Ephemerata Gardens collects all kinds of objects and life forms.1 Some are added on purpose, and others move into the landscape patch of their own volition. Collecting is a process whereby a habitat temporarily gathers things together in a net of emergent relationships. Sometimes a sorting mechanism aggregates collections by size, weight, composition, or information content. Other times everything is anarchically roiled and churned. Shiny silver candy wrappers and Styrofoam cup shreds blow into the yard from the alley. Nesting blue jays drop six-pack rings. A plastic grocery bag parachutes from the sky onto the tomatoes.

Once released into the world, anthropogenic garbage has a life of its own, forming unanticipated collections and connections. The North Pacific Garbage Gyre (or Garbage Patch) is a museum of plastics gathered by the clockwise vortex of oceanic currents. Four other gyres spin in the South Pacific, Indian, and North and South Atlantic oceans. These liquid landfills are self-aggregating collections of trash thrown off ships and set loose by cities along coasts and rivers. Over the decades, plastic photodegrades into ever-tinier polymer chains nicknamed “mermaid tears.” Surface water from the Pacific Gyre’s heart consists of up to six parts plastic to one part plankton by mass.2 Plastic bonds with persistent organic pollutants like DDT and PCBs. While bigger pieces of plastic accumulate life forms like bristle worms, crabs, anemones, and barnacles, smaller pieces like mermaid tears and plastic bags get mistaken as food and eaten, presumably concentrating toxins up the food chain (to humans). Fish stomachs can turn into plastic garbage collectors that eventually kill them if fishermen don’t get them first.

A garbage gyre’s size is hard to establish. Journalists have reported the North Pacific Garbage Gyre as being twice the size of the United States, twice the size of Texas, and only 1% the size of Texas. They are often referred to as “islands,” although they are much more diffuse, a barely visible “plastic soup.” The gyres also exist in an uncertain temporal scale, with today’s single use plastics becoming the next decade’s (or century’s, or millennium’s) mermaid tears. They are colossal archaeological objects, like the sky. The gyres’ tendrils touch remote beaches and compose the bodies of jellyfish. Maybe part of one is in your hands, right now.

Garbage gyres spin out of cities with a catastrophic surplus of threat that sucks us all into their centers. Nobody knows much about them, so urban legends and apocalyptic media reports run wild. They are one half eco-catastrophes begging scientific research and political mitigation, and one half mythological monsters preying on our fears of causing ecological collapse. In a flash, questions like “are humans killing the oceans?” throw together an anxious “we” paralyzed by the staggering size of the accident and the guilt-ridden momentum of consuming plastic every day. The gyres swirl in our minds as forms of collective worry.

Since 1997, Captain Charles Moore with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has led multiple visits to the North Pacific Gyre, including a 2011 voyage that tourists and researchers could join for $10,000 a head. In 2008 a three person crew from VBS.tv joined Captain Moore to film an hour long documentary that aired on MTV2 and online. The weeklong sailing trip to “nowhere” takes its toll on the three mid-twenties documentary-makers as they deal with boredom, seasickness, and a claustrophobic lack of privacy in which Moore is cast as “Dad” in an Oedipal drama. A sense of damnation haunts the film crew as they haul up ghost nets3 and swirl around jars of mermaid tears while moodily narrating their firsthand experiences of oceanic plastic pollution:

I’m totally bummed… It’s different to see … a picture of a jar somewhere, like some magazine, then to realize how long it’s taken for us to get here. I mean we are in the middle of nowhere. I think there are so few people who have actually been here. Maybe no one has ever been in this spot… and it’s filled with our trash, you know? We have really screwed up. We’re all going to hell.

Captain Moore takes them to hell’s center, where they expect to bear witness to a trash island as far as the eye can see, but there is nothing but the usual stray plastic and a higher concentration of invisible mermaid tears.

Call in the artists to give some kind of sensible form to the diffuse plastic monster! Recent artworks respond to garbage gyres by raising awareness and critical self-reflection. Among them, the Institute for Figuring’s “Toxic Reef” is a coral reef collaboratively crocheted out of plastic bags. Kim Holleman’s “Trashnami!” assembles the gyre as a wave crashing down on us. Chris Jordan’s photo series “Midway” documents albatross corpses stuffed with plastic objects, and “Gyre” (after Hokusai) is a mosaic made out of materials collected in the North Pacific. The photogenic horror of these art works gives environmental groups like 5 Gyres aesthetic leverage in their campaigns to regulate plastic production and altar our habits of mass consumption. A flood of online videos about the gyres mixes images of ugly beauty with the aesthetics of scientific research as technicians fiddle with their microscopes, filters, flasks, and tweezers.

The gyres themselves are diffuse mosaics of toothburshes, cigarette lighters, fragmented water bottles, monofilament rope, and other ordinary objects. Are these garbage patches as toxic and deadly as our collective secular apocalyptacism likes to imagine? Even as they strangle and mangle large aquatic animals, ghost nets can become little floating islands of life. One team of oceanographers researching plastic pollution’s impact on microorganisms found that “photosynthetic microbes were thriving on many plastic particles, in essence confirming that plastic is prime real estate for certain microbes.”4 The polluted gyres, yet another indictment of the “human domination of earth’s ecosystems,”5 double as nonhuman cities of living garbage. To “clean up” the patches with endless trawling would also be to kill all the life forms that, however improbably, claim the patches as their natural habitats. The gyres also offer green capitalists and social enterprises an opportunity to flex their muscles and show off. Method, a non-toxic cleaning products manufacturer, markets a 100% recycled bottle, a quarter of which is made from plastics intercepted from beach clean up projects.

I look around Ephemerata Gardens at the plastic menagerie that, some day, will split and crack to shreds. The cat from New York’s Chinatown , the classic kitsch pink flamingos, a donkey from the Cathedral of Junk garage sale, a thrift store carousel horse, a bodiless doll from Smut Putt Heaven. Some day at least a little bit of them might flow out of Austin down the Colorado River to the Gulf of Mexico and gather with the other plastic in the North Atlantic Garbage Gyre.

Image Credits:

1. “Three Gyres,” photo by 5Gyres, 2010, http://www.flickr.com/photos/5gyres/4593934842/.
2. “Rope Debris,” photo by J. Leichter for SEAPLEX (Scrips Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition), 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/8581704@N02/3856010901.
3. “Gyre,” by Chris Jordan, 2009, http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#gyre.
4. “Lanternfish and Plastic,” photo by SEAPLEX, http://www.flickr.com/photos/8581704@N02/3818175490/.
5. “Bodiless Doll,” photo by the author.

Please feel free to comment.

1. This is part of a larger online writing project, “The City of Living Garbage,” a guidebook to my backyard.
2. C.J. Moore, S.L. Moore, M.K. Leecaster, and S.B. Weisberg, “A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 42 (2001): 1297–1300, ftp://ftp.sccwrp.org/pub/download/DOCUMENTS/AnnualReports/1999AnnualReport/10_ar11.pdf.
3. Ghost nets are tangled masses of fishing gear lost or abandoned at sea.
4. Oregon State University News & Research Communications, “Oceanic Garbage Patch Not Nearly as Big as Portrayed in Media,” 2011,
   http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2011/jan/oceanic-“garbage-patch”-not-nearly-big-portrayed-media.
5. P.M. Vitousek, H.A. Mooney, J. Lubchenco, and J.M. Melillo, “Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems,” Science 277, no. 5325 (1997): 494-499, http://www8.nau.edu/envsci/ENV330website/ENV330/downloads/VitousekHumanDomination.pdf.

Seeds the size of little freckles potentially grow into plants taller than me. They like full sun and make valuable shade for more delicate vegetation. When I first planted it a year ago, the amaranth sprouts shaded by the pecan canopy were stunted. Early in the spring a mystery green grew along with them and took over. Sometimes I let these unknowns grow in the garden just to see what they turn into.

The amaranth sprouts in the yard’s sunnier spot were soon three feet tall, then five, then seven. We cook up the youngest leaves like spinach and throw them into soups and salads. Orange-headed beetles with black-and-white-striped backs fly in from somewhere and nibble the leaves to skeletons. Killing them with organic insect spray (with a neurotoxin derived from chrysanthemums) was pointless as new bug waves flew in every day. But we are after amaranth grain, not just greens, so ratty leaves are less of an agricultural than an aesthetic problem. At grain harvest time I discover numerous insects using the stalks as habitat — a young praying mantis, white spiders, tiny caterpillars that come out of the harvested grain that night to endlessly circle the lip of the bowl.

The mystery plant in the shady amaranth patch threw out a small bouquet of white flowers that ripened into dark purple berries the mocking birds ate. Fruitlessly, I search online, trying to identify it as edible or deadly. Finally, I snip a branch to bring to Boggy Creek Farm, where Carol Ann Sayle identifies it as “poke salat,” a wild green that’s toxic if incorrectly prepared. “You can eat the young greens, but you have to boil it and throw off the water three times. It was a pioneer food.” She guessed it got into our garden through bird droppings. It has many names across the south. It’s an edible weed like lamb’s quarters or dandelion greens. Elvis sang about a poor Louisiana girl who collected polk salad. Native and settler people used to make dye and ink out of the berries, and its roots fix nitrogen like legumes. In Argentina, the Ombú, a related plant in the genus Phytolacca, grows to over sixty feet tall on the pampas, surviving wildfires by hoarding water in its massive trunk.

Midway through last year’s hot summer some amaranth grain becomes ready to harvest, but I don’t yet know how to do it. A quick Google search turns up several garden blogs — Kitchen Therapy (focusing on health issues and gluten-free foods), a Survival Podcast (“if times get tough”), and the Backyard Gardening Blog which gets my hopes up: “Yield will be approximately a pound of grain per dozen plants.” One day I daydream about building a solar dehydrator for surplus tomatoes and figs, and find DIY plans on Surviving the Middle Class Crash. On all of these blogs, gardening shifts from being a form of middle class pleasure/recreation to the serious register of provisioning the family or community. They host links to commercial sites like Seedsnow.com that sell seeds as “survival kits.” Cultivating plants becomes a way to directly engage what the blogs describe as economic and ecological collapse.

Information and techniques gleaned from these blogs, as well as seeds purchased online, are virtually circulating potentials that shape far-flung landscape patches. Similarly, collectively imagined futures are affective potentials that are beginning to change urban land use patterns and social relations. The middle class crash, or adverse weather like droughts and flooding connected to climate change, are future events1 that people are responding to (or preparing for) not only by individually altering consumption/production habits or imagining daily life off-the-grid, but also through social enterprises and green capitalist business ventures like community gardens, for-profit organic gardens, and seed distribution companies. Such businesses often double as informal educational institutions that teach the public about gardening and raise awareness on issues of “food security.” Publicly circulating fantasies of ecologically catastrophic futures alter the way we see/feel/use ordinary urban resources like abandoned lots, front lawns, and tap water. The “fantasy” or “imaginary” or “virtual” act on potentials in material practices and agential objects/things/life forms to generate new landscapes and atmospheres. Weedy plants like amaranth shine with some kind of promise of collective survival as future threats heave into everyday life.

Pigweed or careless weed is a wild strain of amaranth that cotton farmers despise. After harvesting the amaranth grain I thrash the stalks around the yard and next to a nearby highway to spread seeds. Maybe they’ll go weedy like the lamb’s quarters we got from Vince at the Cathedral of Junk that lives on as hundreds of purple seedlings popping up everywhere every spring. Carol Ann said she met a woman from Germany who lived off lamb’s quarters while her town was under siege in WWII. On top of growing greens, some amaranth species produce a gluten-free grain with protein content higher than wheat, soybeans, and milk. Like lamb’s quarters, their seeds are small, light, and plentiful, easily distributed across patchy landscapes by wind, birds, and rain. People have cultivated amaranth all over the planet (especially South America) for thousands of years. Specialty gluten-free, gourmet crackers like to advertise that they are made of “ancient grains.” The amaranth growing at Boggy Creek Farm are native weeds semi-cultivated for the greens, but they don’t produce much grain.

This spring, some amaranth sprouted around Ephemerata Gardens and next to the highway. It seems to be naturalizing — an Asian green, Amaranthus tricolor, from a packet of heirloom seeds distributed by the family-run company Botanical Interests. Like some garden blogs, the company’s owners express concern that old time gardening knowledge, techniques, and seeds are endangered. Accordingly, “Our packets are like mini-encyclopedias, full of information to inspire and assist every type of gardener.”2 The amaranth seed packet’s interior is printed with a breathless biographical sketch concerning the plant’s special relationship with soil, sky, and human bodies. Amaranth is

a C4 plant; it is much more efficient at converting atmospheric carbon to biomass than most plants on the planet. This is why it grows so fast, is so productive, and is very adaptive … Worldwide, the greatest use of amaranth is for the grain which contains the amino acid lysine, an amino acid NOT in other grains. Its combination with other grains makes it a fairly complete protein. Amaranth can actually be grown for the grain in the home garden (unlike wheat) and made into a flour; one square yard of amaranth can produce 2 pounds of seed!

Last year I harvested about a half cup of grain from four plants in our sunnier amaranth patch. Dreams of growing my own flour are tempered by a steep learning curve. To harvest seeds, pick clumps of flowers from the stalks and rub them between your palms. Then sift them through a window screen onto a piece of cardboard. Try to blow away the remaining chaff without losing too much grain. Most importantly, do all this somewhere the seeds can enter the landscape patch and grow weedy. All they need is good rain every spring. What could be a better survival kit than edible urban weeds?

Image Credits:
1. Image photographed by and courtesy of the author.
2. Image photographed by and courtesy of the author.
3. Author’s screen capture of Seedsnow.com.
4. Image photographed by and courtesy of the author.
5. Image photographed by and courtesy of the author.

Please feel free to comment.

1. For more on how future threats affectively contour presents, see Brian Massumi’s “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat” in The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2010), 52-70.
2. “About Botanical Interests,” http://www.botanicalinterests.com/botanical-interests/about-us-.

A farm homestead grows among the wireless waves that cross our backyard garden patch.1 Good thing chickens and tomatoes don’t develop Wifi sensitivity. I became a Free Farm Game user several years after forming a gardening habit. If only my backyard could be as fecund and profitable as a single tile of my virtual farm.

“Sick of city life? Tired of those childish and unchallenging farm games?” Make your own farm for free! This back-to-the-land permutation of Monopoly has an international audience with servers in the UK, France, Asia, and two in the US. A line of avatars shows some of the seven thousand Facebook users who like Free Farm Game. Sounds of farm animals, pattering rain, or wind compose shifting refrains that greet users on login.

Despite its anti-urban tagline and aesthetics of rural nostalgia, this virtual landscape adopts the same abstract Cartesian grid employed by modern cities. Urban farmers fond of square foot gardening feel right at home. Wilderness barely creeps into the landscape’s edges, with a river for fishing in the bottom left corner, a forest for hunting in the top right, and useless wasteland to the west. Otherwise, every land tile has its price. Once purchased, chop down trees, then till the land or add a workshop, an animal pen, or some other structure. You can’t escape your grid and visit another farm. The only place all the homesteads and their multiplayers overlap is in missions and competitions you can play with each other, co-ops users can form, and ultimately, in the market where everything is sold, with each market isolated to its particular server.

Real-life farmers, garden enthusiasts, and people who couldn’t grow a weed all play the game. In the English-language discussion forum, one member’s signature advertises the logo for the UK’s United Farmers Cooperative, which brings together local farmers for bulk purchases and operates stores where members can sell goods. You can form co-ops in the game, too – a subtle education, perhaps, in non-corporate capitalism and “social enterprises” that stimulate local economies and communities.2 Raise chickens, pigs, bees, etc., grow grain for their feed, and make your own bread or alcoholic beverages. The Free Farm Game world resembles that envisioned by the Transition movement, whose members long for a peak-oil planet of relocalized economies where people can make a living with old-time skills.

In the US, the game’s popularity thrives amidst waves of sometimes urgent interest in local and organic food and urban sustainability. It taps American’s longstanding pastoral imaginary and a certain bloodthirsty response to pests and wild animals. Everything must be killed to protect the farm. Skunks wander into my territory and a warning pops up: “You will have to hunt them to get rid of them before they damage your farm!” In this quaint little world of “totalitarian agriculture,”3 nature manifests as interlocking anthropocentric resources vs. threats that should be exterminated. Everything (even skunk tails) becomes a product rated on a seven star scale, with the coveted 7* rating catching seven times more on the market than 1* products. Even 7* manure is better. Labor power is similarly standardized and quantified; farmers and hired hands start their week (a single day of real time) with a thousand endurance points, and each farm task subtracts a set number of points. You can eat to regain some endurance, and chores require fewer points over time as farmers learn and become more efficient workers. Surprisingly, transporting goods to market does not take up any endurance.

Every morning over coffee I tend my farm. It takes around five minutes, adding up to over thirty wasted hours a year. Sneak it into your workday as a secret treat. The game requires users to check in every day or their farm will perish. Like another job, even on vacation. You can “hibernate” your farm using “Special Farm Points” (purchased for real currency), but hibernation causes its own problems. On the forum, the user Wigginsmum worries, “I have to hibernate my farm next week for 6 real weeks while I recover from surgery. Am I right in thinking taxes/salaries/bills won’t fall due during that time? … I’ve never hibernated my farm before … I’m going to get withdrawal symptoms…” GingerMan chimes in, writing in a delirious state of fevered imagination after eleven days of no game play:

My withdrawal symptoms … have been sort of energizing; you start panting like a dog every morning more and more. Thiswise, it’s grand if you live a lone [sic] … I have cherry trees now with trunks like some drug czar’s jungle protection… Where will it end? I can see stables and hired hands, and I can see workshops and aquariums. Hell. I can see a strip-club even.4

Although strip-clubs (much less any kind of erotic markets) are not on Free Farm Game’s menu, its virtual landscape fulfills desires for a rural world that can be endlessly exploited and urbanized under a sky devoid of catastrophes. The game’s climate is entirely flat, rolling through four seasons while blissfully lacking hurricanes and tornadoes, floods, droughts and wildfires, or relentless snowstorms – a heavenly climate model compared to those roiling on the servers of global climate change scientists. No earthquakes and tsunamis, just marauding skunks.

Likewise, the game fleshes out an utmost smooth space of utopian green capitalism. Organic farming is the only way to grow 7* produce and make the most money. In addition to teleporting goods to market, you can sell everything at a set price, all at once – no false economies of subsidized crops in this dreamy endless-growth economy. Its virtual currency is a one-way street that allows users to spend real money on “Special Farm Points” (SFP). “With these points you can obtain cash for your farm, pause the game, skip taxes or bills, get special meals for your farmers and other bonuses,” but you cannot convert your farm cash into SFP and back into USD. Among all the multiplayer games online, only Second Life has developed its own legitimate currency, the Linden Dollar, with about 7 million USD of L$ in circulation. Because Second Life players can own their intellectual property and real estate (server space), the economy is continually growing.5 Unlike Ithaca dollars and other self-proclaimed micro-currencies, the virtual economy of L$ has the advantage of printing and minting no actual currency and risking no forgery.

Ridiculously, sometimes I long to live in the game world, forgetting how unproductive it is to compare “the real world” to virtual ones when they are all interwoven and interweaved. The Farm Game world makes the exhausting intensity and specialized knowledge of full-bodied farm labor so easy – click click click. Here, I milk cows and make butter, a good capitalist who can actually make some money. I have two employees. Meanwhile, I need to clean out our backyard chicken coop and compost the gray and white knots of poop on hay where the hen lays eggs. Tomatoes and figs need picking before birds peck them. It takes about an hour a day to water, another drought summer in Austin, Texas. The yard and Farm Game both require my repetitious labor and desire to exist, everyday responsibilities where lives are at stake. Likewise, I require them, experiencing withdrawal symptoms in their absence. They flourish in the sensory register of everyday habits and daydreams, registers adjusting to waves of ecological concern.

Image Credits:

1. Author’s screen capture of Free Farm Game.
2. Image courtesy of the author.
3. Image courtesy of the author.

Please feel free to comment.

1. This short essay is part of a larger online writing project, “The City of Living Garbage,” a guidebook to my backyard, nicknamed Ephemerata Gardens.
2. Nadia Johanisova, Living in the Cracks: A Look at Rural Social Enterprises in Britain and the Czech Republic, Dublin: The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (2005), 20-24. Johanisova and others define social enterprises as businesses that operate in markets not so much to generate profits as to meet social and environmental goals. They often blur into informal economies by developing mutually beneficial relationships that “are long-term, complex and based more on friendship and reciprocity than on written covenants” (36), and often place “emphasis on local resources and local production for local consumption, local money flows and employment, [and] local environmental sustainability” (130)
3. Daniel Quinn, The Story of B, New York: Bantam Books (1997), 83-96.
4. “Question about hybernation,” Free Farm Game forum, http://forum.freefarmgame.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6067, accessed June 29, 2010.
5. Daniel Terdiman, The Entrepreneurs Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse, Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing (2007), 7.