by Jenny Odell
In the preface to one of his guidebooks from a year after the painting was commissioned, I found Crofutt’s breathless description of “a country that only a few years ago was almost wholly unexplored and unknown to the white race”:
But since the completion of the Pacific Railroad, it has been occupied by over half a million of the most adventurous, active, honest and progressive white people that the world can produce—people that are building cities, towns and villages as though by magic; prospecting, discovering and developing the great treasure chambers of the continent; extending our grand system of railroads all over the country, like a vast net-work; or engaged in the cultivation of the inexhaustible soil, which is literally causing the wilderness to “blossom like the rose.”6
Of course, we now know that the soil was exhaustible after all, and that “developing” actually meant quickly depleting—as in, every old-growth tree in Oakland except for Old Survivor. The phrase “as if by magic” is a chilling erasure of the waves of straight-up genocide that ravaged indigenous populations in the nineteenth century. Thinking about the Ohlone shell mounds and about how all of the extinct species on my “Long Lost Oakland” map disappeared in the nineteenth century, I can’t help but read the white-robed woman in the painting as the harbinger of the cultural and ecological destruction. While the tiny beings below her run for their lives, she wears a strange and benevolent expression aimed not at them but at something else in the distance—the imagined target of progress. It’s only with her gaze fixed on this target that she can trample on hundreds of species and thousands of years’ worth of knowledge without ever breaking her pallid smile.
What’s the opposite of Manifest Destiny? I think it would be something like the Angel of History. It’s a concept I call manifest dismantling. I imagine another painting, one where Manifest Destiny is trailed not by trains and ships but by manifest dismantling, a dark-robed woman who is busy undoing all of the damage wrought by Manifest Destiny, cleaning up her mess.
Manifest dismantling was hard at work in 2015, during the largest dam removal in California history. Just a few hours south of here on the Carmel River, the concrete San Clemente Dam had been built in 1921 by a real estate company in the Monterey Peninsula in order to provide water to a growing number of Monterey residents. But by the 1940s, it had filled up with so much sediment that another larger dam was built upstream. In the 1990s, the San Clemente Dam was declared not only useless but seismically unsafe due to its proximity to a fault line. An earthquake might have sent not only water but 2.5 million cubic yards of accumulated sediment into the towns downstream.
The dam was a problem for more than just humans. Steelhead trout, which live in the ocean but must travel upstream each year to spawn, found the dam’s fish ladder impassable; even if they made it, returning to the ocean meant facing the lethal hundred-foot drop on the way back. One local fisherman compared the dam to “shutt[ing] the door on their bedroom.”7 And the effects extended downstream: the dam withheld the debris essential for creating the small pools and hidden areas that trout need to survive—either to rest while swimming upstream, or to live for the first few years before heading to the ocean for the first time. In other words, the river’s loss of complexity spelled death for the steelhead. What had once been trout runs in the thousands had dwindled to 249 in 2013.8
The cheapest option was basically a Band-Aid solution: a $49 million plan to add more concrete to the dam to stabilize it in the event of an earthquake. Instead California American Water, which owned the dam, partnered with various state and federal agencies to carry out an $84 million plan that not only removed the dam but included habitat restoration for the trout and the California red-legged frog, another threatened species. So much silt had accumulated behind the dam that before the agencies could remove it, they had to reroute the river around the old dam site, which would be used for sediment storage. Thus, the project involved not only tearing down a structure but building a riverbed from scratch. Drone footage of the new riverbed is surreal. The project engineers designed a series of cascading pools specifically to be trout-friendly, but without anything yet growing around the artificial banks, it looked like something from Minecraft.
Meanwhile, those hoping for a dramatic demolition of the dam were met with disappointment. Once the river had been successfully rerouted, six excavators and two sixteen-thousand-pound pneumatic hammers arrived and proceeded to slowly and arduously pick away at the concrete structure, turning it into dust bit by bit. In his piece on the dam removal for the San Francisco Chronicle, Steven Rubenstein quotes the president of the demolition company: “It’s fun to knock things down…I spend a lot of time looking at buildings, trying to figure out the best way to get rid of them.” He adds that “if you didn’t wreck something, you couldn’t build something else in its place.” But Rubenstein notes that in this case, of course, “the idea is to replace the dam with nothing.”9
All of this gives the project a strange forward-and-backward feeling. In time-lapse videos of the project in progress, we see people working with the industriousness of ants, set to the majestic music that you’d expect to accompany any great public works project—only this time, the structure is disappearing instead of appearing. Another part of the video features archival footage of the dam being built (just as industriously) in 1921. Over these images—originally meant to depict construction and mastery—a voice narrates the dam’s destruction: “Building dams was once a triumph of humankind’s ability to control nature. As our society evolves we are learning to seek balance rather than control in our relationship with our environment.”10
Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g., of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g., of dams). Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction.
I am interested in manifest dismantling as a form of purposiveness bound up with remediation, something that requires us to give up the idea that progress can only face forward blindly. It provides a new direction for our work ethic. Remediation certainly takes the same amount of work: in this case, a dam that had taken three years to build took close to the same amount of time to remove. The word “innovation” came up a lot in coverage of the San Clemente Dam removal, since it not only required significant design and engineering, but also unprecedented cooperation and consultation among engineers, scientists, lawyers, local agencies, state agencies, nonprofits, and members of the Ohlone Esselen tribe. Seen through the lens of manifest dismantling, tearing down the dam is indeed a creative act, one that does put something new in the world, even if it’s putting it back.
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OF COURSE, MANIFEST dismantling not only messes with what we consider forward and backward—it also requires a kind of Copernican shift of humans away from the center of things. As Leopold put it, we must go “from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”11
In 2002, writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry wrote the introduction to an edition of the 1978 book The One-Straw Revolution. Its author, a Japanese farmer named Masanobu Fukuoka, experienced this Copernican shift when he invented what he called “do-nothing farming.” Inspired by the productivity of an abandoned lot that he saw filled with grasses and weeds, Fukuoka figured out a method of farming that made use of existing relationships in the land. Instead of flooding fields and sowing rice in the spring, he scattered the seeds directly on the ground in the fall, as they would have fallen naturally. In place of
conventional fertilizer, he grew a cover of green clover, and threw the leftover stalks back on top when he was done.
Fukuoka’s method required less labor, no machines, and no chemicals, but it took him decades to perfect and required extremely close attention. If everything was done at precisely the right time, the reward was unmistakable: not only was Fukuoka’s farm more productive and sustainable than neighboring farms, his method was able to remediate poor soils after a few seasons, creating farmable land on rocky outcrops and other inhospitable areas.
In his book, Fukuoka writes that “[b]ecause the world is moving with such furious energy in the opposite direction, it may appear that I have fallen behind the times.” Indeed, just as we associate innovation with the production of something new, we also associate an inventor with creating some new kind of design. But Fukuoka’s “design” was more or less to remove the design altogether. This leads to the uncanny quality of manifest dismantling. As he writes: “That which was viewed as primitive and backward is now unexpectedly seen to be far ahead of modern science. This may seem strange at first, but I do not find it strange at all.”12
In a chapter titled “Nothing at All,” Fukuoka tells of how he arrived at the epiphany that would lead him to do-nothing farming. In his twenties, he had worked for the Yokohama Customs Headquarters in the Plant Inspection Division while studying plant pathology under a brilliant researcher. His life was basically a mix of equally intense studying and partying, and at some point, he started having fainting spells and was hospitalized for acute pneumonia. In this hospital room, he wrote, “I found myself face to face with the fear of death,” and when he was discharged, he continued to be haunted by “an agony of doubt about the nature of life and death.”
When I read Fukuoka’s account of what happened afterward, I was surprised to find that, like me, he had an epiphanic encounter with a night heron:
One night as I wandered, I collapsed in exhaustion on a hill overlooking the harbor, finally dozing against the trunk of a large tree. I lay there, neither asleep nor awake, until dawn. I can still remember that it was the morning of the 15th of May. In a daze I watched the harbor grow light, seeing the sunrise and yet somehow not seeing it. As the breeze blew up from below the bluff, the morning mist suddenly disappeared. Just at that moment a night heron appeared, gave a sharp cry, and flew away into the distance. I could hear the flapping of its wings. In an instant all my doubts and the gloomy mist of my confusion vanished. Everything I had held in firm conviction, everything upon which I had ordinarily relied was swept away with the wind. I felt that I understood just one thing. Without my thinking about them, words came from my mouth: “In this world there is nothing at all…” I felt that I understood nothing.13
Fukuoka sums up the epiphany as the ultimate expression of humility, echoing Zhuang Zhou when he writes: “‘Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.’”
It was only through this humility that Fukuoka was able to arrive at a new kind of ingenuity. Do-nothing farming recognized that there was a natural intelligence at work in the land, and therefore the most intelligent thing for the farmer to do was to interfere as little as possible. Of course, that didn’t mean not interfering at all. Fukuoka recalls the time he tried to let some orchard trees grow without pruning: the trees’ branches became intertwined and the orchard was attacked by insects. “This is abandonment, not ‘natural farming,’” he writes. Somewhere between over-engineering and abandonment, Fukuoka found the sweet spot by patiently listening and observing. His expertise lay in being a quiet and patient collaborator with the ecosystem he tended to.
Fukuoka’s stance is an example of something that Jedediah Purdy suggests in his book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. In each subsequent chapter, Purdy shows how the different views of nature throughout history have each corresponded to a set of political beliefs about value and subjecthood, being used to justify everything from hierarchical social orders and racism (“everything in its place”) to an obsession with the productivity of industry. In each case, people and their governments conceived of nature as entirely separate from the human world, whether it was the idea of “natural capital” or the pristine “backpacker’s nature.”
Dissolving the nature/culture distinction, Purdy suggests that in the Anthropocene, we should figure nature not as separate, but as a partner in collaboration. Like Fukuoka after his epiphany, humans might humbly take up their place as just one partner in “the necessary work of carrying on living”:
In this tradition and in modern ecology, there is potential to realize that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation. Seeing nature’s work in this light would align environmental politics with the key feminist insight that much socially necessary work is ignored or devalued as “caregiving,” a gendered afterthought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality no shared life could do without it.14
Purdy’s recommendation echoes Mierle Ukeles when she insists in her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art:” “my work is the work.” If we take this to heart, it suggests that we dismantle not only structures of exploitation and destruction, but the very language with which we conceive of progress. It asks us to stop, turn around, and then get to work.
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IF YOU LOOK for instances of manifest dismantling, I promise you will find them.
Peter Berg, the founder of modern bioregionalism, did a little bit of manifest dismantling in front of his San Francisco house in the 1980s. Like Fukuoka, he was inspired by weeds—in this case, the ones growing in the cracks of the sidewalk pavement. Berg got the city’s permission to rip up the concrete and plant native species. Giving a tour to visitors, he said he was “secretly pleased to believe that seeds from these plants blow out and into other sidewalk cracks and are propagating more of these natives all over the place, instead of the European invaders.”15
Here are a few more recent examples. Friends of Sausal Creek (FOSC), a group of Oakland neighbors formed in 1996 to restore Sausal Creek, daylighted a section of the creek from beneath a concrete culvert and replanted native species. A UC Berkeley class collaborated with Urban Releaf to grow seventy-two coast live oak trees to donate to neighborhoods in West and East Oakland. Ospreys arrived and began building nests on a former naval site in Richmond. Chris Carlsson, local historian extraordinaire and author of the book Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today!, continued to give bike tours of the ecological and labor histories of San Francisco. Sudo Mesh, the group responsible for the Oakland mesh network, upcycled donated laptops to youth and activists who couldn’t afford them. Stanford removed the name of the Catholic priest Junípero Serra from its entrance campus buildings, citing his role in the enslavement and genocide of indigenous tribes in nineteenth-century California.
One of the best examples of manifest dismantling that I can give you comes from a local Ohlone group called Save West Berkeley Shellmound and Village Site. In 2017 I went to an event held by a group called mak-’amham, in which Ohlone tribal members share traditional food with the public. We had yerba buena tea and chanterelle mushrooms on acorn flatbread—the first thing I had ever eaten from an oak tree. Between courses, Vincent Medina, a Muwekma Ohlone tribal councilman, spoke of a current proposal to build condos at an Ohlone shellmound site in West Berkeley. Shellmounds are sacred burial sites in the Bay Area that at one point were marked by massive structures made of shellfish remains. Although the structures were demolished, the sites still contain human burials below ground level. The contested Berkeley site contains burials thousands of years old that may represent the first-ever habitation in the area; it is currently a parking lot for a fish restaurant. (In fact, I was embarrassed to learn that Shellmound Street, just south of there and which one only takes to g
et to IKEA, was so named for yet another ancient Ohlone shellmound site that was built over in the twentieth century. Workers on that project disturbed dozens of burials, some of which contained adults in groups, with babies, or with limbs intertwined.16) Building the West Berkeley condos would require excavation of the land for the foundations of ground-level parking and businesses.
The political quality of “doing nothing”—of not building at the West Berkeley site—is obvious here. But besides refusing development, what the Ohlone members have proposed is more than nothing. In 2017, Ohlone matriarchs Ruth Orta and Corrina Gould worked with a Berkeley landscape architect to create a different vision for the site: a forty-foot-high mound, echoing the shape of the original shellmound, covered in California poppies. The plan would also restore other native vegetation, create a dance arbor for Ohlone ceremonial use, and daylight a section of Strawberry Creek, which runs underground through the site. While this living monument would be of obvious importance to indigenous folks, I consider it also an incredibly generous gesture to other East Bay residents, who stand to inhabit this place more consciously. Gould herself described the potential site as an opportunity for all of us simply to remember “our compassion, conscience and civility, to learn to be human again, together.”17
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IT’S TEMPTING TO conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live. But I refuse to do that. That’s because the pitfalls of the attention economy can’t just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques; they also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race.