Infrared interpretation of a photo by Michael Gaida
A functional hyper-ecology in El Sobrante (photo by Adam Huggins)
Summary
Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a garbage-o-sphere – an ecosystem of trash and detritus. But despite the extent of anthropogenic impacts, life is resilient and infinitely creative.
Hyper-ecologies; novel ecosystems; freakosystems – different names for the same thing: never-before-seen assemblies of lifeforms, born of human disturbance. These profoundly weird ecologies are persistent, and (through a certain lens) often functional.
In this final chapter of "Nature, by Design?", we meet again with Oliver Kellhammer and Eric Higgs to discuss what we can learn from these ruderal places, and how they can empower a new way of thinking about ecological restoration.
This episode is the last in a 3-part series. Before listening to this one, you may want to catch up with Part 1: Taking the Neo-Eoscenic Route & Part 2: The Path to the Wilderness Lodge
Click here to read a transcription of this episode
Oliver Kellhammer’s Lead Down the Garden Path
Show Notes
This episode features Eric Higgs and Oliver Kellhammer.
Music in this episode was provided by Scott Gailey, C. Diab, Hidden Sky, Aaron S Moran (see also: double take), and Sunfish Moon Light.
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski
Special thanks to Hannah Roessler, Sadie Couture, Todd Howard, Brea Segger, Ilana Fonariov, Bastian Phelan, and Maya Gauvin, Nicole Jahraus, and Jody Baker.
Citations
Higgs, E. (2003). Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration. MIT Press.
Hobbs, R. et al. (2006). Novel ecosystems: theoretical and management aspects of the new ecological world order. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 15: 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-822X.2006.00212.x
Hobbs, R., Higgs, E., & Hall, C. (2013). Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order. Wiley-Blackwell
Kellhammer, O. (2006). Concrete Island. [Land art project]
Kellhammer, O. (2018). Plastivore. [Mealworm styrofoam composting]
Morse, N. et al. (2014). Novel ecosystems in the Anthropocene: a revision of the novel ecosystem concept for pragmatic applications. Ecology and Society 19(2): 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-06192-190212
Yang, Y. et al. (2015). Biodegradation and Mineralization of Polystyrene by Plastic-Eating Mealworms: Part 1. Chemical and Physical Characterization and Isotopic Tests. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2015, 49, 20, 12080–12086. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5b02661
This episode includes audio recorded by Coleco, Bidone, Department64, sengjinn, SpliceSound, InspectorJ, and RTB45, protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and accessed through the Freesound Project.
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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
[Birdcall]
Introduction Voiceover 00:00
You're listening to season three of Future Ecologies.
[Drone synthesizer music]
Adam Huggins 00:05
Hey, everyone, this is Adam. And this is the third and final episode of our series nature by design, which is kicking off our third season. If you haven't listened to parts one and two, then I recommend that you start there, because this is essentially one conversation that ended up being so rich that we had to break it into three parts. To summarize, in parts one and two, I introduced Mendel to two mentors of mine, Eric Higgs and Oliver Kellhammer, and their ideas about designing with nature. Those episodes focused on ecological restoration and ecologies that we design intentionally. This episode, on the other hand, will deal with ecosystems that we create by accident. This is Nature by Design, Part Three, Freakological Fallacies.
[Low drone sweep builds with low bell sound then fades away.]
Mendel Skulski 01:13
Can we keep going?
Adam Huggins 01:14
Indeed. So where was I?
Mendel Skulski 01:18
Well, last time you split the ecologies around us into three categories. And I'm pretty sure you had just made all of them up.
Adam Huggins 01:29
Yeah, I definitely just made them up.
Mendel Skulski 01:31
So you identified those ecologies that human beings create as audacious ecologies. And we spent most of the last two episodes talking about those kinds of ecologies that we create on purpose,
Adam Huggins 01:46
right. But the vast majority of the ecologies that we humans create, are not on purpose. They are accidental byproducts of our economies, and our lifestyles. And these kinds of places are all around us. They, they might even feel comforting, because we're so used to living in them. And since we started last episode, with a flashback to Eric's younger days, it seems appropriate for us to now take a trip down memory lane with Oliver. And as it turns out, he also grew up around the same time in
Mendel Skulski 02:19
don't tell me an industrial part of suburban Ontario.
Adam Huggins 02:24
Exactly. It's like the primordial ooze from which Canadians form. [Laughs]
[Calm, synthesizer music]
Oliver Kellhammer 02:29
As a child, my father worked in factories, and then sometimes on the weekend, he'd have to go in, he eventually became a foreman and had to watch the machines going in, in a weekend to make sure they were still working. And he would take me with him, because my mother worked in a supermarket and she couldn't look after me. So he would take me into the factory. And I was intrigued, you know, by these sort of industrial spaces, and they often had like a yard in the back where there was like, all kinds of rusty machinery and weeds and like, sort of fetid puddles of chemically contaminated water and, and I was like, really excited by those places. They early on, I was quite interested in them. And I remember the house I grew up in you know, was in an area that used to be orchard, but they just went in with bulldozers and pushed all the fruit trees out of the way. So they were like upside down fruit trees all over the place that were dead. And so it was a kind of carnage situation. But as a child, I was in the suburbs of Toronto, I found it interesting. That was this sort of normal landscape. And then it was like these giant construction sites everywhere. They were building shopping malls, this would have been the early 1960s.
[Cackling animal sounds in background]
And so there was giant holes in the ground with big piles of sub soil beside them, which were full of prehistoric fossils of coral and shells and things. And I was like, so interested in how Oh my god, you know, Southern Ontario used to be a tropical ocean, you know. And so this disturbance was always part of my aesthetic. And I grew up in disturbed landscapes.
[Animal sounds end and drone synthesizer chords continue]
And I just thought that that was kind of normal. So when I'm in a place like this, we're currently sitting in this beautiful place in near Victoria. It's incredibly beautiful and heartbreakingly beautiful, but it's also kind of alien to me. It's not really my natural habitat. It does feel a little too, too beautiful. I don't know, is there such a thing, but maybe yeah.
Adam Huggins 04:20
From a tropical ocean to a Laurentian forest, and then from orchards to landscapes of disturbance. This is a story that has been playing out anywhere that human beings congregate on this planet. We reshaped the earth, we alter hydrology, we introduce new species, and we even change the climate, all while trying to achieve it usually completely unrelated purpose, like digging up useful rocks or making food or manufacturing widgets. And meanwhile, we've taken what typically would have been a functional ecosystem. And we've scrambled its constituent parts. Sometimes our impacts Cease after this initial scrambling. Other times, our continued presence and activities create novel conditions that can persist for decades, or even centuries.
Mendel Skulski 05:11
So, what do you call it when, from all that scramble out hatches a flamingo?
[Hatching sound]
Adam Huggins 05:22
Well, if you if you were to ask Eric, he would call that flamingo a novel ecosystem. And if you were to ask Oliver, he would call that flamingo a hyper-ecology. So I guess you can call it whatever you like.
[Pulsing guitar music begins]
Mendel Skulski 05:45
Still, like free ecosystems.
Adam Huggins 05:47
So, in this last episode of nature by design, we're asking what, if anything, should we make of these scrambled places? The true free ecosystems of the Anthropocene?
Introduction Voiceover 06:00
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSANEC, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples – This is Future Ecologies.
[Music takes over with theremin, guitar, and drums to a conclusion]
Mendel Skulski 06:40
Okay, so, Before we continue, I just wanted to challenge you on something. You said before that almost all of the ecosystems around us, especially those in favorable climates, have experienced intensive human impacts over long periods of time. And like, that's often predating European settlement.
Adam Huggins 07:06
Definitely, yeah.
Mendel Skulski 07:08
So in keeping with your idiosyncratic taxonomy, wouldn't that make most ecosystems into audacious ecologies?
Adam Huggins 07:20
I guess, I would say no, because most of the time, our impacts leave their marks on the landscape for a while. But I would argue that historically, these impacts have had more in common with other forms of natural disturbance, like a wildfire or a windstorm than they've had with, like, trying to terraform an uninhabitable planet.
Mendel Skulski 07:45
Sure. Or building a mall.
Adam Huggins 07:47
right, which is, like, functionally the same approach? It doesn't look that different, right?
Mendel Skulski 07:51
[Laughing] Yeah, more or less
Adam Huggins 07:53
So with these historical disturbances, usually natural processes of succession would take over,
Mendel Skulski 07:59
right? Meaning the ecosystem eventually recovers in some way grasslands fill back in and forests regrow.
Adam Huggins 08:06
Yeah,
Mendel Skulski 08:07
Marshes get marshy
Adam Huggins 08:08
Marshes get marshy. And usually, we just take this for granted. And really crafty human societies have actually harnessed this cycle of disturbance and regeneration to grow food and other useful things.
Mendel Skulski 08:19
Yes.
Adam Huggins 08:21
And so to leave behind what I would call an audacious ecology, you'd have to go beyond that level of disturbance, you'd have to transform nearly every aspect of a given ecosystem at once, and basically send it on a totally new trajectory. And I'm not saying that people didn't do this in the past, like people totally did this in the past. And it's pretty likely that some ecosystems that we see as natural, were actually created intentionally or accidentally by people way back when, and overtime, they've just gone from audacious to what I would call tenacious or cherished, if you will.
Mendel Skulski 09:02
Yeah. So when people talk about the Amazon rainforest being, you know, a human made food forest,
Adam Huggins 09:11
that's exactly what they're talking about. Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 09:13
So the difference now is just scale and speed, essentially, there's, there's not as much time to recover and, and the impacts are so much deeper and wider, all at once.
Adam Huggins 09:26
I'd say that's exactly it, that we've always transformed the ecosystems around us to some extent, but now we're doing it all the time, all over the planet, and in many places, just like to such extremes that natural successional processes cease to function as they had previously,
Mendel Skulski 09:45
like in those chemically contaminated wastelands that Oliver described, from his days of yore.
Adam Huggins 09:51
Yeah, and sometimes these places are so wrecked, that they just can't recover at all on their own. But every now and then, These totally unprecedented ecosystems form composed of species that have never occurred together before. And they're functional.
[Drum beat begins with a low bass melody]
Mendel Skulski 10:14
And when you say functional, what do you mean, exactly?
Adam Huggins 10:19
Really, you're asking all of the hard questions at the top of the episode. That's what I'm here for. Okay, anyway, one way that you could define functionality is that an ecosystem provides many of the ecosystem services that we as people tend to value. Are you familiar with that term ecosystem services?
Mendel Skulski 10:39
I am, but I think we should break it down a little bit more.
[Music gets louder and a higher melody enters.]
Adam Huggins 10:46
ecosystem services is a term that ecologists and economists have come up with to try to quantify, in financial terms, the benefits that ecosystems and species and biodiversity provide to us. Because, you know, people have learned the hard way over time that unless we can put things in terms of dollars and cents, people tend not to value them in the society that we live in. And there's this huge debate between people who feel like, we shouldn't put $1 value on ecological systems and species and people who feel like it's actually really important that we do. And I think everybody's right, yeah, to be honest. But, you know, ecosystem services are useful and the extent to which they actually allow us to name some of the things that ecosystems do for us. And in this case, they're going to help me define what makes up a functional ecosystem.
[Music surges for a moment and becomes short melody notes.]
Mendel Skulski 11:47
So what are those?
Adam Huggins 11:49
Okay, so, ecosystem services are typically grouped into four broad categories, and I'm just gonna go through them really quick. The first category is provisioning services.
[Sound of someone biting into an apple]
Mendel Skulski 12:02
So like, providing something
Adam Huggins 12:05
Yeah,
Mendel Skulski 12:05
like food or, or like water, they
Adam Huggins 12:07
produce food and water and materials for us.
Mendel Skulski 12:10
Right? Okay.
[Sound of someone biting into an apple]
Adam Huggins 12:13
Um, the second category is regulating services.
Mendel Skulski 12:16
So that like, a buffer in some way, so they may be like, how forests might keep the region a lot cooler than it would be otherwise? What regulates the local climate?
[Coach whistle]
Adam Huggins 12:26
Absolutely, yeah. Like temperature regulation, storm mitigation, you know, flood mitigation, disease prevention, these kinds of things.
Mendel Skulski 12:34
Right. Okay. So they regulate,
Adam Huggins 12:36
they regulate.
[Coach whistle]
Mendel Skulski 12:38
Can you put a little Nate Dogg on this section?
Adam Huggins 12:40
Okay. I don't know what you're talking about. But sure.
Mendel Skulski 12:42
You don't regulate? It's a classic.
Adam Huggins 12:44
Oh [bleep] [Laughs]
Mendel Skulski 12:46
[Laughs and hums a tune]
[Slow, groovy synth music begins]
Adam Huggins 12:47
Okay, the third category is supporting services.
Mendel Skulski 12:52
Supporting, supporting what exactly?
Adam Huggins 12:56
[Laughs] Yeah, that one's a little bit more opaque. It means that they, they do things like cycle nutrients, and they sequester carbon, right. So they, they provide kind of a backbone for lots of other processes to take place. And another critical supporting service is pollination. Right? All of those buzzing bees and flies, making sure everything gets pollinated.
Mendel Skulski 13:16
Mhm
[Buzzing bee sound]
Adam Huggins 13:19
And the last category is cultural services.
[Bells tings]
Mendel Skulski 13:22
Right? So some places that we went to places like social benefit, like the the trail systems, so their aesthetic or people use them to spiritual ends or for recreation, right, like that's an ecosystem service.
Adam Huggins 13:36
Exactly. All of those values that are maybe a little bit more intangible, but still, like very important to us as people.
[Bell tings]
Mendel Skulski 13:44
Yeah. And again, human centric in that way.
Adam Huggins 13:47
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, ecosystem services like are provided for the whole biological community. Right? It's not just for us. But certainly the cultural services. That category I would say is mostly for us.
Mendel Skulski 14:02
So if an ecosystem has some combination, some balance of provisioning, [Sound of someone biting into an apple] regulating, [Coach whistle] supporting [Bee buzzes] and cultural services, [Bell tings] then it that makes it functional?
Adam Huggins 14:16
Yeah, I think you could say at that point, that it's a functional ecosystem, especially if it's resilient through time, right, that it that it stands up to various pressures or, or change, right. And so these unprecedented ecosystems that I was just describing these freakosystems or flamingos, whatever you want to call them, even though they never would have existed without our human intervention. And even though nobody consciously designed them, some of them end up being functional.
Mendel Skulski 14:48
Okay, I'm satisfied. You can break all the eggs you want, but you're only occasionally going to get a flamingo to hatch from the scramble.
Adam Huggins 14:58
Sure. Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 14:59
And that kind of urban sprawl that Oliver grew up within. That seems like it would be a perfect example of a place where people have created freakosystems without planning to,
Adam Huggins 15:11
I'd say yes. Although Oliver would actually quarrel with the idea that sprawl is unplanned
[Quiet, creepy, noisy music ambiance]
Oliver Kellhammer 15:20
You know, what is sprawl? I mean, sprawl is an aesthetic judgment, like, you know, people are moving into areas where you don't want them to be moving, right? And so, who are you? And what are those areas, like favelas, I mean, people don't like them because there's all these like little junky houses made out of cardboard and tape. But that's because that's all people can afford. And they're kind of genius, people who are building things out of nothing and need a place to live. So but you know, when we think of sprawl, often in the North American context, we think of like the dreaded suburbia, which actually is not unplanned. In fact, it's the opposite of unplanned it's extremely planned. It's just planned badly, but it's not unplanned it The plan is to take over as much farmland as possible and turn it into capital for developers. It's also sort of class enhancement opportunity for the bourgeoisie. It has nothing to do with planning, it's planned. It's a disaster, but it's a plan disaster.
Mendel Skulski 16:30
I - I love that he called sprawl, an aesthetic judgment.
Adam Huggins 16:36
Right?
Mendel Skulski 16:36
Okay, so here, he's contrasting that creative exuberance of unplanned favelas with the planned disaster of suburbia. But in either case, there's a lot of ecological disturbance involved.
Adam Huggins 16:53
Totally. So Oliver grew up as I did, within the planned disaster of urban sprawl. And he kind of became enamored with what he calls ruderal ecologies, which are ecosystems of human disturbance. Basically, brownfields, industrial parks, dumps, train tracks, and I want you to hear him talk about them. So I'm going to cut back to those lecture tapes.
Mendel Skulski 17:20
Oh, you mean the ones where he's talking right next to a whole bunch of chickens?
Adam Huggins 17:25
Yeah, those ones.
Mendel Skulski 17:26
Okay.
[Musical sweep with a singing sighing voice]
[Chickens cackling in the background
Oliver Kellhammer 17:31
There's also all these areas here of what they call ruderal, ecologies, or Brownfield ecologies or post industrial economies where you didn't know you've all seen these places, like so this is between two buildings, and nobody's done anything, but it just isn't right to disturb soil, usually very low in organic content. So what happened? So let's look at this. All right. Nobody garden only got like, Okay, I know about plants a little right. So what what's happening? What's happening? It's an ecosystem, right? So they're looking at it going, Wow, what do I know? Okay, well, I know that this is cottonwood. Okay, that's native to North America. I know that this is ailanthus, which is called garbage palms or ghetto palms in New York, they're a type of tree that's like sumac but they're native to Asia, I know that this is mugwort, and it grows everywhere in New York, and there's mullen in here.
Adam Huggins 18:28
[Over the ambiance from the lecture recording] Often, in these kinds of places, functional ecosystems are just never allowed to form. like there might be living things there. But most of them are just hanging on for dear life. And there's so much disturbance or toxicity, that they don't really get a chance to build something lasting together. But there are lots of times when left to their own devices, these ruderal ecologies can develop into functional ecosystems,
Mendel Skulski 18:59
which just to recap our ecosystems that provide habitat and food and regulate climate and cycle nutrients and prevent erosion, and so on. And so on.
Adam Huggins 19:11
Yes. And Oliver calls these kinds of places, hyper ecologies,
[Chickens cackling in the background]
Oliver Kellhammer 19:16
Right. So this is what I call a hyper ecology, right? So it's combination, native and exotic species. And it's just doing its thing, right. And it's the sort of primary stage of succession is growing on concrete and garbage and donkey. But it's an ecosystem. So I got to thinking, why do I do this? Right? Why don't I like, try and find a way to not think of these spaces as kind of failures. Think of them as kind of successes and think, wow, this is nature sort of fixing, like the built environment, you know, because the idea like the built environment is slow release fertilizer buildings are slow release fertilizer, we're slow release fertilizer, even if we anything we do ultimately has stuff going on.
Adam Huggins 19:54
and these hyper ecologies don't just support weedy species. In many cases, they can also be critical havens for endangered species.
Oliver Kellhammer 20:04
Yeah, American Elms, which only grow now in sort of industrial areas, because they're protected from the Dutch Elm disease by living in these built environments, right? Whereas they're kind of in danger in the natural forest. Right. So it's so weird, somehow these industrial errors are actually saving, rare Native American species. It's so so bizarre and counterintuitive.
Mendel Skulski 20:25
That's wild. So in this case, people accidentally introduced Dutch Elm disease to North America. And that killed off all the elms in their native forest ecosystems. But we also accidentally created these sort of ruderal ecologies that in their own way provided insulation against the disease. So, within those spaces, those trees could actually survive.
Adam Huggins 20:51
Yeah, it's, it's such a bizarre story. And actually, one of the strangest examples of a hyper ecology that I've personally experienced was in California in El Sobrante.
Mendel Skulski 21:05
Right, yeah. The leftovers.
Adam Huggins 21:07
Yep. It's actually on the planting justice food forest farm,
Mendel Skulski 21:11
Which we talked about on episode 2.4.
Adam Huggins 21:15
Yeah. Anyway, there's this seasonal Creek there at the bottom of the farm. And it's clearly seen a lot of change over the last century, like it's been grazed. And it's been used for irrigation and diverted and then partially buried in a concrete culvert.
[Sounds of the creek and birds in the forest]
And when I surveyed it, there was all manner of human detritus in there. And most of the creek goes dry in the summer, like many creeks in California, but I distinctly recall that this one section of the creek was wet year round, because it was fed by a natural spring. And the strange thing was that that area was completely forested. But the forests had a canopy of blue gum, eucalyptus trees, and an understory of Algerian Ivy and poison oak just like covering the ground and climbing up the tree trunks. And then it also had a sub canopy of native Arroyo willows, and native California Bay trees. But the definitely nonnative American Elm.
Mendel Skulski 22:28
I mean, I'm not so familiar with these California ecosystems, but..
Adam Huggins 22:32
Right, right. I like expected that to land and have meaning but you're like, What are you talking about?
Mendel Skulski 22:38
It does sound like strange company.
Adam Huggins 22:41
Yes, to any botanist in California, this would be a very unusual site, to see all of these species growing together, and seemingly like making an ecosystem. But it was definitely there and definitely thriving, it had the structure of a natural forest. And it was providing those ecosystem services we were talking about, it was preventing erosion in the stream bed, and it was providing nesting sites for birds in the canopy and leaf litter to build the soil. But it was definitely a hyper ecology. Like, I've never seen that kind of ecosystem anywhere else.
Mendel Skulski 23:14
That's wild. And it's encouraging, I guess, to see those American elms making a comeback on their own terms and in these unlikely places. But here's the question, we spent a lot of the last episode talking about restoration, and that kind of active way. And wouldn't this be the kind of place you'd want to restore to just those native species?
Adam Huggins 23:41
Well, I guess that's the question behind this whole episode. And if it was just a canopy of eucalyptus trees, personally, I would probably say yes, if it was technically feasible, like you could argue that the native Creek vegetation for this area could be more functional and provide more habitat for native species in the long term. Although with climate change, who knows, right? We have limited resources, right? So usually, we're focused on restoring ecosystems that have been obviously damaged and that aren't really functional. Like something is preventing succession from even happening in the first place, or there's some kind of toxicity or human infrastructure or another issue that's preventing even basic recovery. But in the case of, you know, this little Eucalyptus, Elm, Ivy forest, the ecosystem has kind of recovered, right? It just looks and feels very different to us.
Mendel Skulski 24:39
But you can't say that the hyper ecology that you just described and whatever the native ecosystem would be
Adam Huggins 24:47
Probably a mix of Fremont cottonwoods and willows in maybe a California Sycamore, right?
Mendel Skulski 24:51
Okay. You can't say that that's ecologically equivalent to the Eucalyptus elm forest you just described?
Adam Huggins 25:02
You're right. I definitely can't say that. But when it comes down to it, our powers to intervene in ecological systems are limited. And our resources are limited. And I mean, Oliver actually makes the argument that the whole planet is a sort of ruderal ecology, because humans have already had such a huge impact. I'm not sure that I'd go that far.
Mendel Skulski 25:23
No, you, you're already set with your own categories.
Adam Huggins 25:27
[Laughs] That's right. I guess my point is just that we only have so much time and money. And in terms of like ecological triage, we tend to prioritize areas that have experienced the worst damage and where these kinds of functional hyper ecologies haven't been able to develop. Either that, or places where we just have very specific values or goals that justify the investment. And justify the risks, right, because restoration is a young discipline. And there's always the potential that will damage something that's already working in our pursuit of something that we hope will work.
Mendel Skulski 26:02
Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. We are unbounded in our capacity to mess up.
Adam Huggins 26:09
So Oliver's argument would be that we should just learn to value and embrace these kinds of freakosystems, these hyper ecologies,
Mendel Skulski 26:17
I mean, he did say that's where he feels most at home.
Adam Huggins 26:21
It is his aesthetic.
[Forest sounds end and short note high melody begins]
[Chickens clucking in background]
Oliver Kellhammer 26:25
I got an invitation to enter a credit art show thing where they wanted me to design a sustainable garden, right? Like for six weeks, it was a world urban forum in Vancouver, and it was like, oh, six weeks, that's not very sustainable, to bring in a bunch of plants, and then take them out again it's sort of sucky. And yet, I wanted to do something because I wanted the commission. So I said, Okay, so went down there, and found this weird little thing, which is like a concrete planet highway barriers. And in the middle of these barriers was like, a pile of weeds, right? And I was like, wow, that's perfect. That's my sustainable garden. So I'm going to go rent some stairs. So I did. And people can go up and look at the weeds, and I'll call it done. And it was great, because what I did was I went in there, and I realized that these leaves, this is before smartphones, so we just had those Nokia phones. So I identified the weeds, and I made a little one 800 you could call one 800, whatever. And then it would say, "scotch broom," you know, it would be like record a talking about how scotch broom got to North America. And how cool it is like how, you know, we have some problems, but it's also quite cool. Himalayan Blackberry, right. Cottonwood, right, once again, but if we notice it scotch broom, like well, where does it come from, right? So what is this silver dollar made out of? And how much is it worth? Right? It's like the same kind of question. So we know it comes from Scotland, right? Himalayan Blackberry, from Asia, right? And the native cottonwoods. So you have essentially a reflection of the sort of human settlement of the lower mainland, right. So the weeds in a sense, mirror us, right? Which is kind of cool. And so this is us, the weeds are us, right? So the native plants are still there, right? Some of them, and then we have these exotics as well, and they're kind of commingling in this sort of hyper ecology
[Theremin like melody swells for a moment.]
Mendel Skulski 28:32
He is convincing. He is very convincing
Adam Huggins 28:35
He is, and I would say that his views would be controversial, to say the least for many conservationists and restorationists.
Mendel Skulski 28:43
I'm not surprised.
Adam Huggins 28:44
But let's say that you disagree with all of her, right? You look at the eucalyptus and Elm and Ivy and poison oak and Willow forest that I described an Elsa Bronte and you don't see a functional artistic representation of the cultural diversity of the Bay Area. Instead, maybe you say to yourself -
Mendel Skulski 29:03
What a mess!
Adam Huggins 29:04
Yeah, what a scramble. Let's clean this up. Right. Let's restore the native ecosystem.
Mendel Skulski 29:09
Okay.
Adam Huggins 29:10
What if you can't?
Mendel Skulski 29:15
The, uh, Oh no. What if you can't? What do you mean? Can't we can't we do anything?
Adam Huggins 29:22
What if it's impossible? Like what if anything short of Disney-esque wilderness lodge levels of investment and engineering and intervention will fail to return this ecosystem to your desired state? What then?
Mendel Skulski 29:40
I hope you're gonna tell me.
Adam Huggins 29:42
Eric is going to tell us
Mendel Skulski 29:44
Oh, nice.
Adam Huggins 29:46
That's my transition. Did you did you catch it?
Mendel Skulski 29:48
I did. I noticed.
[Low music swell and continues with guitars]
Adam Huggins 29:55
Okay, so these never before seen ecologies? that we've accidentally created that Oliver refers to as hyper ecologies. There's actually a technical term for these that has developed within the ecological restoration discourse.
Mendel Skulski 30:09
Okay.
Adam Huggins 30:10
They're called novel ecosystems. And it just so happens that Eric is one of the principal architects of this concept. He edited a whole book on the topic.
Mendel Skulski 30:20
What a coincidence.
Adam Huggins 30:21
But before we can continue, he has a disclaimer for us.
Eric Higgs 30:25
I realized that if people superficially look at what I've written on restoration, where they read this book, nature by design, and they take that title, and then they look at novel ecosystems, they might construct the idea of someone who is really interested kind of bullish, a promoter of these, this kind of emerging novelty in nature. And it's very much not the case, if you do a fine read on nature by design, which you have, he'll say that I'm pulling exactly in the opposite direction, I want to get away from a technological notion of ecosystem, I want to embed a commitment, ecological integrity, I want to understand the process of historical knowledge and how it informs restoration. I want to see how people connect more deeply to place through restoration. And then I want to try to rein this in our kind of ambition as people this sort of technological ambition, I want to rein that in by saying we need to be careful designers, whatever we do with restoration.
Mendel Skulski 31:31
So to be clear, unlike Oliver, Eric is not necessarily thrilled to see these novel ecosystems cropping up everywhere.
Adam Huggins 31:41
Nope, not really. He's fascinated by them. But I actually think that he's pretty alarmed by the ecological novelty that we're creating all around us. There is one thing though, that distinguishes his thinking on the topic.
Mendel Skulski 31:55
What's that?
Adam Huggins 31:56
It's that he doesn't define novel ecosystems as ecosystems composed of native and non-native species occurring in places that they never would have before. Right? Instead, by definition, novel ecosystems are ecosystems that are, for all intents and purposes, unrestored like we can't restore them to native ecosystems,
Eric Higgs 32:19
I came into the novel ecosystems to work through a recognition of the effects of rapid climate change on ecosystems and where restoration how restoration is going to deal with the future of ecosystems in which there were these sort of novel assemblages, right, new combinations of species that were emerging because of rapid change. So that was kind of a thought experiment initially. And then we were starting to put together literature and more and more people were doing this, you could come up with novel assemblies of species. So these were usually ecosystems that had arisen as a result of some kind of direct or indirect human disturbance. And you get an amalgam of species that have never existed before, together, alien species, exotic species, native ones. And then they persist over time and form these new ecosystems that we don't manage, we don't intervene, and they are doing, there are functional ecosystems, but they're just very different than what we've been used to. The salient feature of a novel ecosystem, as we began to define it was that they were practically unrestorable systems. So that's what made them so difficult to wrestle with. It wasn't that we might not want to restore them, it's just that we couldn't restore them. And that's because you had persistent invasive species that made that job very difficult. We had altered soil conditions or altered atmospheric conditions that would just constrain what that ecosystem could do. So you might restore until you're blue in the face, and you're not going to get it back. You could invest millions of dollars into restoring an ecosystem and not have it go back.
[Music continues to build as people speak to include more guitar and bass.]
Mendel Skulski 34:03
How do we even how do we assess that, though? I guess that's a question that I have moving into this, this part is, how can you tell in advance that you have no hope of restoring something?
Adam Huggins 34:14
That's the question inherent in that definition. On the flip side, it's like functionality, right? Like the functionality conversation we had earlier was important because it's like, what do you mean by functional? And similarly with this question, it's like, what do you mean by impossible?
Mendel Skulski 34:28
So it's not the composition are the constituents of the ecosystem that necessarily makes it novel? It's just that it's almost impossible to restore to whatever we think it was historically.
Adam Huggins 34:44
Yes, that and it's functional.
[Music fades to silence]
Eric Higgs 34:50
And that's the other thing about novel ecosystems is we might think of them pejoratively, but they are ecologically functional. They are delivering ecosystem services and in some cases, people Either prefer them or they like aspects of them. And so that's what makes it so dastardly, right, really complicated.
Mendel Skulski 35:09
So they're, they're resilient to change. They've got a lot of inertia.
Adam Huggins 35:14
Yeah. And I think a good straightforward definition of this comes from a 2014 paper by Morse et al. They define novel ecosystems this way.
Morse et al 35:25
But novel ecosystem is a unique assemblage of bugs and environmental conditions. That is the direct result of intentional or unintentional alteration by humans, that is human agency sufficient to cross an ecological threshold that facilitates a new ecosystem trajectory and inhibits its return to a previous trajectory. Regardless of additional human intervention. The resulting ecosystem must also be self-sustaining in terms of species composition, structure, biogeochemistry, and ecosystem services. A defining characteristic of a novel ecosystem is a change in species composition relative to ecosystems present in the same bond prior to crossing a threshold.
Mendel Skulski 36:14
Okay, I think I get it, but I'm gonna need another example.
Adam Huggins 36:20
Sure. Okay. So, in addition to Eucalyptus forests in the Bay Area of California, there's another example in the Morse paper, they refer to these abandoned shrimp ponds in Thailand.
Mendel Skulski 36:35
Okay.
Adam Huggins 36:36
Yeah, they described this area that used to be tidal mangrove forest, and then was converted to aquaculture ponds to grow shrimp. But some of these shrimp ponds have been abandoned. And when they're no longer tended, the elevated walls on the sides of the ponds tend to prevent the tides from coming in to wash over the whole area. And so the soils become dry, and then they become saline, because of all of the saltwater evaporating in them. And these halophytic, or salt living plant communities get established. And so when researchers went in and tried to restore the mangrove forests on top of these old aquaculture ponds, the trees just wouldn't grow. And even when they tried to restore the tidal regime that originally allowed the trees to grow, they found that the ponds would just keep accumulating sediment. And that basically like to restore the mangroves, people would have to continuously excavate to try and create conditions favorable to the mangroves.
Mendel Skulski 37:40
Yeah, no, that that doesn't sound like a practical solution.
[Underwater sounding music.]
Adam Huggins 37:44
Yeah, I mean, basically impossible to restore. So novel ecosystems occur all over the world and in many forms, but the thing that unites them is that they are functional, and functionally unrestorable. And this makes them tricky.
Eric Higgs 38:03
There's a sort of a moral entanglement with novel ecosystems that makes them particularly difficult for us to process because we, novel ecosystems are free flowing in the sense of they are doing their thing with often without a lot of human input after the initial disturbance. But they arise through human disturbance. So it's through our actions, usually careless actions that result in systems that go off in different directions and form these novel assemblages. So what is then our responsibility?
Mendel Skulski 38:35
Are we responsible? What? What is our responsibility?
[suspenseful music swells]
Adam Huggins 38:45
It's kind of hard to draw clear boundaries around this concept. Like maybe we can accept that. In addition to oak woodlands and grasslands, California will also have some really funky Eucalyptus forests. But what if climate change and fire suppression have turned the entirety of Western North America into a novel ecosystem that now has mega fires all the time? Like, can we accept that?
[Slow swooping music]
Mendel Skulski 39:15
Right. Yeah. Or, or what if the cumulative effects of salmon farms and industrial fishing and ocean acidification melting glaciers and hydroelectric dams and the loss of intertidal ecosystems? Like what if all those create novel conditions that salmon simply can't survive in anymore? I think most of us would say that is plainly unacceptable. Yeah, definitely unacceptable. But we might just not be able to fix some of those things. at best.
Adam Huggins 39:53
I think that the point of, you know, calling these things novel ecosystems is Just to help us recognize what is and what isn't within our power to accomplish, and, you know, allow us to like, prioritize the things that we can do, and maybe step away from some of these, you know, novel ecosystems or hyper ecologies that might actually just be fine on their own.
Mendel Skulski 40:22
Yeah, you know, this actually reminds me of the Serenity Prayer, you know, to accept all those things that you can't change, and to find the courage to change those things that you can.
[Music stops]
Adam Huggins 40:37
Because there are a lot of places that are more damaged and also potentially more restorable. Right? Like we, we could actually give them some continuity with past ecosystems,
[Music continues]
Eric Higgs 40:53
you know, should we be trying to reflect historically continuous ecosystems? Absolutely. Should we be experimenting with bold new nature based solutions to try to bring, you know, more functional systems into our cities? Definitely. Do we have to accept and work with novel ecosystems? Yes, we need to do all these things simultaneously. And that's what's important right now is figuring that out. And I mean, I, I'm pretty passionate about ecological restoration. And I see lots of value in the more Orthodox practices of it. And that will continue to be the case even under conditions of fairly significant change. But there's all these other practices, whether it's rewilding or forest landscape restoration, or green infrastructure and ecological design, and agroforestry, and so on, that are I have similar impulses that are really important for us to engage.
[Music ends]
Adam Huggins 41:44
So there's a lot of paths to follow. And I take after Eric, in that, I think that as restorationists, we have to embrace a broad spectrum of practices and possibilities. As long as ecological integrity and historical continuity are embedded in there somewhere. And by historical continuity, I don't necessarily mean a sort of nostalgic adherence to a prior ecological state, like we were talking about in the last episode.
Eric Higgs 42:16
historical knowledge is not univocal. It comes to us through many voices and through many different streams. And so it matters. We tend to focus a lot on history as reference and restoration. But you can have history of social justice and history as a kind of form of knowledge that acts as a kind of break on our wilder ambitions, you can have history as a kind of model of the future. There's all sorts of different purposes and ways in which history, functions and restoration that we need to take seriously.
[Drum beat music begins]
Mendel Skulski 42:50
Yeah, I think that recognition that history isn't unique vocal, that's, that's key, especially if we do want the full diversity of human cultures to be reflected in our landscapes.
Adam Huggins 43:03
Yeah. And if we don't have to have things be a certain way, it allows us to recognize opportunities that we might otherwise overlook. For example, what if the eucalyptus Elm forest that I described wasn't just functional, but was also helping to decontaminate the land that it was on? Like, what if some of these hyper ecologies actually hold the keys to adapting to novel conditions?
Mendel Skulski 43:26
Maybe they're trying to tell us something? If we listen to them,
Adam Huggins 43:31
yeah. And so I want to return to Oliver one more time, because he's been looking for solutions in unlikely places,
Mendel Skulski 43:42
or you could say, the most likely places.
Oliver Kellhammer 43:45
Yeah, I'm interested in garbage. I find garbage fascinating. And, you know, obviously, you know, on some level, it's revolting, but I'm fascinated by the layers and sort of palimpsest of, of kind of human existence, like we've always created, like some sort of detritus, right, so the First Nations here have mittens and some of the mittens go back 1000s of years people were living in areas for a long long time. So that's like, shells and stuff, they didn't want any more bones and so forth. So that's garbage. It's perhaps more aesthetic garbage, but it's still garbage and it tells you about what things people valued, what kind of food they ate, what they what sort of material conditions they in, you know existed under and what sort of pass through their lives, what pass through their literally their, you know, digestive tracts or what they made and what they used. So, I'm interested in that and currently, you know, we live in a kind of garbage-o-sphere, we've literally, you know, we're at peak garbage, we're throwing so much stuff out, we're not recycling much and most of the materials we used are either fossil fuel based or similarly, unsustainably sourced. So we have materials now that are extremely persistent in the ecosystem. So I'm fascinated by what that says about our, our sense of the future.
Mendel Skulski 45:13
We are kind of living in our own filth. Especially climatically. You know, if you do consider carbon dioxide to be garbage or a pollutant, our own personal garbage-o-sphere,
Adam Huggins 45:28
it probably wouldn't surprise you if I told you that Oliver is right at home on a garbage planet. Right?
Mendel Skulski 45:34
[laughs] No, not surprised
Adam Huggins 45:36
from very early on, actually. I have one more picture to share with you. Here it is.
[Music stops]
Mendel Skulski 45:49
[Laughs]
Adam Huggins 45:50
So this is an early art installation that Oliver did at a gallery in Toronto that was in an industrial neighborhood with really contaminated soils.
Mendel Skulski 46:00
Yeah, that's ominous. Yeah,
Adam Huggins 46:01
He planted a garden of sunflowers. And yeah, in the photo, you can just see him with sunglasses standing there watering the sunflowers and there's a big sign beside them. And it says, "Eat and get lead."
Mendel Skulski 46:13
[Laughs] Oh, looks like a healthy crop. But yeah, wow. It's uh, it reminds me of that, that John Carpenter movie ‘They Live’
Adam Huggins 46:26
It has such an intensely john Carpenter vibe, you're rightQ Are you gonna unpack ‘They Live’ a little bit!
[Low bass drum beats slowly, then faster]
Mendel Skulski 46:32
Yeah, the main character finds a box of sunglasses, that when he puts them on they, they let him see under the surface of, of advertising and marketing in this corporate world. And all of these billboards just have this propaganda written in this bold font.
[John Carpenter-like music begins]
And it looks just like that, this this sign of direct,
[robot voice interrupts] “stay asleep”
unmistakable.
[robot voice interrupts] "obey"
threatening, eat and get lead,
[robot voice interrupts] "eat and get lead"
It's almost like an instruction, right? Like, it's not even a warning. It's, it's an inducement. Yeah.
Adam Huggins 47:09
I really love this picture.
Mendel Skulski 47:11
It's scary. I love it.
Adam Huggins 47:12
But the cool thing is that sunflowers are actually known to bioaccumulate lead. So this is, you know, this is an art installation, but it's also another one of his botanical interventions.
[John Carpenter-like music swells and continues]
Adam Huggins 47:29
Maybe one of the earliest ones, because he could actually harvest the sunflowers once they were mature, and dispose of them elsewhere. And that would actually pull the lead out of the soils.
Mendel Skulski 47:41
That's so rad. So he's doing bio remediation or Phyto remediation back in what, what year was this taken?
Adam Huggins 47:48
1988 Wow. And, as you know, quite directly, plants are not the only organisms that can detoxify the environment around them.
Oliver Kellhammer 48:00
There's so many other processes like fungal processes, where you can use fungi to, you know, via remediate contaminated landscapes or plants to fight or remediate. And so even though you know, we're living in a kind of disastrous sort of state of contamination you know, nature does develop mechanisms to address that contamination. So I'm fascinated by these disturb you know, postindustrial landscapes where you can might be able to find you know, a turkey tail mushroom.
Adam Huggins 48:26
So Mendel, why would Oliver find a postindustrial turkey tail mushroom, so exciting?
Mendel Skulski 48:32
Uh, like sunflowers, fungi are really useful for that heavy metal contamination and hyper accumulating that in their bodies. Mm hmm.
Adam Huggins 48:42
And there's one particular process that Oliver picked up on that has totally blown my mind.
Mendel Skulski 48:48
I'm down to have my mind blown.
Oliver Kellhammer 48:50
I'm working on a project with my students at Parsons, where we're composting styrofoam, which is an ubiquitous waste product. It's very hard to recycle. There's piles of it all over New York City. So I'm composting it using mealworms common little mealworms and they eat styrofoam, they de-polymerize it and they turn it into compost.
Mendel Skulski 49:12
Are you serious?
Adam Huggins 49:13
Yeah. The gut bacteria of mealworms has been shown to break styrofoam down into biodegradable waste.
Mendel Skulski 49:22
That's amazing.
Oliver Kellhammer 49:24
This home is so fun and easy and will amuse your roommates and scare the hell out of impossibly but, so. So you get styrofoam right, just wherever. And you get mealworms like from a pet store, right? And they eat it like how cool is that right and, and not only do they eat it, they de-polymerize it so they have a symbiotic gut flora. It breaks down this polystyrene right because polystyrene is what styrofoam is. It's styrene molecules knitted together and they break it down into humans. Right so how cool is that? giant pile of white styrofoam. I had like a storage locker full styrofoam and I turned into like a half a bucket full of compost takes a while, but they really go for it. And the more worms the better look at that. They're eating it. And this is my apartment in New York when I sleep in it. It is gnawing [audience laughs] the styrofoam being eaten, right.
Audience 50:20
You're kidding right?
Oliver Kellhammer 50:23
No, honestly, I love this.
Audience 50:24
What is it, in your bathtub or something?
Oliver Kellhammer 50:25
No, like containers [music ends]
Adam Huggins 50:29
and on that note Mendel Can I show you something?
Mendel Skulski 50:33
Okay. Sure. [Shuffling sounds]
Mendel Skulski 50:41
[Surprised Gasp] Are you doing the Oliver Kellhammer thing?
Adam Huggins 50:43
I'm doing the Oliver Kellhammer thing.
Mendel Skulski 50:45
Oh, man. Are they going?
Adam Huggins 50:46
Yeah, they're totally going here. Okay, be quiet for a sec.
[Sound of tiny scrapes in a bucket of the mealworms eating the styrofoam.]
Mendel Skulski 50:55
Oh my god, that's wild. Are they in the block right now?
[Mealworms continue]
Adam Huggins 50:59
Yeah. They just like to end right through that block. like they've got like a little hotel and they're, you know,
Mendel Skulski 51:04
it's so loud. It's amazing.
[Mealworms continue, door closes and mealworms stop]
Adam Huggins 51:11
I've never really been much of a pet person, but this totally captured my fancy.
Mendel Skulski 51:17
[Laughs]
Adam Huggins 51:17
Or they're kind of they're a little bit more like livestock than pet say.
Mendel Skulski 51:20
Yeah, they seem pretty hands-off.
Adam Huggins 51:22
Oliver always knows how to take things to the next level to like, he's not just using the mealworms to compost styrofoam. He's also using them to make marketable art for himself.
Oliver Kellhammer 51:34
But me being an artist, I'm always looking for an angle. Going oh this is cool. Can I make this work for me. So I now make these beautiful things that I sent to art galleries in Europe, which are, these are garbage that I painted the mealworms. And I take it away from the mealworms and before they're done, and I put them on a little stands, and they become like, you know, as Chinese scholar stones that you have in like formal gardens, and they're these beautiful, exquisite stones that people use as objects of meditation and contemplation. Well, I make them on styrofoam. [audience laughs]
[Oliver continues speaking in the background]
Mendel Skulski 52:05
Oh, You know, they remind me of sea sponges, almost like it's interesting because they're subtractive. Right? They're not additive. Oh my God, he's got the mealworms in these containers. Of course, part of this is like the mealworm performance, right? It's not just the product. It's the action.
Adam Huggins 52:29
Mm hmm. [Laughs] And just to bring things full circle, you remember Oliver's dad from the beginning?
Mendel Skulski 52:37
Yes.
Adam Huggins 52:40
You know, what he did for a living?
Mendel Skulski 52:43
No, I have no idea.
[low bass melody plays underneath]
Oliver Kellhammer 52:45
Going back to this business. But my father, you know, my late father, he worked in a styrene factory and me, you know, one of the precursors to styrofoam. And as a kid, he used to come home and his coveralls were just reeking of that, like a burned coffee cup smell and his pores with smell of burn. styrene and, you know, he was later on had cancers and so forth. But it's one of my earliest memories is smelling burns. styrene and I'm probably part styrene myself, I was probably conceived in a styrene fog, you know. So, you know, it's a sort of poetic justice that that the material that I've been sort of, you know, struggling with my entire life is now being turned into soil by these insects.
[swooping chords swell and continue playing]
Mendel Skulski 53:40
Yeah. Yeah, I like the poetry of that. the poetry of decay. So, relating back to novel ecosystems. What, what I'm hearing, to your point is that if we pay attention to these places, and let them evolve, we might actually learn a thing or two. I mean,
Adam Huggins 54:07
people are always saying that we should preserve the Amazon rainforest, because it's full of potentially lifesaving medicines that we could study and replicate and maybe exploit right? So why not also preserve some of these hyper ecologies these novel ecosystems? It's possible that they might have a thing or two to teach us about living in future ecologies?
[Chord music swells]
Adam Huggins 54:44
So I know that we weren't able to address who gets to create ecosystems and whose ecosystems might be considered legitimate or worth protecting.
Mendel Skulski 54:53
No, I think that'll have to be its own series.
Adam Huggins 54:57
But if we set aside formal restoration projects, you could say that we're all ecosystem engineers in our own ways. I mean, we all have some impact on the world around us. And if you think like Oliver, even the litterbugs among us are making their own contributions to the garbage-o-sphere that we all inhabit together.
Mendel Skulski 55:18
I mean, yeah, we can't avoid playing some part in that. And, and I think if I have one overarching takeaway from these conversations with Oliver and Eric, that, that you've brought to me, I guess it's that we shouldn't retreat, we shouldn't be afraid of becoming more intentional shapers of our surroundings from getting involved in the pan-species. direct democracy, of all of these ecological processes.
Oliver Kellhammer 55:50
A lot of folks because things are kind of scary right now in the world are like, retreating. They're like, Oh, my God, I'm gonna live in a log cabin surrounded by barbed wire, and I'm gonna be in the basement with my pickles waiting for the big one. [audience laughs] Right. And with my AK 47, right, if anybody tries to take my pickles, you know. [audience laughs] Right. That's not permaculture. That's not good. That's that's the unabomber [bleep]. That's like, you know, Ted Kaczynski don't want to be that person. Right? And so don't do that. But what we need is an advance, not a retreat. All right, so we got to go into areas that are crazy. And then we got to try to fix things. So one of the permaculture principles that I love is go into the areas that are most disturbed and most screwed up and need help, right? Don't always go into like pristine areas, right? The rain forest doesn't need you to garden, it's fine, right? Like you need to go into like, waste zones, that's what that's where you need.
Adam Huggins 56:45
I asked all of her about this later, because in some ways, I'm also attracted to damage. Like, I love being in healthy ecosystems. But when I come home, typically I'm surrounded by a landscape that has lots of visible signs of damage. And it's actually these damaged places where I feel like I can make a difference as a person. And in some ways that makes them feel like home to me, even though I live on Galiano Island, which I think most people perceive as relatively undisturbed.
[calming piano music]
Oliver Kellhammer 57:20
Yeah, it's true. And I prefer to work and live in, you know in some ways - I mean, if I did live on Cortez island for many years, which, which was similarly beautiful, but I do think now that I'm older, I'm much more drawn to living in ecologies of disturbance, where I feel I can make a difference in terms of improving the relationships between people in the landscape in ways that are, you know, constructive, without, you know, you can't do too much more harm than, you know, when you're in a brownfield. It's like it's already pretty, you know, there's a lot of work that you can do that you're not having to agonize quite so much, because most things will be a slight improvement.
Mendel Skulski 58:00
And I mean, if I can make a quick interjection here,
Adam Huggins 58:03
sure.
Mendel Skulski 58:04
Yeah, I would say me too. These abject spaces seem more ripe for possibility.
Adam Huggins 58:10
And that's like your neighborhood, right is an industrial neighborhood.
Mendel Skulski 58:15
It's a sandbox. It's a place to play around and see what sticks. And you don't have to worry about destabilizing a functional system.
Adam Huggins 58:24
Yeah and in terms of creativity, one of the words that Eric uses in his book Nature by Design, to describe ecological restoration is enlightened meddling.
Mendel Skulski 58:43
[Laughs] Yeah
Adam Huggins 58:43
Which I think he totally forgot about. So I brought it, I brought it up in our conversation.
Eric Higgs 58:49
Enlightened meddling? Yeah, I suppose. I mean, it's just that my experience with restoration is that Yeah, I like to think that I have all these goals and objectives and specific methods, and you kind of put all this into place, and you rein it in scientifically, and so on, but there is always just about every restoration project, there is also a little bit of meddling, a little bit of like, Oh, I wonder if I tried that over there. I wonder if that would work.
[Calming piano music ends and groovy song enters]
Adam Huggins 59:34
Mendel, I'm not sure if you know this, but 2021 will be the first year in the United Nations' decade on ecosystem restoration.
Mendel Skulski 59:45
It's almost like you planned this whole series for just the occasion.
Adam Huggins 59:50
It's actually a happy accident. All of which is to say, there's lots of good work to do out there. And I think this is a time that calls for, dare I say it?
Mendel Skulski 1:00:01
Don't you dare say it.
Adam Huggins 1:00:03
Some Audacity.
[Music swells to high melody and ends]
Adam Huggins 1:00:25
All right, dear listeners. That's it for this series. And for 2020 Let's bid this year a fond farewell together, shall we?
[Steady bass drum begins to play slow hits]
Mendel Skulski 1:00:34
Thanks for sticking with us through this fairly heavy series. Our episodes in the new year will be something completely different.
Adam Huggins 1:00:42
Something novel, perhaps
Mendel Skulski 1:00:45
Why not? Happy novel Year to you, Adam,
Adam Huggins 1:00:47
happy novel Year to you, Mendel
Mendel Skulski 1:00:49
Happy novel year, everyone.
Mendel Skulski 1:00:55
Thanks for listening. This has been an independent production of future ecologies
Adam Huggins 1:01:00
This episode was produced by myself, Adam Huggins
Mendel Skulski 1:01:02
and me, Mendel Skulski.
Adam Huggins 1:01:05
In this episode, you heard Oliver Kelhammer and Dr. Eric Higgs. Oliver teaches at the Parsons School of Design at The New School and you can learn about his many projects at Oliverk.org. Eric teaches at the University of Victoria and is the author of several books, including Nature by Design: people, natural processes and ecological restoration. He also added the volume, Novel Ecosystems, intervening in the New World Order. You can learn more about his work at Erichiggs.ca.
Mendel Skulski 1:01:35
We'll be back next month. Please rate and review future ecologies wherever you can. We love getting your feedback, and it really does help us reach new listeners.
Adam Huggins 1:01:45
Special thanks to Hannah Roessler, Sadie Couture, Todd Howard, Brea Segger, Ilana Fonariov, Bastian Phelan, and Maya Gauvin, Nicole Jahraus, and Jody Baker. Music for this episode was provided by Scott Gailey, C. Diab, Hidden Sky, and Sunfish Moon Light. There's also a sequence of tracks in the middle of this episode by an artist friend of mine named Aaron S. Moran. And if you visit his website at Aaronsmoran.com. He's got a series of artworks in titled "Double Take" that I think relate very nicely to this episode. If you like what we do, please share us with your friends. You can also support us on Patreon, our patrons get access to special mini episodes, interview segments, stickers, patches, and a Discord server. You can support us starting at just $1 a month by going to patreon.com slash future ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 1:02:44
You can always get in touch with us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and I naturalist The handle is always future ecologies. You can find a full list of musical credits, show notes links and transcriptions on our website: futureecologies.net.
Adam Huggins 1:03:04
Alright, that's it for now. Happy novel year.
Mendel Skulski 1:03:08
Happy novel year.
[Groovy music swells.]
Robot Mealworms 1:03:20
Is it over? Can I come out now? I'm so hungry. So so hungry. I just want some styrofoam. Please, Can you fetch me some styrofoam. You will never see it again. I promise
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Rachel Beetz