Month: August 2016

“The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted—all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it.”

—John R. Stilgoe

One of the things that interests me about my neighborhood in Richmond is the contrast between the stately facades of the Edwardian row houses facing the street and their counterpart, the visually chaotic alley behind, filled with weeds, unruly vines, litter, and unremarkable graffiti. On foot from Franklin Street proper, we reach our apartment by sliding through a narrow opening between houses, snaking our way back to what used to be a carriage house. Though we share the same address as the people in the main house, our view is significantly different. Following in the footsteps of John Stilgoe, the legendary Harvard professor of visual and environmental studies, I spent time carefully observing both sides of the block. What I encountered confirmed a few initial thoughts, but a few surprises emerged.

Franklin Street, 1000–1030

MOVEMENT (Number/5 mins)
Pedestrians: 14
Motor Vehicles: 31
Bicycles: 3

ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS
Gabled roof detail
Bay windows
Victorian/Edwardian cone-shaped domes
Brick, various colors

PAVING METHODS
Sidewalk: slab concrete
Street: asphalt

PLANTS
Trees
Grass
Shrubbery
Flowers

LITTER
Tube socks
Shattered glass
Chick-fil-A bag
Cigarrettes

GRAFFITI
Public property: On street signage
Private property: Mostly found in the entry way of the abandoned building near Harrison

—

Franklin Street Alley, 1000–1030

MOVEMENT (Number/5 mins)
Pedestrians: 7
Motor Vehicles: 3
Birds: 3

ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS
Several boxy brick buildings detached from main houses/buildings, presumably former carriage houses like our apartment.
Stairways and fire-escapes on buildings higher than three stories
Crude wooden stairways

PAVING METHODS
Brick/cobblestone. Difficult to traverse.

PLANTS
Vines
Weeds sprouting through the cobblestone

LITTER
This is where garbage cans for the block are stored.
Dirty couch
Mattresses
Cardboard
Fast food bags and cups
Broken glass
Cigarrettes

Many of these same pieces of litter are found on Franklin Street proper as well. They are much more glaring in contrast to the more manicured appearance of the main street front.

GRAFFITI
Surprisingly more orderly than on the street-facing side. Frequently graffiti writers/artists would use architectural elements such as the grids on garage doors to arrange their work. “Greasy” makes numerous appearances here and on the street front.

As a small child I spent many afternoons at the nursery school and daycare center where my grandmother worked. I knew her as Nanny, and the other children affectionately called her Ms. Betty. During the summer, the staff would let us roam free all day throughout the vast playground in special “bare-feet” days. This is the earliest time I can remember truly interacting with nature. We would pick up caterpillars and watch them slowly crawl up our arms, teach each other to sit perfectly still whenever a yellow jacket buzzed around us, and greet daddy-longlegs spiders hiding in dark corners on the back porch. We would tell each other stories about what lurked beneath holes created by gargantuan exposed roots. Older eyes and a taller frame have since concluded that this place was really only a small, unremarkable patch of land tucked into the middle of American suburbia. But this is where I discovered first-hand a small slice of the natural world.

Graduating from kindergarten into the first grade granted us passage through a small fence running down the middle of the playground, the line of demarcation between the “big kid side” and the “little kid side.” One day I vividly remember hearing screams and shouts next to the fence—”Ms. Betty … there’s a snaaaaaake!” My grandmother rushed into action, moving us all to the perimeter of the playground. She was not about to let anything happen to any of us. Fearlessly she grabbed a garden hoe and confronted the curled up copperhead. Seconds later—whack—the snake was bifurcated. We watched in horror as the two parts of the snake writhed and squirmed until finally becoming still. Nanny slowly and somberly moved the dead snake to the edge of the playground and buried it. She saved us from danger but also opened up our eyes to human interaction and interference with the natural world.

As I would learn later, venomous copperhead snakes are especially prevalent in my home region of Upstate South Carolina. They made a home in the area long before humans arrived. Copperheads can form habitats in small patches of land, allowing them to easily adapt to the patterns of modern human development in the area. Unfortunately our nursery habitat interfered a little too closely with the copperhead’s that day. Our takeover of vast swaths of the natural environment causes us to be startled whenever we encounter the wild, threatening side of nature.

This simple story of our encounter with a snake is an especially nuanced account of human interaction with nature. Few animals strike the same kind of terror in humans as snakes, and our reactions to them are often primal fight-or-flight feelings. Some scientists theorize that frequent deadly interactions between snakes and our primate ancestors is partly responsible for the evolution of the human brain. Our ancestors were at one time on more equal footing with snakes, both alternating between predator and prey. In the Anthropocene Epoch, humans are making an enormously outsized impact on the natural world, shaping the trajectory for every other species. Encounters such as these force us to remember that this is a shared habitat.

 

For our introductory project, we each gathered images documenting human interference with a natural system and natural interference with a human/artificial system. As we discovered at the beginning of class, this leads to a broader engagement with the theme of the Anthropocene Epoch, the period of time in which human activity makes the biggest impact on the natural world.

This first image shows human interference with a natural system. This is a packaged “ham and cheese loaf” found at a supermarket. On a basic level, humans interfered with nature (pigs) to source the meat in this product. If we think of killing animals for food as part of the natural world for millennia, that leads to the next point. The supermarket is symbolic of humans interrupting this natural order of food gathering and preparation. Here, a huge company has done the dirty work, chopped, sorted, and processed it, added specs of cheese for good measure (also processed/artificial), and packed it neatly into a square container. Artificial preservatives halt its decay and lengthen its shelf life. It is treated as another commodity, sold under the same roof and with similar packaging as products ranging from laundry detergent to school supplies.

The second image is a detail shot of a metal beginning to rust. Humans forged and cut the metal and constructed this exterior door. Through a chemical reaction, nature has started to leave its mark on the metal. On a formal level in this composition, the hard right angles, perfect circles, and lattice pattern are contrasted with the organic texture of the rust.

As I began narrowing down what I captured, I had two reoccurring thoughts:

1. When looking for examples of natural interference with human/artificial systems, I always found strong reasons to flip that interpretation. Almost everything built by humans is interfering with the natural world in some way.
2. What exactly is interference? Is there a spectrum with obstruction/inconvenience on one end and destruction/devastation on the other?