A Petroleum Pipeline Portal to Regeneration – and Home, with Christopher Brown - The RegenNarration Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Christopher (00:00):
When people come over and visit our kooky little
place here and, like you can see, like they just sort of a lot
of times people will walk inthrough the front gate and get
kind of halfway back to where itsort of changes in this subtle
way.
It is almost like you'vestepped through a portal and it
brings out a different kind ofsensibility and feeling in

(00:22):
people in a way that I think is,yeah, something to be
cultivated and to be shared.

AJ (00:30):
Christopher Brown is a celebrated science fiction
writer and decorated lawyer, andonce co-hosted a punk rock
radio show.
His newest book, however, isdescribed as a genre-defying
work of nature writing, literarynon-fiction and memoir that
explores what happens whennature and the city intersect,

(00:51):
challenging our assumptions ofnature itself.
It's called 'A Natural Historyof Empty Lots: field notes from
urban edgelands, back alleys andother wild places'.
The blurb of its publisher,timber Press, an imprint of
Hachette, puts it like thisDuring the real estate crash of
the late 2000s, christopherBrown purchased an empty lot in

(01:15):
an industrial section of Austin,texas.
The property, a brownfield site, bisected with an abandoned
petroleum pipeline and litteredwith concrete debris and
landfill trash, was an unlikelysite for a home.
Along with his son, brown hadexplored similar empty lots
around Austin ruined spaces onceused for agriculture and

(01:36):
industry, awaiting theirredevelopment as Austin became a
21st century boom town.
He discovered them to beteeming with natural activity
and embarked on a 20-yearproject to live in and document
such spaces.
There, in our most damagedlandscapes, he witnessed the
remarkable resilience of wildnature, learned how easy it is

(01:59):
to bring back the wild in ourown backyards and discovered
that by working to heal thewounds we have made on the earth
, we can also heal ourselves.
Beautifully written andphilosophically hard-hitting, it
offers a new lens on humandisruption and nature, offering
a sense of hope among theedgelands.

(02:19):
As soon as I received this book,I immediately invited Chris
onto the podcast.
As soon as I received this book, I immediately invited Chris
onto the podcast and, to mydelight, he and his family were
happy to have us drop by.
So while our wives worked andkids played, chris and I
explored what he's called theirlittle house on the Petroleum
Prairie and just how henavigated a serendipitous path

(02:43):
through personal and globaltravails to a portal of healing,
regeneration and more than alittle magic.
G'day, nthony James, here forhe eh Regeneration, your
independent, listener-supportedpodcast exploring how people are
regenerating the systems andstories we live by, with thanks
to new subscribers, nevilleStreet and Sharon Grosser, and
three-year supporters Luca akaDr Cat over in Italy and Douglas

(03:07):
Laurie back home in Oz.
If you've been thinking aboutjoining this brilliant community
of supporting listeners andreaders, please do.
.
For as little as a dollar aweek, with benefits if you like,
you can help keep this show onthe road.
Subscribe free or paid onPatreon or Substack.
With all my thanks, okay, let'sjoin Chris.
All right, chris, hello, thanksfor having us at your place.

Thanks for coming to see us.
We appreciate it.
You came a long way from Perth.
Did you drive the whole way?

AJ (03:36):
You drove a fair part of the way, I can tell you.
I'm so curious, chris, toactually retrace the steps of
where you first laid eyes onthis place.
I gather you came around thiscorner, did you?

no, I would have come down this street.
Yeah, I mean, I was looking atthis.
I was just.
I had been living downtown on alittle apartment, um kind of
middle-aged half-time single dadand uh, working a kind of
conventional rat race workinglife, and I wanted to find a

(04:07):
place to live and I had lookedat various options.
But I had also been spending allthis time exploring kind of
little pockets of urbanwilderness with my son and in
particular, this stretch of theriver that's down here that
we'll go see here in a minuteriver that's down here, that

(04:28):
we'll we'll go see here in aminute and, um, I wanted to see
if there was a way to kind offind a way to live in a pocket
of urban wilderness.
So I came over here looking atthese, this little stretch this
is, we're on a little threeblock long street that's a
vestigial remnant of an oldcourse of the road out of town
and you and I are standing herelooking down at where this two

(04:48):
different streets dead end, atthe loading dock of a door
factory.
But in fact there's anothergate down here at the end and
once, uh, that gate was a roadthat led down to an old ferry
landing down within what's nowthe woods and, you know,
evidencing the way in which kindof our land uses sort of come

(05:10):
and go right yeah, as timeschange, as economics change, and
so I came over here looking for, like, is there a way to live
in a spot like that?
and there are a lot of theselittle pockets of uh residential
, uh lots that were left on whathad, over the course of the
last century, mostly convertedinto an industrial corridor.

(05:32):
Right, so this had been 150years ago as a country road
along the river traveling eastout of austin toward the you
know cities closer to the eastbass, drop, houston, etc.
And so this was, as aconsequence of kind of Jim Crow
down zoning, this neighborhoodwas where a lot of the
industrial land uses were, butthere were still these little

(05:54):
pockets of empty lots and houses, and so I looked at one of
these houses but it was likeit's too big, I can't afford it.
And they had this uh littleempty lot for sale, kind of next
door to this little rentalhouse they had and, um, which is
now owned by another couple,but at the time it was a rental

(06:14):
and and it was a sort ofunremarkable place by kind of
conventional standards of, youknow, home buying or looking for
a place to live, and it waspretty much as it is now.
It had this.
Uh, you know you have this chainlink gate kind of classic
industrial fencing material withbarbed wire across the top.

(06:37):
At the time there was barbedwire all the way down.
You can see more here and itwas, I don't know, around the
same time of year that I lookedat it.
I think it was like early April.
So it's just as the.
You know, grasses are startingto come up.
You have the winter grasseshave come up earlier.
A lot of those winter grassesare invasive, but then you get
the.
The native flowers come up,like these spiderwort here,

(07:02):
which are a kind of shadefriendly native plant that
really loves um or that I shouldsay does well in abused soils.

AJ (07:13):
Yeah, it's a really powerfully phytoremediative
plant it reminds me actually howyou said at one stage the
native flowers haven't given up.

There's a little instance yeah, and here this is.
Uh, this is Passiflora herecoming up, Passionvine, which
you know has this.
It's so named because thiselaborate flower was used to
teach the 12 stations of thecross, Is that?

AJ (07:40):
right.

Because it has this elaborate kind of geometric
structure.
So the passion, right, yeahright.
And the plant, that's a flower.
It looks like something thatsome art director for a science
fiction movie would come up with.
It's like the alien plant.
But anyway, so, on this lot,when you kind of came through

(08:02):
the front gate plant in my face,um, you know, it was just sort
of grass basically and um, uh,you know the sort of hallmark
things of an empty lot.
But there was this sign herethat I think I still have.
Let me see if I can find it.

(08:22):
Oh, here it is, let me get thisout, let me get this from under
here.
Pardon my Well, it's buriedunder there.

AJ (08:34):
I'm not going to get it out right now, but it marked a
petroleum pipeline.
I can show you another.

I'll show you another sign.
We have a similar version ofthe sign down here, that
pipeline came straight throughthe middle.
Yeah, so this lot was um emptythe, the.
There's always a reason.
The empty lots are empty right.
In this case it was because ithad been, um, uh, it was the
site of a, an old petroleumpipeline down the street here

(09:01):
and it's still marked in thestreet.
It's still in the street buried, and about six blocks to the
north here there used to be anabove ground petroleum storage
tank farm.
That was people figured out inthe early 90s, was not been not
been well maintained, and it waslike leaching benzene into the

(09:24):
groundwater and killing theneighbors, and so a group of
folks who became friends of mineuh, there's a local
environmental justice activistnamed susana almansa and she and
, uh, her and a group ofcolleagues took on these six
major oil companies that ownedthis site and managed to shut

(09:45):
the tank farm down and got itand so this petroleum pipeline
was abandoned in place and sothis had become basically an
empty lot that had this oldpipeline running through it but
there was no active use and itwas basically a dump site and
people would come and, you know,kind of dump their trash, and I
can show you some of that.

(10:05):
And so as you walked back in thelot you would see, you know,
kind of like the gnarly oldmesquite tree here, which is a
plant that's and this is ayounger mesquite that we've
grown since then, and themesquite is a really kind of
prototypical Texas orsouthwestern plant.

(10:28):
It has these spikes that canlike puncture a car tire,
basically.
Oh yeah and they do really well,and dry climates and in kind of
harsh soils.
They're not really.
They wouldn't really havepredominated here.
You know, at the time ofsettlement, when Anglo American

(10:50):
settlers first showed up, itwould have been more like oak
trees and the hackberries andcottonwoods and things like that
, sycamores.
But these do well in disturbedsites too.
So where you've had a lot oftrash dumping and as the climate
is changing, they thrive moreand they're an interesting plant
, because one of the things younotice is, like you know where's
, a lot of plants have nativelife that comes around to, you

(11:14):
know, enjoy the bounty ofwhatever sustenance they might
provide it right, in order to,you know, fulfill their own
reproductive needs as a species.
The only animals I've seencoming around to eat the
mesquite pods which in thesummer, they grow, these big,
beautiful pods there's probablysome still on the floor here.
They look almost like pea pods,right and the only animals that

(11:39):
come around to eat them arethese monk parakeets, which are
an exotic species from Argentina, the same place that
Augustina's family came from,that supposedly are like the
descendants of escaped pets,whether that's an urban legend
or not I don't know, but whichis funny.
So it's only this invasivespecies that comes around and
they like fill the tree up.

(11:59):
They're chattering like crazyparakeets and they're like
ripping them open and tossingthem like empty beer cans.
You might you know, some kidmight toss to the side of the
road.
Right, they the plant.
As I did a little more researchand became more and more
enamored with their hardinessand with the kind of weird
beauty like this one.

(12:20):
This one is about 70 years oldand it's all kind of bent you
can see all the places where itlost branches over the years to
weather and human abuse andwhatnot and the grace it attains
as it matures and sort offigures out a way to survive.
The beauty of this bright green, of the early growth of leaves
on the tree here at thebeginning of the summer season

(12:42):
or spring season.
Um, these plants are co-evolvedto be eaten by the megafauna
that once walked this landscaperight, yes and so whose
extinctions coincided with thearrival of humans onto the north
american continent yes, I meanour continent right, you know,

(13:02):
and you're like well, and herethey're like oh, we can only
prove correlation yeah,causation, but you know when,
you know how we roll right, youknow, you can just imagine,
right well, I mean it's like inthe, you know the south, like in
the islands of the pacific,there were, like there's a more
recent version, that which iswhere we know what happened.
Because it was all theseflightless birds, right yeah,

(13:25):
they were just there livingwithout other predators, right
yeah, and we showed up and youcould just walk, walk up and
bonk them on the head, right.

AJ (13:33):
And take their flesh and take their nice big eggs and
whatever.

And I guess some have survived, right?
Yeah, a few of those species,but a lot of them were extinct,
which were, of course, basicallyall of those birds were
descendants of dinosaurs thatwere sort of otherwise extinct.
Birds were descendants ofdinosaurs that were sort of
otherwise extinct.
So, as the Austin-basedpaleontologist Tim Rowe once
said in a lecture I saw heexplained that whole story, how

(13:59):
they had figured out theconnection between contemporary
birds and prehistoric dinosaursby looking at using magnetic
resonance imaging to do x-raysof these fossilized skeletons
and see how similar they were toavian skeletons.
And then he realized, as he wasdoing all this work, that the

(14:22):
dinosaurs didn't actually goextinct, but they will now in
our lifetimes.
Yeah Right, ouch.
So, anyway, so yeah.
So here's the mesquite tree.
That is a reminder of the deeppast, and it's also one of the
things I learned is that thepods were used by the native
peoples of these regions to makea meal you know to like grind

(14:47):
into a really hearty meal.
There you go, which if you'vegot some time on your hands, you
might do anyway.
So, circling back to youractual question um what this was
like.
So there was right here, at thetop of these stairs, there was
a um so we're coming back.

AJ (15:03):
Is this sort of the back end of the property already, or
does it go on a fair bit?

oh, sure, yeah, it goes back.
I mean, we're on a kind of likean urban acre here, so.
So here's one of these signsright here.
So this is kind of one of therusted old ones.

AJ (15:17):
There we go.
There's my title image.

Yeah, so this is warning petroleum pipeline
before excavating or anemergency call collect to the
Texas Pipeline Company, whichwas a subsidiary of Texaco,
which is now owned by Chevron.
And I got just got bitten by anant for picking up their plate.
So, yeah, there was this big.
So right here there was a steelbox like six foot by six foot

(15:45):
in the ground and, um, that hada big like wheel in the ground
and it was a, an access valve toaccess the pipeline, but it it
looked like a portal like Idon't know if you ever saw that
television show lost.
Where they were these people?
like on a this magical mysteryisland where their plane has

(16:07):
crashed and they would findthese hatches in the ground that
would actually have some secret, you know, the secret
laboratory of some lostcivilization.
So it was kind of like that.

AJ (16:18):
So am I getting the sense through that of why you would
choose a place that's got apetroleum pipe through?

it.
There's a fascination.
I mean that idea of that steelbox.
It's sort of like it resonateswith the idea of a portal.

AJ (16:33):
Yeah.

You know, an idea that's recurrent in fantasy
literature, especially juvenilefantasy literature, literature
for children.
So the idea that if you lookaround you might find a magical
door that will open up a gatewayinto some other, more
interesting reality than the onewe happen to be occupying.
And I think that idea maybematured a little bit and evolved

(16:59):
a little bit was part of whatwas driving me to spend so much
of my time initially justlooking for things to do with my
then young son, and then kindof on my own, looking for things
to do with my so-called freetime that were more
authentically meaningful, was tofind like gateways out of the

(17:23):
kind of simulation of realitythat we live in and urbanized
contemporary working anddomestic lives right, and trying
to find a way into somethingmore real.
And of course the way to do thatis to get sort of closer to
nature, to use a corny phrase.
But what was interesting to mewas to do that, undertake that

(17:47):
effort to get closer to nature,not by doing what I think,
especially in in the americancontext, is the prevailing
notion that you need to get inthe car and drive off to some
national park that has been, orstate park that has been
designated as the official placewhere you can go experience
nature and uh, but instead tokind of look at the way nature

(18:09):
is manifest all around us in theinterstices of the city.
And so I had been finding thosekinds of places, and so this
was an effort to see if I couldgo find a spot in one of those
kinds of places where you couldlive and then, while living
there, on the one hand, you know, remembering and accepting the

(18:31):
authentic legacy of industrialabuse, while at the same time
trying to like, harmonize withthis natural context and maybe
undertake an effort to generatea kind of surplus of
biodiversity in what had been azone of erasure.

AJ (18:52):
Yeah, I do want to recall a phrase you said in your book.
It was your sci-fi Walden onthe Colorado.

Yeah, that's kind of what this ended up being.
Yeah.

AJ (19:04):
And so when are we talking that you first came across it.

That was in 2009, yeah, in the spring of 2009.
So it was kind of the peak ofthe financial crisis here in the
US, and so the real estateeconomy was really messed up and
it was a challengingenvironment in which to do a

(19:27):
project like this.
But it was also a time whenthere were glimmers of
possibility.
You know, there was this sortof sense that, oh, maybe, you
know, I think I think we hadgone through the period in which
the you know Soviet Unioncollapsed 10 years earlier and

(19:50):
or 20 years earlier, and theideas of you know those kinds of
regimes were somewhatdiscredited.
And then the other utopianversion of the future, the one
that was embodied inneoclassical economics, was sort
of similarly discredited by thefinancial crisis right that had

(20:10):
really dominated since that endof history moment 20 years
earlier, and so that opened up,I think, interesting kinds of
ideas that like, oh, there'ssomething new that's going to be
born from this.
That has not happened yet, butI feel like it's kind of still

(20:32):
been trying to happen since thenand this is, and I suppose, in
a way the project of this houseand of this book.
It's sort of my effort to, kindof like, do some personal
experiments and sort of tryingto find ways forward which you
know I've done in fiction as ascience fiction writer, trying
to imagine more hopeful futures,which usually starts from

(20:53):
confronting and dialing up themixture on the darkest things
about the present right.
But I don't know, I thinkprojects like this, where you
can see I mean if we're justquiet for a minute I mean you
can hear.
You can hear the highway right,yep, you can hear people

(21:14):
revving up their engines as theyget on the on-ramp and get
ready to embrace internalcombustion speed and its joys.
The last of the V8 interceptorsmaybe, to paraphrase Mad Max, I
like that.

AJ (21:28):
You did that, by the way, because that obviously being an
Australian reference and we'vebeen to where they filmed it too
, but more and more, includingwhen I went back to Guatemala.
This is a bigger story I'llshare on the podcast.
It's a very current metaphor.
It almost looks like the endstages of this model of

(21:49):
development before the new comes, or while the new comes ends up
here in what hitcote williamscalled autogeddon.
We still give so much to thecar, like the expansion of those
highways as we've come across.
The states still got, wehaven't got the memo yet it's,
it's still full throttle no,especially in that idea.

I mean listen.
So we're standing here.
You can see, on this side,there's this major road right
here running down here.
So, and we're two miles frominterstate 35, which is a super
highway.
You know an american autobahnthe most.
You know, the most successfully, uh, the most successful of all

(22:30):
of the technologies we capturedfrom the Nazis is Hitler's idea
of a highway which nowdominates the American landscape
, the highway with no stops.

AJ (22:42):
You just go.

We do have speed limits but anyway.
So that highway, it follows anancient migratory pathway,
basically from Laredo and NuevoLaredo, mexico, north to Duluth,
minnesota, up through, you know, oklahoma and Kansas and
Missouri, iowa and Minnesota,and so it's a major connection

(23:10):
between Mexico and Canada andthe heartland of the US.
So it's a major, you know,infrastructure corridor
following, you know, a routethat's still traveled by birds
and migratory mammals, to theextent they're left and like
migrating monarch butterfliesand whatever.

AJ (23:29):
Yeah.

So they want to expand it.
They're really they're likehooked on expanding it even
though it's just constantlyjammed up, it's just hated by
everybody locally in thecommunity.
So here in austin they want toexpand it where it passes
through downtown um and theycan't figure out what to do with
all the additional runoff waterthey're going to generate from
that, you know.
God forbid they would figure outsome way to actually put it to

(23:50):
use, um, as opposed to justtreating it like waste yeah,
yeah and so they're gonna, andthey can't dump it into the
river, where it flows throughdowntown and is really a lake,
because they'd have a cleanwater act violation, it appears
because, it's already so dirty.
Um, so here we have behind usthe basically the cleanest urban
river in te Texas, the onlyurban river that qualifies as a

(24:14):
pristine waterway based on thelow levels of phosphorus in it,
which is almost half by accident, half on purpose.
So they're going to construct agigantic tunnel 100 feet under
this street, over here, to pumpall that water down to here, and
then they're going to make abig pumping station where all
they're going to do to treat thewater before they dump it in
the original idea was just likea mesh filter to catch, you know

(24:36):
large objects and then justdump this untreated water into
the cleanest river in the state,all to make room for, you know,
eight more lanes of cars andtrucks to.
You know, damn me, whether theyou know failure of these free
trade agreements will have anywill impede that in any way.

AJ (24:57):
Well, this is where it gets really interesting, isn't it?
The contradictory forces andparadoxical forces.
We'll see.
But I don't want to brush overeither the personal context that
you came to this in.
So that was sort of some of thesocial economic context.
But reading your book it soundslike there was a serious
wounding, a separation frommarriage, a lovely connection

(25:19):
with your young son through thisjourney.

But I'm expecting that you were feeling it was a
pretty hard time, yeah, achallenging time.
I had gone through the failureof marriage and I was dealing
with a lot of really stressfulthings in my professional life
as a lawyer, like reallychallenging, like tremendous
kind of pressure, beingmid-career and you know being.
You know I worked as a businesslawyer in the technology

(25:47):
industry and so you do that.
You're kind of like a butler totechno capitalism and you know
you're kind of like you.
You're like uh, navigatingreally complex things in order
to try to help rich people getricher.
It's a very fulfilling thing,um and um and so uh.

(26:07):
So, yeah, I was like you knowyou're, if you're living in the
heart of the rat race, it's likegetting out and getting away
from, yeah, the pressures thatexist within that sort of bubble
of unreality is really theessential thing to do.

(26:28):
And, yeah, and the other thingsin life right to do, and um,
yeah, and the other things inlife right and so um, you can
find in, even in these, maybeeven more so in these funny
little pockets of urban nature,moments of solace and of uh
perspective on the how sort ofsmall your own moments of

(26:52):
self-absorption really are, inthe grand scheme of things, If
you're looking, you know, as somany of our kind of sacred and
philosophical traditions teachus, to find ways to sort of get
beyond the idea of the self andthe sort of navel-gazing
preoccupations of you know uh,kind of contemporary, you know

(27:15):
uh, civilized human culture.
It's a very good way to do it,and so I had found yeah, I, I
kind of found my way over hereby, you know, finding ways to
get lost in the city and thenfinding out that by doing so I
had kind of found maybe my truehome, as it were yeah, beautiful
.

AJ (27:32):
I wonder, as you reflect back on what you know of your
ancestry, even upbringing arethere threads to where you've
ended up?

yeah, I mean, um, I mean it kind of in both threads
of my you know parentage.
I mean, um, my father's familywere all kind of you know
classic american pioneers.
They came over from ireland inthe 1750s as supposedly
protestants escaping catholicpersecution and settled in

(28:02):
maryland and then went to ohioand then went to iowa and they
would go there and they would goto the edge of the world and
then start newspapers, right,that was kind of their stick and
every next generation would gobuy a paper in a smaller town or
whatever, um and uh.
And then my mother's family theywere my mother's from germany
and they were all basicallyafter a couple generations back.

(28:26):
They were foresters and thenpainters, a lot of landscape
painters.
So yeah, I suppose there's someof that and it's funny.
I went to this like familyreunion of my mother's family of
one particular branch, and thiswas this particular family

(28:47):
reunion was meeting at thisplace, that where my great
grandparents lived in, uh, uh,in the Spreewald region of
southeastern Berlin and so it'ssort of like a riparian zone
along the river Spree, and theyhad this house where my great
grandparents.
He was a, they were artists fromBerlin and they were looking

(29:10):
for how to make, you know, paythe bills after world war one
and all of the, the uh, economicrealities that followed.
So they started this little artschool in a tiny town in in the
spray vault, and I got to seethis little place and this house
had been built in 750 ad and itlooked and it had the same vibe

(29:31):
as this place I mean not in thesame kind of like living in
nature thing, in the same waythat all of the houses I was
around as a kid, of all of mymom's family, they all had that
kind of way of like partlyrewilding the kind of domestic
reality around them.
So and so as a way to live Ithink it's kind of hard to beat.

(29:51):
There's the privilege of beingable to have a single family
home.
That sort of, you know, is sortof dominant with that kind of
mode, with a lot of these greenroof projects like we have.
It often presupposes thatyou're going to have that
ability.
But I started originally doingthis just with a you know like
balcony of an apartment buildingyou know downtown.

AJ (30:13):
You did.

And I do a lot of work with kind of like guerrilla
rewilding projects andbrownfields and stuff around
here, so there are a lot ofdifferent ways to access that.

AJ (30:26):
And it's just tremendously enjoyable.

Here comes my daughter.
Hey, what did you make?
Make king cakes.
You're making keychains.
Okay, cool, all right, we'regonna walk down around the back
here.
You want to walk down to theriver?

AJ (30:43):
Let's do that before we leave here, though, mm-hmm
describe, had this Speaking ofroof garden.

Yeah, what we're seeing, it's a, it's an awesome
structure yeah, so to describethe house, uh, the house is
built basically on the axiswhere the petroleum pipeline was
when, as we found it, and thisentryway up top is where, as I
mentioned, that valve box was.
And so, uh, we had to work withthe oil company to uh get the

(31:13):
pipeline out, which was easierthan you might imagine.
They're happy to have you paythem to remove their
environmental liability fromyour property.
Uh, and I met these youngarchitects, toma bercy, uh,
who's a belgian who moved overhere in high school, funnily
like the son of an expat frenchoil exec, right or belgian oil
exec, rather sorry.

(31:34):
And um, and then his partner,calvin chen, uh, who's from
taiwan and australia originally,and um, they were young and
sort of got the kind of crazyidea of like how do you build a
house that sort of like, how doyou build a house that sort of

(31:55):
embodies that idea ofremembering the past industrial
uses of the past, while at thesame time trying to rewild and
harmonize with the natural worldand of you know what the
natural bounty of the placecould be.
And so they essentially had thisidea of like as if you've taken
kind of a godhand scalpel tokind of remove that industrial

(32:15):
uh cancer from the site and then, uh, kind of fold up the uh,
blackland prairie that once wasthe dominant ecosystem that ran
from dallas, san Antonio, 99% ofwhich has been brought under
pavement or plow.
And then Augustina had acolleague at the time, john Hart

(32:40):
Asher, who worked at the LadyBird Johnson Wildflower Center
here with a British ecologistnamed Mark Simmons, who sadly we
lost to cancer a few years ago,and they had figured out how do
you design green roofs that cansurvive in the harsh, hot, dry
climate of Texas.
And the idea was basically well, you put in place the
biodiverse plants of the nativeecosystems and, lo and behold,

(33:05):
you have this bright green roofthat's green and lush all summer
long that we hardly ever put adrop of water on wow and the
trick really is about thegrowing medium, which is only
eight inches deep, which ischallenging for, especially for
these like prairie grasses andwhatnot that tend to root very,
very deeply right.

(33:25):
The roots tend to be deeper thanthe plant right so they figured
out a way to send a growingmedium that, and here we're, I
don't know 14 years into havingthis here and we've never put
any new medium down.
It's just sort ofself-regenerating.
It's pretty astonishing that isamazing so the house kind of the
house is like almost invisiblefrom the street.

(33:47):
We've seen we just recentlybuilt a guest house which makes
it more evident to people likeoh, this is a home site.
But for a long time it was suchthat people would just like
delivery persons would come andthey wouldn't even perceive that
there's a house here, becauseit's so kind of hides in the
landscape.
It's a sort of an idea of housethat supplicates itself to
landscape, if you will, asopposed to the other way around,

(34:09):
but then it opens up to theriver as we come around and
watch your step is this a, ashrine or altar of some kind?
this is almost like kind of it'sa grotto an outdoor fireplace
we made from all of the trashthat had been dumped on the site

(34:30):
and we made it for our weddingoh yes, what you have for this
anthill here and so, if you,kind of come up and look, we
have all of this concrete debristhat was dumped here over the
years.
You can see, guys, when peoplewould come just bring like dump
trucks full of demolition debrisright and just dump it here at

(34:51):
this empty lot at the edge oftown, rather than driving to
some place where you had to payor drive further.
Here's another one of thosepipeline sites and so yeah, you
see, and so like, here's an oldcurb cut that augustina had the
idea to turn into a bench.
You know big chunks of old roadbase, some you know cement
staircase, so you know an entirechimney stack buried in the

(35:16):
ground.
Here's a old general motorsengine head.
You know, um, speaking of thelast of the v8 interceptors,
that's a v8 um and uh I used tohave one too, by the way I
aspire to all that yeah but yeahit actually.

AJ (35:32):
It looks so beautiful, though it's not hodgepodge, is
it?

it's well and so, and then I had this memory of
like we had a little outdoorfireplace, kind of like this,
when I was a kid, so a lotsmaller, not so much my memory,
but in reality probably.
And then, um, I had thispostcard of a grotto in some
seminary in Missouri.
I collect, like weird, you know, antique postcards or vintage

(35:56):
postcards, more like 20thcentury not really antique and
which, in turn, was based on agrotto somewhere in Europe.
Right, and so I found theseguys I knew who were like
hanging out on the street onfriday afternoons drinking beer
after work.
That were um masons, uh, whohad lost their business during

(36:19):
the financial crisis.
There you go, they were workingin the county housing authority
across the street, and so they.
I tried to move all theseblocks myself with my son.

AJ (36:27):
I realized I needed help, and so these guys helped and
they kind of really got it, andso we collaboratively like,
built this thing over a summer,um well, you know, it's almost
exactly as I recall the oldimage of where my dad went to
boarding school at St Mary'sMount.
It's called in the outside,perth, and there's an old photo

(36:51):
of all the students in front ofa structure that's very much
like this, though without theurban industrial integration.

Yeah, but yeah, I think there are these grottos
which are kind of shrines thatare made in a lot of Catholic
and Anglican places that arevery similar.
So here you see we've got, andall these kind of steps down to
the woods are the same thing,and here the all the spider
words coming up a little morerobustly, and this is all we're

(37:20):
in soil that's all mixed withtrash in here, and you can.
You can no longer really see itbecause the foliage has come up
so robustly.
In the past couple of weeksWe've had good rain, but you get
the idea, and so if we comearound you'll see more.

AJ (37:41):
There are beautiful sounds in here.

Yeah, and so as you transition out of the city and
into the woods and we're justwalking, you know a few feet,
but you experience how, howrapidly the context changes,
right, yeah and um, we'releaving kind of what was at one

(38:06):
point prairie and is now justindustrial zone, down into the
riparian forest, kind of thefloodplain of the river.
And if we look down here, we'reup at the base of a bluff, kind
of coming down a path, and youcan see how it suddenly flattens
out and that's really part ofthe river, that's part of the

(38:26):
path of the river and the riverthe river, I think, used to
course closer to here and thatthat urban river is really
incredibly precious habitat.
yeah, you know, in all citieshave.
I mean, that's kind of, thewildest spots of most cities are

(38:47):
where the watershed is, youknow?
Yes, all right, I guess thedogs are going to come with us.
So come on Want the gate shut,it's fine.
We can just leave it, since thedogs are.
A tree fell on it, so it's notlast season.
It's not really shutting allthe way.

AJ (39:09):
It's amazing to think that this also brought about meeting
Agustina.
Yeah, Serendipitous encountersyou've had on the journey really
stand out Meeting Agustina,meeting as a designer and then
helping you with all that kitsince.

She had a studio down the street and we were
introduced by the architectswith the view to possibly
collaborating on some aspects ofwhat was in the plan, and then
we just kind of started aconversation that led to talking
about a lot of other things.

AJ (39:43):
And I think too about your chance meeting with Chance yeah,
yeah, yeah, right on withchance that was earlier.

Yeah, that was crazy, yeah, um, yeah, I met
this uh subaru salesman who hadthis magical.
I was sitting here waiting forhim to like you know the sort of
the drama of um uh, having himum go talk to his manager to see
what he could do on the pricefor whatever.

(40:11):
So I'm sitting there in hislittle cubicle and looking at,
uh, this aquarium he had on hisdesk.
That was like an ecosystem in abottle and I was just entranced
by it.
So then I asked him about it.
When he came back, it's likeyeah, I don't care, I don't know
whatever about the car, butwhat's this?
What he's like explaining, he'slike.

(40:32):
And then he's like yeah, well,I mean, I'm really a tracker.
You know, I'm not really asubaru salesman, I'm really a
tracker.
And so, um, I convinced him to.
He didn't take a lot ofpersuading.
He came and uh did a littletraining session for our um cub
scout troop at the time with theyoung kids, and then he and I

(40:56):
spent some time together and Ilearned a lot about kind of how
to read the stories of whatrecently transpired in the land
around you, right.

AJ (41:10):
Yeah, you called it time travel and it reminded me of the
songlines back home, with theaboriginal folk there as well.
Just that, the layering ofstory and landscape, and to be
able to read that, yeah, and andperceive the gifts from the
land and ancestors and so forthyeah, I mean, it's sort of
surprisingly easy.

You learn these things over time and it's just
kind of like paying attention inthe way you know of like an
18th century naturalist, wherethey didn't have anybody to know
books to tell them what wasgoing on.
Um, or you know certainly the,you know people who had lived on
this land for you knowmillennia right, yeah who kind

(41:48):
of knew it not through booklearning but through uh
experience and the experience ofthe people that they grew up
with.
Right that was shared with themright for a long time.
So like here we're standing here.
You can see in the groundbeneath your feet.
This is where the armadilloswere out in the night digging
around for tasty grubs in thenice wet soil I've only seen the

(42:10):
leftover shells of dead ones sofar oh, they're around.
They're sort of predominantlynocturnal, especially in the
warmer months.
In the colder seasons they comeout some during the daytime.

AJ (42:26):
I was curious to read too about in all your experiments
about supplicant living, as yousaid, and experimenting with
permeable boundaries between theinside and the outside, and I
was so related to that with theway we've tried to set up back
home too, but with some of thechallenges that come along with
that creatures that end up inyour house or all over it that

(42:47):
you don't necessarily wantaround.

And so in that sense I was really drawn to the
story of the.
Was it the millipedes that werejust everywhere?
Yeah, well, we had, yeah, thegreen roof.
There's this species of, yeah,of it's I guess it's like an
arthropod, not an insect.
Um, the species of millipedethat lives here and, you know,
lives off the uh, the leaflitter Mostly eats the leaf
litter in the soil, whatever'sin the leaf litter, and they
like to be in the dark and theylike to stay dry.

(43:22):
And so a green roof that'strying to pretend to be a
prairie will attract a lot of,will generate a lot of leaf
litter.
Attract a lot of leaf, willgenerate a lot of leaf litter.
So we found early on in thehouse that when we had really
intensely rainy seasons, themillipedes would start trying to
come into the house to seekshelter.
Yeah, and so we had to kind ofconfront, like horror movie

(43:47):
quantities of creepy crawlies onthe floor when you would get up
at the in the night and figureout how to deal with it without
just like chemical bombing thehouse, right, well, exactly, and
so, and we figured it out well,I mean after, like vacuuming
them up with a shop vac, and itwas just a matter of like oh.
Like kind of altered the ecologya little bit, but, you know,

(44:09):
get rid of some of the leaflitter and figure out how to
reinforce the transoms andfigure out how to deal with the
drainage better, and I don'tknow, there's usually a solution
like that, uh, if you'rethoughtful about it and have a
little bit of patience.
So so here, uh, anthony, we'rewalking up onto the banks of the
colorado river here.

(44:29):
Yeah, and this is kind of whatfirst drew me to this place.
This is a sort of I first sawthis on a bridge, like driving
to the airport.
They had moved the airport fromits original location, kind of
in the north central part ofAustin, to an old Air force base

(44:54):
that we were talking about theend of history earlier.
So this was an air force basethat had closed after the end of
the cold war, and so in 1999they opened the new, glamorous
new airport and I would bedriving to go on a little you
know day business trip orwhatever overnight, and I'd
drive over this old bridge thatwent over the river and look
down and you just kind of getthis glimpse of what looked like

(45:14):
some 19th century landscapepainting or something like in
the middle of the city and um,and in time I was like, well,
maybe I will go down in thereand investigate it in person.
And so my son and I figured outhow to find a way to get down in
here with our canoe.
When we paddled up this way andit was talk about time travel,

(45:36):
yeah, it was really remarkable.
And so you come down here, herewe are.
The blue bonnets have all justpopped here, as you can see,
this kind of the state flower oftexas, a beautiful wildflower,
a lupine that's native to thisregion, that does well in these
kinds of sandy soils, like youhave on the banks of a river.

(45:58):
And so I started exploring downhere.
I'd bring my canoe down hereand come around and paddle up
and, you know, just sort ofenjoy the refuge that is
provided in the middle of thecity.
And I thought, in my sort ofnaively romantic framing, to
which maybe I'm always prone, Iwas like, oh, I found an intact

(46:23):
remnant of what this is, a placethat escaped the erasure that
comes with colonization andsettlement and industrialization
and urbanization, becausesurely that's the only way that
all this wild green could bearound you.
But then I learned, I startedlooking at the old topographical

(46:46):
maps and you could see that asrecently as like the 1970s, this
had all been an activeindustrial site.
These were like gravel pits.

AJ (46:56):
Yeah, amazing, you said, rachel Carson wrote this up
partly.

Well, yeah, this stretch of the river.
Yeah, in the 60s there was aDDT plant right up here, a few
blocks away, and they would justkeep their dry powders for
their chemical mixtures out inthe yard of the job site.
And there was a big rain and itall went into the river and
killed all the fish for 100miles.

AJ (47:21):
So this is a return from neglect.

Yeah, this is just nature restoring itself.
So the municipal governmentpushed the mineral extraction
land uses further east andbasically a lot of these lands
became disused.
Some of them were acquired bythe city.
This is a big municipal parknow, across the river and what

(47:46):
had been ranch land 40 years agoand down here begins a wildlife
sanctuary made from an old,basically dump site.
And so, yeah, this is just, youknow, a sterling example of the
resilience, the resilient wayin which wild nature is able to

(48:07):
kind of recover if kind of leftto its own.
Now that story is morecomplicated than some sort of
natural restoration of edenbecause, um, the sort of plants
that are native here, uh, a lotof them are starting to struggle
with the kind of very differentclimate we have than what they

(48:29):
evolved for and so you see thatin some of these trees, like,
like I noticed we have a coupleof black walnut trees in our
yard that are a native tree tothis region but they don't seem
to be handling the hot summer aswell anymore.
And in these wetlands a lot ofthese like invasive Asian
species have pretty aggressivelynaturalized into the landscape

(48:51):
and like what we call elephant.
here I don't know the speciesname, it's the, it's the plant
from which taro root comes whichis a popular, like you know,
vegan protein alternative andthat grows really thick down in
here, which is not necessarily abad thing.
It's sort of like oh, it's likemaybe that's and they're very
phytoremediative plants.
You have to like be carefuleating them, because if they're

(49:12):
growing in a place like this,you want to check to make sure
they're not totally full ofheavy metals.

AJ (49:17):
Yeah, I liked how you referenced eugenics.

Yeah, that idea of who determines what's native and
invasive?
and these kinds of rigorous.
I'm very wary of those sort ofrigorous taxonomies, uh, that
are sort of temporally frozen,that are often caught up with
the guilt of colonizers of, likeyou know, yeah, we're going to
bring back the things weexterminated and erased and, um,

(49:44):
you know, the next nature, thefuture is going to be a
different one than the past, andso we can.
You know, it's like I put ablackland prairie on my roof and
then we realize like, oh, it'snot, it doesn't really want to
be a prairie, it wants to be aforest.
Right, and you come down hereand you see how, um, yeah,

(50:08):
things like the flourishing ofthe spiderwort, which is a
function of the soil, being kindof damaged, right, it's sort of
mildly contaminated, and sothese plants that do well with
cleaning up the soil sort oftake over and maybe in time they
will sort of move on.

AJ (50:28):
Let's retrieve this puppy here so she doesn't get lost.

Come on, baby, let's go.
Go back, maybe the way we cameor we lost.
Come on, baby, let's go.

AJ (50:33):
Go back, maybe the way we came or we can go in the deep
woods whatever you want.
Oh well, if we go through thedeep woods, who's going to say
no to that?

Yeah, all right, we'll go up this way.
I just want to carry this puppy.
Let me know if she interfereswith the sound.
Here's kind of a rare.
This is a pink blue bonnet.
Oh, this is a pink blue bonnet.
Oh yeah, sort of uh uh, it'slike finding somebody with a
strange color of eyes.

AJ (50:58):
They're very uncommon.
Yeah, so I'm conscious too thatyou you've got involved with
community campaigns with thatfriend you mentioned earlier,
susannah, as well.
Yeah, and because with?
Because, with this wave of thereturn of industrial systems in
their current guise tall andskinnies was how they were

(51:18):
referred to in Nashville by somepeople there who were having
these new developments come- inyeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Super talls is what they call them in Manhattan.
There you go.

AJ (51:26):
And everything that comes with that the water plan off,
the expanded interstate andthings like that.
How do you sit with that?
I mean, we relate to it too.
It's happening back home aswell.
We're on a beautiful stretch ofcoast, but we're we're deemed
iconic now and and due fordevelopment.
How do you sit with that?
And I mean, you're obviouslytrying to get involved in
protecting places.
What's your approach and how doyou feel about your next bunch

(51:50):
of years in that context?

Well, you know, I mean if you believe the World
Wildlife Fund.
You know, in their latestLiving Planet report, the
vertebrate wildlife populationof the planet has plummeted by
an astonishing 73% since 1970,when I was a little kid In their

(52:12):
lifetime, yeah.
And you know, when that came outin the fall, I noticed how a
lot of at least in the US a lotof the press coverage focused on
questioning you know howaccurate those numbers are, and
my reaction was kind of like,well, okay, what if it's half
that?
Yeah, well, that's right, it'sonly 45% of the vertebrate

(52:35):
wildlife population has gone inour life.
You know, it's like, um, andit's it's speaking to something,
a sort of truth.
I think we all know intuitively, uh, about how severe the
biodiversity crisis is and it'ssomething that, um, we haven't
talked as much.
It's kind of a parallel crisis,with global warming and the

(52:58):
climate crisis.
They're sort of coupled crises,and so to me, I'm really
interested in engaging with thataspect of the crisis, with that
biodiversity crisis, andconfronting the extent to which
that erosion of biodiversity ishappening, kind of like one lot

(53:21):
at a time, right, onesubdivision at a time, as the
human population just continuesto sort of sprawl across the
planet, continues to sort ofsprawl across the planet and you
know, I think it's, you know,more than half the planet
probably.
You know, the substantialmajority of the landmass of the

(53:42):
planet has like directreflections of human development
and use, and so engaging withthese kinds of projects to sort
of try to get people to figureout that sort of human
development doesn't have to comeat the expense of biodiversity,
that you can maintain the two.
You know, in the United Kingdomthey just enacted laws, final

(54:02):
rules, last year under theconservative government, right
before the elections, to requirethat all major new real estate
developments demonstrate a 10percent net gain in biodiversity
after completion of the project.
And I think there's some waysyou can do.
you know, buy credits to do thatsomeplace else, not on your own

(54:23):
project, whatever, right, butum, but that kind of thinking is
, you know, sort of fundamental.
So we're advocating for a lot ofthose kinds of things here.
It's sort of you know, doing thebest you can, working with
developers and local governmentsto try to set aside big chunks
of lands, like we have here,like the one we're standing in,
but also in the more marginalspaces, to try to figure out how

(54:43):
to maintain something.
So, just down river from us, inthe heart of covid, the fellow
people know as Elon Musk,through his biggest company,
tesla, built a new factorythat's the second largest
structure by volume in NorthAmerica Right on this same

(55:08):
beautiful river, beautiful river, and so we were able to even
work with them and bring them tothe table to, like, invest in
restoring the riparian portionof that huge site.
And, uh, and they did it andthey followed through on it
after some public pressure.
Right, okay, um, maybe moresuccessful than you know,
getting them to attend to, say,their labor practices or the uh,

(55:32):
some of the other you knowsafety practices or god forbid
what kind of wastewater they putin you know, let's just go back
the way we came so that thesmall dog will all right get too
lost or we see a deer and we'llbe so the um.

AJ (55:44):
Then there's a sort of a bigger issue that you've come to
and partly with your legal haton, hey in the book around
seeing the world through theprism of property.
It was such a powerful part.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, as a lawyer, you know you're
really in, certainly in the USor in any other.
You know, common lawjurisdiction that is descended
from the English and Britishsystem, property rights are.
It's really the first thing youlearn, it's like the most

(56:16):
fundamental thing you learn.
And there's kind of all thesetechniques of kind of
brainwashing, essentially thatyou go through right at the
beginning of law school of likecreating weird little laboratory
experiments on paper to makeyou deeply internalize the way
in which we think about how wetake the world around us, the
world we find the thing we callthe natural world and convert it

(56:40):
into extensions of us.
Right, these ideas that, if I Imean like the very idea that I
have ownership of this puppy,right In a way, you know, and
people talk now like, well, Iadopted it, you know, but in the
eyes of the law you own it theanimal is a chattel.
Right, it has no rights otherthan such as we've, you know,

(57:05):
deemed it appropriate to give it.
And then, certainly, the land,right, I mean right now.
One of the things I love aboutthis place is where we're
standing right now, here on thebanks of the river is land that
once was um at the edges ofprivate property, but it's
basically where the river usedto run when they originally

(57:27):
platted out the private propertyparcels of what became the
state of Texas.
And so when the river moved andleft land where it had been, it
became land that no one ownedit, sort of accreted public land
, and so it's kind of like thisvestigial, accidental commons,

(57:48):
and so the idea of walkingaround in a space like that.
It's land nobody owns.
It's in the heart of thefastest growing city in America,
which is kind of like one ofthe main centers of
techno-capitalism.
It's a pretty groovy thing, itsure is.

AJ (58:11):
It's really that relationship with land.
That's the ultimate task in theend that you're writing about
too, wow look at that.
That's beautiful, great blueheron wow, big and well, yeah,
there's a bunch of active nestsdown here.

Yeah, I mean, that's a bird that was driven to
the brink of extinction really150 years ago.
Yeah, people love the feathers.

AJ (58:29):
This is laden with possibility, isn't it?

and and life yeah, well, and it just shows you how
much of like the world could belike this exactly.
It's just like you can do that.
I mean, there's like people arebuilding new tall and skinnies
right nearby here, right, and wejust sort of work with the city
and the developers to try tokeep them back enough to

(58:56):
maintain some of thisinterstitial habitat and to
figure out kinds of terms ofcoexistence, and yeah, and it's,
I think you know, reasonablysuccessful.
It's not utopia, right, yeahRight, but I just I think that's
kind of successful.
It's not utopia, right, yeah,right, but I just I think that's
kind of.
We're kind of beyond that pointright now, right.

AJ (59:18):
Exactly, and Well, that's the point, though we're beyond
that point yet.
This can still happen.

Well, and you're setting precedence for, you know
, things people will benefitfrom in three generations or
more, right, yeah, threegenerations or more, right, yeah
, and um.
And I think one of the things Ilove about, like what you were
asking about, getting involvedand you know, local development
battles and kind of fighting forbiodiversity on the you know,

(59:46):
quarter acre at a time, you know, hectare at a time approach of
these sort of urban developmentfights is that, or even just
rewilding your own yard.
These are all ways that you canhave meaningful agency, actual
agency, to achieve meaningful,if modestly scaled, change and

(01:00:10):
preservation.
You know, without waitingaround for the big institutions
we all hope will save us from adismal future to do so, which
they're not really going to dobecause they're totally invested
in the status quo and the useof land as the basis from which
we extract, you know, thesurplus that is the embodiment

(01:00:34):
of our wealth and, as acivilization, our ability to,
you know, kind of survive andthrive in a way.

AJ (01:00:40):
Right on.

Christopher (01:00:41):
Here's a snowy egret.

AJ (01:00:44):
Smaller bird, but beautifully snowy-colored.

Yeah, flying up the river, if you look, anthony, if
we go walk down here, you'llsee A bloke in a hammock.
Yeah, there's a dude in ahammock and a bike next to him.
You can see there's a tree,there's a sycamore tree, which
you can tell because it's white,and so if you look, you'll see

(01:01:08):
these spots in the tree, up inthe branches, these kind of
brown discs, and those are nestsof great blue herons they're
like each about this big wow so,as we head back to the house
and lot, I feel like the closeto your book is where this
should close to, in the amazingpassages that were prompted by

(01:01:28):
unwrapping the weather radiothat used to be your dad's.

AJ (01:01:30):
Yeah, right, yeah, of course he'd passed, so you'd received
this old radio from him and itprompted a recognition of a
connection that you'd shared,that you hadn't quite
appreciated uh, yeah, well, Imean, my dad was um I talked
about the long line of newspaperreporters, but he was not one,
he was a dentist.

So yeah, so my dad was one of these guys who in his
retirement became totallyobsessed with the weather and um
and being like a weatherwatcher.
And I remember the timethinking that was just kind of
weird and a weird kind of anerdy affectation of an older
man, and but then in time Irealized like that was his way

(01:02:11):
he connected with nature theprimary way, right, um and um,
of being one of these kids.
He'd sort of grown up in asmall town in the midwest and
you know he loved watching thebig storms blow in and that was
kind of like, you know it'senlivening and he could.
He had living memory.

(01:02:32):
I would be reading in booksabout these great like huge
flyovers of migratory waterfowlthat would kind of come through
the Midwest on their way to theDakotas and Canada up the
Missouri River near where helived.
And the last really huge onewas in the late 40s where there
was like really icy winterconditions late in the season in

(01:02:54):
Canada.
So all these birds got stuckwaiting around and foraging and
he could remember hearing themat night.
He couldn't sleep because theywere so loud.
This is like you know, millionsand millions of ducks, right,
but yeah, the.
And then I so, yeah.

(01:03:14):
So when he passed away, camehome and I had this, what I

(01:03:41):
thought was like a butterflytrying to get into the house and
would like we have a lot ofinsects.
They kind of like gather aroundthe green roof and then they
sort of settle on the glasswindows because I think they
sort of perceive that as a saferspace.
And so I had this moth it was.
It was this butterfly I thoughtwas a butterfly trying to get
in and I sort of shoot it offand kept it from flying into the

(01:04:03):
house and getting trapped whereit would have no access to food
.
And then that same night Ifound it again at the door,
trying to get it in at night,and I realized it was a moth.
And then I texted it to mypicture of it, to my nature nerd
mother, and she's like, oh,that's a black witch.
I was like what it kind ofmoney.
She's like it's a black witch.

(01:04:23):
And so I look up the blackwitch butterfly, black witch
moth and it's a see, here's thisgreat blue ocean, new nest
right there leading a nest rightnow.
Yeah, the black witch is a moththat many cultures in the
Western Hemisphere associatewith death.
It's like the Jamaicans call itthe duppy bat, the Haitians call

(01:04:45):
it the socio-noir, and it'slike a spirit manifestation in
folklore and it's associatedwith like a relative coming to
say goodbye, and you know youjust with like a relative coming
to say goodbye and you know youjust have like a you.
You have the experience.
And then you see this, what thestories are in the folklore,

(01:05:06):
and it sort of shows you some ofthe ways in which, um, these uh
, uh, uncanny interactions thathappen in the natural world can
give you access to meaning thatyou may be imposing upon it, but
that helps you see the extentto which the world is full of

(01:05:30):
things that can be explained byscience but also understood by
poets, right, and then, like, aswe were leaving, uh, after his
memorial service, we weredriving through the like
cornfields and there was a um,this is really cool, this new
nest, see there's a mom in thereum, we saw a juvenile bald

(01:05:52):
eagle, uh, which was the same,which was a really strange
looking bird, because they look.
They're kind of-and-whitespatter patterns in the
juveniles, the brown looksalmost black and they're just
really far out.
This looks like Jackson Pollockpainted their feathers or
something.
So, yeah, I think life is fullof those things and it's the

(01:06:14):
same way in which you come downinto a place like this and we're
walking through this urbanwoodland that right now is full
of fresh spring foliage, so it'ssort of hiding the trash that's
lurking here in the floodplain,that every time the river, you
know, gets up over its banks,when it goes back down it leaves
stuff we left outside behind,and sometimes those, like you

(01:06:38):
know, human objects put intothese natural contexts kind of
can produce beautifulmanifestations of the uncanny
that can kind of help you thinkabout the world differently.
Here you can still see somesitting over there.

AJ (01:06:53):
I love that interpretation.
I want to bring up a particularframe.
You also brought to bear at theend, and with reference to your
dad too, that there's a in thatsort of related everything
we've said to this point.
There's a shamanistic aspectthat's not only available to our
experience in the world rightnow, but to deny on all of us,

(01:07:16):
you think, to our experience inthe world right now but to deny
on all of us.

You think, yeah, I mean, I think that in the book
Spell of the Sensuous David, Ican't think of his name Abram.
David Abram talks about, youknow, going to study shaman with
shamanic cultures, I think inBali and then in Tibet, shamanic

(01:07:41):
cultures and, and I think inBali and and then in Tibet, and
how he came to understand thatthe role of the shaman was just
as a person who would live kindof in the border zone between
the human settlement, thevillage, and the natural world
and help mediate the community'srelationship with the natural
world and sort of maintain it inbalance and almost through like
weird sympathetic, magicalmodes of trying to maintain the

(01:08:07):
balance of exchange, like, oh,we took from you this stuff, so
we got to give this stuff back,right, the kind of literal
balance in a way that reallyresonates with anybody you know.
Like I mean, you think aboutlike all of our human
relationships and how you knowall relationships are based on a
kind of reciprocity of exchange, maybe if it's just exchange of

(01:08:29):
affection, right, yeah, uh, butum, and that just is so
intuitively true when you applyit to thinking about how our
societies exist with the naturalworld that the idea of trying
to adopt and implement a littlebit of that shift in philosophy
in one's own life is a prettyeasy thing to do and it's sort

(01:08:53):
of consonant with our own.
You know teachings from our own.
You know, uh, supposedly sacredtexts, right, about ideas of
stewardship, although even thatidea of stewardship has a kind
of it's sort of already wrappedup with an idea of dominion.
When you talk about I'm thesteward, it's like you know,

(01:09:14):
you're the sheep, I'm theshepherd, right, you know that
kind of thinking.
I don't know.
I think all of this is an, is anexperiment in trying to
implement some of those ideas inthe fabric of everyday life,
right, um, and then maybe takesome of the fresh lessons from
doing so and applying them on alarger scale, and the book on

(01:09:35):
trying to kind of applying themon a larger scale.
And in the book I'm trying tokind of share those ideas and
experiences as a sort of a, nota manifesto or a manual per se,
but maybe some notes of you know, lessons learned that others
might be able to apply in theirown way and their own lives.

AJ (01:09:54):
You talk a lot, in that sense, about the path of healing
land.
Has this healing of self effectas well, and is that something
that you know, 15, 16 years inyou continue to experience?

absolutely, yeah, I mean, I'm going to be out here
weeding the roof some more todayweeding the roof.
I like that you know and um andthat will heal you I mean it's,
it's funny.
Yeah, I mean like I grew uphaving to do a lot of yard work
as a boy, right, and sort oflike, first as the free labor

(01:10:27):
supply for my father.
And then as a, you know, not oldenough to get a job, but young
enough to need some extra money,or old enough to need some
extra money, so mowing lawns andwhatever.
So that became like the thing Imost disliked doing yeah, and,
and you can, and you know theidea of like getting, your

(01:10:47):
getting getting down on yourknees to the land.
That's kind of like theultimate supplication in a way,
a sort of indignity.
You know, and our culturestreat that as the most degraded
form of labor, of like gettingdown and working on the land.
And there's a good reason,because, you know, if you read
books like james scott's againstthe grain, oh, where he talks

(01:11:10):
about how, you know, theearliest human sperm and human
settlements were all about thediscovery of grain agriculture
and the generation of wealththat comes from the accumulated
surplus of those crops and thesystems of power and property
that evolved to control it andto control access to it, so that
these societies would have toenslave their neighbors to do

(01:11:31):
the work to generate more ofthat surplus through
agricultural labor.

AJ (01:11:36):
And now applied through the property lens in urban
landscapes.

Yeah, totally exactly yeah and so you know, in
the distance between that andsitting at a computer,
generating bits of data for thecompany is not as far as we
might like to think in my view.
But when you undertake a kindof labor of tending to the life

(01:11:59):
that lives off the land on termsof regeneration rather than
extraction, right it becomes animmensely pleasurable activity.
It's not like, you know, lyingon a beach kind of pleasure,
right, it's dirty, you getbitten by bugs, you might have a

(01:12:24):
close encounter with a venomoussnake.
If you're here, a lot of theplants here are out to get you.
They have thorns that will makeyou bleed and whatnot.
But seeing the surplus of lifearound you and experiencing the
like biodiverse energy of allthis other life around you can

(01:12:44):
really, you can just you canlike literally feel it.
It's really tangible, um, likephysically tangible, sensorially
tangible to all your senses,and like tangible, sensorially
tangible to all your senses, andlike existentially tangible.
You can feel it in your soul.
And people come over and visitour kooky little place here and,

(01:13:07):
like you can see, like theyjust said, a lot of time people
like walk in through the frontgate and get kind of halfway
back to where it sort of changesin this subtle way.
It is almost like you'vestepped through a portal and it
brings out a different kind ofsensibility and feeling in
people in a way that I think is,yeah, something to be

(01:13:29):
cultivated and to be shared fullcircle with the portal.

AJ (01:13:33):
Yeah, I love it.
Yeah, I could absolutely feelthat too.
Well, chris, as we get back tothe house, I'm gonna ask you
what music would we go out with?
What?

music do you go out with?
And you asked me this before umI one of the things.
I, my grandfather and my dadwere both guitar players.
My grandfather played theGerman lute, which is not really
a lute, it's kind of basicallya funny fake Renaissance

(01:14:03):
instrument that's strung like aclassical guitar.
And then I started learning toplay really only during COVID,
but I really love Baroque guitarlike.
Bach and Weiss and people likethat baroque guitar, like Bach
and Weiss and people like that.
Where there's this German musicthat sort of, I grew up hearing
that.
When I hear it now I can hearits connection to like the deep

(01:14:27):
past and it often has both asort of an elegiac quality but
also a joy, a kind of amelancholy joy.
That I think sort of an elegiacquality but also a joy, a kind
of a melancholy joy that I thinksort of tunes into this sort of
feeling of places like this,well, and of occupation or maybe

(01:14:52):
occupation is the right word ofa sort of existence in kind of
a long now, right In the waythat you hear those renaissance
pieces that precede theclassical era and you can really
hear the connection to earlymusic and you can hear the
connection to like improv,improvisational modes that
preceded like the writing things, and here's how many of those

(01:15:12):
pieces are like kind of likevariations of the same tune,
right, and so I don't know.
So I think there's like I lovethose Sarabands of Bach for the
guitar.

AJ (01:15:24):
Beautiful.
Do you play one of them?

I play.
I don't play well for anybodyto record it.

AJ (01:15:33):
Well, we'll come back in a couple of years and you'll be
ready.

There you go, there you go.

AJ (01:15:37):
Chris, thanks a lot, mate.

Thank you, Anthony.
Absolutely a pleasure, reallyfun to walk around with you.

AJ (01:15:41):
It sure was.
That was Christopher Brown.
As usual, there are links inthe show notes, photos on the
website and more for you.
aid subscribers soon, an greatthanks for making it all
possible.
You can join this generouscommunity of listeners by
heading to the website or theshow notes and following the
prompts.

(01:16:01):
With all my gratitude, themusic you're hearing is
Regeneration by Amelia Barden.
My name's Anthony James.
Thanks for listenin, than y.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}A Petroleum Pipeline Portal to Regeneration – and Home, with Christopher Brown