Читать книгу Tales From the Sustainable Underground - Stephen Hren - Страница 10
ОглавлениеDETROIT WAS ACTUALLY the last stop I made on my big round-the-country journey looking for some answers — or at least some insightful questions and interesting stories — on what it’s going to take to change the law of the land so that a sustainable life is even potentially legal, much less standard practice. But the more I thought about the place, the more iconic it seemed as a prime example of where we went wrong, and also as a Petri dish of what could change for the better. So it makes sense to start with this most intriguing of metropolises.
Detroit is dying; Detroit is pulsating with life. Both are true, and the place is, at least on a few levels, undergoing a metamorphosis from a corporate car town to a thriving hub of grassroots artistic and regenerative experimentation. While broad avenues built for massive car traffic now lay barely used with plastic bags caught in dead weeds growing through cracks in the pavement, the residents of the city are reinventing themselves by growing their own food on abandoned land, running vegan restaurants out of their foreclosed homes and elaborately decorating nearby abandoned buildings to preserve them and scare away the crackheads.
Detroit is corrupt, almost utterly so. While I was there, the specter of ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s felony charges for paying nine million dollars of public funds to police officers to try and cover up an extramarital affair hung over the city, as did a multitude of other scandals including bribery and the embezzlement of educational funds involving a police chief and several former city council members. Over its two-hundred-year existence, the city has a long history of piling up laws on top of laws, many passed with special interests in mind rather than the welfare of the public. It seemed like whoever I spoke with said that what they were doing was illegal for some reason or another, in violation of some relic of a statute that was somewhat contradicted by another statute under a different department.
Laws can have two different purposes. They can protect the welfare of the less powerful by holding those with more power accountable. Or they can reinforce the privilege, Latin for “private law,” of the elite and keep the little guy from achieving any independence. Often it is the case that laws that start out with the purpose of, or at least the pretense of, promoting the former end up over time turning into the latter. Power, it seems, is the most addictive thing on earth. No amount of it is satisfying. The people I met in this dynamic city, and all across the country, were mostly violating laws that started out as reasonable but ended up being used as a source of privilege and corruption. The motivations of the amazingly diverse group of folks I met who were challenging laws across the land were remarkably consistent, a mix of a longing for more personal independence and a desire to bring their lives and communities back into the cycle of life. It was a great inspiration to see how consistently these two goals were achieved by the same actions.
Part of what makes Detroit so interesting as a jumping off point is how unsustainably it grew after 1900, especially as the advent of the automobile industry transformed the town into the Motor City. Detroit was one of the first cities to embrace the automobile on a large scale, with Henry Ford’s five-dollars-a-day wage given much of the credit for developing a manufacturing middle class capable of affording this luxury. All technology is a double-edged sword, and whatever conveniences it provides come at the cost of more dependencies. The car culture that swallowed Detroit’s city planning is an excellent example of this. The rampant suburbanization that didn’t severely affect many cities until after World War II was already evident in 1920’s Detroit. Many main thoroughfares are four or five lanes wide, even in the older parts of town. Trying to cross these mammoth and decaying boulevards on foot feels foolhardy, and the fear of the light changing before you’re anywhere near the other side is constant. Getting around without a car, unlike in neighboring midwestern cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, is unimaginable to a newcomer like myself.
Detroit continued its road-building binge after World War II, steamrolling older neighborhoods to make way for a bevy of interstates to ferry fearful whites out to the burbs from downtown. It worked. And then these urban refugees decided they would simply build their businesses out where they lived, especially after the Twelfth Street riot raged for five days in the summer of 1967 leaving 43 dead. Next, the oil spikes of the 1970s came and put massive dents in the auto industry. By the turn of the millennium, large swaths of the city had been abandoned and burned to the ground. Finding a grocery store became close to impossible for many urban residents.
All of this puts Detroit at the forefront of dealing with issues that are likely to plague the rest of the nation, and potentially the world, this century. Dwindling fossil fuel supplies will likely make much of the suburbs in their current form uninhabitable. Importing food long distances is likewise suspect. Archaic and poorly applied laws, relics of the days of cheap fossil fuels and ignorance of global climate disruption, hinder and exasperate attempts to retrofit existing infrastructure for sustainability. Every city faces the prospect of lower populations, so the paradigm of paying for existing infrastructure with revenue from new growth is suspect everywhere. Most fundamentally, relying on a culture that attempts to derive its satisfaction from ever-increasing–quantities of material goods rather than a deep connection with nature, community and personal spirituality is no longer possible for most folks in Detroit. The material economy has been decreasing for decades.
While responding with fear and dread to these disturbing phenomena is understandable, many Detroiters have also come to understand that relying on a fix from the powers that be is foolhardy at best. Mistrust of the law’s benevolence has combined with an ingrained DIY ethic to get folks out from in front of their TVs and computers and trying to do stuff to improve their lives and communities, regardless of the law or the outdated mores of their neighbors.
To understand whether changing any particular law will allow for a more profound flourishing of sustainability, it helps to start off with at least a cursory examination of the foundations of our culture and to test the bedrock upon which it rests. I found a great forum for exploring these deeper questions when I showed up at Dabl’s and Perette’s African Bead Museum, on the corner of Grand River and Grand Boulevard near downtown Detroit. I parked on a block that dead-ended into a freeway, with a staid church on my right and the vibrantly patterned African Bead Museum on my left. The brick walls of the two-story building were painted in a frenzied red, yellow and black, with shards of broken mirrors interwoven into bold geometric designs. The sidewalk was filled with a multitude of unrecognizable scripts (at least to me), all underneath an orderly procession of juvenile maple trees. Beyond this main building lay an intriguing arrangement of artwork in an open field, a mix of painted cars, stones sitting in chairs, and piled up paint cans in some kind of fort. All of this artwork was arranged in front of what had initially caught my eye, a two-story multi-family boarded-up house decorated with vivid geometric patterns and the ubiquitous shards of mirror.
The entrance to Dabl’s and Perette’s African Bead Museum in Detroit. The chevron beads painted on the wall represent a nonverbal form of cultural transmission sorely lacking today.
Once inside, I found Dabl presiding over a glass countertop with rows upon rows of hanging beads surrounding him on all walls. He is a large stout man, especially compared with my own skinny self, with close-cropped hair and an introspective air that gives a thoughtful and measured cadence to his deep voice. Over the next few hours I would receive not just a detailed history of the African bead, but also a multitude of ideas about how art, language and writing can either keep cultures enslaved on the path to destruction, or be used as tools of wisdom to help us integrate ourselves with the natural world. Finally, I would learn the motives behind his unsanctioned decorating of the two-story boarded-up home, and how this was an amazing example of bringing “art” (Dabl despised this word) back to its original purpose of preserving history and conveying cultural stories in an unwritten format.
Beads have a long history in all pre-European African societies, especially with the semi-nomadic pastoralists of sub-Saharan Africa, and their origin was considered mystical. Originally made of wood, bone, shells and stone, their diversity of color and meaning flourished after the introduction of glass beads from the Middle East in 200– 300 ad, and became crucially important for pastoralists. These glass beads were often further enhanced by local tribes, and some parts of Africa began manufacturing their own glass beads by the Middle Ages. Beads were used to convey position and marital status and represent ancestors, but especially, along with patterned textiles, to tell the stories of the tribe. More sedentary clans in the wetter parts of Africa also used beads, but supplemented them with artifacts such as carvings, masks and other totems. All these things assisted in keeping alive the oral traditions and stories that shaped and directed these cultures. While Dabl was an expert in the bead and its role in Africa specifically, I found myself generalizing much of what he said to indigenous cultures around the world. Ultimately, he was asking me a profound question: Is art or even literature sustainable? Or does it result in patterns of thought that ultimately separate us and our culture from the natural world? According to Dabl, as an African-American he is part of a population that has been marginalized and whose history and culture have been co-opted. There was not much to disagree with there. But he then argued that forsaking an oral tradition based on handcrafted artifacts in favor of art and the written word, and later the televised image, took a form of story transmission out of the natural world and the community, and isolated it in the mind and the individual. Likewise, the idea of the lone artist working in isolation to create works of “genius” separated from tradition and any cultural story forced the audience for this art to think in terms of these objects being inaccessible and without historical meaning. Such objects are not to be touched and their interpretation is ambiguous and often incomprehensible. They are not a part of day-to-day life and their utility is dispensable.
More traditional methods of cultural transfer like beads and other physical creations, the kind of stuff we would describe as being created by artisans, have been denigrated and eradicated to great effect and, according to Dabl, replaced with stories and religions that are anthropocentric and no longer in the control of the people that need them. Although I’ve heard similar arguments before, it was great to hear it explained from a minority perspective and put in terms of our relationship with creative expression.
One book that had a profound effect upon me in this regard is Chellis Glendinning’s My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery From Western Civilization. Chellis does a wonderful job laying out how our move from a nomadic lifestyle to agricultural domestication ten thousand years ago started a spiral of disconnection from the natural world that we had evolved with over tens of thousand of generations. This disconnection can be regarded as a massive ongoing trauma that has disrupted and almost destroyed our sense of safety and well-being on the Earth. We then react to this trauma with compulsive and addictive behavior that further disassociates us from ourselves, and leads to destructive actions that further traumatize ourselves and our descendents. Books like this have led to a field called eco-psychology that examines our disconnection from the natural world and tries to help us create a deeper understanding of our loss and the resulting compulsive behaviors, like non-stop technological addictions and trying to replace the hole in our hearts with more material goods, that seem to provide short-term fixes but exacerbate our original trauma of disconnection.
Although persuasive as all get out, arguments like these are ultimately frustrating in the vague solutions they offer and their pining away for a lost world it is no longer possible to recreate. Somehow we have to figure out a way to apply those primal connections to our current existence to restore the damage done to our individual and collective psyches and to the Earth itself. There has to be a way to cultivate an enduring compromise between our domesticated and wild selves, and to show that this is a more fulfilling life that others caught up in destructive behavior will want to emulate.
So as Dabl continued his explanation, I kept thinking to myself, what are we going to do about it? If artistic expression originally had the purpose of keeping alive the history of a culture and integrating a given people with their surrounding ecology, but has now been lost or co-opted to keep us isolated and anxiety-ridden, are we simply doomed to be blown in the wind like a decaying plastic bag? We can’t go back to being pastoralists on the plains of Africa.
Seeming to understand my frustration on this issue, Dabl got up from his perch behind the counters full of ancient beads and took me on a tour of the property. His magnum opus lay sprawled out in the field behind the shop, the paint cans and chairs and stones sitting in chairs. The piece is titled Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust. It involved about a dozen different staging areas and was assembled with discarded urban detritus and painted with vivid reds, yellows and greens. Dabl is working to create living artwork that transfers a cultural story of meaning and history to its viewers. This story centers around the interwoven existence of iron, stone and wood, the foundations for humanity’s physical culture, and is based on his interpretation of a synthesis of African tradition. Dabl spun a long tale, not all of which I followed, to be honest, even though I’ve watched my video of him explaining it many times since. It involves a long saga of iron being freed from stone, iron engaging in a civil war, and stones escaping during the tumult. Other parts were more immediately comprehensible. A piece involving four timbers set out in a cross with stones on each point and in the middle represented the four stages of life. A big part of Dabl’s complaint about what he considered “outside” religions (he was referring to non-animist religions like Islam and Christianity introduced into Africa) is the concept of having to be judged once you die. He argued persuasively that belief in religions that judge you when you die not only goes a long way towards creating a fear of death, but also impedes the processing and passing on of cultural knowledge during the final quarter of life. Rather than creating an expectation of becoming an ancestor who advises their progeny after death, making the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom in later life attractive, Western religions create a horrendous stress in the elderly by pushing them up against a time when they might burn in hell forever. Regardless, knowledge is obliterated when the living can no longer turn to their ancestors for advice.
Part of Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust. To the left of the car, chunks of concrete sit in chairs to learn from the tangle of metal wire before them.
Part of Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust was a large iconic figure, which Dabl referred to as an mkissi, an iconic figure that is empowered with the help of iron. The mkissi played a central role in achieving two things. First, it kept vandals away. And secondly, it made all of the public artwork, including the heavily painted two-story abandoned building next door, invisible to the city officials. This is very important, because that building did not belong to Dabl or the African Bead Museum, and its decoration could potentially bring about two unwanted consequences. Either it could hasten the building’s demolition because of its “unsightliness.” Or the city could try to force the Bead Museum to take possession of the building because they are “using” it and thus charge them property tax.
Prior to its decoration and protection by the mkissi, the building was simply abandoned and had become a haven for prostitution and drug use. Dabl had continued his physical storytelling onto this abandoned home. The most conspicuous decorations were three giant blue, red and white chevron beads painted across the front on the first story. This style of glass bead was commonly made in Venice in the Middle Ages and exported to West Africa, where it became incorporated into the existing bead culture and traditional storytelling. There were also many jagged pieces of mirror worked into the design. Mirrors are important, according to Dabl, as a means of communicating with ancestors. They also reflect the sun, and the fact that it is possible to catch the fire of the sun by using correctly placed mirrors makes them an extension of the sun. There was one additional benefit of mirrors. They have the power to make potential wrongdoers become self-aware. Destructive behavior like crack cocaine use and vandalism are things people like to do in the dark where they keep their wrongdoing shielded from their own consciousness. But mirrors break through these shadows and bring consciousness to the surface. This is who you are and this is what you are doing, they say. There is no hiding. In the almost fifteen years since Dabl started the project, there has been no vandalism, squatting or interference from public officials. So the decorating, the storytelling and the guarding by the mkissi have been effective in preserving this building until someone can be found who wants to occupy it usefully. Rather than be a deteriorating eyesore ripe for arsonists or demolition by the city, the building relates some of Africa’s history to the surrounding African-American community.
Dabl telling it like it is in front of the abandoned building he helped decorate with painted chevrons and applied mirrors to assist in its preservation.
Maybe one of the most interesting things about Dabl’s work was that he refused to be the only person helping to save buildings in this manner. When I asked him whether he would continue decorating any other nearby structures with the hopes of saving them, he said he wouldn’t. He couldn’t handle more than one. If members of the community became inspired and wanted to decorate abandoned buildings on their own, he would more than encourage it, and help to procure paint and mirrors as necessary. But he couldn’t be a one-man community. Others had to get involved.
I moved on from some of the questions Dabl was raising to the first reason that Detroit had piqued my interest — its urban farming movement. It is currently illegal for gardening to be the primary use for any parcel of land in the city limits of Detroit. The city has a nationwide reputation as a innovator in using abandoned land for farming and gardening, and with 40 square miles (25,600 acres) of vacant land, you would think city leaders would be all about having more of it used for productive good rather than sitting idle. But the law hasn’t changed. The good news is that, like most of the laws in Detroit, most folks just don’t give a damn what it is. Usually it’s too complicated to know, and whatever it is, the city’s law enforcement have bigger fish to fry.
How do laws that prohibit growing your own food arise? How did we stray so far from personal independence and local reliance that a government official could tell you you can’t grow food on your own land? I had some insights into these questions over the last few years back in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. In some ways Durham is like a mini-Detroit. We thrived on the tobacco industry in the early decades of the 1900s, growing prosperous and attracting a lot of immigrants, many of them African-American, from the surrounding countryside. A thriving middle class developed with the success of this notorious product (I won’t go into the debate of whether the automobile or the cigarette is more evil — that would be too long a digression). Some of the largest African-American-owned businesses in the country eventually became based in Durham, mostly on Parrish Street downtown, which became known as the Black Wall Street.
As the cigarette manufacturing base eroded in the 1970s and ’80s due to reduced smoking rates and the loss of factories to lower-cost sites, especially overseas, our downtown turned into a gang-riddled wasteland. Many of the whites had fled to the burbs. Those that stayed in control of city government banned chickens and other livestock from within the city limits. Generally speaking, the upper-class whites saw banning livestock as a way of maintaining property values. The black community took it as an affront to their independence, yet another way of keeping them down. This all came to a head in the last few years when a mixed-race group of homeowners, albeit predominantly white, sought to overturn the chicken ban. Mostly people of both races didn’t have any problem with overturning the old law banning chickens, but a vociferous leader of a local African-American organization raised absolute hell about it. This ornery octogenarian woman screamed bloody murder about black people being barred from having chickens for decades but now that white folks wanted them, the law was going to change. The problem was, she was mostly right. She may not have done a good job of choosing her battles, but I understood her anger.
I bring this story up for a few reasons. The first is to point out that existing laws that get in the way of allowing potentially sustainable activities probably have complicated social reasons for their enactment. Challenging a law is generally much more complicated than just pointing out how ridiculous it is. Although I appreciate all the hard work the Durham group did to make chickens legal, part of me wonders if it was worth it. What if everyone who wanted chickens just went ahead and got them? What official would have spent the time to do anything about it? The second point is a random observation on what I’ve noticed can be a difficulty in bringing lower-income and/ or marginalized minorities into the sustainability movement. To the extent that living a sustainable life means operating within the confines of petty bureaucratic agencies and statutes that may historically have existed as means of segregation and constraint, it is likely to be unappealing to sections of society that have seen the law as a force of repression rather than as an agent of justice. It’s important to consider whether working within the existing system is of any inherent value, and whether doing so might potentially promote or hinder progress toward other laudable goals such as greater racial and income equality. Each case will no doubt be unique, but I think it is a question worth asking. I hope the reader can be tolerant of my rather simplistic thoughts on these matters. Being a Southerner, I’ve learned you have to acknowledge racial issues, even if you do it clumsily, rather than pretending they don’t exist.
My urban agriculture visit took me to a few community gardens, the biggest being D-Town Farm, run by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. That’s a mouthful and it’s almost impossible for me to remember this name without looking it up. I headed on over to their plot of land in River Rouge Park. Driving in Detroit is fun because even though there are No Parking signs all over the place, there’s so much empty road people don’t pay any attention to them. I followed their example and blocked an unneeded lane of traffic with my old Saturn.
Just inside the gate at D-Town Farm. This spot was formerly an abandoned park that had turned into a giant dump.
The two-acre spread was protected with seven-foot wire fencing for deer. A row of turned-out tires painted white and filled with flowers guides visitors through the main gate. It’s a lovely spot if you stay in the garden proper, flanked as it is on three sides by dense woods. Stout rows of kale and onions beckoned me onwards. I lucked out and soon found one of the board members, vice-president Jackie Hunt, just beginning a tour. D-Town Farm has pulled together solo gardeners into a community farm where they can share resources like tools and greenhouse space. At first they met reluctance from city officials about using the park for their farm. Historically, River Rouge Park was a city park in the traditional sense, like Central Park. It was laid out by landscape architects and was cultivated as a tame version of wild nature where city residents could escape the noise and bustle of the city. But then whoever was supposed to take care of it forgot to, or got fired or just never got paid, and the whole thing turned first into a colossal urban dump and then became so tangled with briars and broken bottles that folks couldn’t even dump shit there anymore. And then most everyone just forgot about the entire place because it was filled with mosquitoes and crackheads and was flat-out disgusting.
Jackie Hunt, vice-president of DBCFSN, with the day’s harvest of melons. One was a little too ripe and I convinced her we should eat it. Yum!
But then Malik Yakini, a local activist and owner of The Black Star Community Book Store, came in with a bunch of volunteers and cleared out their space and started planting veggies. Many of their concerns, such as high unemployment, lack of available fresh food, and abandoned lots coalesced around the idea of a vibrant local farm within the city limits. A few years on, they grow much of their members’ fresh produce and have a spot at one the many farmers markets in Detroit, selling their extras and creating a few part-time jobs for hardworking youth. I enjoyed my tour and visited their booth at the farmers market later that afternoon to buy some veggies. Like many urban farms in Detroit, on one level the place is still in violation of the law even though park officials eventually gave it their blessing — its primary purpose is for farming, something that is explicitly forbidden by the city’s ordinances. But there’s no one to enforce it, and even if there was, who would want to tell a bunch of hardworking folks that they can’t reclaim an overgrown eyesore and use it to feed their families? It’s a kind of deregulation by bankruptcy and apathy — not, in my opinion, the best way to go about things, but marginally effective nonetheless. As folks who are concerned about the well-being of our earth, we want laws that maintain the privilege of business-as-usual freight-train-to-planetary-annihilation dismantled, but not at the cost of those laws that help alleviate injustice, socioeconomic inequality and clean air and water. As resources dwindle and our consumerist economy continues to falter as a consequence, funding for our municipal, state and federal governments will be under constant strain, conceivably for the remainder of our lifetimes and beyond. Transitioning to a sustainable existence will mean taking a hard look at existing regulations and trying to weed out the good from the bad, unless things get so far gone that we all end up like Detroit, having to operate under a blanket of bureaucratic regulations that, even if they’re not enforced, do nothing but distract us and make us feel even more insecure.
