Abandoned Cities 2: Flaw in the Design

I've previously written about what I call 'Abandoned City Ecology' here

            The other day, I went for a walk in Leigh Woods. I’d done this walk a few times before, but this time I got a little lost because I was being lazy and stupid with following directions, and so I got to walk past the Stokeleigh camp twice, and on the second amble past, I really thought about it, and imagined what it was once upon a time.

            The Stokeleigh camp is an ancient site in Leigh Woods, facing out towards the Avon gorge by Bristol. Two crescent shaped mounds are all that’s left of an iron age fort that once kept guard over the banks of the River Avon for reasons so far unknown. All that’s left are the two mounds, surrounded by trees, shrubs, grassland, and themselves completely covered in a variety of wildflowers and weeds.

  Between the two mounds at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods.

The Mound Rising up ahead at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods, Bristol.

            I’d been thinking a lot lately about the impermanence of all things, especially artifices, and how cities have a lifespan. The abandoned cities archaeologists find weren’t always deserted during some cataclysmic event, rather citizens trickled out as life in the city became less and less viable. The cities we have opted to create in ridiculous climes such as Las Vegas, a city that functions as any other American city albeit in the middle of the desert with strained water sources; similarly, Cape Town in South Africa experienced a water crisis just last year. Whether we like it or not, artifices have a lifespan of usefulness that might be shorter than we expect; everything from a skyscraper to a coke bottle to a city has a timer counting down in its usefulness.

The problem with artifice’s useful lifespans is that, unlike organic features, artifices do not break down or transform on the demise of their usefulness. Where an eggshell, once empty, will dry up, the membrane and residues rotted away, the shell becoming brittle, eventually shattering, and then one day becoming powder, returning the mineral constitution of the shell to the ground. A plastic drinks bottle, once empty, just sits. It might tear or warp, and shed a few shavings of plastic into its surrounds, but generally it will not disappear.

The Stokeleigh camp, re-absorbed into nature being just mounds of dirt, seemed to me the most brilliant, unintentional design, because its demise was factored in, and this isn’t a spoon we’re talking about, but a fort. If we accept that an era’s worth of cities could well be left due to war, climate change, and  resources stress, then we should be designing and building with decay factored in. Nothing is permanent, including unfortunately us as a species; whether we evolve, planetary migrate, or go extinct, I’d hate to wander the globe a spirit, and see city stacks still stood where a rich base of habitats could have instead been fed and allowed to succeed us.

Followed up by Abandoned City Ecology 3: Cut in the Landscape 

Greens

Some Photos of Green Things. 2016-2018

All Pictures my Own.

 Sussex Roots London Trip: Dalston Eastern Curve Garden 2017

 Sussex Roots London Trip: Nomadic Community Gardens 2017

 Crickety, Bisley, where my Grandfather grew up 2017

 Berries on Rodborough Common 2017

 Foraged Haws, Sloes, Blackberries and Crab Apples, Rodborough Common 2017

 St. Catherine's Valley, Batheaston with Avon Wildlife Trust 2017

 Hills in South Bristol, 2017

 Nightingale Valley, Brislington, with Avon Wildlife Trust 2018

 Newly Planted Orchard, Batheaston, with Avon Wildlife Trust 2018

 Hengrove Mounds Wildlife Reserve, with Avon Wildlife Trust 2018

 Incredible Edible Millenium Square Raised Beds 2017

 Ogmore-by-Sea Coast 2018

River Ogmore, Ogmore-by-Sea 2018

 Devil's Dyke, East Sussex 2016

Devil's Dyke, East Sussex 2016

Lives in our Death: Rewilding for a Post-Human World.

Apocalyptic visions are getting harder and harder to ignore in the 21^st century; they’re embedded densely in popular culture, the media frequently leans towards intense catastrophic fear-mongering, and many experts are espousing troubling theories about the nearing end-times, including the man who conceived of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, James Lovelock.

            Instead of spurring a drive towards correction, this kind of embedded fear has all too often led to frantic action and bizarre offsetting of fear; Slavoj Žižek observes that in the face of impending sea level rises and the loss of both ice caps, people are instead attracted to (and fed by the media) stories about possible carbon-saving boat travel across the newly created Arctic sea, or the possiblility of Antarctica as an entirely new plain to colonise. This impedes the kind of radical environmental action massively; people are either happy to continue with business as usual or are too pessimistic to do anything proactive.

            Rewilding is definitely proactive and radical; it suggests a drastic change in our approach to natural landscapes to just leave them be, or to reinstate vital aspects of ecosystems that we have helped eradicate (such as large predators) to enable them to be self-sufficient. Many, including George Monbiot in his seminal book on rewilding in Britain, entitled Feral, espouse human-oriented arguments that delve into the spiritual and the economic. I believe that, especially in the case of humans becoming extinct, rewilding is essential simply for the planet.

            As the global landscape stands, especially in Europe, where there are animals, there are fences. We alone can permeate these fences; we bring the animals their feed, we rake away their droppings. The space animals, especially livestock, are allowed to occupy is a liminal space, often without natural function. The same can be observed in some ‘wild’ and natural spaces; conservation organisations created ‘natural disturbance’ to manage the lives of the animals therein, also most likely fenced in. What happens to these animals when we die?

            Presumably, they also die. Without a supply of food, surrounded by their own muck and often separated from breeding partners, these animals will die, and rot, and provide food for the scavenging few that can even make it past the fence such as birds or insects. If this was a rewilded or truly wild space, it would be self-sufficient and naturally functioning. Animal carcasses would of course be present in the landscape, but they would be integrated into the natural processes present just as should occur in the wilderness. Species can roam, breed, interact, spread, just as animals and plants naturally do; they are fluid.

Although the lifetime of a fence is far greater than their own lives, the chance we would give them to be able to live and breed for generations yet to come before the fence finally falls is still a whole lot better than the meagre chance afforded to our pets, zoo occupants, livestock, pitiful nature reserves. To not think of the lives of those we implicate in our own past our species’ extinction is as absurd as assuming that when you die, everyone else dies. Besides, through proactive rewilding, we might even solve some of the apocalyptic issues currently plaguing our planet such as carbon emissions, deforestation, and the terrifying loss of biodiversity the world over.

“Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better.” John Muir, People and Native Americans in 'My First Summer in the Sierra.'

As someone interested in history, in the environment, in wilderness, conservation, and writing, I am ashamed to say that I just learned about John Muir, the late 19^th century Scottish- American naturalist, last month. From a comic. Muir is famed for petitioning the U.S government for the creation of Yosemite national park, and also for his involvement in the Sierra club and other moves for conserving wilderness in the U.S. I decided to read the only of Muir’s books my library had on offer, My First Summer in the Sierra, to dip into oldey-timey conservation and naturalist writing, hoping to find connections and optimism for movements today.

            It is hard not to feel deeply for the environment as Muir sees it; he admires all life, even the ferocious bears and irritating Douglas squirrel, and laments the very undergrowth that the flock of sheep he accompanies lays waste in its trampling past. It is no surprise then, that he feels deeply the wound capitalism has created between man and the ever-connected and brotherly web of nature he sees before him. This occurs mainly in his observations of Shepherds in California, whom are degraded and exhausted by their economic strife, and may only be driven by hopes of escalating in the capitalist system by saving up to buy a flock of their own. I can think of no better summarizing image than the one Muir paints of Billy, the shepherd he accompanies, who’s clothing becomes entirely coated over time with the greasy, fatty dripping of the lunch he ties to his belt, meaning that “instead of wearing thin [his trousers] wear thick.” Billy has no emotional connection to the sheep, remarking often when one goes astray that he is not paid enough to keep saving them.

            It is thus greatly surprising, considering Muir’s deep-felt empathy for nature and his lamentations about the Arcadian shepherd being broken by American capitalism, to read his shocks and spites for Native Americans, in this era still referred to widely as ‘Indians.’ From the off Muir writes of the feeble and weak ‘Digger Indians,’ who are never specified by tribe, culture or nation, instead just a taxonomic ugliness akin to the South African settler’s naming of the ‘bushman.’ Muir frequently writes of the Indians sustenance on nature, of which he is jealous of as he and his colleagues must rely on deliveries of bread and other supplies which runs dry for an uncomfortable time. He also writes of their skill in living in their environment, as he is startled a few times by the sudden and silent appearance of a Native in their camp. Despite these admirations, he still affords them little acknowledgement for their ingenuities. He remarks on their ragged clothing, their begging for whiskey or tobacco, without really acknowledging the corrupting effect of white capitalist invasion in the same way he affords the white shepherd.

            I am sure there are a number of ways to understand his perception of native Americans, but I find it most hard to digest as a result of his perceived special ‘Scotchness,’ which I feel Muir stresses to tie him stronger to nature within the capitalist systematics of shepherding in California. When commenting on the Californian shepherds ill education, grimy food and overall depressing life, he compares it to the Scottish shepherd, whom he praises alongside the ‘Oriental shepherd’ for maintaining a keen intellect and interest in culture. Muir also retells an event where, in the dead of night, he ‘felt’ that a friend of his was nearby, and in the morning found that his friend was indeed in the valley he felt him to be in, to everyone’s surprise. This is written as being an event of extraordinary ‘Scotch farsightedness.’ I want to believe that, as result of his belief in himself as Scottish and thus different in culture etc. to other Europeans, Muir would understand other cultural uniquenesses and admire them in the same way he would admire a forested valley. I am no great scholar of Muir, but I feel that, between his heightened Scottishness and his flippancy towards the fascinating lives of Indians who understand and admire their environments as much as, if not more, than muir, exists the kind of Celtic, white-supremacist mythologizing that helped spawn various blights to the development of American culture(s) such as the Southern confederacy, which borrowed the very flag design of Scotland for their own, and also the Ku Klux Klan, who borrowed the symbolism of the 'clan' for their own twisted ends. Like I said, I am not great scholar of Muir, and also never knew him personally, but on closer critical reading I have dug up this dull residue of his understanding of the Natives of the wild lands he so greatly admires.

            I have written the above without even dipping into his mentionings of ‘Chinamen,’ some vague myths he recounts of Indian surrenders, and also an event in passing that was of interest to me, wherein he claims to have enjoyed the company of a general of the Florida Seminole wars, one of many wars between white invader and Native Americans.

(The comic that I mentioned is this one: http://noahvansciver.tumblr.com/post/159136532289/a-sequence-on-john-muir-from-my-upcoming-book )