie Danger. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press.
**Austin Water. 2010. “Wastewater Treatment Plants,” http://www.austingo.org/department/water-treatment-plants.
***Todd, John and Nancy Jack Todd. 1993. From Eco-Cities to Living Machines. Rev. edition of Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming. 1984. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, p. 167
****Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 191.

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?"

Mangled Plastic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015

French Sponge

A ghost creek haunts our backyard. The neighbor remembers the fold of earth that once cut across our properties, down to the end of the block, and on through the neighborhood to connect with Boggy Creek. Now there's a buried culvert for street runoff, and when it pours, a ghost flows between our houses and through our backyard.

The water poured into the next yard until I built a French drain. The idea came from Vince at the Cathedral of Junk, who engineered the way water flows through his yard. He'd talked about the possibilities of geological A/Cs by digging a long underground tunnel that opens up a hundred or so feet from the house. If you had an attic vent, it would suck air through the cooling underground and into your house. French drains usually route water out of the yard (and into your neighbors, or wherever). Henry French, not the French, suggested the design in his 1859 book, Farm drainage: The principles, processes, and effects of draining land with stones, wood, plows, and open ditches, and especially with tiles. How the south was drained. He laid curved roofing tiles along the bottom of trenches, then filled in different sized gravel as filters. These days, instead of roofing tiles, landscape architects use various perforated tubes and geotextiles to do the job.

Wanting to save as much rainwater as possible, not shunt it off the land, I used the principles of the French drain to build a sponge. I shoveled out trenches two feet deep in an L shape at the yard's heart, drilled a hundred holes in PVC scavenged from a backyard pile, laid them in the trenches, and filled in a half ton of gravel. While excavating I found an old path of paving stones a half foot underground. I moved dirt displaced from the trenches to form a swale that routes the ghost creek to our fig trees. Wrapping the PVC in geotextiles would have helped absorb water and reduce clogging from roots and migrating soil. If I were doing it all over, I'd encase my PVC in used baby diapers, an undervalued and underestimated geotextile that lines landfills everywhere. Maybe diapers would have leached bad things into the soil. Now the ghost creek soaks into the French sponge, the fig and pecan trees, and the Boggy Creek watershed.

Just upstream at the old airport, backhoes and bulldozers dug out a stormwater retention basin surrounded by restored Blacklands prairie as part of the Mueller Development. Street runoff from the New Urbanist housing/retail development floods into the basin, filling it up to slowly soak in. A sprinkler system beneath the Blacklands prairie keeps the wildflowers blooming even in drought years like this one. The pond/prairie patch is a machinic landscape or living machine designed to save rainwater that, through its deployment on the land, engineered that water's flow out of the Boggy Creek watershed to the neighboring Tannehill Branch Creek watershed. The pond, stocked with native fish, bubbles at the center to prevent eutrophication. You can jog or walk your dog around the pond on a hilltop path overlooking the water, riparian plants, waterfalls, and a wild old tree on a peninsula. Many benches to sit and contemplate nature.