ACCOZZAGLIA

Aside from depending a lot on the peculiar skills of discreet-packing and space-optimization (side topics on which I’m still doing writing), I’ve been prepping a thin strip of ground outside my door for another season of gardening.

“But you’re about to be evicted.”

(I know. Thanks for remembering.)

When I moved in, the strip was gravel construction fill sandwiched between two asphalt car park pads.

The obnoxious, former upstairs tenants (two rich white cishet brothers in their late twenties, who were every bit as insufferable as that description hints) welcomed visiting guests to use the strip to park cars. They encouraged this after they saw me gardening and even after the (mostly sunflower) seedlings were shin-high. They blew me off when I asked them to have their friends park on asphalt. They moved out weeks later.

What I committed to, so long as I was in this unaffordable place, was to work to remediate the strip to become healthy and arable enough to support food-grade flora. In other words, I wanted to revive the soil’s biota — to restore its habitability.

Before 2001, the plot of land where my apartment is — now a half-dozen structures of attached, narrow dwellings (totalling maybe 30 or 36 street addresses) — was zoned for light industrial use. The land was used for assorted manufacturing and a textiles factory.

Today, it’s nearby a bunch of light industrial businesses, the former meat packing yards, and a tire recycling plant. All were once served by a spaghetti of railway spurs, including two just steps from this strip of gravel. Most spurs, along with industry, left by the turn of the millennium, replaced by retail and increasingly upmarket infill housing. Although hints of industrial traces betray themselves here and there, the key rail corridors from which those spurs branched are still an active part of a national rail network.

Yattering about brownfields, because of course that’s something I’d do

While the impact of textiles manufacturing may not have risen to the threshold of a heavy metallic, petrochemical, carcinogenic miasma — like those found around extreme, heavy-industrial brownfields (in America, these would be Superfund sites) — most who’ve ever been around “light industrial” zones can attest the grounds don’t get treated gently. There aren’t personal or community stakes to care about them. They’re treated, solely, as sites to extract wealth from labour conducted atop it. Contaminated land becomes one whoopsie! oh well! externality of this.

On this spot, workers dumped dirty water full of phosphate-loaded surfactants. Spillage, from metal drums of dye or fabric conditioners delivered by rail spur loading dock, was probably not unheard of. Lubricants for mechanical equipment dripped. Soot from coal-fired boilers settled. Millions of cigarette butts across the decades, their residual tar and “the 210s” — polonium-210 and lead-210 — leached into soil with the cycles of rainwater and snowmelt. And so on.

Further back, before environmental regulations came into force, there were dozens of other chemicals I haven’t considered which made their way into these grounds. Without a specific, regular history of this plot, I can deduce there was perfunctory soil remediation in the late 1990s — following factory demolition and a city council motion to re-zone it for multi-unit residential.

This isn’t a condemnation for converting former brownfields into places people will live, eat, and play. Far from it.

As an urban studies student and, later, urban planning candidate, remediation of brownfields for new uses, like residential and mixed-commercial/residential, was something I spent considerable energy understanding, writing, and even presenting. I thought then (and still do now) that remediating all brownfields was not only feasible to resolve housing shortfalls and affordable activities, but also necessary for undoing decades of deposited damage by our forebears.

They were oblivious. We aren’t. We bear responsibility to rectify that for all who survive us.

I found brownfield remediation personally important to take on — if for no other reason, then as a commitment toward fostering stewardship over human-disturbed lands, even when I couldn’t do much better than to present the history.

I’m also motivated by something more foundational and personal: my own upbringing and a desire to see much less of what I witnessed regularly as a child.

On being born into a foul world carved by wealth extraction

Typically, I was about a dozen years older than my university counterparts during the later 2000s.

This meant the timing of when (and where) I was born afforded memories of how people behaved around industrial and liminal lands before U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air Act measures began taking hold. I’ve innumerable memories of the foulness that reckless activity generated. I know others my age probably saw much worse elsewhere, and much worse exists abroad now, courtesy of off-shoring.

Around 1977, on a humid summer afternoon, my dad let me walk with him to just beyond the dead end barricade at the end of our semi-rural street in southeast Texas: a small, sixties-era, fledgling starter-home mini-subdivision with modest streets — most with open culverts — abutting tracts of older, active farmland.

Just beyond a striped wooden barricade, I watched him pour a two-litre metal container of fat drippings into a ditch full of other dumped stuff. This spot, a deeper culvert maybe two metres lower than the end of the road, was littered with junked tires, appliances, and other flotsam. There were tossed containers of volatile liquids — house paints, spray cans, old motor oil cans — either rusting or seeping into puddles of stagnant rainwater and tangled, half-yellowed weeds. This was when many paints still contained lead and most gasoline was still formulated with tetraethyl lead.

Under gulf coast sunlight, this stagnant water shimmered in rainbows and it sort of stank. I could see it was dirty and dangerous. My dad made sure I couldn’t get too close. Dumping spots like this were probably thrice as common then as household trash-dumping spots are now.

[ABOVE] People did shit like this all the time, pretty much everywhere one looked (often far from industrial areas)

[Fire take. If anyone wonders why North American violent crime peaked in 1991 [more fun: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2022.103826], around when I was 18, or why it seems Gen X-aged people from this continent — myself included — are, in aggregate, not quite as… flexible on their feet as those born later, look to these photos. Consider how air, water, and soil had been front-loaded with multiple neurotoxins (like lead, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene, mercury, and so much more), around which so many of us were reared (and around which we played). Try to find a way to not factor these as interfering with developing nervous systems.]

When no community stakeholding or legal enforcement is there to discourage it, humanity’s worst inclinations hold fast and true: we dump our shit. We still do. The following is from last September, next to a natural hidden waterfall in my Canadian city.

Trash dumped into a stream valley [My City, Canada, 27 September 2023]

In 1988, my uncle still poured used motor oil into storm drains at the end of the block. I even volunteered once to save him a walk and did the disposal myself, because I strove to be useful. (This was shortly before he went from being “jokester-prankster-playful uncle” to “menacing-threatening-catnapping uncle”.)

Instinctively, even then, it felt off: these weren’t sanitary sewage drains. These were storm drains. And yet, I still facilitated it. I’d relish the chance to have a few words with 15-year-old me: not only to tell her the tran and gay thing was forever and OK, but also, “The fuck are you doing? Walk that shit over to the Exxon station. idc if it takes you 45 minutes. Go.”

Maybe it’s why Lily Tomlin’s 1979 satire, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, always hits a certain way.

Witness to fields becoming brownfields (wait, wasn’t this about gardening a gravel strip outside a flat from which I’m being evicted?)

My dad worked in a petrochemical district.

Several plants were located throughout Houston, most within rail spur or docking distance from the Houston Ship Channel. He also worked in similar industrial districts in Corpus Christi and Matagorda County.

His workplace was a chemical plant. It synthesized products like acrylic acid — the stuff giving maxi-pads and diapers their absorbency. The company produced other chemicals, but I couldn’t guess what they were. (Pipe stacks and tanks mostly look the same.) A peculiar, but not entirely offensive smell outgassed by acrylic acid production was a constant throughout my childhood memories. When coming home, my dad (along with his car’s interior) always smelled of it. It hung in the air whenever we visited his plant. So although it’s a familiar odour personally, it’s probably alien for most others. (Chances are good you’ve never smelled it.)

Beyond his plant’s road, on the distal end of the main boulevard maybe two or three minutes away by car, there was a refinery called “Big 3”. It was once the most reliably foul place I knew (superseded in 1996 once I drove past the Bayer drug plant along the Ohio River in West Virginia).

I’m unsure whether Big 3 was a company name; an alliance of three petrochemical concerns; or a nod to three main products: gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. I remember the logo badge — a giant “3” in red, the rest in black — plastered on colossal, white spheroid tanks facing the boulevard, storing whatever fresh hell they cracked and distilled. The tanks resembled menacing, inverted kohlrabi.

Nearly all refineries sported tall stacks, each burning blue, orange, or bright, campfire-like flames into the sky — night and day.

Big 3 went beyond. It not only belched sooty smoke and burnt waste gasses. It also spewed a brownish-yellow gas of unknown composition. I sussed the especial acridness around Big 3 came from that pipe stack. On an overcast day with no wind, enough of it would envelop its grounds in a kind of brownish smog — much the way a cartoon might depict an SBD fart.

My brother and I would try to see who could hold our breaths the longest around Big 3, to miss the sulphurous stench. (It wasn’t like rotten eggs.) It’s probably criminal now to spew in North America, but in countries with lax regulations, something like it probably still vents somewhere — all so someone can fill up their crossover or a container ship can get its bunker fuel.

[ABOVE] Welcome to glimpses of what I saw regularly during the first half-dozen years of my life: selections from DOCUMERICA

The DOCUMERICA series of colour photos commissioned by the EPA, a visual inventory on the state of U.S. environmental pollution during the early 1970s, chronicled plants, dumping sites, heavy industry factories, coal mines, roadsides, and common spaces — and how these intersected with where people lived, particularly racialized and lower-income communities. Some of that toxic mess had been stacking for nearly a century.

The photos reflect what I saw frequently — probably more than the average kid, given how my dad worked in these places. Some had recreation areas for employee families — playgrounds and covered areas for barbecues and bingo. Grass was different: always yellow-green, shallow, and rarely needing mowing. My earliest swimming memories were two summers at a mostly empty, community-sized swimming pool — with stacks, constant hissing, and that acrylic acid smell as the backdrop.

Satellite view (2024) of this chemical plant next to the childhood swimming pool [far top-right corner], still there 45 years on

Years ago, maybe 2012, I tweeted a thread about DOCUMERICA, exactly as the National Archives scanned them. For this essay, I’ve colour-adjusted them to remove Ektachrome’s telltale dye shifts. (Slides needing nearly nothing were shot with Kodachrome.)

Although I wasn’t there at these shots, they ring true because I’d been driven past them.

Generating Plant, Part of Houston Lighting & Power, Houston TX, July 1972 [Jim Olive; accession: 412-DA-1420]

For instance, this triplet of petroleum power (hydro) plants and their candy-cane stacks were parallel to the freeway which brought us into town to visit my grandmother. They’d always leave me transfixed as I stared out the window. (There was another group of four similar plants several kilometres away; those sported graphite-grey stacks and appeared like they belonged on the Death Star. I swore these plants, always side-by-side, must have existed probably everywhere — had we driven long enough.)

Most thoroughfares were lit at night by the silvery-turquoise glow of streetlights — not the salmon-orange or cool whites we’ve known these last 35 years. It’s because they used mercury vapour bulbs. [Streetlighting was a whole research area I undertook alongside brownfields. It’s why I chose to become an urbanist: to fix a light pollution problem now far worse than during my childhood.]

Common 1970s and early 1980s mercury vapour street lighting, Tanglin Road, Singapore, February 1971 [© Bill Strong, used without permission]

Whenever these broke, mercury dribbled to groundwater, poisoning aquatic life and animals — like mammals and birds which rely on fish as their food source. [Yah, I know metal-halide (cool white) and high-pressure sodium (salmon) streetlights still contain traces of mercury to facilitate ignition. It’s a fraction of what mercury vapour bulbs and office fluorescent tubes once had.]

I have no nostalgia for any of this.

I do wish I could have pulled a Brainstorm moment long ago: to be able to write full sensory data to a recorded medium, to give folks not alive then ways to replay these full sensory experiences — to bring home what I‘m trying, futilely, to describe with clunky words and faded photographs.

The takeaway from those experiences is they impressed upon me an urgency to focus on the things I treat, somewhat idiosyncratically, as important today — at a time when I’m still undocumented; in limbo around learning whether status restoration and permanent residency may be restored in late 2025; weeks away from being street-bound; and unable to work legally.

OK, this was about gardening — not brownfields or mnemotechny, wtelf

So in 2020, the strip outside this apartment was gravel — greyed and bereft of life. Years of trash bits lingered beneath. Gardening this was a challenge accepted — an opportunity I’d not known since before the police thing in my bedroom.

For that first summer, pandemic lockdown, I bought a bag of nutrient-rich soil from the supermarket and hauled it home in my messenger bag. I figured it could deliver enough nutrients to let sunflower sprouts grow in those spots, to reach deeper into hard-packed soil to help aerate it. Slowly, using the only gardening implements I had — Dollarama hand spade and hand rake — I moved gravel from spots where I planted seeds.

Much to my delight, the sunflowers germinated.

Lockdown summer garden, first try, struggling with the gravel (but Frida was there to help), 5 August 2020

They grew from seeds I’d kept since my final round of gardening at the old place in summer 2016 (before we were renovicted). I’d done much the same there in a small, paving stone-covered area (which, technically, doubled as a back yard).

A new garden in a decreasingly stone-paved enclosure, 1 July 2011

The seeds aren’t ever strict varieties like Titan, Russian Mammoth, or whatever. They’re always seeds from the hybrids across all the varieties to have sprouted since I first gardened in 2011. (Were they canines, they’d be mutts.) I never totally know what the collected seeds will become — though in recent years, I’ve taken to placing them in bags and, on each, jotting general descriptions of their origins.

In very unscientific, descriptive language, one bag may read:

90–120 days, late August bloom, corelle supper dish-sized
2.2m, single crown, zebra centre
low serrations
seeds sourced from [so-and-so] avenue, 2021
sunflower maggot magnet

Sunflowers are one of the best ways to draw out heavy metals and other pollutants from contaminated soil. (One must still dispose of the dead stalks after growing season.) There are others, like swales of tall grasses and other plants, but sunflowers are simple. They cost basically nothing, and hot take: they’re kinda majestic.

Wherever possible, passive remediation using native flora — phytoremediation — can go a long way toward restoring polluted soils. It’s less carbon-intensive or disruptive than, say, digging up, stripping, and either treating soil, in situ, or replacing contaminated soil with trucked-in soil. That blunt-force approach, often necessary on Superfund sites, still means years before subterranean ecosystems can restart.

The main downside is passive remediation is a multi-year commitment: pulling out pollutants takes time.

Lockdown summer went well. One sunflower, a single crown, reached three metres before being weighed down by its heavy cluster of seeds.

My one and only three-metre wonder at this place. I think it tapped into nutrients underneath the laneway pavement, 14 August 2020

I also planted pole beans — not for eating, but for fixing nitrogen in the long-dead soil.

On nights when it rained, I’d grab my bicycle’s rear lamp to collect earthworms from area sidewalks. (Earthworms aren’t sensitized to red wavelengths and won’t react.) I brought those to the gravel garden in hopes the slow accumulation of organic matter could support their offspring.

Each year, this city provides a community service: dumping truckloads of fresh compost in selected city parks — usually, at least two per ward — on a specified date, free for residents to grab however much they can while it lasts. Most comes from the city’s prior autumn haul of curbside leaf matter (brown compost), mixed with a smaller share of organics from green bins (green compost food wastes) — resulting in rich, black soil by late spring. Anticipating the dump, I’d grab an empty recycling bin, a snow shovel, and walk however many streets over to the designated park.

I resumed doing this in 2022. The ritual is comical: a grown-arse woman rolling a noisy recycling bin along a sidewalk, with a snow shovel sticking from it like it’s an everyday ritual. It also makes a difference for the garden.

Just as 2022 planting was underway, an anonymous neighbour donated a couple of folding trellises from the dollar store and left them by my garden.

This time, I planted diagonal rows of sunflowers on a now-halved strip (that’s another story about petty neighbours who moved in after me and wanted their gravel to remain as… gravel and weeds.)

Maybe I overdid it with those diagonal rows, 7 August 2022

Every attempt I’ve made to plant gourds, as has always been my challenge in this city, is futile: black squirrels are zealous about eating blossoms, along with every fruiting gourd they can spot. So these are usually a non-starter, if I even bother.

This was also the first growing season I noticed an uptick in earthworms. It was this year when I began to see the remediation was working. I felt it safe enough to sauté some bean pods in garlic and olive oil. (They were wonderful.)

Although the insufferable dwellers next door never warmed to the garden, others have enjoyed stopping by to take in the spectacle and to make spontaneous chit-chat on the lane, usually around dusk and dawn.

[My landlord, meanwhile, has visited here a total of once during summertime and is oblivious to this remediation effort. I’m not remediating soil to make their real estate more valuable. Rather, I‘m thinking about what I’m leaving behind for who comes next. I’m trying to make lemonade from the astringent citrus of my legal bind (and my inability to earn a living over-the-table legally). I’d go mad if I did nothing.]

Morris Day, on the move, 4 June 2023

Water on an oak tree

In 2023, I upped the ante. I found two oak saplings in public spaces to transplant to the strip. There’s a nearby white oak tree on an easement whose acorns sprout along an adjacent fence line. Although in 2022 I tried planting acorns chilled the prior winter, none germinated (because I suck, apparently, at coaxing oak shoots). I brought over two saplings and transplanted them about four metres apart.

I named one Morris Day. The other is Philip Oakey. (There’s a nearby seedling I didn’t transplant I’ve been calling Annie Oakley.)

The monarch summer

2023 brought the first milkweed plant to the strip. For two years, I’d tried to transplant milkweed rhizomes and get immature seeds from collected seed pods to germinate. At last, one emerged.

One afternoon in July, just before a passing shower, I opened the door to let in a breeze. (Basement windows are terrible for light and air circulation; open doors make up for it.) It afforded a way to also see the garden from inside the bunker.

In one of those blink-and-miss-it moments, I watched a monarch butterfly land, briefly, on the lone milkweed before flitting away. After five minutes of rain, I went outside to find, underneath one of the milkweed leaves, the telltale sign of a monarch egg — the first I’d seen which wasn’t on a laptop screen.

I didn’t know it, but this moment would change my summer.

The garden grew, as usual, with its mix of sunflowers, beans, chives, and volunteer dill weed.

A week after the visit, I inspected the milkweed to find a tiny thing of a caterpillar, maybe a half-centimetre long. It was too early to know for sure, as its markings hadn’t yet emerged, but it resembled a monarch. Over the coming days, I grew fascinated with the growth and whereabouts of this, yes, monarch. I named them Big Leggy. Whenever I spoke with local friends, I gushed whenever mentioning Big Leggy. I was so proud of them.

Big Leggy on the milkweed, second instar, 31 July 2023

Sometime around the third instar (five in all), Big Leggy vanished.

I grew nervous. I brought out a bug net I bought years earlier for camping and covered the milkweed with it. My worry was a predator had found them. The following night, I found Big Leggy outside of the netting, trying futilely to reach the leaves. I felt like a tool. I gently brought them back to the milkweed and removed the netting.

Everybody poops. Even Big Leggy poops.

Net removal was probably a mistake.

Two afternoons later, now fourth instar, they disappeared permanently.

There was a predator, probably a young blue jay, who tried to make a meal of Big Leggy and regurgitated almost immediately, given milkweed’s toxic cardenolides. (I understand this happens most often with blue jays and other younger birds which lack memory to associate illness with aposematic warning stripes of a monarch caterpillar or distinctive wings of an adult.)

No matter. Big Leggy was gone. I was devastated.

I’d hoped to witness them moult into a chrysalid, but I became aware of how maybe one in every twenty outdoor monarch eggs reaches eclosing — that is, to emerge from chrysalis as an adult butterfly.

So I began looking in marginal spaces and along an industrial corridor known for being sprayed seasonally with herbicides.

Soon, I found one egg underneath a leaf. I brought it in and let it hatch indoors before transferring them to the garden’s milkweed. That caterpillar vanished within a day or so, probably never moulting to second instar — not enough time to name them.

This made me determined to find and raise at least one monarch egg to adulthood.

I returned to marginal spaces in the dark of night. I was that weirdo with a torch, inspecting milkweed leaves to find telltale signs of an egg. Meanwhile, most were asleep or in bed with their phones watching either naughties, David Attenborough, or naughties with David Attenborough.

I returned with four leaves and four eggs.

On my desk, I prepared four separate, shallow dishes from old takeaway trays, to give the leaves just enough water to keep them hydrated for a few days — shallow enough not to drown wayward caterpillars.

Three hatched, all within twelve hours. The fourth was unfertilized.

So began the saga of the three monarch caterpillars I named Inky, Blinky, and Pinky.

(Had it hatched, I was not going to name the fourth Sue, Clyde, or Todd… for reasons.)

If power dots were milkweed leaves

With each dish on my desk, I maintained a lamp to check whether they were moulting, resting after moult, or needing fresh leaves. I ended up shooting a mess of potatocam pics with a seven-year-old phone (yes, my phone is still 2016 technology).

Each evening, I went out to pick fresh leaves from different milkweed plants, to provide the caterpillars with a variety of sources and to minimize possible exposure to Ophryocystis elektroscirrha — or OE — protozoa.

OE is nasty for monarchs. OE spores dust the wings of lightly infected adults and can end up on leaves where eggs get laid. Caterpillars eat the infected leaves. Once ingested, OE spores hatch and begin to feed inside the caterpillar and reproduce. During metamorphosis, OE feeds on the maturing wings, leaving them misshapen when infection is severe. A heavily infected adult emerges to find it can’t fly, making it vital to segregate caterpillars and to rinse and diversify milkweed leaves they eat.

By third instar, each began revealing their personalities. They became large enough to let them crawl from leaf onto my finger.

Inky and Pinky were methodical about their munching and moulting. Blinky, meanwhile, was kind of a brat.

As they all moulted to fourth instar, Blinky began wandering. At first, they appeared in Pinky’s leaves and tray — meaning, they’d found a way to leave theirs and amble across the desk to Pinky’s area. Worried about OE, I added fresh leaves and returned Blinky to their tray.

I went to bed. Around four a.m., I awoke to check on the cats. Blinky was missing.

I panicked, fearful my other cat — Frida, the purring calico — had discovered them. (Fortunately, she never clued in to my monarch midwifing.) I scoured the desk for a half-hour. I paused for a break and to calm down.

I came back later and glanced at my SLR film camera, also on the desk. It caught my eye because it had a certain wayward caterpillar exploring the lens barrel.

Blinky on the lam, 18 August 2023

That piqued my fascination with this rebellious little shit.

I marked each caterpillar’s back with a colour-coded, water-based ink, to keep track of who was whom. Blinky got a green dot. Inky got blue. Pinky got red.

By collecting several fresh leaves each day, I accidentally brought home two more monarch eggs. Both hatched. They were ten days younger than their elders. I named them Slinky and Genki.

“They grow up so fast these days!”

By a few hours, Blinky was first to moult into a chrysalid.

Once they have their fill of milkweed, monarchs prepare for metamorphosis by finding a spot to dangle themselves, using silk they spin for a mounting point. Next, they clasp onto this silk mount from, well, their bum, to dangle in a “hanging J” shape. After about a dozen hours, they emerge as a chrysalis. The hours between are delicate: they can’t be disturbed.

Blinky, less than an hour after moulting into a chrysalid, 24 August 2023

With Blinky, I managed to capture the whole event on time-lapse. I missed Inky doing the same, but with Pinky, it meant moving them first, just before they finished their mount point, to get them to a safe place to make a second mount point, away from Frida’s view.

Only as chrysalids can one assess the morphology of their genitals. (As adults, their wings are also dimorphic.) It turned out Blinky had male genitals; Inky and Pinky had female genitals. As each eclosed a week later, their wing patterns confirmed this.

Each eclosed with healthy wings, free from OE. For Blinky, the entire eclosing was captured on time-lapse.

Their generation is the migratory brood — now designated as threatened and, in Nova Scotia, endangered. This brood flies to México to overwinter before reproducing. The migratory brood the following summer are the great-grandchildren of the previous. This also means, now in mid-late May, the grandchildren of Inky-Blinky-Pinky’s generation are probably caterpillars somewhere in West Pennsyltucksee and will eclose in June, making their way to this area by July).

For the 24 hours after eclosing and gaining strength for migratory flight across, well, the red states, Blinky was calm about climbing onto my hand: they let me move them to a bundle of various flowers I picked for their first nectaring. Blinky was just plain chill.

[Although I know an insect’s nervous system isn’t especially complex, I do wonder whether they associate and recall odours with general experiences, such as my finger when I let them crawl as caterpillars — then as adults, recalling my scent being unassociated with danger.]

Witnessing Blinky take first flight the next morning left me as a pile of cry. Blinky took their time, sticking around a few hours on the sunflower to which I brought them. They’d flex wings periodically in preparation for flying, but otherwise weren’t rushed.

Blinky, taking their sweet time on departure, 4 September 2023

There wasn’t time for sadness: Inky eclosed hours later. They were methodical about being ready to leave after resting for a day. The next morning, after maybe ten minutes on the sunflower, they flew up and away.

Pinky eclosed shortly after Inky, leaving me with two butterflies to watch after overnight. Pinky was whom I had to relocate as they were spinning a silk mount point. I gathered they were annoyed by the interruption. So if they’ve memory of odours, mine was probably associated with annoyance.

Pinky, full of energy, was ready to leave immediately. Even trying to bring them outside had me chasing them around the closed room as they fluttered about. They didn’t bother to climb onto the sunflower from my finger. They just up and flew off in an invertebrate huff.

A few hours later, death struck. Genki moulted into a chrysalid successfully, but Slinky didn’t.

During moult from “hanging J”, Slinky bled a few drops of green haemolymph — each drop akin to losing a pint of blood. I don’t know how or why it happened, but Slinky was dying. I did what I could to understand why this might happen, checking monarch forums. It was never clear, and I blamed myself anyhow.

For Slinky, I gently cut their silk anchor from the netting without touching them, cupping a tissue on my hand just beneath. I gently covered them under more tissue and did what forums recommended: euthanize by freezing (or squishing, but no… just no).

After some grieving, I froze them, then prepared a tiny ritual to bury them the next day, still in tissue, beneath the garden’s milkweed.

Genki, whose genitals and wing pattern indicated male, eclosed without trouble. I marked them with purple ink. They were relaxed overnight and began nectaring. As with the others, I set up a sleeping spot for myself on the floor, next to a jar of freshly picked flowers; closed the door to keep Frida out; and napped fitfully, checking on them periodically.

The next morning, I brought Genki to the sunflower. They were in no rush to leave.

I left home to do other tasks, as I knew seeing them flutter off would hit harder than the others. I came back maybe six hours later. On the sunflower, there was a certain monarch flexing their wings every so often. (You’re fucking kidding, I thought.) When I brought my finger over, it startled them to fly away at that moment. (Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa whyyyyy…)

My monarch midwifing was done, but so too was the realization I’d probably not be here for summer 2024. There was no path to assure I’d have rent covered after September or have a place to go.

My mental health slipped once I verified my anti-depressants, variations on a 2017 combo, were no longer working. It was time to go back to what worked just fine before 2017. The existentialism of finishing immigration paperwork and scrambling to find some way to cover rent nudged me to panic and withdraw, mostly out of a sense of complete powerlessness and isolation. After having given six weeks to midwifing monarchs, little else at that moment felt terribly meaningful. It felt more lonely than even during the apex of lockdown. Those little creatures changed a part of me I didn’t know was in me.

The garden arced toward the autumnal wind-down of remedial sunflower blossoms and tough bean pods. Morris Day and Philip Oakey were still hanging in there: their transplantation wasn’t too severe.

This was enough. Where my mind went from there isn’t something I wish to write about. I carried on.

Life during eviction and gardening at night

I’m constantly and brutally aware I’ll be evicted and removed before a first sunflower seed can become a tall crown or cluster of gangly blossoms. Yet I’m still gardening.

Last week, with little to lose, I began a second year of night gardening.

I once associated this idea with the early R.E.M. song whose lyrics I still don’t know, but I’ve come to enjoy gardening at night while other people are asleep and not distractions. I can be in the moment, in my element. [Maybe I’ve become misanthropic, idk.] I needn’t explain to anyone what I’m doing. It’s quiet. I can observe nocturnal faunal life: earthworms, trash pandas, slugs, Luigi (the local alpha cat), earwigs, bunnies, moth caterpillars, howling of distant coyotes, skunks, and even the occasional avian trill (though no owls).

When gardening in vain speaks to an expression of faith

In vain, I’m gardening at a place where I’m nearing three months in arrears — something I’m powerless to remedy.

In vain, I’m gardening at night because it ushers forth a meditative calming. It’s to say gardening, night or day, is good for my mental health because, consistently, it always has been. If this is selfish, then I’d love to know how to make it less so, owing to external circumstances I can’t change or expedite.

In vain, I’m gardening even when I won’t be here to enjoy what’s reaped, because I’m upholding my own commitment for better land stewardship in tiny ways I’m able to do so — all within the very confined constraints of a trans person, without status, who can’t practice urban design or planning to implement remediation at scale or by drafting regional policy to effect similar ends.

Even were I in a financially fortuitous place to hold title over this place, this land would still not be my land and it never really could be — just a legal illusion, imported to force by systematic colonization. Real estate, a chief consequence of the Inclosures Acts, is probably humanity’s greatest folly, even if in this age we’re in heavy denial about it. Once we’ve eradicated ourselves from this planet as an apex species, this land will again belong to no one and everything, as it always was. We’re its squatters.

In vain, I’m gardening because I enjoy knowing the garden brings joy to others who live along this laneway — insufferable next-door neighbours notwithstanding.

In vain, I’m gardening to add to a push-back list. Come eviction hearing, the list will itemize areas I‘ve improved the state of this flat (over how I found it when the previous tenants handed me the keys.

In vain most of all, I’m gardening because doing so speaks to an expression of faith. It’s a faith that growing conditions may be favourable — not onerously hot, dry, or plagued. It’s faith that some of what’s sowed may sprout and nourish other life, adding a tiny link to the constant cycle of life and death for so many others. It’s faith in an idea that leaving this world in better shape than how one arrived to it may do much to heal it.

It’s putting faith of hope in a morrow I won’t witness.

The satisfaction of undoing harm

I’ve relished gardening. When I moved in, the strip (the only feature to lessen the crushing sting of how costly this unaffordable bunker has been) was basically barren. I accepted this challenge because it’s enlightening, didn’t need money, and I’m capable.

I take satisfaction in knowing I remediated the strip to restore life to a spot once rendered lifeless by my species, to make it helpful for passing pollinators who make our food possible. After other humans used that strip to extract wealth and to park cars (to extract wealth elsewhere), I revived it with sweat equity, attention to care, and an eagerness to keep learning.

Let’s talk about a land ethic

To strive toward embracing a land ethic, as Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac, is to make no small commitment. It’s the literal antithesis and repudiation of real estate claims and exploiting finite resources for private enrichment.

Leopold argued a land ethic demands from humanity our humility to live as companions with all other life on land, sea, and air — not to domineer over it. It demands we use our aptitude for learning, memory association, and self-awareness to steward — not conquer — that life. It implores we reduce our impact, our lifeprint (my fancy talk for kicking “footprint” up a notch), on theirs.

A land ethic means learning we’ve no alternative but to treat each other a whole mess better than we ever have. Writ large, we’ve never been good at this. Superficial attempts historically have been facile, pivoting on an assimilation of reductiveness — to the omission and exclusion of people marginalized as Others. It’s frequently involved some form of conquering and subjugation.

That act of conquering, something we’ve been especially good at doing, includes exploiting labour to extract wealth from land, for a conqueror to hoard those spoils — often by depriving those doing extraction labour (and depriving those doing unpaid labour to support paid labourers) with the most minimal of pay one can get away with in compensating for that labour. It’s why labour unions organized.

Conquering stimulates abuses of land and people. It leaves behind the kinds of messes DOCUMERICA chronicled — or those of now, of kids sorting through noxious trash cargo containers shipped from the Americas and Europe. Conquering and wealth hoarding are manifestations of our species’ impulsive adolescence. The fucked-up thing is we enable a culture which elevates these as inviolable.

From an industrial latrine can come restoration: a road, a railway, a warehouse, and a junkyard, 6 February 1948

This photo is a one-minute walk from my garden — shot 25 years before I was born and the same year Leopold finished A Sand County Almanac.

That railway is where I found two monarch eggs amongst five I raised. That tree trunk, probably an elm, is where I found Morris Day and Philip Oakey. Likely a Dutch elm disease casualty, it’s long gone and succeeded by a modest oak canopy — its trunk where that truck was parked. That factory yard is now an asphalted schoolyard. That warehouse burnt to its slab in 2012.

Even when we may not see it directly or immediately, traces of ways which those before us rejected a land ethic still lurk.

It amounted to treating land like a toilet, dumping onto it all our forebears considered disposable. This exploitation implied land must also be disposable: a being to subdue for exploitation, a creature to bring to heel — all so long as doing so routed spoils into one’s accounts for wealth hoarding, for bequeathing not to a commons of life, but to one’s own progeny (who find themselves born on second or third base, each base further removed from grounding in a mindful conscience essential for embracing a land ethic).

We may believe we’re neutral, benign actors. We may believe our surroundings being Insta-ready with spendy branding and twee accoutrements, like hostile architectures, are harmless as we blur public-common realms with fortresses of private-exclusive enclaves. With ambiguity, accountability falters.

When we do so, we’re culpable of harming land upon which we comport ourselves in these ways. It’s because celebrating wealth extraction — monetization included — feeds on ambiguities around how we interpret our relationship with land. “It’s my property: I’ll do whatever I want on it,” is the aggressive surrender of accountability for a land ethic. It’s petulant.

We reject a land ethic when we use land for personal gain and convenience:

• Whenever we drive.
• Whenever we join Amazon Prime.
• Whenever we consume fast-anything (food, fashion, furniture).
• Whenever we frequent Business Improvement Areas.
• Whenever we use liquid soap in plastic bottles instead of bar soap packed in cardboard or paper.
• Whenever we buy Mexican avocados in January (cartel-run orchards raze oyamel fir forests migratory monarch butterflies rely on for overwintering).
• Whenever we subscribe to cloud services.

These all defer unavoidable costs rapidly — and severely — coming due.

As they come due, they have us finding ourselves in ecological disasters created by what our species — in wealthier, industrialized nations — spewed decades earlier. Wealth extraction then was profitable because it didn’t pay for today’s end-of-life costs on that extraction. It’s why we inherited brownfields and microplastics.

Wealth extraction is finite because the Earth has only so much matter available: a desire for profit launders the damages it causes, deferring it for surviving generations to face.

That reckoning has just entered the planet’s chat.

It’s all to say this CO₂ and methane disruption we’re no longer ignoring came from what we expelled by the 1980s: a 40-year lag time. (I apologize to everyone for my childhood contributions and these next 20 years to come, reflecting my consumption through the aughts.) If we thought we pumped tonnes then, then we probably shouldn’t think about how much we’ve disgorged since the ’90s, or all the ecological chain reactions we’ve kick-started but have yet to witness.

The 2040s are gonna suuuuuuuck in ways which make now seem like daycare. (The 2060s? Hoo-boy.) Unlike other disrupted life, we know what’s going on and are able to give voice to it. For anyone who couldn’t or didn’t hoard wealth and are most vulnerable now, it’d be ironic were it not grimly, wilfully cruel: those to reject a land ethic by hoarding wealth from extraction will be last to feel this pain.

Folks born this century have reasons for being peeved: too few, especially owners over production, volunteer to remediate damage, even when our species knows what must be done. We’ve left third-millennians born this century holding this titanic bill of consequences by our doing. As with disrupting land how we have, wealth hoarding behind it thumbs a nose, surlily, at a land ethic.

Yah, I know this reads like some unhinged rant.

I know nothing I’ve written, especially on planting trees, hasn’t been written before by minds orders brighter than my lead-and-mercury-stunted brain. The only novelty lies in how I got here and in knowing how my unique station — an undocumented, poor, nearly houseless tranny with a masters in urban planning I can’t utilize — has me powerless to coax ecological healing in consequential ways.

What I’m getting at is how all these activities we undertake, often on autopilot, and perspectives we’ve learnt from forebears, are intertwined — how, once one works back to origins which give them footing, one finds they share a relationship: all contravene adoption of a land ethic. Fleeing this planet for a mostly lifeless rock a third of our mass is nihilistic af.

(Seriously, if you’re going with that, grow tf up: you’ll ruin there, too. Fix here first with all your lucre. Most of that’s a loan on which you’re now defaulting. Pay it off. Then go live off-world with whatever true profit, if any, you’ve left.)

But don’t call me a doomer. I have hope. I know we can do orders better. Hope is why I remediate soil, plant oaks, and midwife monarchs — why I use a bicycle for everything and why I upcycle old computers.

You can have hope, too.

I can be cranky, anxious, and have hope if you can walk, doom-scroll, and chew gum

Just a week after removing early invasive weeds (and days after sowing every sunflower seed variety on hand — along with gourd seeds, raw peanuts, and pole beans), I wrapped up writing about those experiences in this essay.

This are basically the only thing over which I’ve agency during this personally treacherous moment. My future is uncertain, nerve-wracking, gut-twisting. I planted enough to anticipate squirrels and slugs will find some bonus snacks, but not enough to find all of them. I’ve reserves and some weeks remain before it’s too late to do secondary planting.

In the 32 years since I first rented a flat, this is the first time I’ve fallen into arrears and only the second time I’ve had a landlord who’s treated my tenancy as, principally, a cash machine — nothing more, nothing better.

Although it may not be in their vision, this place will be in better shape than how I found it in 2020 — even if they’ll never know it. Whatever else they plan to do is what they’ll do. They’re keen on extracting and on enabling extraction for personal wealth hoarding. I’m remediating — trying to mend what’s already here. It’s how we differ fundamentally.

When a giant gesture of faith is to foster shade where you’ll never cool down

Planting any tree whose growth is slow, but predictable is, literally, a radical act of faith. It’ll help others by whom we’ll be survived. We may know we won’t witness the tree’s maturation. Future generations may never meet us. But planting facilitates a powerful relationship with tomorrow around these shared commons.

Oak saplings tend to send deep taproots and set up complex root structures early on. This helps to anchor what follows. Removing them probably won’t be as convenient as pulling up weeds. If someone wants to pave over this strip, then bless their little heart.

I’m keenly aware Morris Day and Philip Oakey’s futures are shaky. If, however, in an off-chance even one matures, it’ll be a magnificent shade tree, welcomed by whatever life is around. Though odds against are great, it may live to the 2200s. If they’re around, people will have no knowledge of how and why that tree got where it is. And that’s as it should be.

Maybe after lightning, wind, or some malady fells it, its heartwood will end up in furniture or become home to troves of organisms across the spectrum of life, using its decay as a springboard for new life.

Until then, it’ll be a fantastic food source for so much living above and beneath ground. It’ll suck up water faster following downpours supercharged by CO₂-energized air able to hold more precipitable moisture inside the column of atmosphere directly over our heads.

It might prompt whomever lives around here to stop using adjacent spaces as parking for personal cars — to re-purpose by ripping out asphalt to create their own gardens. Doing this will help to lower overnight summertime minimums as these rise most rapidly within pavement-heavy urban heat islands.

Or, it might not. But I shouldn’t not try.

I know my trivial gardening won’t change the land’s health, but I’ve faith it might prompt others to take up that mantle in greater ways.

In closing, because im need edtior

I’m trying to make up for the dozen years I owned and drove an ICE-powered car.

Sure, they were all four-cylinder compacts, but I still pushed out tonnes of CO₂. I generated CO₂ every time I went on night drives or searched several stores to find one item in stock. I dumped more whenever I flew between cities. The CO₂ of convenience is magnificently easy to downplay.

I poured used motor oil into a storm sewer for my uncle when I was in high school. I still generate trouble with my dietary routine (though — real talk — poverty constraints do more nowadays to shape that one). I especially loathe how food and essential products, once packaged in metal, glass, and paper, now ship almost entirely in plastic made nearly entirely from petroleum feed-stock.

That trio of petroleum-burning power plants I saw as a kid was demolished sometime during the later 1980s. At last inspection, its brownfield was remediated for developing — in orthodox Texas fashion — a residential, monocultural subdivision with single-family dwellings, a food desert far removed from transit service, for a tier of buyers in the same, modest income bracket (as subdivisions typically do). It’s viable only by consuming petroleum for nearly every aspect of its existence. In the trio’s stead, a field of ExxonMobil petroleum holding tanks was built in 2020, just one kilometre away.

In ways I can, I try to account for and redress past harms I’ve done, to uphold a land ethic. I know I can’t leave behind a net-zero presence, but I can try to approach it.

As with this soon-to-be-former apartment, I’m striving to leave things in a better state than how I arrived, however in vain the endeavour may be.

Morris Day, one year later (now twice as tall), last Thursday afternoon