The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
A Petroleum Pipeline Portal to Regeneration – and Home, with Christopher Brown
Christopher Brown is a celebrated science-fiction writer and decorated lawyer (and once co-hosted a punk rock radio show). His newest book, however, is described as a ‘genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect … [challenging] our assumptions of nature itself.’ It’s called A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and other Wild Places.
The blurb of its publisher Timber Press, an imprint of Hachette, puts it like this:
'During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—a brownfield site bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash—was an unlikely site for a home. Along with his son, Brown had explored similar empty lots around Austin, “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment as Austin became a 21st century boom town.
'He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards, and discovered that, by working to heal the wounds we have made on the Earth, we can also heal ourselves. Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, [it] offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.'
As soon as I received this book, I immediately invited Chris onto the podcast. And to my delight, he and his family were happy to have us drop by. So while our wives worked and kids played, Chris and I explored what he’s called their ‘little house on the petroleum prairie’, and just how he navigated a serendipitous path, through personal and global travails, to a portal of healing, regeneration and more than a little magic.
Recorded 30 March 2025.
Title slide: Chris holds a tell-tale sign, in front of the house you can barely discern from all the lush greenery there now (pic: Anthony James).
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Music:
Silhouettes, by Muted (sourced from Artlist).
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden.
The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests.
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When people come over and visit our kooky little place here and, like you can see, like they just sort of a lot of times people will walk in through the front gate and get kind of halfway back to where it sort of changes in this subtle way. It is almost like you've stepped through a portal and it brings out a different kind of sensibility and feeling in people in a way that I think is, yeah, something to be cultivated and to be shared.
AJ:Christopher Brown is a celebrated science fiction writer and decorated lawyer, and once co-hosted a punk rock radio show. His newest book, however, is described as a genre-defying work of nature writing, literary non-fiction and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect, challenging our assumptions of nature itself. It's called 'A Natural History of Empty Lots: field notes from urban edgelands, back alleys and other wild places'. The blurb of its publisher, timber Press, an imprint of Hachette, puts it like this During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, texas. The property, a brownfield site, bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash, was an unlikely site for a home. Along with his son, brown had explored similar empty lots around Austin ruined spaces once used for agriculture and industry, awaiting their redevelopment as Austin became a 21st century boom town. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity and embarked on a 20-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards and discovered that by working to heal the wounds we have made on the earth, we can also heal ourselves. Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, it offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.
AJ:As soon as I received this book, I immediately invited Chris onto the podcast. As soon as I received this book, I immediately invited Chris onto the podcast and, to my delight, he and his family were happy to have us drop by. So while our wives worked and kids played, chris and I explored what he's called their little house on the Petroleum Prairie and just how he navigated a serendipitous path through personal and global travails to a portal of healing, regeneration and more than a little magic. G'day, nthony James, here for he eh Regeneration, your independent, listener-supported podcast exploring how people are regenerating the systems and stories we live by, with thanks to new subscribers, neville Street and Sharon Grosser, and three-year supporters Luca aka Dr Cat over in Italy and Douglas Laurie back home in Oz.
AJ:If you've been thinking about joining this brilliant community of supporting listeners and readers, please do.. For as little as a dollar a week, with benefits if you like, you can help keep this show on the road. Subscribe free or paid on Patreon or Substack. With all my thanks, okay, let's join Chris. All right, chris, hello, thanks for having us at your place.
Christopher:Thanks for coming to see us. We appreciate it. You came a long way from Perth. Did you drive the whole way?
AJ:You drove a fair part of the way, I can tell you. I'm so curious, chris, to actually retrace the steps of where you first laid eyes on this place. I gather you came around this corner, did you?
Christopher:no, I would have come down this street. Yeah, I mean, I was looking at this. I was just. I had been living downtown on a little apartment, um kind of middle-aged half-time single dad and uh, working a kind of conventional rat race working life, and I wanted to find a place to live and I had looked at various options.
Christopher:But I had also been spending all this time exploring kind of little pockets of urban wilderness with my son and in particular, this stretch of the river that's down here that we'll go see here in a minute river that's down here, that we'll we'll go see here in a minute and, um, I wanted to see if there was a way to kind of find a way to live in a pocket of urban wilderness.
Christopher:So I came over here looking at these, this little stretch this is, we're on a little three block long street that's a vestigial remnant of an old course of the road out of town and you and I are standing here looking down at where this two different streets dead end, at the loading dock of a door factory. But in fact there's another gate down here at the end and once, uh, that gate was a road that led down to an old ferry landing down within what's now the woods and, you know, evidencing the way in which kind of our land uses sort of come and go right yeah, as times change, as economics change, and so I came over here looking for, like, is there a way to live in a spot like that?
Christopher:and there are a lot of these little pockets of uh residential, uh lots that were left on what had, over the course of the last century, mostly converted into an industrial corridor. Right, so this had been 150 years ago as a country road along the river traveling east out of austin toward the you know cities closer to the east bass, drop, houston, etc. And so this was, as a consequence of kind of Jim Crow down zoning, this neighborhood was where a lot of the industrial land uses were, but there were still these little pockets of empty lots and houses, and so I looked at one of these houses but it was like it's too big, I can't afford it. And they had this uh little empty lot for sale, kind of next door to this little rental house they had and, um, which is now owned by another couple, but at the time it was a rental and and it was a sort of unremarkable place by kind of conventional standards of, you know, home buying or looking for a place to live, and it was pretty much as it is now. It had this.
Christopher:Uh, you know you have this chain link gate kind of classic industrial fencing material with barbed wire across the top. At the time there was barbed wire all the way down. You can see more here and it was, I don't know, around the same time of year that I looked at it. I think it was like early April. So it's just as the. You know, grasses are starting to come up. You have the winter grasses have come up earlier. A lot of those winter grasses are invasive, but then you get the. The native flowers come up, like these spiderwort here, which are a kind of shade friendly native plant that really loves um or that I should say does well in abused soils.
AJ:Yeah, it's a really powerfully phytoremediative plant it reminds me actually how you said at one stage the native flowers haven't given up.
Christopher:There's a little instance yeah, and here this is. Uh, this is Passiflora here coming up, Passionvine, which you know has this. It's so named because this elaborate flower was used to teach the 12 stations of the cross, Is that?
AJ:right.
Christopher:Because it has this elaborate kind of geometric structure. So the passion, right, yeah right. And the plant, that's a flower. It looks like something that some art director for a science fiction movie would come up with. It's like the alien plant. But anyway, so, on this lot, when you kind of came through the front gate plant in my face, um, you know, it was just sort of grass basically and um, uh, you know the sort of hallmark things of an empty lot. But there was this sign here that I think I still have. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, here it is, let me get this out, let me get this from under here. Pardon my Well, it's buried under there.
AJ:I'm not going to get it out right now, but it marked a petroleum pipeline. I can show you another.
Christopher:I'll show you another sign. We have a similar version of the sign down here, that pipeline came straight through the middle. Yeah, so this lot was um empty the, the. There's always a reason. The empty lots are empty right. In this case it was because it had been, um, uh, it was the site of a, an old petroleum pipeline down the street here and it's still marked in the street. It's still in the street buried, and about six blocks to the north here there used to be an above ground petroleum storage tank farm.
Christopher:That was people figured out in the early 90s, was not been not been well maintained, and it was like leaching benzene into the groundwater and killing the neighbors, and so a group of folks who became friends of mine uh, there's a local environmental justice activist named susana almansa and she and, uh, her and a group of colleagues took on these six major oil companies that owned this site and managed to shut the tank farm down and got it and so this petroleum pipeline was abandoned in place and so this had become basically an empty lot that had this old pipeline running through it but there was no active use and it was basically a dump site and people would come and, you know, kind of dump their trash, and I can show you some of that.
Christopher:And so as you walked back in the lot you would see, you know, kind of like the gnarly old mesquite tree here, which is a plant that's and this is a younger mesquite that we've grown since then, and the mesquite is a really kind of prototypical Texas or southwestern plant. It has these spikes that can like puncture a car tire, basically.
Christopher:Oh yeah and they do really well, and dry climates and in kind of harsh soils. They're not really. They wouldn't really have predominated here. You know, at the time of settlement, when Anglo American settlers first showed up, it would have been more like oak trees and the hackberries and cottonwoods and things like that, sycamores. But these do well in disturbed sites too.
Christopher:So where you've had a lot of trash dumping and as the climate is changing, they thrive more and they're an interesting plant, because one of the things you notice is, like you know where's, a lot of plants have native life that comes around to, you know, enjoy the bounty of whatever sustenance they might provide it right, in order to, you know, fulfill their own reproductive needs as a species. The only animals I've seen coming around to eat the mesquite pods which in the summer, they grow, these big, beautiful pods there's probably some still on the floor here. They look almost like pea pods, right and the only animals that come around to eat them are these monk parakeets, which are an exotic species from Argentina, the same place that Augustina's family came from, that supposedly are like the descendants of escaped pets, whether that's an urban legend or not I don't know, but which is funny.
Christopher:So it's only this invasive species that comes around and they like fill the tree up. They're chattering like crazy parakeets and they're like ripping them open and tossing them like empty beer cans. You might you know, some kid might toss to the side of the road. Right, they the plant. As I did a little more research and became more and more enamored with their hardiness and with the kind of weird beauty like this one. This one is about 70 years old and it's all kind of bent you can see all the places where it lost branches over the years to weather and human abuse and whatnot and the grace it attains as it matures and sort of figures out a way to survive. The beauty of this bright green, of the early growth of leaves on the tree here at the beginning of the summer season or spring season.
Christopher:Um, these plants are co-evolved to be eaten by the megafauna that once walked this landscape right, yes and so whose extinctions coincided with the arrival of humans onto the north american continent yes, I mean our continent right, you know, and you're like well, and here they're like oh, we can only prove correlation yeah, causation, but you know when, you know how we roll right, you know, you can just imagine, right well, I mean it's like in the, you know the south, like in the islands of the pacific, there were, like there's a more recent version, that which is where we know what happened.
Christopher:Because it was all these flightless birds, right yeah, they were just there living without other predators, right yeah, and we showed up and you could just walk, walk up and bonk them on the head, right.
AJ:And take their flesh and take their nice big eggs and whatever.
Christopher:And I guess some have survived, right? Yeah, a few of those species, but a lot of them were extinct, which were, of course, basically all of those birds were descendants of dinosaurs that were sort of otherwise extinct. Birds were descendants of dinosaurs that were sort of otherwise extinct. So, as the Austin-based paleontologist Tim Rowe once said in a lecture I saw he explained that whole story, how they had figured out the connection between contemporary birds and prehistoric dinosaurs by looking at using magnetic resonance imaging to do x-rays of these fossilized skeletons and see how similar they were to avian skeletons.
Christopher:And then he realized, as he was doing all this work, that the dinosaurs didn't actually go extinct, but they will now in our lifetimes. Yeah Right, ouch.
Christopher:So, anyway, so yeah. So here's the mesquite tree. That is a reminder of the deep past, and it's also one of the things I learned is that the pods were used by the native peoples of these regions to make a meal you know to like grind into a really hearty meal. There you go, which if you've got some time on your hands, you might do anyway. So, circling back to your actual question um what this was like. So there was right here, at the top of these stairs, there was a um so we're coming back.
AJ:Is this sort of the back end of the property already, or does it go on a fair bit?
Christopher:oh, sure, yeah, it goes back. I mean, we're on a kind of like an urban acre here, so. So here's one of these signs right here. So this is kind of one of the rusted old ones.
AJ:There we go. There's my title image.
Christopher:Yeah, so this is warning petroleum pipeline before excavating or an emergency call collect to the Texas Pipeline Company, which was a subsidiary of Texaco, which is now owned by Chevron. And I got just got bitten by an ant for picking up their plate. So, yeah, there was this big. So right here there was a steel box like six foot by six foot in the ground and, um, that had a big like wheel in the ground and it was a, an access valve to access the pipeline, but it it looked like a portal like I don't know if you ever saw that television show lost. Where they were these people?
Christopher:like on a this magical mystery island where their plane has crashed and they would find these hatches in the ground that would actually have some secret, you know, the secret laboratory of some lost civilization. So it was kind of like that.
AJ:So am I getting the sense through that of why you would choose a place that's got a petroleum pipe through?
Christopher:it. There's a fascination. I mean that idea of that steel box. It's sort of like it resonates with the idea of a portal.
AJ:Yeah.
Christopher:You know, an idea that's recurrent in fantasy literature, especially juvenile fantasy literature, literature for children.
Christopher:So the idea that if you look around you might find a magical door that will open up a gateway into some other, more interesting reality than the one we happen to be occupying.
Christopher:And I think that idea maybe matured a little bit and evolved a little bit was part of what was driving me to spend so much of my time initially just looking for things to do with my then young son, and then kind of on my own, looking for things to do with my so-called free time that were more authentically meaningful, was to find like gateways out of the kind of simulation of reality that we live in and urbanized contemporary working and domestic lives right, and trying to find a way into something more real.
Christopher:And of course the way to do that is to get sort of closer to nature, to use a corny phrase.
Christopher:But what was interesting to me was to do that, undertake that effort to get closer to nature, not by doing what I think, especially in in the american context, is the prevailing notion that you need to get in the car and drive off to some national park that has been, or state park that has been designated as the official place where you can go experience nature and uh, but instead to kind of look at the way nature is manifest all around us in the interstices of the city. And so I had been finding those kinds of places, and so this was an effort to see if I could go find a spot in one of those kinds of places where you could live and then, while living there, on the one hand, you know, remembering and accepting the authentic legacy of industrial abuse, while at the same time trying to like, harmonize with this natural context and maybe undertake an effort to generate a kind of surplus of biodiversity in what had been a zone of erasure.
AJ:Yeah, I do want to recall a phrase you said in your book. It was your sci-fi Walden on the Colorado.
Christopher:Yeah, that's kind of what this ended up being. Yeah.
AJ:And so when are we talking that you first came across it.
Christopher:That was in 2009, yeah, in the spring of 2009.
Christopher:So it was kind of the peak of the financial crisis here in the US, and so the real estate economy was really messed up and it was a challenging environment in which to do a project like this.
Christopher:But it was also a time when there were glimmers of possibility. You know, there was this sort of sense that, oh, maybe, you know, I think I think we had gone through the period in which the you know Soviet Union collapsed 10 years earlier and or 20 years earlier, and the ideas of you know those kinds of regimes were somewhat discredited. And then the other utopian version of the future, the one that was embodied in neoclassical economics, was sort of similarly discredited by the financial crisis right that had really dominated since that end of history moment 20 years earlier, and so that opened up, I think, interesting kinds of ideas that like, oh, there's something new that's going to be born from this. That has not happened yet, but I feel like it's kind of still been trying to happen since then and this is, and I suppose, in a way the project of this house and of this book.
Christopher:It's sort of my effort to, kind of like, do some personal experiments and sort of trying to find ways forward which you know I've done in fiction as a science fiction writer, trying to imagine more hopeful futures, which usually starts from confronting and dialing up the mixture on the darkest things about the present right. But I don't know, I think projects like this, where you can see I mean if we're just quiet for a minute I mean you can hear. You can hear the highway right, yep, you can hear people revving up their engines as they get on the on-ramp and get ready to embrace internal combustion speed and its joys. The last of the V8 interceptors maybe, to paraphrase Mad Max, I like that.
AJ:You did that, by the way, because that obviously being an Australian reference and we've been to where they filmed it too, but more and more, including when I went back to Guatemala. This is a bigger story I'll share on the podcast. It's a very current metaphor. It almost looks like the end stages of this model of development before the new comes, or while the new comes ends up here in what hitcote williams called autogeddon. We still give so much to the car, like the expansion of those highways as we've come across. The states still got, we haven't got the memo yet it's, it's still full throttle no, especially in that idea.
Christopher:I mean listen. So we're standing here. You can see, on this side, there's this major road right here running down here. So, and we're two miles from interstate 35, which is a super highway. You know an american autobahn the most. You know, the most successfully, uh, the most successful of all of the technologies we captured from the Nazis is Hitler's idea of a highway which now dominates the American landscape, the highway with no stops.
AJ:You just go.
Christopher:We do have speed limits but anyway. So that highway, it follows an ancient migratory pathway, basically from Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, mexico, north to Duluth, minnesota, up through, you know, oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri, iowa and Minnesota, and so it's a major connection between Mexico and Canada and the heartland of the US. So it's a major, you know, infrastructure corridor following, you know, a route that's still traveled by birds and migratory mammals, to the extent they're left and like migrating monarch butterflies and whatever.
AJ:Yeah.
Christopher:So they want to expand it. They're really they're like hooked on expanding it even though it's just constantly jammed up, it's just hated by everybody locally in the community. So here in austin they want to expand it where it passes through downtown um and they can't figure out what to do with all the additional runoff water they're going to generate from that, you know.
Christopher:God forbid they would figure out some way to actually put it to use, um, as opposed to just treating it like waste yeah, yeah and so they're gonna, and they can't dump it into the river, where it flows through downtown and is really a lake, because they'd have a clean water act violation, it appears because, it's already so dirty.
Christopher:Um, so here we have behind us the basically the cleanest urban river in te Texas, the only urban river that qualifies as a pristine waterway based on the low levels of phosphorus in it, which is almost half by accident, half on purpose. So they're going to construct a gigantic tunnel 100 feet under this street, over here, to pump all that water down to here, and then they're going to make a big pumping station where all they're going to do to treat the water before they dump it in the original idea was just like a mesh filter to catch, you know large objects and then just dump this untreated water into the cleanest river in the state, all to make room for, you know, eight more lanes of cars and trucks to. You know, damn me, whether the you know failure of these free trade agreements will have any will impede that in any way.
AJ:Well, this is where it gets really interesting, isn't it? The contradictory forces and paradoxical forces. We'll see. But I don't want to brush over either the personal context that you came to this in. So that was sort of some of the social economic context. But reading your book it sounds like there was a serious wounding, a separation from marriage, a lovely connection with your young son through this journey.
Christopher:But I'm expecting that you were feeling it was a pretty hard time, yeah, a challenging time. I had gone through the failure of marriage and I was dealing with a lot of really stressful things in my professional life as a lawyer, like really challenging, like tremendous kind of pressure, being mid-career and you know being. You know I worked as a business lawyer in the technology industry and so you do that. You're kind of like a butler to techno capitalism and you know you're kind of like you. You're like uh, navigating really complex things in order to try to help rich people get richer. It's a very fulfilling thing, um and um and so uh.
Christopher:So, yeah, I was like you know you're, if you're living in the heart of the rat race, it's like getting out and getting away from, yeah, the pressures that exist within that sort of bubble of unreality is really the essential thing to do.
Christopher:And, yeah, and the other things in life right to do, and um, yeah, and the other things in life right and so um, you can find in, even in these, maybe even more so in these funny little pockets of urban nature, moments of solace and of uh perspective on the how sort of small your own moments of self-absorption really are, in the grand scheme of things, If you're looking, you know, as so many of our kind of sacred and philosophical traditions teach us, to find ways to sort of get beyond the idea of the self and the sort of navel-gazing preoccupations of you know uh, kind of contemporary, you know uh, civilized human culture. It's a very good way to do it, and so I had found yeah, I, I kind of found my way over here by, you know, finding ways to get lost in the city and then finding out that by doing so I had kind of found maybe my true home, as it were yeah, beautiful.
AJ:I wonder, as you reflect back on what you know of your ancestry, even upbringing are there threads to where you've ended up?
Christopher:yeah, I mean, um, I mean it kind of in both threads of my you know parentage. I mean, um, my father's family were all kind of you know classic american pioneers. They came over from ireland in the 1750s as supposedly protestants escaping catholic persecution and settled in maryland and then went to ohio and then went to iowa and they would go there and they would go to the edge of the world and then start newspapers, right, that was kind of their stick and every next generation would go buy a paper in a smaller town or whatever, um and uh.
Christopher:And then my mother's family they were my mother's from germany and they were all basically after a couple generations back. They were foresters and then painters, a lot of landscape painters. So yeah, I suppose there's some of that and it's funny. I went to this like family reunion of my mother's family of one particular branch, and this was this particular family reunion was meeting at this place, that where my great grandparents lived in, uh, uh, in the Spreewald region of southeastern Berlin and so it's sort of like a riparian zone along the river Spree, and they had this house where my great grandparents.
Christopher:He was a, they were artists from Berlin and they were looking for how to make, you know, pay the bills after world war one and all of the, the uh, economic realities that followed.
Christopher:So they started this little art school in a tiny town in in the spray vault, and I got to see this little place and this house had been built in 750 ad and it looked and it had the same vibe as this place I mean not in the same kind of like living in nature thing, in the same way that all of the houses I was around as a kid, of all of my mom's family, they all had that kind of way of like partly rewilding the kind of domestic reality around them. So and so as a way to live I think it's kind of hard to beat. There's the privilege of being able to have a single family home. That sort of, you know, is sort of dominant with that kind of mode, with a lot of these green roof projects like we have. It often presupposes that you're going to have that ability. But I started originally doing this just with a you know like balcony of an apartment building you know downtown.
AJ:You did.
Christopher:And I do a lot of work with kind of like guerrilla rewilding projects and brownfields and stuff around here, so there are a lot of different ways to access that.
AJ:And it's just tremendously enjoyable.
Christopher:Here comes my daughter. Hey, what did you make? Make king cakes. You're making keychains. Okay, cool, all right, we're gonna walk down around the back here. You want to walk down to the river?
AJ:Let's do that before we leave here, though, mm-hmm describe, had this Speaking of roof garden.
Christopher:Yeah, what we're seeing, it's a, it's an awesome structure yeah, so to describe the house, uh, the house is built basically on the axis where the petroleum pipeline was when, as we found it, and this entryway up top is where, as I mentioned, that valve box was. And so, uh, we had to work with the oil company to uh get the pipeline out, which was easier than you might imagine. They're happy to have you pay them to remove their environmental liability from your property. Uh, and I met these young architects, toma bercy, uh, who's a belgian who moved over here in high school, funnily like the son of an expat french oil exec, right or belgian oil exec, rather sorry.
Christopher:And um, and then his partner, calvin chen, uh, who's from taiwan and australia originally, and um, they were young and sort of got the kind of crazy idea of like how do you build a house that sort of like, how do you build a house that sort of embodies that idea of remembering the past industrial uses of the past, while at the same time trying to rewild and harmonize with the natural world and of you know what the natural bounty of the place could be.
Christopher:And so they essentially had this idea of like as if you've taken kind of a godhand scalpel to kind of remove that industrial uh cancer from the site and then, uh, kind of fold up the uh, blackland prairie that once was the dominant ecosystem that ran from dallas, san Antonio, 99% of which has been brought under pavement or plow.
Christopher:And then Augustina had a colleague at the time, john Hart Asher, who worked at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center here with a British ecologist named Mark Simmons, who sadly we lost to cancer a few years ago, and they had figured out how do you design green roofs that can survive in the harsh, hot, dry climate of Texas. And the idea was basically well, you put in place the biodiverse plants of the native ecosystems and, lo and behold, you have this bright green roof that's green and lush all summer long that we hardly ever put a drop of water on wow and the trick really is about the growing medium, which is only eight inches deep, which is challenging for, especially for these like prairie grasses and whatnot that tend to root very, very deeply right.
Christopher:The roots tend to be deeper than the plant right so they figured out a way to send a growing medium that, and here we're, I don't know 14 years into having this here and we've never put any new medium down. It's just sort of self-regenerating.
Christopher:It's pretty astonishing that is amazing so the house kind of the house is like almost invisible from the street. We've seen we just recently built a guest house which makes it more evident to people like oh, this is a home site. But for a long time it was such that people would just like delivery persons would come and they wouldn't even perceive that there's a house here, because it's so kind of hides in the landscape. It's a sort of an idea of house that supplicates itself to landscape, if you will, as opposed to the other way around, but then it opens up to the river as we come around and watch your step is this a, a shrine or altar of some kind?
Christopher:this is almost like kind of it's a grotto an outdoor fireplace we made from all of the trash that had been dumped on the site and we made it for our wedding oh yes, what you have for this anthill here and so, if you, kind of come up and look, we have all of this concrete debris that was dumped here over the years.
Christopher:You can see, guys, when people would come just bring like dump trucks full of demolition debris right and just dump it here at this empty lot at the edge of town, rather than driving to some place where you had to pay or drive further. Here's another one of those pipeline sites and so yeah, you see, and so like, here's an old curb cut that augustina had the idea to turn into a bench. You know big chunks of old road base, some you know cement staircase, so you know an entire chimney stack buried in the ground. Here's a old general motors engine head. You know, um, speaking of the last of the v8 interceptors, that's a v8 um and uh I used to have one too, by the way I aspire to all that yeah but yeah it actually.
AJ:It looks so beautiful, though it's not hodgepodge, is it?
Christopher:it's well and so, and then I had this memory of like we had a little outdoor fireplace, kind of like this, when I was a kid, so a lot smaller, not so much my memory, but in reality probably. And then, um, I had this postcard of a grotto in some seminary in Missouri. I collect, like weird, you know, antique postcards or vintage postcards, more like 20th century not really antique and which, in turn, was based on a grotto somewhere in Europe. Right, and so I found these guys I knew who were like hanging out on the street on friday afternoons drinking beer after work. That were um masons, uh, who had lost their business during the financial crisis. There you go, they were working in the county housing authority across the street, and so they. I tried to move all these blocks myself with my son.
AJ:I realized I needed help, and so these guys helped and they kind of really got it, and so we collaboratively like, built this thing over a summer, um well, you know, it's almost exactly as I recall the old image of where my dad went to boarding school at St Mary's Mount. It's called in the outside, perth, and there's an old photo of all the students in front of a structure that's very much like this, though without the urban industrial integration.
Christopher:Yeah, but yeah, I think there are these grottos which are kind of shrines that are made in a lot of Catholic and Anglican places that are very similar.
Christopher:So here you see we've got, and all these kind of steps down to the woods are the same thing, and here the all the spider words coming up a little more robustly, and this is all we're in soil that's all mixed with trash in here, and you can. You can no longer really see it because the foliage has come up so robustly. In the past couple of weeks We've had good rain, but you get the idea, and so if we come around you'll see more.
AJ:There are beautiful sounds in here.
Christopher:Yeah, and so as you transition out of the city and into the woods and we're just walking, you know a few feet, but you experience how, how rapidly the context changes, right, yeah and um, we're leaving kind of what was at one point prairie and is now just industrial zone, down into the riparian forest, kind of the floodplain of the river. And if we look down here, we're up at the base of a bluff, kind of coming down a path, and you can see how it suddenly flattens out and that's really part of the river, that's part of the path of the river and the river the river, I think, used to course closer to here and that that urban river is really incredibly precious habitat.
Christopher:yeah, you know, in all cities have. I mean, that's kind of, the wildest spots of most cities are where the watershed is, you know? Yes, all right, I guess the dogs are going to come with us. So come on Want the gate shut, it's fine. We can just leave it, since the dogs are. A tree fell on it, so it's not last season. It's not really shutting all the way.
AJ:It's amazing to think that this also brought about meeting Agustina. Yeah, Serendipitous encounters you've had on the journey really stand out Meeting Agustina, meeting as a designer and then helping you with all that kit since.
Christopher:She had a studio down the street and we were introduced by the architects with the view to possibly collaborating on some aspects of what was in the plan, and then we just kind of started a conversation that led to talking about a lot of other things.
AJ:And I think too about your chance meeting with Chance yeah, yeah, yeah, right on with chance that was earlier.
Christopher:Yeah, that was crazy, yeah, um, yeah, I met this uh subaru salesman who had this magical. I was sitting here waiting for him to like you know the sort of the drama of um uh, having him um go talk to his manager to see what he could do on the price for whatever. So I'm sitting there in his little cubicle and looking at, uh, this aquarium he had on his desk. That was like an ecosystem in a bottle and I was just entranced by it. So then I asked him about it.
Christopher:When he came back, it's like yeah, I don't care, I don't know whatever about the car, but what's this? What he's like explaining, he's like. And then he's like yeah, well, I mean, I'm really a tracker. You know, I'm not really a subaru salesman, I'm really a tracker. And so, um, I convinced him to. He didn't take a lot of persuading. He came and uh did a little training session for our um cub scout troop at the time with the young kids, and then he and I spent some time together and I learned a lot about kind of how to read the stories of what recently transpired in the land around you, right.
AJ:Yeah, you called it time travel and it reminded me of the songlines back home, with the aboriginal folk there as well. Just that, the layering of story and landscape, and to be able to read that, yeah, and and perceive the gifts from the land and ancestors and so forth yeah, I mean, it's sort of surprisingly easy.
Christopher:You learn these things over time and it's just kind of like paying attention in the way you know of like an 18th century naturalist, where they didn't have anybody to know books to tell them what was going on. Um, or you know certainly the, you know people who had lived on this land for you know millennia right, yeah who kind of knew it not through book learning but through uh experience and the experience of the people that they grew up with. Right that was shared with them right for a long time.
Christopher:So like here we're standing here. You can see in the ground beneath your feet. This is where the armadillos were out in the night digging around for tasty grubs in the nice wet soil I've only seen the leftover shells of dead ones so far oh, they're around. They're sort of predominantly nocturnal, especially in the warmer months. In the colder seasons they come out some during the daytime.
AJ:I was curious to read too about in all your experiments about supplicant living, as you said, and experimenting with permeable boundaries between the inside and the outside, and I was so related to that with the way we've tried to set up back home too, but with some of the challenges that come along with that creatures that end up in your house or all over it that you don't necessarily want around.
Christopher:And so in that sense I was really drawn to the story of the. Was it the millipedes that were just everywhere? Yeah, well, we had, yeah, the green roof. There's this species of, yeah, of it's I guess it's like an arthropod, not an insect. Um, the species of millipede that lives here and, you know, lives off the uh, the leaf litter Mostly eats the leaf litter in the soil, whatever's in the leaf litter, and they like to be in the dark and they like to stay dry.
Christopher:And so a green roof that's trying to pretend to be a prairie will attract a lot of, will generate a lot of leaf litter. Attract a lot of leaf, will generate a lot of leaf litter. So we found early on in the house that when we had really intensely rainy seasons, the millipedes would start trying to come into the house to seek shelter. Yeah, and so we had to kind of confront, like horror movie quantities of creepy crawlies on the floor when you would get up at the in the night and figure out how to deal with it without just like chemical bombing the house, right, well, exactly, and so, and we figured it out well, I mean after, like vacuuming them up with a shop vac, and it was just a matter of like oh.
Christopher:Like kind of altered the ecology a little bit, but, you know, get rid of some of the leaf litter and figure out how to reinforce the transoms and figure out how to deal with the drainage better, and I don't know, there's usually a solution like that, uh, if you're thoughtful about it and have a little bit of patience. So so here, uh, anthony, we're walking up onto the banks of the colorado river here. Yeah, and this is kind of what first drew me to this place. This is a sort of I first saw this on a bridge, like driving to the airport. They had moved the airport from its original location, kind of in the north central part of Austin, to an old Air force base that we were talking about the end of history earlier.
Christopher:So this was an air force base that had closed after the end of the cold war, and so in 1999 they opened the new, glamorous new airport and I would be driving to go on a little you know day business trip or whatever overnight, and I'd drive over this old bridge that went over the river and look down and you just kind of get this glimpse of what looked like some 19th century landscape painting or something like in the middle of the city and um, and in time I was like, well, maybe I will go down in there and investigate it in person.
Christopher:And so my son and I figured out how to find a way to get down in here with our canoe. When we paddled up this way and it was talk about time travel, yeah, it was really remarkable. And so you come down here, here we are. The blue bonnets have all just popped here, as you can see, this kind of the state flower of texas, a beautiful wildflower, a lupine that's native to this region, that does well in these kinds of sandy soils, like you have on the banks of a river.
Christopher:And so I started exploring down here. I'd bring my canoe down here and come around and paddle up and, you know, just sort of enjoy the refuge that is provided in the middle of the city. And I thought, in my sort of naively romantic framing, to which maybe I'm always prone, I was like, oh, I found an intact remnant of what this is, a place that escaped the erasure that comes with colonization and settlement and industrialization and urbanization, because surely that's the only way that all this wild green could be around you. But then I learned, I started looking at the old topographical maps and you could see that as recently as like the 1970s, this had all been an active industrial site. These were like gravel pits.
AJ:Yeah, amazing, you said, rachel Carson wrote this up partly.
Christopher:Well, yeah, this stretch of the river. Yeah, in the 60s there was a DDT plant right up here, a few blocks away, and they would just keep their dry powders for their chemical mixtures out in the yard of the job site. And there was a big rain and it all went into the river and killed all the fish for 100 miles.
AJ:So this is a return from neglect.
Christopher:Yeah, this is just nature restoring itself. So the municipal government pushed the mineral extraction land uses further east and basically a lot of these lands became disused. Some of them were acquired by the city. This is a big municipal park now, across the river and what had been ranch land 40 years ago and down here begins a wildlife sanctuary made from an old, basically dump site. And so, yeah, this is just, you know, a sterling example of the resilience, the resilient way in which wild nature is able to kind of recover if kind of left to its own. Now that story is more complicated than some sort of natural restoration of eden because, um, the sort of plants that are native here, uh, a lot of them are starting to struggle with the kind of very different climate we have than what they evolved for and so you see that in some of these trees, like, like I noticed we have a couple of black walnut trees in our yard that are a native tree to this region but they don't seem to be handling the hot summer as well anymore.
Christopher:And in these wetlands a lot of these like invasive Asian species have pretty aggressively naturalized into the landscape and like what we call elephant.
Christopher:here I don't know the species name, it's the, it's the plant from which taro root comes which is a popular, like you know, vegan protein alternative and that grows really thick down in here, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It's sort of like oh, it's like maybe that's and they're very phytoremediative plants. You have to like be careful eating them, because if they're growing in a place like this, you want to check to make sure they're not totally full of heavy metals.
AJ:Yeah, I liked how you referenced eugenics.
Christopher:Yeah, that idea of who determines what's native and invasive?
Christopher:and these kinds of rigorous. I'm very wary of those sort of rigorous taxonomies, uh, that are sort of temporally frozen, that are often caught up with the guilt of colonizers of, like you know, yeah, we're going to bring back the things we exterminated and erased and, um, you know, the next nature, the future is going to be a different one than the past, and so we can. You know, it's like I put a blackland prairie on my roof and then we realize like, oh, it's not, it doesn't really want to be a prairie, it wants to be a forest. Right, and you come down here and you see how, um, yeah, things like the flourishing of the spiderwort, which is a function of the soil, being kind of damaged, right, it's sort of mildly contaminated, and so these plants that do well with cleaning up the soil sort of take over and maybe in time they will sort of move on.
AJ:Let's retrieve this puppy here so she doesn't get lost.
Christopher:Come on, baby, let's go. Go back, maybe the way we came or we lost. Come on, baby, let's go.
AJ:Go back, maybe the way we came or we can go in the deep woods whatever you want. Oh well, if we go through the deep woods, who's going to say no to that?
Christopher:Yeah, all right, we'll go up this way. I just want to carry this puppy. Let me know if she interferes with the sound. Here's kind of a rare. This is a pink blue bonnet. Oh, this is a pink blue bonnet. Oh yeah, sort of uh uh, it's like finding somebody with a strange color of eyes.
AJ:They're very uncommon. Yeah, so I'm conscious too that you you've got involved with community campaigns with that friend you mentioned earlier, susannah, as well. Yeah, and because with? Because, with this wave of the return of industrial systems in their current guise tall and skinnies was how they were referred to in Nashville by some people there who were having these new developments come- in yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Christopher:Super talls is what they call them in Manhattan. There you go.
AJ:And everything that comes with that the water plan off, the expanded interstate and things like that. How do you sit with that? I mean, we relate to it too. It's happening back home as well. We're on a beautiful stretch of coast, but we're we're deemed iconic now and and due for development. How do you sit with that? And I mean, you're obviously trying to get involved in protecting places. What's your approach and how do you feel about your next bunch of years in that context?
Christopher:Well, you know, I mean if you believe the World Wildlife Fund. You know, in their latest Living Planet report, the vertebrate wildlife population of the planet has plummeted by an astonishing 73% since 1970, when I was a little kid In their lifetime, yeah.
Christopher:And you know, when that came out in the fall, I noticed how a lot of at least in the US a lot of the press coverage focused on questioning you know how accurate those numbers are, and my reaction was kind of like, well, okay, what if it's half that? Yeah, well, that's right, it's only 45% of the vertebrate wildlife population has gone in our life. You know, it's like, um, and it's it's speaking to something, a sort of truth. I think we all know intuitively, uh, about how severe the biodiversity crisis is and it's something that, um, we haven't talked as much. It's kind of a parallel crisis, with global warming and the climate crisis.
Christopher:They're sort of coupled crises, and so to me, I'm really interested in engaging with that aspect of the crisis, with that biodiversity crisis, and confronting the extent to which that erosion of biodiversity is happening, kind of like one lot at a time, right, one subdivision at a time, as the human population just continues to sort of sprawl across the planet, continues to sort of sprawl across the planet and you know, I think it's, you know, more than half the planet probably. You know, the substantial majority of the landmass of the planet has like direct reflections of human development and use, and so engaging with these kinds of projects to sort of try to get people to figure out that sort of human development doesn't have to come at the expense of biodiversity, that you can maintain the two. You know, in the United Kingdom they just enacted laws, final rules, last year under the conservative government, right before the elections, to require that all major new real estate developments demonstrate a 10 percent net gain in biodiversity after completion of the project. And I think there's some ways you can do.
Christopher:you know, buy credits to do that someplace else, not on your own project, whatever, right, but um, but that kind of thinking is, you know, sort of fundamental.
Christopher:So we're advocating for a lot of those kinds of things here.
Christopher:It's sort of you know, doing the best you can, working with developers and local governments to try to set aside big chunks of lands, like we have here, like the one we're standing in, but also in the more marginal spaces, to try to figure out how to maintain something.
Christopher:So, just down river from us, in the heart of covid, the fellow people know as Elon Musk, through his biggest company, tesla, built a new factory that's the second largest structure by volume in North America Right on this same beautiful river, beautiful river, and so we were able to even work with them and bring them to the table to, like, invest in restoring the riparian portion of that huge site. And, uh, and they did it and they followed through on it after some public pressure. Right, okay, um, maybe more successful than you know, getting them to attend to, say, their labor practices or the uh, some of the other you know safety practices or god forbid what kind of wastewater they put in you know, let's just go back the way we came so that the small dog will all right get too lost or we see a deer and we'll be so the um.
AJ:Then there's a sort of a bigger issue that you've come to and partly with your legal hat on, hey in the book around seeing the world through the prism of property. It was such a powerful part.
Christopher:Yeah, I mean, yeah, as a lawyer, you know you're really in, certainly in the US or in any other. You know, common law jurisdiction that is descended from the English and British system, property rights are. It's really the first thing you learn, it's like the most fundamental thing you learn. And there's kind of all these techniques of kind of brainwashing, essentially that you go through right at the beginning of law school of like creating weird little laboratory experiments on paper to make you deeply internalize the way in which we think about how we take the world around us, the world we find the thing we call the natural world and convert it into extensions of us. Right, these ideas that, if I I mean like the very idea that I have ownership of this puppy, right In a way, you know, and people talk now like, well, I adopted it, you know, but in the eyes of the law you own it the animal is a chattel. Right, it has no rights other than such as we've, you know, deemed it appropriate to give it. And then, certainly, the land, right, I mean right now.
Christopher:One of the things I love about this place is where we're standing right now, here on the banks of the river is land that once was um at the edges of private property, but it's basically where the river used to run when they originally platted out the private property parcels of what became the state of Texas. And so when the river moved and left land where it had been, it became land that no one owned it, sort of accreted public land, and so it's kind of like this vestigial, accidental commons, and so the idea of walking around in a space like that. It's land nobody owns. It's in the heart of the fastest growing city in America, which is kind of like one of the main centers of techno-capitalism. It's a pretty groovy thing, it sure is.
AJ:It's really that relationship with land. That's the ultimate task in the end that you're writing about too, wow look at that. That's beautiful, great blue heron wow, big and well, yeah, there's a bunch of active nests down here.
Christopher:Yeah, I mean, that's a bird that was driven to the brink of extinction really 150 years ago. Yeah, people love the feathers.
AJ:This is laden with possibility, isn't it?
Christopher:and and life yeah, well, and it just shows you how much of like the world could be like this exactly. It's just like you can do that. I mean, there's like people are building new tall and skinnies right nearby here, right, and we just sort of work with the city and the developers to try to keep them back enough to maintain some of this interstitial habitat and to figure out kinds of terms of coexistence, and yeah, and it's, I think you know, reasonably successful. It's not utopia, right, yeah Right, but I just I think that's kind of successful. It's not utopia, right, yeah, right, but I just I think that's kind of. We're kind of beyond that point right now, right.
AJ:Exactly, and Well, that's the point, though we're beyond that point yet. This can still happen.
Christopher:Well, and you're setting precedence for, you know, things people will benefit from in three generations or more, right, yeah, three generations or more, right, yeah, and um. And I think one of the things I love about, like what you were asking about, getting involved and you know, local development battles and kind of fighting for biodiversity on the you know, quarter acre at a time, you know, hectare at a time approach of these sort of urban development fights is that, or even just rewilding your own yard. These are all ways that you can have meaningful agency, actual agency, to achieve meaningful, if modestly scaled, change and preservation. You know, without waiting around for the big institutions we all hope will save us from a dismal future to do so, which they're not really going to do because they're totally invested in the status quo and the use of land as the basis from which we extract, you know, the surplus that is the embodiment of our wealth and, as a civilization, our ability to, you know, kind of survive and thrive in a way.
AJ:Right on.
Christopher:Here's a snowy egret.
AJ:Smaller bird, but beautifully snowy-colored.
Christopher:Yeah, flying up the river, if you look, anthony, if we go walk down here, you'll see A bloke in a hammock. Yeah, there's a dude in a hammock and a bike next to him. You can see there's a tree, there's a sycamore tree, which you can tell because it's white, and so if you look, you'll see these spots in the tree, up in the branches, these kind of brown discs, and those are nests of great blue herons they're like each about this big wow so, as we head back to the house and lot, I feel like the close to your book is where this should close to, in the amazing passages that were prompted by unwrapping the weather radio that used to be your dad's.
AJ:Yeah, right, yeah, of course he'd passed, so you'd received this old radio from him and it prompted a recognition of a connection that you'd shared, that you hadn't quite appreciated uh, yeah, well, I mean, my dad was um I talked about the long line of newspaper reporters, but he was not one, he was a dentist.
Christopher:So yeah, so my dad was one of these guys who in his retirement became totally obsessed with the weather and um and being like a weather watcher. And I remember the time thinking that was just kind of weird and a weird kind of a nerdy affectation of an older man, and but then in time I realized like that was his way he connected with nature the primary way, right, um and um, of being one of these kids. He'd sort of grown up in a small town in the midwest and you know he loved watching the big storms blow in and that was kind of like, you know it's enlivening and he could.
Christopher:He had living memory. I would be reading in books about these great like huge flyovers of migratory waterfowl that would kind of come through the Midwest on their way to the Dakotas and Canada up the Missouri River near where he lived. And the last really huge one was in the late 40s where there was like really icy winter conditions late in the season in Canada. So all these birds got stuck waiting around and foraging and he could remember hearing them at night. He couldn't sleep because they were so loud. This is like you know, millions and millions of ducks, right, but yeah, the. And then I so, yeah. So when he passed away, came home and I had this, what I thought was like a butterfly trying to get into the house and would like we have a lot of insects. They kind of like gather around the green roof and then they sort of settle on the glass windows because I think they sort of perceive that as a safer space. And so I had this moth it was. It was this butterfly I thought was a butterfly trying to get in and I sort of shoot it off and kept it from flying into the house and getting trapped where it would have no access to food. And then that same night I found it again at the door, trying to get it in at night, and I realized it was a moth. And then I texted it to my picture of it, to my nature nerd mother, and she's like, oh, that's a black witch. I was like what it kind of money. She's like it's a black witch. And so I look up the black witch butterfly, black witch moth and it's a see, here's this great blue ocean, new nest right there leading a nest right now.
Christopher:Yeah, the black witch is a moth that many cultures in the Western Hemisphere associate with death.
Christopher:It's like the Jamaicans call it the duppy bat, the Haitians call it the socio-noir, and it's like a spirit manifestation in folklore and it's associated with like a relative coming to say goodbye, and you know you just with like a relative coming to say goodbye and you know you just have like a you. You have the experience. And then you see this, what the stories are in the folklore, and it sort of shows you some of the ways in which, um, these uh, uh, uncanny interactions that happen in the natural world can give you access to meaning that you may be imposing upon it, but that helps you see the extent to which the world is full of things that can be explained by science but also understood by poets, right, and then, like, as we were leaving, uh, after his memorial service, we were driving through the like cornfields and there was a um, this is really cool, this new nest, see there's a mom in there um, we saw a juvenile bald eagle, uh, which was the same, which was a really strange looking bird, because they look.
Christopher:They're kind of-and-white spatter patterns in the juveniles, the brown looks almost black and they're just really far out. This looks like Jackson Pollock painted their feathers or something. So, yeah, I think life is full of those things and it's the same way in which you come down into a place like this and we're walking through this urban woodland that right now is full of fresh spring foliage, so it's sort of hiding the trash that's lurking here in the floodplain, that every time the river, you know, gets up over its banks, when it goes back down it leaves stuff we left outside behind, and sometimes those, like you know, human objects put into these natural contexts kind of can produce beautiful manifestations of the uncanny that can kind of help you think about the world differently. Here you can still see some sitting over there.
AJ:I love that interpretation. I want to bring up a particular frame. You also brought to bear at the end, and with reference to your dad too, that there's a in that sort of related everything we've said to this point. There's a shamanistic aspect that's not only available to our experience in the world right now, but to deny on all of us, you think, to our experience in the world right now but to deny on all of us.
Christopher:You think, yeah, I mean, I think that in the book Spell of the Sensuous David, I can't think of his name Abram.
Christopher:David Abram talks about, you know, going to study shaman with shamanic cultures, I think in Bali and then in Tibet, shamanic cultures and, and I think in Bali and and then in Tibet, and how he came to understand that the role of the shaman was just as a person who would live kind of in the border zone between the human settlement, the village, and the natural world and help mediate the community's relationship with the natural world and sort of maintain it in balance and almost through like weird sympathetic, magical modes of trying to maintain the balance of exchange, like, oh, we took from you this stuff, so we got to give this stuff back, right, the kind of literal balance in a way that really resonates with anybody you know. Like I mean, you think about like all of our human relationships and how you know all relationships are based on a kind of reciprocity of exchange, maybe if it's just exchange of affection, right, yeah, uh, but um, and that just is so intuitively true when you apply it to thinking about how our societies exist with the natural world that the idea of trying to adopt and implement a little bit of that shift in philosophy in one's own life is a pretty easy thing to do and it's sort of consonant with our own. You know teachings from our own. You know, uh, supposedly sacred texts, right, about ideas of stewardship, although even that idea of stewardship has a kind of it's sort of already wrapped up with an idea of dominion. When you talk about I'm the steward, it's like you know, you're the sheep, I'm the shepherd, right, you know that kind of thinking. I don't know.
Christopher:I think all of this is an, is an experiment in trying to implement some of those ideas in the fabric of everyday life, right, um, and then maybe take some of the fresh lessons from doing so and applying them on a larger scale, and the book on trying to kind of applying them on a larger scale. And in the book I'm trying to kind of share those ideas and experiences as a sort of a, not a manifesto or a manual per se, but maybe some notes of you know, lessons learned that others might be able to apply in their own way and their own lives.
AJ:You talk a lot, in that sense, about the path of healing land. Has this healing of self effect as well, and is that something that you know, 15, 16 years in you continue to experience?
Christopher:absolutely, yeah, I mean, I'm going to be out here weeding the roof some more today weeding the roof. I like that you know and um and that will heal you I mean it's, it's funny. Yeah, I mean like I grew up having to do a lot of yard work as a boy, right, and sort of like, first as the free labor supply for my father.
Christopher:And then as a, you know, not old enough to get a job, but young enough to need some extra money, or old enough to need some extra money, so mowing lawns and whatever.
Christopher:So that became like the thing I most disliked doing yeah, and, and you can, and you know the idea of like getting, your getting getting down on your knees to the land. That's kind of like the ultimate supplication in a way, a sort of indignity. You know, and our cultures treat that as the most degraded form of labor, of like getting down and working on the land. And there's a good reason, because, you know, if you read books like james scott's against the grain, oh, where he talks about how, you know, the earliest human sperm and human settlements were all about the discovery of grain agriculture and the generation of wealth that comes from the accumulated surplus of those crops and the systems of power and property that evolved to control it and to control access to it, so that these societies would have to enslave their neighbors to do the work to generate more of that surplus through agricultural labor.
AJ:And now applied through the property lens in urban landscapes.
Christopher:Yeah, totally exactly yeah and so you know, in the distance between that and sitting at a computer, generating bits of data for the company is not as far as we might like to think in my view. But when you undertake a kind of labor of tending to the life that lives off the land on terms of regeneration rather than extraction, right it becomes an immensely pleasurable activity. It's not like, you know, lying on a beach kind of pleasure, right, it's dirty, you get bitten by bugs, you might have a close encounter with a venomous snake. If you're here, a lot of the plants here are out to get you. They have thorns that will make you bleed and whatnot.
Christopher:But seeing the surplus of life around you and experiencing the like biodiverse energy of all this other life around you can really, you can just you can like literally feel it. It's really tangible, um, like physically tangible, sensorially tangible to all your senses, and like tangible, sensorially tangible to all your senses, and like existentially tangible. You can feel it in your soul. And people come over and visit our kooky little place here and, like you can see, like they just said, a lot of time people like walk in through the front gate and get kind of halfway back to where it sort of changes in this subtle way. It is almost like you've stepped through a portal and it brings out a different kind of sensibility and feeling in people in a way that I think is, yeah, something to be cultivated and to be shared full circle with the portal.
AJ:Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I could absolutely feel that too. Well, chris, as we get back to the house, I'm gonna ask you what music would we go out with? What?
Christopher:music do you go out with? And you asked me this before um I one of the things. I, my grandfather and my dad were both guitar players. My grandfather played the German lute, which is not really a lute, it's kind of basically a funny fake Renaissance instrument that's strung like a classical guitar. And then I started learning to play really only during COVID, but I really love Baroque guitar like.
Christopher:Bach and Weiss and people like that baroque guitar, like Bach and Weiss and people like that.
Christopher:Where there's this German music that sort of, I grew up hearing that. When I hear it now I can hear its connection to like the deep past and it often has both a sort of an elegiac quality but also a joy, a kind of a melancholy joy. That I think sort of an elegiac quality but also a joy, a kind of a melancholy joy that I think sort of tunes into this sort of feeling of places like this, well, and of occupation or maybe occupation is the right word of a sort of existence in kind of a long now, right In the way that you hear those renaissance pieces that precede the classical era and you can really hear the connection to early music and you can hear the connection to like improv, improvisational modes that preceded like the writing things, and here's how many of those pieces are like kind of like variations of the same tune, right, and so I don't know. So I think there's like I love those Sarabands of Bach for the guitar.
AJ:Beautiful. Do you play one of them?
Christopher:I play. I don't play well for anybody to record it.
AJ:Well, we'll come back in a couple of years and you'll be ready.
Christopher:There you go, there you go.
AJ:Chris, thanks a lot, mate.
Christopher:Thank you, Anthony. Absolutely a pleasure, really fun to walk around with you.
AJ:It sure was. That was Christopher Brown. As usual, there are links in the show notes, photos on the website and more for you. aid subscribers soon, an great thanks for making it all possible. You can join this generous community of listeners by heading to the website or the show notes and following the prompts. With all my gratitude, the music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listenin, than y.
