More Selfing

Rock Depot is just south along the highway from The Home Depot closest to Ephemerata Gardens. Rock Depot is the rough rock-by-the-pound arm of the Nature’s Treasures new age crystal store. Jewelers can get rock and lapidary supplies. In the yard are chunks of azurite, chrysicola, serpentine, but nothing approaching a landscape supply yard. Natural capital of mineral supply chains and the magic properties of matter converge here to supply the means to DIY sorcery. Rock Depot’s name plays on its multinational corporate cousin up the road, but also rock deposits. Both names resonate with military depots and fantasy despotisms of an individual ruling absolutely. “You create your own reality,” the mantra goes.

The Home and Rock Depots both deal in the subject, self, or individual – objects that are the epitomy of not being objects but the kernel of human agency or soul. In US history the force of the self seems to saturate as beyond ideological – rugged individualism of pioneers, captains of industry, self-reliance, self help... Contra these figures there are toiling swarms of ecological agents and people, of course. The discourse of liberating a self, escaping – whether in lofty political radicalism or on the cookie bag – seems blind to the force of dependent-self, the feeling body’s intensely permeable boundary with other lands, atmospheres, factories, and lives. Subjectivity circulates, an event always composed in relations. Depots stockpile the supplies to make a self, while the home forms exoskeletal and metabolic buffer zones. Treasures, sensations, bodies – all need a home to nestle inside so selves can carefully collect and cultivate themselves as a slew of private properties.

When I need mortar or soil to build Ephemerata Gardens, like a kneejerk reaction, I think of shopping at The Home Depot. The company arms handymen and contractors working at multiple scales to shape housing infrastructure and land use patterns. Its fortunes depend on the housing market’s ups and downs, while the matter it distributes contains lives and brings infrastructure to fruition in the home. Locked in constant battle to underprice and outcompete its rival Lowes, The Home Depot focuses on customer service and the transmission of specialized knowledge – thus the motto “More Saving, More Doing.” It is second only to Wal-Mart in bigbox retailers, and has been criticized for endangering local economies of mom and pop hardware stores while also putting licensed electricians, plumbers, carpenters, home decorators out of work as consumers save money by doing it themselves. Some of these unemployed look for jobs at The Home Depot.

Following the burst housing bubble in 2008 sales associates at Home Depot faced layoffs as over fifty stores closed nationwide. But the firm, along with craft stores, fared somewhat better than other Fortune 500 corporations. Sales from ambitious home renovation projects dropped, while sales of supplies for modest projects and gardening goods went up. Disaster from heavy weather offer welcome seasonal spikes in sales. The Home Depot’s “hurricane command center” redistributes generators, batteries, plywood and the like from stores all over the country to stores along storm paths. These emergency supply-chains make the corporation almost like a de facto FEMA unit. Disaster preparedness and response falls on individuals, or organized publics in DIY community mode.

The Home Depot cultivates an informal labor of DIY that positions the consumer as an unpaid, subcontracted worker (the IKEA model of consumer-producer). But the corporation’s relationship to informal economies hardly stops there. Day laborers congregate in the parking lot for people who need help painting or moving heavy things and for building contractors to hire. Immigrant advocacy groups that have urged building shade pavilions and bathrooms for day laborers are cynically met with criticism that this would just welcome more illegal aliens. The flexibility of the situation is such that The Home Depot can market DIY everything while denying that the informal economy and precarious labor it enables are part of the firm’s responsibilities.

The corporation fills the role of an unwitting social enterprise in multiple ways, adopting some of the responsibilities of nonprofits or NGOs. As mentioned, they provision DIY disaster response with plywood and generators when hurricanes hit. And like it or not, they network an informal market for day labor. Its “associates,” who are sometimes experts on home construction and repair, teach consumers how to do-it-yourself with free classes and more informal Q&A sessions in the store aisles. The Home Depot is the biggest US recycling collection point for florescent lightbulbs and touts this as environmental stewardship (taking back the mercury they sold). And they’re huge – they can have enormous impact on supply chains by favoring sustainable forestry practices or pushing energy efficient commodities.

The agential “self” here is highly managed and projected by the corporation, educated into being. It is at once an empowerment – here’s the tools and how to use them! – and the calculated production of a consumer, the humble maker, hobbyist, or homemaker, whose core identity lies in the image of their independence from experts and licensed professionals. The Home Depot website offers video tutorials on home improvement projects that can be crammed into a weekend, and “do-it-herself” workshops. One workshop leader is a blogger who teamed up with The Home Depot: “I haven’t had any special training, just a desire to make my home beautiful without paying someone to do it all for me! … I find it’s all about trying – getting that courage to do something you’ve never done. I think you’d be surprised at the results! But believe me, my first attempts were not perfect. Actually most of my latest work still isn’t perfect, but it’s little stuff no one would notice.”* Her projects range from wrapping paper for guys made of blue tarp and jingling washers to redoing her whole staircase.

The self engages in an unfolding education through trial and error. There were stories of kitchen cabinets crashing to the ground full of heirloom china, a man who electrocuted himself in the shower by wiring too close to his plumbing. Surely there are meth makers who stock some supplies and tools at The Home Depot. Selves and DIY aesthetics put material forms available as commodities to unanticipated uses, even as the selves are mass-produced via commodity forms. Everywhere in the process informal economies and unintended material processes disarticulate individual and corporate despotisms, snatching trash and pirating network potential. The powers of rocks, plywood, skill saws, fertilizers, knowledges surge and bloat the selves, extending the range and potential of subjectivity to do more and more.

*http://ext.homedepot.com/community/blog/tag/diy/

The Once White House

Maybe when it was first built it was bright white. Now the little house in our backyard has chipping paint, burn marks, wasp nests. Leaves from yard plants stenciled in green spraypaint overgrow one corner. The building is a construction in decomposition, the original structure cut apart and added to in layers. The tacked-on bathroom's tub pipe snaps one night and floods the yard. We cap the water main and lug the tub to the front courtyard as a pond. The once white house could be made livable again, but most people would just tear it down and start over, send the house to the landfill. The wood floor pitches like a funhouse. Two tiny rooms under the leaky roof glow with potential, waiting to be lived in or gussied up as a micro-tourist destination. Maybe we could transform it into the Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata's new space for community exhibitions (since we're turning the old space in our house into a bedroom). Or fortify the structure and add a roof garden.

Did the house's first, tiny incarnation--before its last owners extended both its ends, doubling its floor space--have a bathroom and kitchen at all? It must have, since there's a sewer main. Across the yard concrete steps lead nowhere and a sewer pipe opens to the underworld, traces of another little building that got struck by lightning and burned. Small houses like these dot east Austin. They are being torn down one by one, or refurbished, additioned. Their abscences trace changing habitation patterns of extended families in humble houses giving way to McMansions, shifts in racial demographics that fit familiar gentrification stories. The pair of backyard bungalows were added by the family that bought our house when it was new in 1950--part of the Chestnut neighborhood constructed for segregated Austin's growing Black middle class--when their son returned from the war. The Hispanic family who bought the property in the 80s concreted over the front yard rose garden to make a courtyard, planted fig trees, and modified the bungalows as well as the main house, extending its kitchen and adding a bathroom and an odd, narrow bedroom with rough plank floors.

Their handmade additions are cobbled out of wood and fixtures from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. The corners don't quite meet at right angles. They did the wiring and plumbing, too. They knew how to make do. This capacity to make things like housing work without means has long been racialized and maligned as underclass. Hispanic improvisations are derided as rasquache--cheap, ghetto, bootleg. Use of the censored saying “n-word rigging” persists in online rants, trade unions, and even among public council representatives.* Poor whites improvise "hillbilly fixes"** or "white trash repairs,"phrases that mix derision with amusement or even endearment. These terms point to improvisation as something those people do. In this pejorative mode, improvised engineering and construction practices take on the qualities of a bad aesthetic style by which middle class or licensed experts (racially) differentiate themselves.

But the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and self-reliance behind improvisation can become a point of pride. Rasquachismo is an aesthetic sensibility celebrated as a style in both domestic interiors and homemade shrines, as well as the high art world. "In its broadest sense, it is a combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity. The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors."*** Self-taught arts of making do circulate in wider publics and the formal economy not only as bad examples or failures, but as a particular kind of rough beauty.  Lovingly repurposed and repaired things can become valorized as "outsider art" or "vernacular architecture" and marketed as do-it-yourself. Their idiomatic singularity expresses a learning process and a way of living outside of the standardized, routinized, and formalized.

Making and repairing houses in the rasquache mode might not always be permited and up to code. Structures are never finished, always in process. Buildings might take form by the grace of cast-offs and decay, an urban waste stream of construction debris that only comes into being because something else was torn down. But these informal ways and means are held together by something new like wires, nails, 2x4s, concrete, or duct tape, relying on Home Despot-style do-it-yourself supply retail stores. 

While retail workers in the formal economy wait smiling at their registers to fill the informal architect's needs, code inspectors at municipal regulatory departments wait by their phones for call-in violations. "My neighbor's building some kind of second story on this old house in his backyard. Looks like he's gardening up there." When Dan Phillips first started building small houses out of recycled and salvaged materials in Huntsville, the code inspectors scratched their heads. His methods are experimental, trying things that have never been done, learning what materials and trash can do, assembling landfills into housing: wine bottle cork floors, bathtubs and towers of caulked 2x4 stubs, glass dinner plate windows, license plate shingles! 

The mission of Dan's design/build company Phoenix Commotion is to construct "aftermarket housing" out of scavenged materials, catering to "single parents, artists, and families with low incomes." By hiring "unskilled laborers at minimum wage," he trains apprentices in all aspects of construction so they can move on with marketable skills. This tactic, along with using free and recycled materials, keeps costs low for an affordable mortgage. Working with Houston's Code Department, Dan helped to pass "Appendix R," a set of guidlines that formalizes the use of recycled materials in code compliant construction.  He hopes it will "be a model of how large metropolitan areas can respond to the social issues of affordable housing and overburdened landfills" (and resource depletion, high unemployment and foreclosure rates, and disasters that leave thousands homeless). 

When people who could afford McMansions started asking him to build their homes, Dan joked that his formalization of informal, improvisational building was "gentrifying icky." While Dan's mission is "to prove that constructing homes with recycled and salvaged materials has a viable place in the building industry," this kind of improvisational construction is the norm in shantytowns, squatter settlements, favelas, and slums in megacities like Karachi, Pakistan; Mumbai, India; São Paulo, Brazil; and Mexico City. Stewart Brand writes,**** "Squatters are now the predominant builders of cities in the world" (42), their enclaves criss-crossed with a welter of "do-it-yourself infrastructure" in the absence or abandonment of state-regulated urban services (45):

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community. To a planner's eye, squatter cities look chaotic. To my biologist's eye, they look organic. (42)

To my quack scientist imagination, they are living machines. The once white house is an atmospheric anomaly that yearns for solidarity with these informal survival modes, learns from them another way to live the good life. It is part of an urban future constructed of aftermarket materials and little, local improvisations and self-taught knowledges. The magic of the City of Living Garbage lies not in bourgoise bohemian romanticism (or not only), but instead, in an aesthetic of working within limits, doing the most with the least, finding value even in trash. Some kind of optimistic humility, learning to be happy with less in response to financial and environmental meltdowns.   

2012

*See Bass, Holly, “Union Bias: Black Members Blast Local 1110’s Record on Race,” Washington City Paper 15, no. 31 (1995), Frank Donze, “N.O. Council Ends Deal After Racial Slur: Spokeswoman Loses Her Job,” The Times-Picayune, December 15, 2006, and Jonah Owen Lamb, "Questions raised about councilman's conduct after discovery of racist e-mails," Merced Sun-Star, July 17, 2009. 

** Hartigan, John. Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1999, 102.
***Mesa-Bains, Amalia. “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache.” http://sparcmurals.
org/ucla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=129&Itemid=74 (accessed March
23, 2010).
****Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, New York and London: Viking, 2009. Thanks to Amanda Jones for my copy of this book. 

Backwaters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?"

Amaranth Weed

"Seeds the size of little freckles potentially grow into plants taller than me..."

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