A Natural History of Empty Lots

"A Natural History of Empty Lots", by Christopher Brown, 2024, 318 pages, 86k words. Subtitled "Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places". I think recommended by Cory Doctorow. Brown is a lawyer & sci-fi author - I have his 1st novel, but haven't tried it yet.

The book has 3 parts of 4 chapters each.

This is a great tale of the wild attempting to survive civilization. I really felt resonance with the overall message of the book - that wildlife finds a way to exist in the margins, where cities meet non-cities.

Brown bought a lot in an environmental sacrifice zone (it contained an old oil pipeline, abandoned cars, etc.) near the river in Austin TX, and then figured out how to put his family home there.

His accounts of wildlife encounters are of course fun to read. I loved when he talked about finding trails - trails are always there, & since I was a kid, I have always loved finding them. The word "numinous" kept springing to mind reading his descriptions of his explorations & run-ins with local wildlife. The definition of "numinous":

• Of or relating to a numen; supernatural.
• Filled with or characterized by a sense of a supernatural presence. "a numinous place."
• Spiritually elevated; sublime.

OK, yeah, that, but the secular version ;->

The 2nd chapter "A Wilderness of Edges", in a section titled "Demeter and Dionysys", contained an interesting discussion of the trade-off between hunting-gathering and agriculture. It concluded referencing the 2017 work of Yale political scientist James C. Scott: "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States".

To be a so-called barbarian, Scott argues with anarcho-libertarian flourish, was the only way to be truly free, living a life with no "labor" other than the natural activities of hunting, foraging, and making tools from the world arounc you. As a theory for freshly understanding the rest of human history, it's intuitively compelling. Especially when you couple this reconsideration of the bargain with Demeter with the deeper understanding Scott provides of the power we acquired through the gift from Prometheus. How our mastery of fire coupled with our relentless pursuit of surplus - in its elemental cereal form and all the actual and metaphoric forms we have been able to discover or imagine, from hordes of gold to storage lockers full of stuff and infinite digital vaults of virtual currency - has led us to the brink of an overheated climate that may bring our civilization to the point of collapse before this century is out.

In chapter 3, "Where the Wild Things Are", in a section titled "Portals and Psychopomps", we run into semiotics, and, of course - shudder - French philosophers.

Looking for new ways to understand the semiotic traps of the city, I sampled bits of theory like Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, a manifesto about the way consumer marketing in the age of mass media insinuates itself into our heads so effectively, replacing our authentic experience of real life and social relations with transactional exchanges. That led to the discovery of Debord's earlier investigations of the way we experience the city.

"Psychogeography"

[Kobo had "Society of the Spectacle" for $3.99, so I bought a copy. It's only 38k words.]

Also mentioned, a French philosophy from the 1950s and 1960s, Situationism.

The 2nd part of the book gets into the construction of his house. Chapter 7 is titled "How To Live In A Feral House". The section titled "Brujas and Devil Riders" touches on some of the philosophy which would up embodied in his 2-part house:

I've gone without air-conditioning in the worst summer heat and humidity, and survived without heat in severe winter conditions of cold and ice. Those experiences provide surprising windows into how else life could be, and how much our climate-control systems are the barrier between us and real life. The means whereby we maintain the illusory boundary between "inside" and "outside" that defines our lives.

I found particularly interesting the techniques Brown used to establish, as much as possible, native foliage over the top of his crazy berm house - pictured on the cover shown above, it has 2x 700 sq ft sections such that you have to go outside to travel between them.

At the end though, it looks like a wave of gentrification may sweep through and destroy the wild lands and wet lands he has helped (via lawyering) get established around his unconventional home. Not sure how to follow the progress.

Chapter 9 is titled "Blood in the Land". In a section titled "Maoists and Muralists", Brown tracks the evolution of graffiti around him. The graffiti is aware that gentrification is just more of the same old colonialist playbook:

Contemporary gentrification may be less violent than the first couple of centuries of colonization in the United States, operating as it does under due process of law; but when you dig deeper into what's really going on, the differences are not so easy to parse out.

Basically it's privileged, rich white people deciding they want what black-and-tan people have and taking it. Again.

As this is happening, in the last part of the book, you can feel him attempting to come to grips with the rapaciousness & the inevitability of the onslaught of capitalism. Quoting The Firesign Theater, "Civilization, ho!".

Here's the last paragraph of the book:

In a world governed by human reason, we experience an abundance of surplus and a poverty of meaning. We believe ourselves to have banished magic and superstition from the world. But the magic is still there, all around us. The trick is learning to see it, for what it is: the seemingly supernatural wonders produced by everyday interactions among different elements of the natural world. Things that can all be explained by science, but also understood by poets. Even in the most urbanized human terrains, those wonders can still be found - most often at the edges where the pavement ends and the wild is allowed to express.