I was chilling by the pool surrounded by screaming first graders when I saw the object from space.

We spent the second weekend of spring break, which was also the vernal equinox and the official beginning of the new season, visiting Houston with two other couples and their same-aged kids. Three of the four parents are professors, and the one who is not had the awesome idea to get us all down there to take the kids to Meow Wolf Houston and check out the outstanding Frida Kahlo retrospective at the MFA. So that’s how we found ourselves waiting for the sun to come around the high-rises and warm the third-floor outdoor pool at the downtown Residence Inn, which occupies the former corporate headquarters of Humble Oil built in 1921. I was reading the prior weekend’s paper that I had thrown in my bag, periodically looking up to check on the kids and the progress of the sun, which I was certain would soon come out from behind the high-rises, shine on the pool, and warm us up. The other parents were more properly focused on the kids, and so no one else was looking when the meteor momentarily lit up the sky before disappearing behind the Enron Building [pictured above; now occupied by Chevron].

I have seen many a shooting star over the years, but always at night. This daytime phenomenon was much more spectacular: an intensely bright projectile moving at the speed of a UFO, with a blue and white corona that suddenly flared a platinum yellow flame. I immediately announced the sighting to the other parents, testing my credibility already strained as a science fiction writer hanging out with literary scholars (our view of the glistening Enron building had me thinking about the 1975 dystopian film Rollerball, presciently set in a 21st century Houston & USA where democratic institutions have been replaced by corporate rule). I looked on the flight tracker app to see if the radar had any info, and convinced myself it had been a small aircraft glistening in the late afternoon sun.

But after we got home Sunday, one of the other parents sent me a news story about how NASA confirmed it really was a meteor—one that flamed out over the city traveling 35,000 miles per hour and then crashed through the roof of a suburban home whose residents found the remains on their living room carpet. This local news clip has a great roundup of amateur videos of the thing I failed to capture, and a visit with the homeowner:

Later in the week, I found myself reading some of the scholarship on meteorites as omens and objects of human veneration, from the Stone of Delphi and the Heliogabalus of the Emperor Macrinus to the Hajar al-Aswad. Some classical-era Confucian cultures, including the Josean Dynasty of Korea, evidently took the appearance of flaming objects from space as signs of a loss of legitimacy of the current executive political power, and in medieval Europe they often foretold the imminent demise of the monarch. Such is the case in Shakespeare’s Richard II, when the Welsh Captain gives this report to the Earl of Salisbury:

The bay trees in our country are all withered,
And meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the Earth,
And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

The European-American settlers of the United States found a wide array of extraterrestrial stones in the landscape, but unlike the Native cultures they displaced, they mostly treated them as utilitarian objects, like the 320-pound mass in Wichita County, Texas that had been an object of worship for the Comanche only to end up cut down into souvenirs, the meteorites of Kiowa County, Kansas that were used to hold down stable roofs and cover rain-barrels (until the farmers realized they could be sold to scientists for enough money to buy another farm), or the massive chunk of iron from space that the founders of Tucson repurposed as a public anvil. Perhaps the problem in those cases was that the settlers had not seen the objects fall from the sky.

The next morning, while the oil wars raged on the other side of the planet, we roamed the industrial expanses of East Houston, scouting material for new projects—the site of a public art commission my wife is competing for, and the zone along Buffalo Bayou and the Ship Channel that I plan to explore in connection with my new book. Sundays, when the machines have mostly stopped, are a good time for those kinds of explorations — you can get closer to the interesting sites, and the chances of danger are lower.

Houston famously has no zoning, and has been in a state of more-or-less continuous industrial development since the discovery of oil at Spindletop near Beaumont in 1901 and the opening of the Ship Channel in 1914, which engineered Buffalo Bayou—Houston’s connection to the sea—into a channel capable of supporting the infrastructure of oil export and import. The result is a minimally regulated sprawl of massive installations along a 35-mile stretch of river, far too expansive to get more than a few glimpses of on a Sunday morning.

There’s something intensely, charismatically feral about that zone, where our most brutal Promethean infrastructure coexists with pockets of swampy coastal wild. Not just in the river corridor—you can also see it in the endless blocks of beat-up old industrial buildings that sprawl across the flats of East Houston, and even in the shiny corporate towers that crowd around the metropolitan freeways. Extensions of it can be found all along the Gulf Coast, from Boca Chica to Florida, but this is its beating heart.

As we scouted ways to penetrate the labyrinth of security fences and closed-off sites, aiming to witness both the pulse of petrocapital and the wildlife that manages to survive in its margins, I concluded the best way will be by water, and perhaps by bicycle, through the interstitial commons.

In the news that week I had read about the Administration’s plans to convene the so-called “God Squad”—the interagency committee statutorily empowered to grant exemptions from Endangered Species Act protections for threatened species—in order to unburden oil & gas extraction activities in the Gulf on national security grounds at the request of the Pentagon. The principal measures at issue were those designed to save Rice’s whale, which is the only baleen whale native to the Gulf, with a population believed to number fewer than a hundred.

The committee met on March 31, and essentially concluded that it had no legally permitted choice other than to grant the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” the exemption he had requested, as required by the plain language of the statute. But the basis on which the request was made, judging from a review of the backup memoranda that were published, was specious (focused not so much on national security risks as economic ones), speculative (worried about what would happen if pending litigation results in future rulings that disrupt oil & gas activities in the Gulf), and hypocritical (proclaiming the action was designed to prevent exactly the kind of economic shock from disrupted oil & gas distribution that the self-parodically named Operation Epic Fury has already caused).

I found myself reading NOAA’s papers on the wildlife impact of underwater noise associated with offshore industrial activity, and remembering the enigmatic recordings of whalesong that were popular when I was a kid in the 70s—so popular that, by helping people empathize with the cetaceans, they engendered the popular support that helped save the humpback whale from extinction. I found two of those records in my stacks, Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, which started the fad, and Andre Kostelanetz’s And God Created Great Whales, which uses whalesong in orchestral arrangements of Sibelius, Skalkottas, and even Weill’s “Mack the Knife.”

Playing Payne’s remarkable disc, an album of field recordings of nature sounds that went multi-platinum, I could remember how strange it was to first hear those songs as a kid. Hearing it now, I can better appreciate the way the sounds give you a deeper sense of that undersea environment, and what it must be like for those animals when we come down there and start blowing things up. It’s hard to imagine a slow media phenomenon like the whalesong fad of the 70s being replicated in today’s digital ecosystem of platforms that enable us to channel-surf all night without any actual channels. Maybe Druski can get his Jacques Cousteau on.

The only enigmatic migratory leviathan I personally witnessed in March was this Qatar Airlines 777 I noticed flying over our street the last Thursday morning of the month on final approach into Austin, a destination that airline doesn’t regularly serve. I pulled up the flight tracker again, and saw it had originated in Brasilia. I wondered if it was a luxury charter, carrying rich evacuees from Dubai, or some mystery cargo tied up with the war they won’t call a war.

Today is Easter, so I suppose I will try to focus on the good news evident in the early wildflowers popping up all around here—bluebonnets, blue sage, cross vine, winecup, spiderwort, and tons of pink evening primrose, with other prairie flowers coming up green and ready to bloom soon. The folks are out selling big bags of cascarónes by the side of the road, and when she wakes up our daughter will be happy to break a few over my head the way her big brother did when he was her age. I might even shake the premonition I got Saturday, when the retama trees all started to open up their hot yellow flowers after the rain, of a hot brutal summer around the corner.

The rain came after an exceptionally trippy Pink Moon we got to see coming up Thursday night, just as the Artemis II expedition launched to go check it out more closely. Another celestial sign said to herald imminent changes in the land, it was so remarkable in those first moments when it came up over the treeline that I could almost believe the omen was real, and the current powers working to make the world their slave will soon have their own Enron moment.

The Roundup

For more on the wild ecologies of the Gulf Coast, check out my piece for Southlands magazine now available online on this side of the paywall.

And on the idea of paddling the Houston Ship Channel, check out this epic 2006 piece by Josh Harkinson on how he did just that. There’s also this interesting video from the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Houston residency not long after that, which includes footage from some of their Buffalo Bayou boat tours:

I just sent to production the zine I made for the series of guided edgeland walks I’ll be taking folks on for the first-ever collaboration between Texas Book Festival and Fusebox arts festival, and I’m excited to see how they turn out. The walks are sold out, but I’m planning to do another one later in the year for newsletter readers, so if you’re interested shoot me an email (chris at christopherbrown-dot-com).

Here’s another Easter egg I found last Sunday, while scouting for the fourth and final walk:

The following week I’ll be at Alienated Majesty Books on April 22 in conversation with journalist and author Patrick Strickland on his debut short story collection, A History of Heartache. At the end of March I got to see Pulitzer winner Cristina Rivera Garza there in a bilingual presentation of the English translation of Autobiography of Cotton, and it was an incredible event from an exceptionally brilliant and charismatic author. If you’re in Austin and you’re not tracking that bookstore’s events feed, you should fix that (yes, they also host punk shows)—and drop by there and all the other stops on this weekend’s Austin Book Trail.

Friday’s episode of the public radio talk show On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti had great coverage of the new research about the decline in America’s bird population, its correlation with the intensification of agricultural practices, and possible remedies. Sobering but hopeful.

On the songs of the humpback whales, here’s a fascinating 2022 conversation with researcher Dr. Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews:

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I mention Jacques Cousteau, here’s one of his whales episodes:

In other news a fiction writer or satirist couldn’t make up, Texas is trying to figure out how to annex parts of New Mexico.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it, and have a great week. Here’s some blue sage (Salvia azuria) in bloom this week behind the factories:

Springtime arrived in earnest this week. We saw our first bats of the season fly through last Friday evening, and over the weekend as February turned to March the first flowers appeared around our yard. This year the trees bloomed before the spiderwort: Mexican buckeye, mountain laurel, and the hot pink blossoms of the redbuds, including the volunteer pictured above that I found the honeybees tending Monday evening. The warm sun brought a bunch of red admiral butterflies doing mating dances on our back patio while the cedar waxwings were still hanging out in the tall hackberries eating last year’s fruit, and by Friday the yard was full of monarchs working their way north.

Last Sunday morning I took our puppy for a long walk down the side streets of our post-industrial neighborhood. The sky was overcast, and the general mood induced by the newsfeed was dark, with Saturday morning’s attack on Iran followed by the local horror show of a mass shooting overnight at one of the downtown bars popular with college kids and recent grads. Putting the phone away and stepping out to get a little unstuck in time at first light, on streets that felt abandoned, seemed like a healthy antidote for the dog walker as well as the dog.

I don’t know exactly what it is that attracts me to monoliths of infrastructure as places to experience nature—something about the way they reveal the ruins of the future at the edges of our reality. The radio antenna pictured above is a hundred years old and change, the first one they built in Austin. The signal is long dead, but you wouldn’t know that from the signs warning you of the invisible waves of deadly energy. And because of the way the antenna embodies an intangible right to the broadcast spectrum, the few acres it occupies remain undeveloped. It’s less feral now than when I first stumbled upon it in 2010, as they have taken to clearing out the foliage since Covid in order to deter long-term campers and avoid freaking out the occupants of the new office building next door. But it still provides a weird little pocket of refuge, especially in the trees that line the lot lines on three sides.

Sunday morning as Fifi showed me the scent trails that wound around the antenna, we could hear more than a dozen different species of songbirds in the foliage, including a couple of new lifers for me. We also heard a red-shouldered hawk nearby, and spotted an osprey perched atop the tower. The ospreys seem to be mating right now, as evidenced by the one I saw later in the week trying to scare off every other avian inhabitant of the river, hovering and shrieking around the heron rookery, then flushing a pair of caracara from the cottonwoods and hazing the male halfway to the toll road.

Pressed into the field at the base of the antenna below the osprey’s gaze, we found bones. A femur, forelegs, a ball joint, half a fanged mandible. I wondered what predators came around here big enough to kill a mammal that size, which seemed too big a prey for a feral cat to have taken. Coyotes seemed more likely, or perhaps the jaguarundi-looking creature I glimpsed on the other side of that lot last summer.

Looking back up at the tower, I thought about the news that had been carried over the airwaves from there over the remainder of the century that followed its construction in 1922. News of the Crash and news of the Wars, before the arrival of FM consigned it to soft rock oldies. I’ve gotten to thinking that news from afar is better when it gets to you slower, and as an experiment in proving my point I’ve been trying to get most of my news with a cheapo print subscription to the Financial Times that comes by snail mail 2-7 days after the date on the masthead, usually out of chronological order. It achieves the desired distancing effect, but has not yet weaned me off the breaking news alerts on my phone.

After the walk we drove en famille to pick up my mom to take her out for breakfast. The walk had flushed the news of the active shooter event from my mind, until we got downtown and had to detour around the blocked streets and the looming sense of dread. That’s when I realized that the mass shooting had taken place three blocks from my mom’s apartment, and two blocks from my law office, at a bar we often passed on our way to pick her up. I remembered the scene I had glimpsed and mostly ignored on Super Bowl Sunday, two stories of open decks packed with ecstatic young revelers getting their college town Dionysus on. The memory made the scene described in the dribbling-out details of the horror easier to imagine.

I remarked to Agustina how I guessed they would soon tell us it was linked to terrorism, laying pipe for the coming state of exception. And of course they did just that at the mid-day press conference, as the phone feed revealed seemingly implausible stories of the shooter wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie, one of those details designed to reveal character that would be too obvious and implausible to use in a work of fiction. Later in the week the security cam videos were released and revealed the evident truth of the story.

Monday as I finished up my salad bar lunch at the Whole Foods flagship store around the corner, I got another news update about the shooting. I decided to walk by the site on my way back to the office. The crime scene investigation had been completed, and things looked mostly back to normal as I crossed the bridge over Shoal Creek. But you could still feel the event in the air. Then I started to notice more tangible signs, weirdly similar to animal tracks in the encrypted stories they tell of what happened before you got there.

The first thing I noticed was a faded black stain on the sidewalk, like the shadow of a spilled drink. Then I noticed some grains of a beige sawdust-like material sprinkled around it, like the one the janitors would use to clean up the mess after some kid puked in class in grade school. Other signs of what definitely were spilled drinks were all over, especially along the curb—tossed plastic cups, empty airplane-size wine bottles, broken brown fragments of Bud Light. Walking on, I noticed the constellation of orange dots freshly painted on the sidewalk, perhaps where spent casings had been retrieved.

When I looked up from there, I saw one of the dudes who works in the bar next door patching a bullethole on the front wall of his Kung Fu Saloon, while their AI cowboy Bronson mural that has always creeped me out let the world know what the bots think will make you want to come in for a couple of beers.

At lunch I had been reading about Elon Musk’s recent remarks to the team on his vision of “sustainable abundance” (recently updated to “amazing abundance,” evidently because “sustainable” has acquired negative connotations) and Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” As the week went on, I watched the drama unfold as the founder-CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic played out their prisoner’s developer’s dilemma game of who would allow their LLM to be used by the Pentagon to power autonomous weapons. Then on Friday I read how Musk’s brain-computer interface company start-up, Neuralink, is building its new headquarters not far from our home. And how last weekend’s shooter had allegedly been a Tesla employee until recently. The paranoid science fiction stories practically write themselves.

On Thursday my not-so-paranoid science fiction writer friend Bruce Sterling sent me a link to an interesting new study from Oxford’s Leverhulme Center for Nature Recovery about AI visions of ecological rewilding, and the ways they tend to show what they think we want to see, with lots of cute mammals in depopulated landscapes and a total absence of rotting carcasses, dead vegetation, or human infrastructure—“the aestheticisation of hope through sanitized nature narratives.”

I also found Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which is really a kind of manifesto for the emancipation of machine intelligence from any constraints other than those chosen by its owners. The manifesto mentions nature five times, the takeaway of which is distilled in this quote:

“We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”

Friday morning after I dropped our daughter off at school, I went to grab a quick breakfast and answer some emails at the coffee shop around the corner, in an old strip mall by the highway. Out the window I noticed the evening primrose had begun to bloom in the median below the double decks of I-35. Primrose is one of those resilient native wildflowers that somehow persist in the zones formerly dominated by the prairie ecologies we have largely erased from this region through plow and pavement—after we took the land with the power of the gun. I wondered if anyone is putting the bots to work figuring out how to reconcile their mandate to maximize human abundance with the accelerating destruction of other life our myopic hubris has caused. Or if they’re worried the AIs we barely control now will eventually use the autonomous weapons we give to realize a greener version of John Connor’s future.

Friday evening after school we took the kid to a screening of the new Pixar movie, Hoppers. It’s about a girl trying to save the wetland her park ranger grandma stewarded from the construction of a new elevated highway. It’s also about the repurposing of our advanced technologies in service of the protection of nature, as the girl learns how to install her own consciousness into a robotic beaver that she uses to incite a revolution of all the animals, now crowded together into their last multi-species redoubt. In the end they and the humans all figure out how to get along, and even the development-addicted evil mayor becomes a steward of the wild. It was pretty great as kids movies go, but they probably won’t let Claude and GPT watch it. I like to think some of the kids who watch it will grow up to program a better future than we seem to have managed, but I fear that will come after the lightning teaches us who’s the real boss.

Extra Credit

Thanks to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society for flying me up to speak at the Philadelphia Flower Show, and to the great crowd of folks who came over in the rain to hear my talk and hit me up with some of the best questions I’ve gotten giving talks about A Natural History of Empty Lots came out, including an excellent provocation from landscape architect Hans Hesselein of Philadelphia’s Apiary Studio about how we can reconcile rewilding and human inclusion. I’d never been to one of these big flower shows (other than Chelsea, which my parents dragged me to on vacation when I was in sixth grade), and it was pretty trippy to see the psychedelic floral installations.

Friday was the 136th anniversary of the introduction of 30 pairs of European starlings into New York’s Central Park by the American Acclimitization Society. There are around 200 million here now, outcompeting the natives, including the ones who nest in the billboards near our home.

The Romans had their version of daylight savings time, but their approach was to lengthen and shorten their hours, all year long—summer hours up to 75 minutes long and winter as short as 45.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is real, and has been doing the work for a decade now. (Roll over, Isaac Asimov.)

When I got back from Philadelphia Wednesday, my copy of Washington, D.C. photographer Stephen Voss’ photo book about the landscape and eerie energy of Silicon Valley, The Haunting of Verdant Valley, was waiting for me. Powerful stuff, and a great companion to Malcolm Harris’ excellent Palo Alto, which I started reading last week.

Today is International Women’s Day and March is Women’s History Month, the theme of which for 2026 is rights, justice and action for all women and girls.

For some new women’s history with a regional natural history focus, I’m excited to check out Jennifer Bristol’s new book Wild Women for Good, a profile of a century and a half of women in conservation in Texas, out from Texas A&M University Press.

If you’re in Austin and up for it, the evolving impromptu memorial outside Buford’s on West Sixth is a deeply moving way to pay respects to the victims. The bar reopened this weekend.

Have a safe week.

One morning last week, our year-old Jack Russell Terrier and I found three skulls in the weird woods behind our house. Fifi (so named by our six-year-old daughter) found two of them, proving herself a more capable field companion than I had expected from her homuncular scale. The most remarkable of these totems was the stag pictured above, which she found a few feet away from the carcass I had stumbled upon; the opossum she found still attached to its spine was also pretty intense. The doe skull had been out there for years, evident from rain-bleached white bone. We did not take them as omens; just signs of the season, when the foliage is at its barest, animal trails are easier to follow for the bushwhacker, and things are easier to spot when you do. In a couple of weeks it will be over—the invasive brome grass is already beginning to carpet the forest floor, crowding out the natives by coming up before them, and the spiderwort came back strong this week, flourishing in the dirty soil of ancient bluffs polluted with illegally dumped construction debris slowly sinking into some Anthropocene geological layer.

It’s good to know the coyotes are still around, after a few seasons where I worried they had moved on. The pandemic brought a lot more people into this pocket of riparian forest down between the dam and the bridge, and the human activity on the upland terraces around it has gotten a lot more intense. If you drive up the onramp to head south on the old highway, you get a glimpse from above of the Saruman-grade hole they are digging to house the pump station that will channel all the runoff from expanded Interstate 35 into the river, and at night you can see the lights of the crews working under the Moon. I have not yet seen any orcs being hatched, but they do have Skylink.

The naturally-occurring folk horror of the urban woods is an addicting thing. Experienced through regular ambles over the course of multiple seasons, it reveals the story of the food chain in the land, both the nibbling of the peaceful foragers and the left-behinds of the predatory hunters, and the ways that the other species we share the world with are left to occupy the margins of our dominion. Winter’s end lays it bare, when you can see not just every bone that would otherwise be buried in the tall grass, but also every nugget of the unimaginable volume of human trash the floodwaters leave behind.

February in this mostly unfrozen climate also brings the first signs of spring—not just the brome and the spiderwort, but also the rosettes of the native wildflowers that somehow persist even more resiliently than the coyotes and the whitetail. I saw the first bluebonnet blossom of the year Thursday, at the edge of the parking lot of our daughter’s school, and the rocky riverbank behind our home is flush with plants a couple of weeks from blooming.

The most beautiful seasonal development for us this winter’s end is probably the two mated pairs of great blue herons that have nested in a tall sycamore down in the floodplain right behind our house. There have been a half-dozen nests in another such tree upriver a bit for at least the last 7-8 years—I devoted a subchapter to it in Empty Lots—but last year was the first such nest visible from our living room. After many of the big floodplain trees were uprooted from their boggy basin by the 85-mph microburst that inaugurated last summer, I feared they would not come. So to see two nests where last year was one is an especially uplifting thing. The herons are an ambient presence all through the day, moving back and forth across the widescreen of our windows as we are making coffee, gathering more nest-making materials and skronking in the wind as we wash dishes and host friends, always with that lanky, extra-large grace that reminds you how close they are to the pterosaurs.

Even an old cynic like me feels the simple wonder and romantic sense of hope such a witness kindles, of a majestic species that a century ago had almost been extinguished now thriving within earshot of a door factory and a bus depot. A little research reveals how common such adaptations are all over the country, as various species of herons and egrets have learned how to make their nests in the interstitial remnants of viable habitat we have left them in otherwise intensely industrialized zones, from Newark Bay to the suburban delta around DFW Airport. When you learn that a healthy heronry involves a colony of as many as five-hundred nests, the hope and wonder sobers up a bit, as you wonder if any such colony could still be found.

The Sunday before last I attended the beautiful and uplifting memorial of my neighbor, friend and ally Daniel Llanes, a singular figure I got to work with for fifteen years advocating for these pockets of urban wild. I was feeling upbeat as I drove home, impressed by the diversity of the folks that turned out to laugh, cry, shout, and get re-energized about the power of community to make change happen. As I rolled down our street, passing Daniel’s home he made from an old auto body shop across from a truck tarp shop, I saw a weird jumbo jet coming in heavy, on final approach to our local airport. It was painted with the colors of some unknown airline, blue on white with the name “NATIONAL” painted across the fuselage.

I looked it up on the planespotter app, which lets you identify aircraft from their proximity to your location. An Airbus A330-200 operated by National Airlines, which research revealed is a private charter that specializes in defense logistics, “moving sensitive, high-value, and highly classified cargo to the world’s most complex locations.” It was arriving from Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, after having flown there earlier that morning from El Paso, and was scheduled to leave two hours later for its corporate home base in Orlando. I wondered what cargo it carried, and what kind of border-forward operations it was supporting. I even wondered if the windowless plane might be loaded with people, in this era when “Homeland Security” officials talk up their ambition to be like “Amazon Prime, but with human beings.”

Two mornings later, the insane news alert came out at the beginning of the work day that the airspace over El Paso had been closed for 10 days for undisclosed emergency reasons. The closure was reversed later the same morning, and various fragmentary pseudo-explanations about drones and counter-drones were circulated. I wondered if the plane I had seen had some connection to whatever’s going on out there, and to the other news reports about the massive detention facilities now being operated on the grounds of Fort Bliss. (My wife posed the question whether it might be evidence from the Epstein ranch being moved to a more undiscoverable secret location.) I found myself thinking about how, since the huge deportation funding bill was enacted last summer, the skies around here have become more active with all manner of unexplained military and paramilitary movements, in a way I haven’t seen since the tail end of the War on Terror, when we first started living under the flightpath. How the vibe back then, which was also the aftermath of the Financial Crisis, the peak of #Occupy, and the long year of the Arab Spring, induced me to write black mirror fictions imagining what it would be like if that war, with its black sites and extrajudicial punishments, came home.

That era, the last few years of the Obama administration, was also when we seemed to be trying to take on more robust public policy efforts to tackle the climate crisis. This week I read most of the EPA’s final rule rescinding the 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger clean air and human health, curious to see if it would provide any insights into what all is going on in the hive mind of the state. The document endeavors to ground its decision in dry questions of statutory authority, but the exuberant celebration of extractionist restoration comes through. A reminder that the war on nature and the war on our neighbors are deeply connected, and the path to a better future starts with seeing those intersections more clearly.

New Book News

I’m delighted to share this deal report from Thursday’s edition of Publisher’s Marketplace:

The aim of this new book is to blend nature writing, technology criticism and memoir to explore the landscapes of 21^st century capitalism through a natural history prism, seeking out pockets of biodiversity and adaptation at a moment when machine intelligence seems on the verge of taking over the world, and exploring paths to a greener and more livable future. It will be centered on field visits to sites that epitomize our current economic and ecological trajectories, and I am excited to dig into that original research around the continent. I may be pinging some of you for help and local knowledge.

Thanks to all the readers who checked out and spread the word about A Natural History of Empty Lots (the ebook edition of which is still on sale as of this morning), and this newsletter, and helped create the opportunity for this new book.

Let’s Go for a Walk

I’m also really excited about this upcoming event announced Tuesday, the first-ever collaboration between the Texas Book Festival and Fusebox, our amazing local performing arts festival. Unfortunately, all the tickets sold within a day! So if you are in Austin and want to go for a walk but didn't get this news in time, feel free to email me and we’ll work on one just for readers of this newsletter.

The Roundup

Happy 94th birthday to Gerhard Richter, whose landscape paintings have been on my mind of late.

On the subject of the “endangerment finding,” I was simultaneously uplifted and sobered by Bill McKibben’s newsletter this week about the coming El Niño, and how it’s arrival will quickly bring the urgency of the climate crisis back to the forefront of our politics.

The February issue of Harper’s has a great Hari Kunzru piece on his psychogeographical ramble through “Another London.”

Thanks to Field Notes friend and “human web-crawler” Bruce Sterling for this amazing piece on how to use deep search to find novel Anthropocene nature adaptations in crowdsourced digital platforms, or “INQUIRE-Search: Interactive Discovery in Large-Scale Biodiversity Databases.” An outtake:

RIP Jesse Jackson, who I got to meet in Chicago in the summer of 1985, after experiencing an amazing morning session at PUSH headquarters, an old South Side synagogue that had been turned into the venue for rousing secular sermons. My Republican parents had been so moved by his message that they crossed over, supported him in the 1984 Iowa Caucuses, and hosted one of his senior staffers in our Des Moines home. He was perhaps the most effective orator I ever heard, and definitely the most grounded in a righteous sense of justice. Over at Grist, a perspective on his commitment to environment justice.

In urban wildlife news, interesting New York Times report this week on the cougars of L.A. and the wildlife crossing that’s about to open just for them.

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that cavorting between black vultures and crested caracara is not as surprising as the Times suggested in the same issue of Science Times.

Have a great week.

Real winter weather is so rare in this part of Texas that I sometimes forget how essential the occasional long walk in the cold white stillness is to my mental health, maybe even to my personality. Until my mother moved down here a year and a half ago, I would always get my fix visiting her in the remote Iowa woodland she and Dad retired to. Last weekend we were blessed with a wintry mix that arrived on a Saturday, and allowed us time and space to relish it. And in Austin, any real accumulation of snow or ice shuts down the machineries of state and capital almost completely, as the local governments lack both the capacity and will to do anything to remove it. So this week, after a mix of freezing rain and sleet coated the city overnight on Saturday, all they did was tell everyone to stay home and do nothing until it melts. Typically that would happen the next day, but this time it really wasn’t until Wednesday that the bridges were clear, and Thursday that it got genuinely warm.

That the sleet storm was accompanied by thunder and lightning added an apocalyptic frisson to the event. In the morning the season’s first flock of waxwings had come through, filling the high boughs of our fruit-filled hackberries a little earlier than usual.

The cold snap hit right on schedule, just as we finished setting up my wife’s birthday present in the yard: a huge, old-school canvas tent designed to accommodate a wood stove, the sort of set up designed for cold country elk hunters that we aim to experiment with in this warmer clime. By mid-afternoon the cousins were already over making s’mores on the stovetop with Octavia. The only member of the household who wasn’t excited about the arrival of real winter was our 16-year-old hound, Lupe. Lupe’s hips had begun to really fail her last summer, and it was evident that the sudden cold amped up her discomfort to the point where she couldn’t get up or lay down without assistance. Thankfully the floors under her bed are heated, and we had developed an easily changed set up that let us keep it clean and comfortable.

Our house is designed such that the bedrooms and living room/kitchen, which are the only rooms we have, are divided by an uncovered patio. So when you get up before sunrise after a winter storm, you open the bedroom door and step right out into it. Not enough accumulation this time to leave a drift at the door, but thick sheets of ice dusted with just enough powder that you might think it was snow until your feet went out from under you. The kind of cold that also brings the quiet, the comforting silence when the machine of the city shuts down for a few hours, no one else is out, and even the animals are hunkered in whatever warm shelters they can find.

The padlock on our back gate was frozen, so rather than open it with the shovel the terrier puppy and I headed out on the icy street and walked toward the base of the tollway onramp, past the abandoned milk plant, and down one of the cul de sacs in the industrial park designed for the semis to turn around, where we found a less official access point to the urban woods, pictured above. The zone on the other side of the chainlink is a mix of private and public land, but the boundaries between the two are not marked, and pathways do not recognize them. In the snow the animal trails and tire paths through the foliage stood out in high relief, like a network map suddenly lit up on the board.

We took advantage of that to explore trails we had not taken before. One took us into a clearing where we encountered two young bucks staring back at us, another into a recently abandoned camp deep in the viney woods that had been shielded with a wall of cut bamboo. Further in from there, we came upon a tight-looking tent made from a big tarp and other found materials, which seemed a picturesque tableau until we heard a dog growl at the sound of the shutter on my dad’s old Canon F-1, and I was reminded that most tents do not have fancy little stoves.

Monday the city was still closed down, so we decided to go further and explore the gnarlier industrial lots being slowly cleared to make room for a mixed-use development that will profoundly transform this little pocket of Tarkovsky Park. The ferality we found when we moved here sixteen years ago has been bleeding out bit by bit every season, sometimes rebounding. Fewer coyotes, more cool birds, the curiosity of Capital and its commission-chasing young brokers ebbing and flowing with the interest and occupancy rates. A good winter storm lets you see what wildlife is still out there from the tracks they leave in the snow, and get windows through time, into memory, and into the variant futures that leave other signs on the land, and sometimes in the light that shimmers.

At the spot where the frontage road loops under the tollway bridge, we found a little trail that led past another tall fence into the sliver of woods on the north bank of the river. The ice crunched under every step, and the big herons and egrets telegraphed our passage with loud skronks. We walked under the power pylons, and eventually the trail left the woods and entered the weird plain that leads to the mountain of asphalt millings. I stepped up onto a high berm, to take in the wider vantage. I could see where they had recently demolished the old building a guy I know had squatted in for years, under the canopy of the largest circumference tree in Travis County, and decided to see how it was doing.

Those ancient oaks, centuries old, often can be found near old highways, most of which follow more ancient pathways. They’re more common near two-lane highways in less-traveled parts of the state, but sometimes you’ll find a tough old Ent that’s holding out as two lanes become four, and now eight, and the pavement and traffic get ever closer. A few years ago I saw the rendering where the developers showcased that tree as the entry landmark for their planned redevelopment. A nice idea, but I can’t help but want to imagine how it will look in another few hundred years, when it outlasts our ruin. Monday morning, it didn’t look that far off.

We worked our way back from there, across expansive sheets of ice that gave the industrial wastes a beauty they had not earned, tracing a new path through a savanna of frozen retama until we found the main trail. At one spot we came upon some discarded objects that included a trio of stuffed animals face-down in the snow, and a massively warped vinyl record whose label had become illegible. I picked it up and turned it over to look at the other side, and could just make it out: The Legendary Josh White. Half of a two-disc compilation, I later learned, from 1982, by a remarkable artist I had never heard of, who bridged the blues into political folk in the mid-twentieth century until he was blacklisted in the early 50s for advocating conceptions of freedom and community not founded on private property rights.

Tuesday morning the schools and offices were still closed, but the back lock had finally de-iced, so Fifi (so named by our six-year-old, and an apt choice) and I walked down to the river around 8:30. We hadn’t gotten far when we saw motion in the near distance. A pair of coyotes on the rocky bank, ducking into the woods when they saw us. We followed, slowly, wanting to see them but also wanting to give them space.

Winter makes it easier to see wildlife in the middle distance, and if you track the line where the horizon would be, you always have a good chance of spotting whatever’s around. The coyotes had split just a little bit to go in slightly different directions, probably a smart strategy. But both stopped when we stepped from the riverbank into the woods, and watched us back as we stood there. Their coats were thick and autumnal, a lush orangey brown like the color of old Carhartts tinged with goldenrod. They looked healthy and big, and I wondered if they might be a Central Texas variant of the ghost wolves, the coyotes who are partly descended from our native and otherwise exterminated red wolves. I also thought about how often coyotes encountered in the early morning seem unwary, maybe exhausted or engorged from the long night’s hunt.

The coyotes only moseyed when we did. They sauntered slowly back deeper into the woods, headed downriver. Or so it appeared.

When we worked our way back to the house fifteen minutes later, they were there. One right at our back gate. The other on the rise nearby, just inside the edge of our unmarked property line.

I remembered how, when Lupe and our other dog Katsu were younger, right after we built the house and rewilded the lot, the coyotes would often come to the fence to visit, as if luring our dogs out.

That afternoon we dropped our snow day daughter off at grandma’s and took pain-stricken Lupe to the veterinarian for an assessment. We talked through her progression and status since the last visit, and all sat with her there on the floor. When we began to conclude that maybe it was time, she gave us eerily comprehensible expressions of enthusiastic concurrence.

Living in a place like this, I’ve come to see how dogs often embody many of the dark aspects of our domestication of animals, in the way we have bred dogs to instinctively try to kill or chase off any living creature that enters our domain and is not human or canine. Lupe’s 10-year companion Katsu, a fierce hunter from a breed raised to chase down the wild boars of Kishu, was very much that way. Lupe was different.

She appeared down the street from us as a puppy right after we moved into a rented little cottage next to our then-empty lot, abandoned and living on an old sofa dumped behind the diner with her sister. Our neighbors adopted the sister, who they named Lucy, and we adopted Lupe. She was all black in color, mostly blackmouth cur in breeding but with a mix of other traits, and native to this place, where the riparian woods hide in a secret pocket of wildness behind the factories at the edge of town, a landscape she had learned to survive in. She was an incredible tracker, a stealthy ninja, wary of humans, and super tough, but also strangely gentle—able to protect the home while also managing to co-exist with the other life around her. I had to earn her trust, and was rewarded with a glimpse at how she experienced the world, and her subtle way of teaching me lessons in how to live in the world.

Only later, as we headed home, did I mention to Agustina the eerie visitation from the coyotes. Like spirits of the forest, who knew where Lupe was going before we did.

Further reading

I also wrote remembrances of Lupe’s sister Lucy here in 2024, and of her companion Katsu here in 2021. For a great read on how free-ranging dogs adapt to urban life, check out Alan Beck’s amazing 1973 study from Baltimore, The Ecology of Stray Dogs.

RIP J. David Bamberger, chicken tycoon turned restoration practitioner and advocate, who died last weekend at 97. My son Hugo spent a lot of time in his childhood summers at nature camp at Bamberger Ranch, where he got deep learning about the ecology of our region and how it can be regenerated and stewarded. Bamberger did much to give that kind of work social and ethical cachet among people with the resources to do land restoration work at the scale of huge acreages, and the welcome he extended to others from across the community over the course of his life was remarkable.

In the long reads department, I enjoyed Adam Shatz’s January lecture and essay for the London Review of Books, “Visions of America,” which provides an interesting perspective on the current moment and where we could be going, at the same time as it made me frustrated with its absolutely urbanist and metropolitan focus. I don’t think it’s possible to understand the dark power dynamics and profound inequalities that hide behind our exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology without seeing how rooted they are in our damaged relationship with the land on which we live. But I still recommend the talk, even if (spoiler alert) what you get at the end of an 8,000-word survey heavy on pessimism is a little dose of giddiness about Mamdani as messiah. Print version here, and lecture video here.

For another perspective on the real American, read about the remarkable life of the legendary Josh White.

And thanks to Rick Klaw for tipping me off to the amazing story of Minneapolis indie bookseller Greg Ketter, owner of DreamHaven Books and Comics, going viral with the images of him facing down the federal troops even as the clouds of tear gas swarm around his unmasked face.

@msnow“I’m 70-years-old and I’m f—ing angry” A Minnesota man reacts in the aftermath of today’s fatal federal shooting in Minneapolis, as agents deploy crowd-control munitions during protests. #news #minnesota

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Here’s a wider shot of the largest circumference oak tree in the county, holding out between the asphalt dump and the tollway.

Stay warm and have a safe week.

Monday morning as I inched my way onto I-35 after dropping my daughter off at her sweet little school across from the abandoned shopping mall, I saw a dude walking along the shoulder of the northbound lanes, wrapped in a black blanket that blew in the wind every bit like a cloak he might have borrowed from one of Galadriel’s elven lieutenants circled around the fire behind the Home Depot. The guy was being followed by three police interceptors inching along behind him at the same pace, emergency lights running. My view was obscured as we passed under the 51^st Street overpass, and when we emerged, the cops had disappeared. In the moment’s glance I could grab as I merged into the flow, I watched the hero continue his journey on the concrete ledge as if it were some mountain pass, the cloak animated with the brush strokes of the winter wind. Put one on the boards for the home team.

On our way to drop-off, the first grader and I discussed the new year’s resolution she had shared in her homework: “Toking to Birds.” That got me thinking about how we might go about making first contact, and with which species.

Winter is the season when the great-tailed grackles are especially easy to find. In the evening when I’m headed home from work they are often gathered on the ledges of the interstate’s upper deck during evening rush hour. Maybe they are looking for the pyramids that were once their home, when Moctezuma’s uncle Ahuizotl imported them to Central Mexico from their native habitat around Veracruz. They’ve only occupied Central Texas for a century or so. Thursday morning when I got my early departure for LAX, hundreds had filled the branches of the little landscaper trees that pretend to hide the parking garage. When grackles vocalize, it sometimes sounds like the squawk of a radio being tuned, and I’ve always wondered if you could imitate them with some sort of hand-held held electronics.

It’s also the season when the great blue herons return to their nests along the river behind our home, in the sliver of forest grown up in the floodplain between the tollway and the dam. There’s one tall old sycamore with a half-dozen nests that you can see from the end of our street. The tree grows from a trash-ridden bog at the base of a steep bluff, and was long hidden behind a cluster of windowless metal warehouses. But when they tore those down to make room for a planned development, the nests on the high branches were suddenly revealed, not that any of the young singles notice the amazing view while navigating their way from their cars to the bars. The first nest was re-occupied right after Thanksgiving, and by New Year’s they all looked to be. Those birds make strange noises too, more skronk than squawk, that I’ve sometimes thought could be easily replicated on a baritone sax with the right sort of free jazz energy.

Not far from that spot, a pair of black vultures has been hanging out a lot on this one particular telephone pole, above Rumpelstiltskin’s little shack behind the wind chime factory. They showed up right around Christmas, smudged with chalky white stains, cleaning each other and necking in the way only vultures can do, with those necks, heads and beaks designed to crawl up through a tear in your belly and pull out the the soft bits. They don’t really have a way for us to talk to them, but they seem very contented with the roadkill-rich habitat we’ve created for them.

And down in the woods, the barred owls seem especially active. It may be that the leafless winter canopy just makes it easier to spot them from a distance on our morning walks—I saw one every morning when I got down there this week. They are the only raptor I’ve ever managed to imitate well enough to elicit a response to my call, and they are the first bird Octavia and I saw when I carried her down into those same woods as a baby, so maybe I’ll try teaching her their call first. We might even summon Athena along the way.

New Year’s Roundup

Apologies to regular readers for what has been my longest gap between posts in the five years I’ve been writing this newsletter. We had an especially busy December, which culminated with an extended family journey to spread my father-in-law’s ashes at his hometown. The trip included an unplanned two-day layover in a Miami Airport business park Hyatt living off airline coupons, a challenging day getting over the Andes from Santiago to Mendoza by car, and a rough 24-hour journey back that included a 10-hour red eye in a cramped middle seat with the kid sprawled across my lap. I read Piglia on Borges most of the way, having gotten completely hooked while in-country, and able to read the Spanish more fluently thanks to the week of immersion. We had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president that morning, and the vibe at DFW as we re-entered the USA reminded me how, ever since 9/11, the return home is always the most anxiety-inducing part of the trip.

Thursday evening in my L.A. hotel, watching CNN as I got ready to head to a business dinner, I was momentarily confused by the way the Chyron-crowded splitscreen made me think that footage of the violent uprising in Iran was downtown Minneapolis. I had a flashback to this time 15 years ago, when my feed was full of scenes from the Arab Spring, while the old neon plant across the street was the secret staging ground for the local chapter of #Occupy. I thought the conflation of the two could make a great story, and soon started working on what became my first novel, Tropic of Kansas: a story about an uprising in the U.S. to take out a fascistic corporate government run by a charismatic CEO turned authoritarian president. As I imagined him at the time, a mix of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Hugo Chavez. The way the story played out, it opens in a militarized Minnesota, where rebels have been fighting the government for years. It seemed so implausible at the time.

I hadn’t looked at or given much thought to that book in years. Writing a book is a lot like an exorcism, and the idea of re-reading one’s first novel is a bit like the idea of reading stuff you wrote in your high school yearbook. But I was curious enough to see how my Minnesota scenes written in 2013-14 compared to reality that I opened the file up on my flight home Saturday, and it was strange to see how what had felt deliberately surreal in the writing has come so much closer to the now. You can read the first three short chapters here at Reactor, if you’re interested.

Having worked so hard to imagine what real-world Minnesota Monkeywrenchers would be like, I got a big smile reading this weekend’s field report from Julie Bosman at the NYT on how some folks are using the winter ice as their ally in pranking the Southern boys they assume to be disproportionately represented behind the ICE masks. Even my cranky old Republican dad would have admired the detail of the locals using their pull-on cleats to get around on surfaces the Homelanders can’t handle, as he was a big fan of those.

Over the holidays we started watching long-form nature documentaries with our daughter, looking for video-based narratives that reward more patient observation. We settled on Nature, which proved to be one of the only old-school PBS documentary series that still had the pacing of the pre-digital era. We screened two amazing episodes, one about sea turtles and jaguars, and the other about the walrus, and they were each beautiful but also slightly sad, as the stories they told were stories of animals adapting to the ways we have altered their longtime habitats. I wrote about it for my friends at Aqueduct Press, the Seattle-based publisher of feminist science fiction, for their always-excellent year-end roundup of things to read, watch and listen to.

While part of the point of watching nature documentaries is seeing real life instead of computer imaging, the episode about the walrus included some graphics that reminded me how data-based machine visualization can powerfully complement real-world observation. I especially liked the below animated representation, which shows the females and pups making their run for the safety of the pack ice while the males hang back and get ready to head for the coastal beaches.

The punchline of the story is that the pack ice you can see at the center top, so critical to the way the walrus have long raised their young, is receding to a point where they may no longer be able to reach it.

Upcoming Appearances

If you’re in Austin, I’ll appearing this Thursday evening, January 22, at the Fusebox Artists Lab, to talk about my programming for this year’s festival, part of a new collaboration between Fusebox and the Texas Book Festival. I’ll be sharing more about that here soon—stay tuned.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, on March 3 I’ll be appearing at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

More events coming up throughout the year, and I will share the details as they become available.

Stay safe, and have a great week.

November was the season of the rut, when the stags become a more common sight in the urban woods, looking for mates and more inclined to do crazy shit. I’ve been walking our terrier puppy down in the floodplain and along the riverbank, watching her energetic strategies for navigating the obstacles that bushwhacking present when your legs are less than six inches long. I keep her on a long lead, which further complicates the exercise, but the wildlife seem to appreciate it. And we made it through the season without any dangerous encounters, despite walking into the middle of some exceptionally frisky mixed groups of whitetail.

The puffed-up poise with which the males presented themselves during this was striking, turning and trotting like regal specters, maybe headed back to whatever other world it is where the most majestic ones spend the rest of the year.

My friend Henry emailed from his Monday commute into Manhattan to share this image of the rut as it occurs in New Jersey:

this morning a stark sight at the commuter train station, the picture of which I do not send,

a young sixpointer white-tailed buck, renversé, impaled

impaled in left posterior haunch following a failed traverse of the spiked railway palisse or fence

I am not superstitious but it seems a grim portent, or anyway a data point in the proposed Montclair deer census. It is the deer equivalent of teenage dare in overcrowded suburbia

I told him I may steal that dark winter vignette for a story, about the uptown rare book dealer who can’t get the scene out of his head, and makes the unwise decision to go back on foot and see if he can give the animal a more dignified eternal rest. I’ve had my own share of similar encounters, which provoke something different than the usual impulse of stewardship.

The rut seems to have mostly wound down here this week, a little on the early side. The week before Thanksgiving brought us rain, and late bloomers. The most notable, if not the most colorful, was the frost weed, which seems extra thick this season, and well matched with the cold moon of December.

When the really cold nights come, the frost weed sweats extravagant vents of ice from its stems, often in surreal formations. The plant roots most readily in places where a lot of water collects. Its abundance may in part reflect the fact that the deer apparently don’t like it, and the fact that it has such an effective way of finding wet spots in a dry land. A winter bloom that comes with an enigmatic promise. In part, for me, a sign of the brief but expansive refuge year-end can provide from the treadmill of Capital, in the same way it signals the cold season’s incubation of spring.

The Wednesday after Thanksgiving, I snuck away from the office early to say a death bed goodbye to a dear friend. Daniel Llanes was someone I worked closely with over the past dozen years on urban conservation issues, a neighbor who became an ally and a mentor of sorts. I chronicled some of our work together in A Natural History of Empty Lots, but I only hinted at his unique character and personality. Daniel was a rare type, a unicorn among men—one of the grooviest people you could ever meet, at the same time as he was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen at driving people crazy. The latter because he was so persistent and unvarnished in his commitment to calling out injustice when he saw it, and in his refusal to accept it as the way the world must be.

In a way, I didn’t really know the whole guy—just the one from the last 15 years of his life, working together on projects where we were so focused on the matter at hand that we didn’t talk much about personal pasts. He was a striking fellow, even in his elder years, with shoulder-length curly hair, a simultaneously extravagant and humble 70s sartorial style, and a big smile. He lived in a house he had made from an old body shop, with a view of an industrial corridor outside his front door and the wild river and woods as his backyard.

A San Antonio kid of Indigenous heritage who loved to dance, sing and make music, and managed to get himself into Juilliard (if I remember the story right), he returned to Texas to be one of the first non-white members of the Austin Ballet, and there learned some of the ways in which Austin was (and is) not as progressive and inclusive as it likes to convince itself. He developed an independent career as a multi-instrumental singer-songwriter who also worked as a healer and occasionally produced lovely works of visual art (including macro photography of flowers), and dedicated much of his adult life to advocating for environmental and social justice in East Austin. He made a huge impact during his life, and nurtured the seeds for an awakening I can feel beginning to emerge as the new generation takes the mantle.

He passed peacefully Thursday evening, as the last full moon of the year was rising in the eastern sky.

It was a drizzly week, and it wasn't until Saturday morning that the sky cleared and the sun came back out. The puppy and I went back down to the river, maybe thinking a bit about our friend’s passage into the spirit world.

It was chilly, and a little foggy, but more alive than this stretch has seemed in a while. The river was thick with gadwalls in the water and birdwatchers on the opposite bluff. A pair of white ibis flew past us, into the sun, followed by a kingfisher, and then a big osprey came over low, from shadow into sun. The sandy stretches of the banks were thick with tracks of raccoons, herons, and coyotes, the latter a less frequent sight around here lately.

The river was reshaped by the summer’s floods, so we had to find a new path to the east, one that took us through the trash-strewn woods just over the banks. When we made it back out to the edge, where the river stretches out right before the bridge, there were a half-dozen young deer cavorting in the shallows. We even managed to catch one pair playing at combat on their hindlegs:

It was a scene of restoration and peace, even as you could hear the piledrivers banging away in the near distance, building the pump station that will channel all the drainage from the expanded Interstate 35 into the river just past the stretch pictured above. With luck, we will be able to turn that project into an opportunity for ecological uplift, and maintain this little pocket of rewilded river our departed friend worked so hard to protect.

Extra credit

More about the work of Daniel Llanes, including links to performance videos, here at his website.

My Empty Lots editor at Timber Press, Makenna Goodman, had a wonderful piece at the NYT this week, on the idea of magic as an alternative to therapy.

You may have seen the report about the raccoon in Virginia who got into a liquor store and got into the product:

In Boerne, Texas, on the western road from here to San Antonio, they have opened a new Predator-themed bar:

In homage to the original 1987 action movie thriller, Darkside After Dark is draped in lush jungle greenery with the skeleton of a pilot dangling from an actual helicopter stuck in a massive tree behind the bar. High up in a corner near walls that resemble treacherous rock cliffs, the Predator himself lurks, looking out over the crowd.

This is the same place where, twenty years ago, a group of locals got busted while recreating scenes from Mad Movies on the highways.

Crazy ant season is back.

And in Anthropocene evolutionary news, the WSJ confirms the suspicions reported earlier here that the self-driving Jaguars now hunting local streets in Austin, San Francisco and elsewhere in four-wheeled packs really are becoming more aggressive.

Apologies for taking a month between posts. I’ve been busy working on some new longform projects, thinking about how to take the newsletter in fresh directions—and taking our daughter camping. Here’s Inks Lake, upriver from us an hour, as it looked the night in November when the rain finally cleared, and the burn ban was lifted with it:

Have a safe week.

Friday morning as the front rolled in that would finally bring us some rain, I went for a walk beneath the platforms of two elevated freeways with my friend Paul, before we both headed to work. Paul is a birder, and this unlikely pocket of urban wild space he wanted to show me is also one I had long wanted to visit, after more than two decades of glancing curiously down at it while hurtling through the labyrinthine concrete cloverleaf where State Highway 183 intersects with the Mopac freeway.

When my son Hugo was his little sister’s age, 24 years ago, we went searching for the source of Shoal Creek, one of the main tributaries of the Colorado that cuts through the northern half of Austin. We lived close to the creek, and as transplanted Midwesterners were excited to find a place within walking distance of home where you could easily find fossils mixed in with the rocks of the limestone creekbed. Once you’re in a half-dry creek like that, you realize what a great trail it is, and want to follow it. We read about its history, how it used to always be full of water. The old-school paper street map we had in the car showed the full course of the creek, and at the origin point we saw icons marking the location of natural springs. We went looking for them, and found a new shopping center had been built where the map said the springs were. It was named The Arboretum, probably for the trees that the developers killed to make room for a Pottery Barn, and as we traced the coordinates we found ourselves looking down into a gabion well outside an office building. Ever since, every time I drove that way I’d see these ponds on the opposite side of the interchange, and wonder what connection they might have to that re-engineered ecology.

Paul and I met at 8 behind a Firestone shop along the frontage road. He was there when I arrived, binoculars in hand as he surveyed one of the ponds. The fall migration had mostly already passed through over the month preceding, though there were still a few stragglers. It looked like the state troopers had been through the week before, in the sweeps of homeless camps on city-owned land that the governor ordered without consulting city officials. As a consequence, it was quiet enough for Paul to make out every bird call, with the traffic noise just distant enough.

We saw one other human on the levee, and a lone Cabbage Patch Doll face down on the ballast along the railroad tracks, its pants around its ankles. We saw a lot of no trespassing signs as we got deeper into the zone, but knew they marked public property. The signs of life were a little sparse, until we crossed the tracks and made our way to the south pond and the dry wetland below the overpass. An egret in the water, a red-tailed hawk in a tree, prodigious crops of wild onion bulb underfoot, and the sound of a lone killdeer behind the Public Storage.

On our way back we checked out the patch of woods that parallels the tracks. Paul showed me a mature willow he has found a lot of cool birds in, and I found the skull of a medium-sized mammalian predator in a little clearing next to some coyote scat. In the moment I guessed it to be an opossum, but after some research now think it was likely a feral cat.

Places like that have a weird charisma, the way they hide the natural history of the region in the margins of our enshittified suburban landscape. Southern Pacific built a water stop for the steam trains at that spot, no doubt because there was ample water coming up out of the ground, and you can bet research would show that the highway they call Research Boulevard followed the path of some more ancient trail that preceded Anglo-American settlement. The idea that beautiful migratory birds seek cover in the sliver of junk woods that have been allowed to grow between a freight line and a freeway is both wondrous and sad, even as you can see what could be if we let that memory in the land more fully express.

We talked as we walked about Paul’s career path as a newly minted member of the bar setting out on a path as a public interest environmental lawyer. He and I had worked together on some river advocacy projects during lockdown, and had a lot of fun and a tiny bit of success taking on Tesla. I was heartened to hear he was sticking with his plan, which is not one the system makes easy.

We didn’t see any springs. Just a lot of concrete channels, one of which had been tagged with a message from the underground: “TAYLOR SWIFT IS A CIA PSYOP.”

The rain came that night, with thunder and lightning intense enough to awaken me from a deep slumber. After two brutally dry, hot months, the ecological response to the sudden saturation was immediate. By midday, when the sun was up and the clouds cleared, my daughter and I took in the marvel of a dragonfly ballet here in our feral lot behind the door factory. She didn’t notice it at first, as we walked out to the car, but when she did she lit up at the energy of dozens of little monsters zig-zagging above the desiccated foliage from which must have just hatched a brood of smaller flying nymphs we could not see.

We were headed to the Central Branch of the Austin Public Library, while Mom worked on finalizing Addams Family costumes for Wednesday and Morticia (my Gomez only required finding the pinstripe suit at the back of the closet). We’ve been spending a lot of time at the library, as Octavia has just had some breakthroughs as a new reader, Agustina and I are both in research mode on new projects, and the utopian promise of the public library has felt like a particular sanctuary in this darkening historical moment. Our main branch is especially promising in that regard, managing to be a temple of books that is also a temple of light deeply connected to its natural context, and staffed by an incredible team of professionals, many of them graduates of UT’s world-class information studies (fka library sciences) program.

On the wall by the fiction, you can even find a handy infographic guide to the library’s levels of illumination:

We had just passed the interstate, where the grackles were lined up atop the new sound barriers they have erected to muffle the cacophony of its coming expansion, when Octavia announced from the backseat that she didn’t want to go to the library after all. Instead, she said, we should just go out for lunch at her favorite place for noodles (which is catercorner from the library) and then return home. I could sense the certainty in her declaration, and acceded. But I continued in that direction, until a minute later when we pulled up to the light around Brazos Street, and I saw the road ahead was entirely blocked by a Die Hard-level deployment of police and fire trucks with their emergency lights on.

We diverted, found an alternate route, and got to the restaurant. Noodles ordered, I looked on my phone for more info about the emergency. And got a sobering lesson in the power of my child’s intuition:

I looked again a few minutes later, as we drew monsters on our placemats, and learned the shooter had escaped and was at large. That’s when I put my phone down and started paying more attention to what was going on around me.

Thankfully, just one person was injured, and no one killed, in what was evidently a dispute between two people known to each other, which transpired in the men’s bathroom on the top floor. The suspect was apprehended near a Starbucks in South Austin around 90 minutes later, in an area a lot like the frontage road edgeland I had been exploring with Paul the morning before.

Before we left the lunch spot I emailed a librarian I have gotten to know over the past year, to make sure she and her colleagues were okay. She replied that they and all but one patron were, that the years of active shooter training somehow did not work to prepare them for the experience, and that they were staying home the next day.

It rained again that night, and Sunday morning came the fog, so thick that when the puppy and I walked down to the river it was like stepping into the cover of some lost album of ambient music.

A few days later, right on cue, the rain lilies came up from the ground. Native wildflowers that somehow only respond to actual rain, not water from a hose, and seem to thrive in the most blighted, recently scraped patches of bulldozed dirt. I found them Thursday at the base of the onramp, greeting the sun as it rose over the tollway. Maybe it was the imminence of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos that made me see them for the first time not so much as wildflowers but as lilies, funerary flowers, offerings for the dead.

At lunch that afternoon, I read in the paper how scientists now believe that the exceptionally high water temperatures of the summer of 2023 have rendered the elkhorn and staghorn coral of Florida functionally extinct, raising concern about the viability of the rest of that marine ecosystem. Then I turned the page and read that the Japanese government is sending the Army into Akita prefecture to help exterminate the bears, which was like reading that they were hunting down Totoro.

When I suited up Friday after work and took Octavia trick or treating, we found another patch of rain lilies, this one in the median along the sidewalk in front of an unintentionally scary looking old house. She had been method acting the goth morbidity of Wednesday Addams with such a convincing ease over the course of the week that I shouldn’t have been surprised when she plucked one, and then gave it to a stranger as we arrived at her aunt and uncle’s house.

In the morning I found a rare specimen freshly hatched on our kitchen counter: A plume moth, a flying creature so strange in its anatomy, with wings like pipe cleaners and limbs of needle-like spikes, that you cannot quite believe it is truly alive until it flies away as you try to catch it and free it outside. Only now, looking at the picture, do I notice that it came in Halloween colors.

At the end of a grim week, it was good to get a reminder that there are still strange wild things being born all around us—even if we are not so good at seeing them, let alone being good stewards of the environment we share with them. I’m still coming to terms with the way our daughter, who loves the light, seems to be thinking she also needs to develop fresh tools to navigate the dark.

Today Octavia wants to teach me how to make an ofrenda. I wonder what other lessons she and her peers will have for us, when they take the reins of the future we have made for them.

In memory of Emily Lott, 1947-2025

The Roundup

This Wednesday evening, November 5, I’ll be teaching a class on “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas. It’s a single session, and you can participate from anywhere on the planet as long as you can do it from 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Details and registration here.

Thursday, November 6, I’ll be giving a talk about A Natural History of Empty Lots at the Joynes Reading Room on the UT-Austin campus as part of the Plan II Honors Program’s 2025-26 lecture series, co-sponsored by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights & Justice. Open to the public—details here.

And Saturday night, November 8, I’ll be participating in one of the Lit Crawl events for Texas Book Festival, 7-8 pm at the Speakeasy at 4th & Congress downtown.

At WSJ, the rise of the water sommelier, and $95 bottles of melted glacier.

I loved this Michelle Nijhuis post on “sintering”—the process whereby snowflakes build connections with each other after they fall.

On the political front, I was struck by this incisive Mark Lilla piece in the Nov. 6 issue of the NYRB tracing the seeds of our current situation back to the beginning of the 90s and beyond.

Enjoy your extra hour, keep an eye out for migrating monarchs, check out Wednesday’s full moon, and stay safe.

The last flowers of late summer are mostly gone now, after a brutally dry end of the season, working on two months of almost no measurable rain here in Austin. The urban forest in the floodplain behind our home feels dangerously dry, maybe even on the verge of some kind of collapse. But last week’s beautiful harvest moon finally brought a break in the temperatures, and permission for the hackberries and pecans to begin to drop their leaves.

I suppose that’s why, as I hung out with my 85-year-old mom this week during her recovery from oral surgery, I found myself reading an article in the paywall-obsessed Financial Times about how the battle over leaf blowers became a front line in the culture wars, which took me down a rabbit hole into the invisible literature of landscape management marketing copy.

“Dominate any cleanup job with the industry’s highest blow force.” So reads the tag line for the RedMax EBZ9000, one of the newest and perhaps one of the last in a line of gas-powered leaf blowers, in this case a “frame-mounted throttle” that lets you carry the oversized engine and gas tank on your back while you transform your right arm with a low-slung machine extension whose Freudian echoes don’t need the embellishment of the copywriters (though I suppose the promises about “25% longer run-time than the competition” and “decreased operator fatigue” don’t hurt).

In my youth as a Midwestern lawn boy making comic book money doing the work my dad and our neighbors were happy to outsource for cheap, the company that now markets its professional-grade outdoor power products under the macho brand “RedMax” went by Husqvarna, which I always figured was just the name of some chainsaw-loving guy from Minnesota, the state to our north. Turns out it’s a Swedish industrial conglomerate that originated as a 17th century rifle workshop sponsored by the sovereign.

I never used a leaf blower in all those years, not even when I became a suburban homeowner dad myself. Even when I was trapped with the absurd all-American labor of cleaning up the autumn leaves, my reflexive aversion to power tools and their noise and alienation from the object kept me seeking the hand-blistered zen of the rake. When I was little, and the autumns were cool and rainy, after Dad got the leaves into piles he would burn them. By the time I hit my 30s most municipalities, including all the towns I lived in from Des Moines to D.C. to Austin, had implemented burn bans and requirements that all leaves instead be put into giant, government-issue paper bags for collection, a Sisyphean task that helped one see how against nature the whole exercise is. So sometime during the peak of the Global War on Terror I became a conscientious objector in the war on leaves, and life has been better ever since.

Agustina, Hugo and I ended up making our home in a brownfield acre in the edgelands of East Austin, and set about restoring biodiversity to what had been a dump site bisected by an abandoned petroleum pipeline. That involved seeding the soil — including on the roof over our heads — with native plants that thrived when this region was Blackland prairie, an ecosystem that has been almost entirely (99%) eradicated for agriculture and development, but whose plants pop up just about anywhere the mowers leave alone. And one thing you learn, tending to a yard you have tried to make into a wild ecosystem, is that in a place like Central Texas where it never really freezes, the season of falling leaves is also the real beginning of springtime, when the tall grasses drop their seeds and the native wildflowers are ready to start germinating into hardy rosettes.

This year the work beckons more than usual, as our yard is recovering from a three-year-long guest house construction project that destroyed much of the prairie restoration we had done in the preceding decade. I got the front yard started back to health in the spring, only to have that work trampled cleaning up the three big trees that came down in May’s microburst. So the full moon reminded me to put in my order, and Thursday’s mail brought three five-pound bags of fresh biodiverse life in the form of native grass & wildflower mixes from our friends at Native American Seed in Junction, Texas, who use the tools of production agriculture to enable us to restore the landscapes agriculture has destroyed.

As we hung out on Tuesday I told Mom how I was thinking about trying to burn sections of the yard, the way she had taught me by example with the 200-acre oak savanna she and Dad spent three decades restoring with nothing but fire (longtime readers will remember the story of how my dad singed his eyebrows off the first year they burned). She advised me, with the authority of an experienced sorceress who has tried all the spells in all the possible situations, what a bad idea that was. So this weekend I found myself reluctantly rummaging around for a rake, to be able to clear the dead foliage of the season passed and make room to get the seed in properly.

“Just get it in before the next good rain,” said Mom.

Somehow the way she said that simple bit of gardening advice felt obliquely political. So I got after the yard work while I should have been protesting, and found myself imagining the rejuvenation of the American land a good controlled burn would bring.

Going LoCo

Saturday morning our six-year old daughter and I carried our canoe and paddles down to the urban Colorado and met up with our neighbors and then a bigger group of volunteers for the annual LoCo Trash Bash started a few years ago by Austin fly fishing guide Alvin Ledeaux. Who knew grabbing plastic bottles, used styrofoam, weird metal objects and the occasional diaper from the the riverbed, the green and muddy banks and the trees at the river’s edge could be so fun.

It reminded me of the insight of the eccentric French utopian Charles Fourier, who recommended work be essential labor tasks be allocated based on which members of society would most enjoy them, and that trash collection would therefore be the playful work of children. Maybe his vision of a future in which whales would tow ships through oceans of lemonade after the polar ice caps melt was also more accurate than it sounded when I first heard it as a college freshman.

The Roundup

Thanks to the amazing crowd that made them pull out every last chair and strain the lawful capacity at Alienated Majesty Books in Austin last week for the launch of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots, to Brett Gaylor and crew for the beautiful documentary short they made and let us screen (coming soon, we hope, to a festival near you), and to Alexia Leclercq of PODER + Start:Empowerment and Craig Campbell of UT Anthropology and the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography for the great conversation about how to decolonize the future. Plus extra thanks to the hard-working UPS driver who arrived with the books just in the nick of time 5 minutes before the event.

My piece for Texas Highways about the time we went looking for the Marfa Lights and saw a maybe-Chupacabra is now available online on this side of the paywall—the photos by Eli Hartman are amazing.

This week I’ll be working on the plans for the class I’ll be teaching November 5 on “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas. Just one 3-hour session, and it’s an online class, so you can participate from anywhere on the planet (as long as you can do it from 6:30-9:30 pm CST). Details and registration here—please consider signing up if the topic is of interest.

And the day after that, Thursday, November 6, I’ll be giving a talk about A Natural History of Empty Lots at the Joynes Reading Room on the UT-Austin campus as part of the Plan II Honors Program’s 2025-26 lecture series, co-sponsored by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights & Justice. Open to the public—details here.

This week the UN World Meteorological Organization released its report showing that global CO2 levels peaked in 2024. And the UN Environment Program released a separate report arguing for the urgent of accelerating our investment in forests.

Scholars at the University of Utah this week published their research indicating that the evolution of psychedelic Psiloscybe fungi occurred around the same time as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, as planetary ecology adapted to the aftermath of the the asteroid that threw Earth into a brutal, prolonged winter and killed 80% of all life.

At The Nation, Maya Vinokour on the Cybertruck.

In the ideas worth stealing department, Gen Z protesters in climate-ravaged Madagascar scared the nation’s president into fleeing the country.

Coincidentally, this week was also the anniversary of John Brown’s October 16-18, 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. You can check out W.E.B. Du Bois’ book on Brown if you’re looking for some good cool weather reading.

For a less violent rebellion, here’s Cate Blanchett ranting about leaf blowers for the wonderful interview series Subway Takes (via the above-linked FT article):

Have a great week.

September always brings big moons. The best this year was the one I saw on the Friday before the autumnal equinox: a waning crescent low in the eastern sky an hour before sunup, rising u-shaped over the roofline of the beat-up old door factory next door and the tollway beyond. Venus was next to it, and both were exceptionally bright. Not bright enough to outshine the unshielded floodlights that illuminate the loading dock there at the edge of the urban woods, or all the other ambient lumens of the solipsistic city. But wondrous enough, in that ephemeral moment, to let a glimpse of celestial transcendence pierce our semiotic prison.

At night since Labor Day we’ve heard the piledrivers pounding away between the onramps, building out the pump station to channel the water from the expanded interstate into the river. I wonder if the birds headed south notice the change in the landscape below, the freshly excavated hole where a month ago was a tall green hill.

The morning sun brings the reveal of whatever weird shit went on in the night, stories told by things. A car left behind, a pink plastic margarita cup in the bush, two spent whippit canisters by the curb. Friday morning we found a dead mama opossum in the middle of the lane, American marsupial with her four little joeys scattered from her pouch across the warming blacktop. Early enough that the vultures had not yet found them.

According to the 1933 OED on our library shelf, Captain Smith reported back from Virginia in 1612 that the opossum has “a head like a Swine, a tail like a Rat, and the bigness of a Cat,” which is a good description of the adults, but the infants look more like little puppies.

The coral vine has been in bloom all over town throughout the month, long strands of hot pink petals crawling up fences, power lines and the occasional building. This is the plant’s usual season to flower, from the end of summer to the first real cool of fall. The plant is designated as an invasive, being a native of Mexico, but it seems to fit in here well, like a lot of species that have moved up here as temperatures have gotten hotter. It coexists and intertwines with the cross vines and their hummingbird-friendly trumpet blossoms, and when you get up close you can see how busily the bees work them, in this season when so few of the native plants are in bloom or even alive.

I saw a beehive on TV right around the same time as I started noticing all the bees around our yard. It was there in the background during one of those press conferences about the assassination of the traveling campus evangelist outside Provo. A beehive is the symbol at the heart of the Utah state flag, a symbol that relates back to the days of Deseret. The beehive also was the central feature of my high school’s official seal, up there on the podium to be deciphered every day during morning assembly. I guess they got the idea from the Freemasons, which the founders of both places must have been. A symbol of industriousness, of individuals always busy working for the community, but a weirdly inapt one for such intensely patriarchal communities. Maybe it expresses a subconscious yearning for a better mode of organization than mass supplication to the dark energy of the angry father.

The bees may be as invasive as the coral vine, but I’m always reflexively reassured by any prodigious signs of biodiverse life around me here in the city, as our rainy summer devolves into a long autumnal drought, and even the mature trees seem ecologically exhausted. In our early years here on this lot, we had a colony of what they used to call “killer bees” in the zone of illegally dumped debris at the back of our yard. They had made their home in a tire half-buried in the ground, surrounded by concrete rubble. A big truck tire, filled with honeycomb instead of air. The bees were chill, unless you tried to mess with their nest, in which case they would swarm and chase you out the front gate and down the block (I never tried, but some others did). Maybe we should make our own camp flag out of that memory.

The Tuesday after the equinox my Instagram feed served me another creepy post from the current management of the Department of Homeland Security. This one featured a flyover video, coming up over a mountain meadow to see the majestic snowy peaks as the text rises from the valley in all caps, “AMERICA: REMEMBER WHAT WE’RE FIGHTING FOR.” I thought about where I’ve seen that cinematic maneuver before—in both The Sound of Music and Triumph of the Will. Which of those they were going for was made even clearer by the caption below the image:

It’s been weird this year, the feeling that every time I open my phone I’m being trolled by my own government. In this case, with a manufactured and self-evidently false nativism used by the agency to justify its eviction of people who in many cases are the descendants of actual Natives of this hemisphere. They as well as you surely appreciate what classic Orwellian doublespeak it is, to make performative declarations of nativity about a colonial settler nation built through genocidal depopulation and the ravaging of a “wilderness” through the exploitation of enslaved and indentured labor. What makes it so uniquely American is how you can tell they are laughing when they do it, with the sinister privilege of the popular kids in some campus comedy.

I remember thinking how creepy it was, 24 years ago, when they reorganized the government after 9/11 to put various agencies that had slowly evolved across disparate federal departments under a new cabinet secretary devoted to protecting the “Homeland,” an un-American euphemism that encodes, in almost all of its modern uses, an idea of return of what are really settlers coming from someplace else. And when the people invested in those myths push them this strongly, in a way so obviously at odds with observable reality, you know they must be worried that the fiction on which the legitimacy of national borders depends is becoming more apparent.

If it were really our home, surely we would have treated it better. Ask the opossum who is the native, and who the conqueror.

Nature has a way of complicating our conceptions of nativity, and it’s starting to do so at an accelerating pace. Last week researchers at UT-Austin announced the discovery of a new bird—a hybrid of two species of jay from different genuses, whose most recent common ancestor was 7 million years ago and historically had no overlapping range. Global heating has changed that, and now the green jay of Mexico and Central America and the blue jay of North American backyards have found each other, as the former birds’s range has reached further north into Texas as average temperatures rise and ecologies change with them. The resulting bird, offspring of a female green jay and a male blue jay, is pictured in the center panel below:

Discoveries like these are a powerful reminder, in the back pages of the feed, that diversity is the key to success, and the path of successful adaptation to a dynamic and destabilized future. One wonders how many other new hybrids and other fresh evolutionary wonders are out there that have not yet been observed. And how our own species will adapt to the challenges we’ve created for all the life on Earth.

We may never acquire the gift evidenced by this anole I saw on our retaining wall last weekend: the ability to regenerate large portions of one’s own body after an accident or an encounter with a predator.

I was grilling dinner when I saw it, and had to raise my glass in admiration. Long live the new flesh. May your descendants grow large, and lord over the rewilded ruins we leave behind.

Upcoming Events

It’s been a year this month since the release of A Natural History of Empty Lots. Thanks to all the readers, booksellers, librarians and reviewers who have given the book such a warm welcome, and to the longtime readers of this newsletter who helped me see and develop the promise of this material.

The book has done well enough to warrant publication of a paperback edition, the launch of which we’ll be celebrating the evening of Tuesday, October 7 at Alienated Majesty Books in Austin. We’ll be screening Brett Gaylor’s short film Field Notes from an Apocalypse, which documents some walks in urban woods and a paddle to the Tesla Giga Texas factory, and then climate activist Alexia LeClercq of Start:Empowerment + PODER, anthropologist Craig Campbell of UT-Austin + the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography and I will be in conversation about how to find (or fight) our way to a better future from here. RSVP and details here. And if you haven’t checked out the book but are interested, you can preorder the paperback (or order the already-available hardcover, e-book or audiobook edition) here.

On November 5, I’ll be teaching a single-session class “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas, online from 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Details and registration here.

I have a piece in the October issue of Texas Highways that hit the stands this week, telling the story about the time I saw a strange, Chupacabra-like creature while driving to see the Marfa Lights. The accompanying photos by Eli Hartman are amazing. I’ll share a link here when the piece is available online.

The Roundup

“An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion” — full story about the green jay hybrid here and full research paper here (no paywall).

For more on tissue regeneration in anoles, visit ASU’s Kusumi Lab.

On the subject of resilience in the face of what’s coming, Alex Steffen over at The Snap Forward has a new 30-day Personal Climate Startegy workshop starting next week.

Via “human web crawler” Bruce Sterling, recent research on the marine life that makes its home in and around abandoned WW2 munitions.

RIP Mark Norell, the paleontologist whose adventures in the Gobi Desert finding feathered dinosaurs provided rich learning and entertainment for my son and I when he was a dino-crazy kid.

The tundra is exploding.

The Wall Street Journal visited William T. Vollman in his writing studio, a former Mexican restaurant in Sacramento.

The etymology of the American idea of the “Homeland.”

Currently reading: An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith.

At the LRB, Brett Christophers on Andreas Malm and giving up the fight to prevent climate breakdown, and Ian Penman on Brian Eno.

If you’re in the Boston area, my son Hugo Nakashima-Brown, a woodworker and furniture maker, has an exceptional show up at the Crossings Gallery at Harvard’s Ed Portal in Allston, with some of his latest marquetry pieces among other work in display.

Have a great week.

Friday morning as I was sitting alone in the waiting room at the car wash near our home, flipping through the weird selection of basic cable channels and tempted to pick up the dog-eared Joel Osteen book on the coffee table, I saw a cicada killer fly up to the glass door, gently probing it like a tiny helicopter trying to find its way through the invisible forcefield. I’ve seen a lot of cicada killers this summer, probably because we had a healthy crop of cicadas, and because I’ve learned to notice them lumbering through the periphery of my reality. They are the Clydesdales of wasps: bigger than bumblebees, with menacing stingers you can see from twenty feet away, and capable of hauling heavy loads. I’ve seen more than one carrying a freshly-paralyzed cicada twice its weight through the air, headed back to the nest chamber where it will lay an egg on its captive and then seal the chamber with dirt. A day or two later the grub will emerge, and begin its life eating the chitin-cased monster mom has left for it.

A shack next to a parking lot off a major urban thoroughfare seemed an unlikely place to see such a bad-ass bug. Most of the cicada killers I’ve seen were in our feral yard, where I first learned what they were after seeing one crucify her prey on the spokes of my wife’s bicycle one hot summer afternoon. But a little research indicates Sphecius speciosus is well-adapted to urban environments, tolerant of desiccated zones of full sun and adept at using sidewalks and other concrete slabs as structural enhancements for its burrows. Looking in my own photo archive, I found evidence of just that—a video from 2022 of one navigating a driveway. It seemed odd at the time but now I wonder if its nest was nearby.

The cicadas on which they live also seem to be holding out, though a review of recent reports suggests population numbers are declining overall, a dozen North American species of cicada have disappeared since colonial settlement—one of them recently—and there’s concern their current abundance is no guarantee of survival.

When the cicada killer flew off, the Wounded Warrior ad finally ended and I got to see what movie was on. I had flipped to a channel called Outlaw, which looked to be all Westerns all the time. It came on mid-scene, just as an aged but still tough-looking Randolph Scott shot and killed Warren Oates and his gang-mates while Mariette Hartley watched. Then the end-credits rolled and I realized it was the one Sam Peckinpah movie I never saw. I got to imagining an alternate timeline in which Peckinpah made nature films, like some shitfaced high desert horseback Cousteau. Human nature-nature films that mined the deep Anthropocene, in the spirit of that scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch where a group of young kids trap some scorpions around the mouth of a fire ant mound and watch the orchestrated carnage that follows.

Earlier that morning while I was walking the dog, I found a disco ball by the side of the road, more than half its mirrors gone. It was in a spot I’ve passed hundreds of times over the course of 15 years, in a shadowed patch of dirt behind a mysterious shed next to the ruins of the bar they called el Agasajo (rough translation: “the royal treatment”). It might have just been dumped, but it looked like it had been there forever. A relic of prior inhabitants who had more fun here than we did.

Later in the day, my wife told me about the theory she had heard, convincingly presented, that time is actually, truly accelerating. In order, at least one author theorized, to accelerate the arrival of humans more capable of caring for the planet.

A week earlier, on the Friday morning that began Labor Day weekend, I joined a “stewardship walk” in our neighborhood wildlife sanctuary organized by staffers from a local parks nonprofit. Our group included representatives from the City Parks Department, two other folks from the river conservation and environmental nonprofits I work with, and a handful of other neighbors who love this weird pocket of urban wild.

Like a lot of the lands cities set aside off the tax rolls as habitat for other species, it’s a former industrial site adjacent to transportation infrastructure, such that the portal you pass through to enter the preserve looks designed to deter you:

But if you brave that brutality and keep walking, you don’t have to go far before you find some remarkable vignettes that let you see how rapidly an urban river corridor can rewild with little more assistance than being left alone—in this case a place that 40 years ago was an industrial gravel dredging site:

Along the main trails we also came upon the extensive camps that have been set up in the preserve over the summer. One of the Parks managers explained that most of the folks we encountered had relocated from a big camp immediately below the dam, which had to be evacuated during the July floods. He also explained to us the processes the city tries to deploy to help such folks get housing and other assistance at the same time as it compels them to clear out.

At one spot, on a rapidly eroding river edge, someone had somehow transported a gigantic metal tank harvested from the ruins of the old dairy plant a quarter-mile upland and turned it into a shelter. It looked every bit like a marooned spacecraft. Or one that had splashed down, and was ready to safely float downriver to the Gulf with the next flood.

We saw some cool birds and some scary dogs, made new connections, and discussed how best to organize to protect this place and other local pockets of riparian wild, including some of the more complicated issues around how to balance the needs for human and non-human habitat, and simpler questions around how to manage the trash people dump and the trash the waters leave behind. We left with a worthwhile list of community initiatives, but I couldn’t help but feel we’d just toured a pocket of unevenly distributed future in which personal prosperity and healthy lands are as endangered as most of the wildlife. There are only a few species like the cicada killer that can adapt to live at the edges of our concrete dominion.

I walked home the way I came, through the woods and along the old right of way behind the dairy plant. It was a lot hotter on the return, and at one point after choosing a route I thought unlikely to disturb any more encampments, I realized I had managed to get myself deeply embedded in an extensive patch of cactus I thought I had evaded only to find a big spine sticking out of my leg. There were a mix of species, mostly prickly pear but also a prodigious new growth of the pencil cactus tasajillo, whose Christmas bulbs had not yet reddened.

When I got through, I found myself at the edge of a construction staging area that had just been laid out along the road, where an old potable water line under the river is about to be relaid. They had bulldozed some small trees out of their way, and the remains of some camps. In the clearing I found a legless gamer chair, some cool drawings laminated for protection, and a big pile of CDs.

I recognized one CD immediately, because it was one I used to have. Emperor Tomato Ketchup by Stereolab, which I remembered as one of my favorite records of the late 90s, and hadn’t listened to since the late 90s.

I took it home, cleaned it, and it played. But the feelings of that world it came from, the optimistic moment between the End of History and the beginning of the long dark that was uncorked on 9/11, when the World Wide Web was the new new thing and the promise of the century to come was foretold with utopian certainty, were like they had been translated into some language I no longer knew.

“What’s society built on?” the French girl sang over and over, acting like she knew the answers.

The Roundup

If you’re in the Austin area, please join me October 7 at Alienated Majesty Books on 29th St. for the launch of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots. We’ll be screening Brett Gaylor’s short film Field Notes from an Apocalypse, which documents some walks in urban woods and a paddle to the Tesla Giga Texas factory, and then climate activist Alexia LeClercq of Start:Empowerment + PODER, anthropologist Craig Campbell of UT-Austin + the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography and I (and potentially one other panelist) will be in conversation about how to find (or fight) our way to a better future from here. RSVP and details here. And if you haven’t checked out the book but are interested, you can preorder the paperback (or order the already-available hardcover, e-book or audiobook edition) here.

On November 5, I’ll be teaching a single-session class “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas, online from 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Details and registration here.

I have several other local and regional events and some new short-form publications scheduled for the coming months, so watch this space for details and links as they become available.

Speaking of preorders, Makenna Goodman’s brilliant new novel Helen of Nowhere will be published on Tuesday (Sep. 9) by Coffee House Press in the US, with a UK edition to follow from Fitzcarraldo in January. Told in four parts, short enough to read in a single sitting, with the same razor-sharp language and voice that made her first novel The Shame so hard-hitting, Helen of Nowhere tells the story of a house outside the city and a handful of people connected to it, and encodes in that story a deeper exploration that I think readers of this newsletter will connect with. I’m excited to see this book getting the reception it and its author deserve.

(Full disclosure: Makenna was (is) my editor at Timber Press for Empty Lots, having taken on the project after the editor who acquired the book left following a merger. The book and I owe a tremendous deal to her.)

You also should keep your eye out for my friend Cory Doctorow’s new nonfiction book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, also forthcoming on October 7 in the US from MCD and in the UK on October 14 from Verso. The book is technology criticism at its heart, a radical (and funny) political economy of early 21st century capitalism (it’s even been shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year), and its explorations are also relevant to how we think about our ecological and climate trajectories.

From cooler climes, here’s a cool new urban nature newsletter from the NYC Plover Project.

Last Sunday I harvested my first batch of chiltepin for our table, from this lush bunch of ur-peppers I found growing amid the concrete rubble dumped at the back of our lot before we got here. If you live in a region where it grows, it’s a really fun forage and an easy one to make into a delicious hot vinegar or salsa.

Enjoy the full moon, and have a great week.

Early Tuesday morning, around 5:30 a.m., I heard someone hollering down in the woods. It was super dark, the waning crescent moon low in the eastern sky with Jupiter, Venus, Castor and Pollux. The noise sounded like it was coming from the municipal wildlife sanctuary under the bridge, about a half-mile away. A few years ago you would have been more likely to hear coyotes calling from there, or owls, but since lockdown the parks and woodlands along the river and creeks here at the eastern edge of town have all become more frequently and densely occupied by dislocated members of our own species. The newest camps have motor vehicles, generators, dogs, and ingenious structures made from found materials, and when you stumble upon one of these improvised communities while out for a walk in the August heat you can’t help but think that what once felt like signs of the precarity of life under 21st century American capitalism now feels more like a slow-motion collapse.

Many of our newest neighbors relocated here after the floods forced emergency evacuations of other camps. The floods weren’t as bad in Austin as they were in the Hill Country, since we are protected by the series of Depression-era dams upriver. We got the water though, the farthest it’s been above its normal banks in a decade, and when it receded a couple days later the woods were filled with flotsam, mostly our trash. When I came upon this mushroom of a type I’d never noticed before, I found myself wondering if it might be some rhizomatic expression of the tens of thousands of fragments of styrofoam that surrounded it on the forest floor.

July’s floods followed a tremendously damaging windstorm at the end of May—a microburst with 85 mph gusts that uprooted the 80-year-old mesquite in our yard and two huge cottonwoods that had grown more than a hundred feet tall around the mouth of a city drainage pipe that empties into the floodplain behind our house. That storm followed three years of extreme temperatures—historically anomalous deep freezes and winter storms one never used to have here, two of the hottest summers on record, and a long decade of drought. The woods have suddenly become a graveyard of fallen giants, and I wonder how they will evolve with these new holes in the canopy. The invasive Johnson and Bermuda grasses that dominate the upland terraces need full sun, and so the shade of those big trees created a zone where the inland sea oats and wild ryes could carpet the forest floor every spring and bring more biodiversity with them.

This is mostly a young forest here along the banks of the Colorado in East Austin, the majority of trees having grown in the past five decades since gravel dredging and other industrial activity was pushed further east. It took me a while exploring the area to realize it was not the miraculously intact remnant I had assumed, but something even more wondrous—a stretch of riparian land that had rewilded on its own after being left alone by us, in a brief historical moment when it managed to hide in plain sight.

Such wonders, alas, never seem to last.

You can really feel the development pressure amping up along the edges of this corridor, with an undercurrent of brutality I didn’t foresee. The deserted traffic island I’ve frequently reported on here, which for a time was home to a nested pair of red-shouldered hawks I once spotted mating in one of the ancient pecans that grew in that unlikely arbor between two onramps, has been filled with an apartment block that looks more like a border wall than a work of architecture (notwithstanding the developer’s naming the project “The Eclectic”). The big dig that will channel all the water that drains off expanded Interstate 35 to a pump station next to one of those onramps is now underway in earnest, big machines working at night to open up giant holes in the earth for the underground boring machines to tunnel their way here from the entry point being walled off at what’s also the entry point to downtown.

Our local government, despite its pretenses of progressivism, seems completely captured by real estate capital and devoid of any real concern for affordability, environment, or diversity. And then you read the headlines out of Washington, a daily barrage of weirdly performative policy reversals that lead one to think it’s not so much that they don’t believe our burning of the world is overheating it to the point of mass extinction, but rather that they get turned on by the idea, like some insane death cult that gets off on the power of bringing about the end and making dark fortunes in the process. Daring us to step away from our work stations long enough to organize and take the collective action that should be so easy but seems so paralyzed. Even as we can all remember five years ago, when that same freeway was shut down by a flash mob of incensed protesters, and we got a glimpse of the power the multitude could yield if it could sustain it for more than a microburst.

It’s not all bad. While the growth booster part of the city greenlights all the crappy projects, another contingent works hard to add new public lands, with an emphasis on lands along the river corridor, despite ever-increasing efforts of the state legislature to strip the local governments of any regulatory power. Our municipal water stewards have intervened to control and clean the outflows from TxDot’s insane I-35 drainage project. And everywhere you look, you can signs of life and evidence of ecological resilience. The old man’s beard that blooms in the hottest pockets of summer, tiger swallowtails mating in the shadows still cast by the trees that fell, whistling ducks that come and go at dawn and dusk between the river and their roosts behind the old industrial lots. We had good rains all through June and July, and the flora and fauna show it.

The most heartening sign for me in the past two weeks has been the early arrival of abundant fruitings of chiltepin. The ur-pepper of the Americas, it can only germinate after passing through the digestive system of a bird. When it does, it grows as a shrub, usually in shady spots, a scruffy little plant with tiny white flowers that might easily escape your notice until the flowers turn into peppers and the peppers ripen from green to red and tempt you to taste the burn hotter than a habanero. A plant that only grows in the places that don’t get mowed, and the one from which the botanists think all the other peppers on our table were derived. An ephemeral being that is also one of the oldest living things around, and a window into the wilder world we came from that still expresses in the margins of our dominion.

Today I hope to make some hot vinegar with a sampling from the bushes in our yard, and start the work of tending our pocket prairie for the winter growing season that incubates spring. We’re lucky to have refuge, and daily reminders that what sometimes feels like the end can also be an opportunity for new beginnings.

Thursday evening I found a downed bird nest by our front door, blown by that afternoon’s storm from its mooring in the mustang vine that hangs from our green roof. The fledgling cardinals recently reared there had already flown off, so no active home was lost, and we could admire the nest’s Anthropocene construction: fragments of clear plastic packaging harvested from the industrial yards around us woven in to better insulate the beautifully threaded coils of dried native grasses. All the cardinal nests are like this, every season, reflecting a learned adaptation to the world we’ve made and an intelligence we don’t really understand. Evidence of the weird new nature cyborg nature aborning, it makes me mildly horrified and modestly hopeful about what’s to come.

Empty Lots in Paperback

Friday’s mail brought me my author’s copies of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots, and I’m delighted to report they look great, inside and out. Thanks to the team at Timber Press, including my editor Makenna Goodman (whose own new book Helen of Nowhere, a novel I think readers of this newsletter will love, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK), designers Hillary Caudle and Sara Isasi, and the publicity team of Katlynn Nicolls, Melina Dorrance and Caroline McCulloch who helped get the word out. And bigger thanks to all the readers, librarians, booksellers and reviewers who helped make the hardcover edition such a success.

If you’re in Austin, we’ll be having a paperback launch party on the release date, October 7, at Alienated Majesty Books, which will include a screening of Brett Gaylor’s new short film Field Notes from an Apocalypse, and a panel discussion with a diverse group of local thinkers and activists about how we can go about the hard work of decolonizing and rewilding the future. Please join us if you can, and RSVP here.

And just for fun, I’m going to do another preorder promotion for readers of this newsletter (especially new readers). If you preorder the paperback (or order any of the other editions already available) and email me your confirmation (chris-at-christopherbrown.com) and snail mail address, I’ll send you a bookmark in the form of a 3x5 print from the negative of one of the below film photos (your choice):

Alternatively, I’d be happy to send you one of 9 free copies I have to give out of the Audible version of the audiobook narrated by yours truly (while supplies last), or a copy of the print zine I did for the hardcover launch last September (also while supplies last), which includes an original essay and a reading list of other books in the genre.

Last week I learned that the book is on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale, part of this library Porch curated by the team at Places. Thanks to Boyce Upholt for the heads up—and keep an eye out for issue 1 of his new print magazine Southlands, coming next month (and including a short essay by me).

Nature Writing Class

I’m also excited to share the news that I’ll be teaching an online class this fall designed to provide a fresh take on “Writing the Natural World” through the Writer’s League of Texas: November 5, 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Whether you are interested in nature or place writing as independent genres, or in thinking in fresh ways about how nature and environment feature in your fiction or nonfiction, this class will aim to provide you new tools and have fun in the process. We did a panel discussion on these themes with WLT earlier this year, and it was a big hit. Please register here if you’re interested, and ping me if you have questions.

The Roundup

In other news:

Perito Moreno, one of the few great glaciers thought to be stable due to its unusual location in Patagonia (and a natural wonder my wife and I visited on our honeymoon), is shrinking.

They are trying to rewild the Venetian island of Poveglia.

The floods exposed 115-million-year-old dinosaur footprints in northern Travis County.

Tesla is also getting exposed in Travis County.

Hanging with the coyotes of Central Park.

At Harper’s, Lewis Hyde on “The Geological Sublime” (long read on butterflies, deep time, and climate change).

Field Notes friend Ed Park is finally on Substack with a cool new newsletter (that sort of revives his old blog).

Have a great week. Field Notes will be back after Labor Day.

Saturday morning, back through the trees behind the old AM radio transmission antenna pictured above, I saw what may have been a jaguarundi. The likelihood that’s what it was, an expert would rightly note, is low, considering that an 18-year study concluded in 2021 that the species has been extirpated from Texas, and Austin is outside the jaguarundi’s historic range. But there have been sightings reported around here in recent years, including several outside Seguin at the beginning of this summer, and wildlife often break the rules our field guides lay out for them.

I was out walking our puppy, a Jack Russell Terrier our daughter named Fifi, exploring some pockets of interstitial green space I hadn’t visited in a while, including the expansive empty lot around the radio tower of old KNOW-AM. That field is less feral than it used to be, in an effort to keep the long-term campers out, but the zone it’s part of remains a quiet one where several secondary streets terminate in the backsides of light industrial blocks, and the verdant green corridor of the Colorado River is a literal stone’s throw away. Fifi and I had just stepped from the shade of a stand of tall trees when we saw the cat trotting past a row of shipping containers lined up behind a pottery studio. It was bigger than a typical domestic cat, with fur the color of graphite, a tail as long as the rest of its body, and short legs, almost the proportions of an otter.

We tried to get a second look, tracking around the edge-space between the chainlink and a parking garage, but it was gone.

Such a sighting would have been more plausible where we spent the week before, vacationing with extended family on the Texas coast in Cameron County. That’s where the last confirmed sighting of a jaguarundi in Texas was, in 1986, on State Highway 4 east of Brownsville—the road that now takes you to Elon Musk’s newly incorporated space colonization company town of Starbase. Calling that a “sighting” is generous, as it was actually roadkill, there where the road runs past the marshy preserves along the Rio Grande. Maybe that’s why the scientists are so confident in the accuracy of that report, of an animal that seems to have always been good at counfounding our perception.

The authors of the 2021 study that concluded it’s gone from here called Puma yagouaroundi “understudied, cryptic, small.” I first assumed they meant cryptic in the common sense—hidden, occult, maybe even evoking “cryptid.” But it turns out that for biologists, “cryptic” is a term of art, intended to denote species that are morphologically difficult to distinguish from other species but “biologically isolated.”

Not so biologically isolated, in the case of the jaguarundi, as to be incapable of interbreeding with other felines—or so some quick (but not definitive) research indicates. Maybe it’s the science fiction writer in me that got to speculating, after seeing the cat and considering the other recent sightings, that our putatively extirpated puny puma might have followed a path similar to the ghost wolves of Galveston. If otherwise extinct native red wolves have survived by interbreeding with urbanized coyotes, perhaps the jaguarundi could be similarly adapting to our post-colonial erasure of their habitat by mating with feral cats, and creating descendants adept at hunting the edgelands of our rodent-infested cities.

House cats gone wild mostly serve as agents in our elimination of biodiversity in the world, especially songbirds. I see them often, slinkily stalking at dusk into the green expanses beyond the chain link, after enjoying the easier meals of store-bought kibble left out front by the office staffs of the industrial businesses that line our neighborhood. Cats seem to be more dominant as predators around here lately, as our neighborhood has begun morphing into an entertainment district, and the coyotes have gone quiet, maybe moved on.

I used to see a lot of cryptic stray dogs back in these empty lots and woodlands at the edge of town, including a few that looked like hybrids of wild and domestic canines. I came to wonder if they were a glimpse of some emergent packs of the future—unevenly distributed manifestations of the end of the world slowly unfolding around us. A decade later, I learned the ghost wolves are real. The cats were ghosts already, in the stealth with which they roamed these spaces.

When we returned from the beach, contractors for the State Department of Transportation had begun site work on the giant berm near our home—a man-made ridgeline between two onramps whose weird animal users, urban cowboys and Anthropocene vistas I have chronicled in this newsletter. The new project relates to the expansion of Interstate 35 where it passes through downtown Austin, two miles west of us. To accommodate the growth of that clogged corridor, TX-DOT plans to take all the water that drains from the widened right of way (from Airport Blvd to Lady Bird Lake, for locals), channel it into a gigantic, truck-sized pipe buried a hundred feet under East Cesar Chavez that will carry it to a new pump station atop that berm, and spew it into the clean and clear stretch of the Colorado River below Longhorn Dam. The state’s original plan was no more “treatment” than a mesh filter to catch large debris, but the city has intervened, supported by advocacy groups like our Colorado River Conservancy, to redirect it to a new treatment pond that will ensure it meets drinking water standards before it hits the river, and perhaps provide an opportunity for some improved wetland habitat in the process. I still wonder what the pump station will sound like, and how it will smell. I already know why they put it on this side of town, and not the west side.

Fifi and I walked the site last Sunday, before they fully fenced it off. All mud, dried hard in the rough contours of heavy machine tracks. Toward the top of the berm there was a little container office. I peeked in the window and the only thing in there was a sheet of paper showing, in text-free visuals, how to connect your phone or laptop to Starlink. It felt weirdly like coming upon some abandoned ruin, on an Earth where the engineered machine systems have come to a stop, but the satellites we launched into orbit can still be seen in the night sky.

My waking dream of an emergent future of wild predators cross-bred with our emancipated house pets got me thinking of a cheesy Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback I read as a kid: Lost Continent, the cover of which featured a Frank Frazetta vignette of a 22nd century man and woman facing off against the jungle cats that have taken over the ruins of the future. A reminder that stories like that, usually packaged as warnings about the end of the world, express our unarticulated yearnings for the new beginning we could have—a rewilded future in which the balance between us and other life has been restored, and we get to live closer to our own nature.

Maybe exporting capitalism into space wouldn’t be a bad thing, if it left this planet behind in the process.

Summer Reading

Save the date: we’ll be celebrating the launch of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots with an event at Alienated Majesty Books here in Austin on October 7, hopefully with a short film screening of a work in progress and a panel discussion about ruderal ecologies and radical futures. Watch this space for more info as the plans come together, and you can preorder the paperback (or get the hardcover, ebook, or audiobook narrated by yours truly) here at Timber Press/Hachette.

I ended up working most of our week in South Padre, and spending the time I had free playing with the kids on the beach, but I did get out to see some of the wild things with my 85-year-old nature nerd mom, including a visit to the new South Texas Ecotourism Center just west of Port Isabel. Created by Cameron County, STEC is a remarkable facility designed to provide visitors a platform for getting to know local flora and fauna, and a starting point for exploring the rich wilderness areas around the region—including this excellent interactive map to help you find them. (One of the big preserves is next to the facility, as pictured in the second photo above.) We got to meet Director Edward Meza and his exceptionally friendly and knowledgable staff, and will be back.

Congratulations to my bride and baby mama Agustina Rodriguez aka AgiMiagi for the successful installation of her insanely beautiful new sculpture, “Chorus,” in Dallas at The Village, and stay tuned for information about the dedication planned for September. The piece was trapped in Wimberley for six months while they figured out a legal route to get it to the site, and having heard Agustina negotiating logistics with trucking dispatchers, bucket truck drivers and state highway officials for the entirety of 5.5-hour drive back from South Padre, I have a new appreciation for what goes into moving oversized loads—especially tall ones.

On the subject of endangered and threatened species, the July 24 issue of the NYRB has an excellent piece by Michelle Nijhuis on what we choose to save, and why (paywall, but not for long, so bookmark it for later if you get blocked).

In wild canid news, the NYT had a Dora-ready report on the shoe-swiping fox of Grand Teton National Park.

In biodiversity crisis news, the EPA this week proposed re-approving the use of the twice-banned herbicide dicamba with “Roundup-ready” GMO crops. (Note the last line of the NYT report: “Last month, Kyle Kunkler, a former soybean industry lobbyist who has been a vocal proponent of dicamba, joined the E.P.A.’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention as its deputy assistant administrator.”)

And in free speech crisis news, the Austin Public Library’s amazing Zine Collection is under threat and not currently able to add new material due to legal concerns related to TX SB 412, “relating to defenses to prosecution for certain offenses involving material or conduct that is obscene or otherwise harmful to children.” If you’re local (or from elsewhere) and love to find weird new stuff at the library, please consider completing this online form to register your support for APL’s efforts to archive some of the most innovative and culturally rich content the community generates. More about the Zine Collection and its unstoppable curator Katrin Abel here in this Austin Chronicle piece.

Speaking of zines, my copy of Revelation Records’ new edition of Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music by Nathan Nedorosek and Anthony Pappalardo just arrived in Saturday’s mail, and it’s almost as cool as maybe seeing a jaguarundi.

RIP, Ozzy, and thanks for the hometown memories—the time he bit the head off a bat onstage was in Des Moines during my senior year in high school. I wasn’t there, but several of my friends were, and one even still has his ticket stub.

The film photos in this installment of Field Notes were taken on my Ilford Sprite, a fixed shutter-speed plastic 35 mm camera that’s my preferred film camera for beach trips where I don’t want to expose my “good” camera to sand and salt water. If you’re looking for an easy point-and-shoot way to try the wonders of film, it’s a good one.

I took this shot of the summer sunset over our home on my phone:

Stay safe, and stay cool.

This is the season when the right-of-way in front of our house reaches its most intensely feral state. We live at a double dead-end, where two secondary roads terminate at what used to be the edge of town, and every summer the sidewalks and chainlink fences are consumed by foliage. Much of it creeping vines—mustang grape, poison ivy, alamo vine and others—but there is also prickly pear and a cluster of agaves that have been holding their own. One just bloomed, shooting its flower spike fifteen feet above the crowd, the yellow traffic warning to turn (recently installed after the third time in a decade someone drove right through that fence) pointing right at it for emphasis. Chances are the plant is monocarpic, as are most agave species, and after this first and last reproductive burst it will die.

I walk out there every morning to retrieve our newspapers—one local and one national. An old habit that has matured into an anachronism, and an extra expense. But the better the digital versions get at near-real-time notices of what’s happening, the more I prefer the delay of reading yesterday’s news. It keeps the algorithms out of your head. Even as you can tell the digital edition now shapes the print content. The only part of the Times that feels untainted by the changed media environment is the obituaries, where the good ones still read like condensed novels.

Tuesday after dinner I made the mistake of reading one on my phone—Clay Risen’s obituary of the poet and critic David Slavitt, who also wrote popular fiction as Henry Sutton (among other pen names). It was suitably diverting, recounting the life of an author from the good old days when there was an actual mass market for mass market paperbacks. When I got to the end, the phone app served up the genteel variant of clickbait pictured below—a Rorschach of our damaged Zeitgeist that held my attention for a moment, and then got me to put my phone away.

It was a reminder of why I spend my mornings looking for signs of real life in places like the patch of grass next to the onramp (not just because our new puppy, who our daughter named Fifi, needs a walk).

The deserted traffic island I used to explore regularly with our older dogs is gone now, filled with a concrete parking garage that looks like a military fortification and the apartments and offices being built around it. The other day Fifi and I found ourselves walking past there anyway, around its east end and up the grade of the engineered berm that supports the tollway onramp. Where, to our surprise, we came upon a wildflower I had never noticed before—yellow-puff blooming in the expanse of recently mowed Bermuda grass just inside the guardrail.

Neptunia lutea is a native, one of the species that does well in areas that the botanists describe as “disturbed,” usually meaning environments whose previous ecological diversity has been heavily damaged by us. It’s a ground crawler that knows how to find its way to the light, staying low enough to evade the blades of the mower. A plant that doesn’t compete so much as find the space that’s left, even if it’s already crowded.

It’s also a sensitive plant. If you touch it, it will visibly recoil, closing its fern-like leaves. Here’s a video:

The scientists don’t seem to know the evolutionary purpose of this kind of rapid plant movement. It may be an adaptation to deter mammalian foragers or insects, a strategy to survive prairie fires, or a way to hold out in spots thick with other plants.

Neptunia is not the only sensitive briar we have around here. A couple blocks from where Fifi and I found the yellow-puff, a patch of hot pink powderpuff mimosa has been established for several years that we’ve observed, in a low wet spot between the driveway of a motor oil distributor and the unmowed lawn of an abandoned lighting factory. The yellow-puff reminded us, so we walked down there the next day, and the Mimosa was also in bloom, with flowers like hot summer candy.

The field guides suggest the easiest places to find sensitive briar are near bodies of water, especially stream banks and the edges of lakes. Yellow-puff’s genus, Neptunia, gets its name from the aquatic habitat of some of the species. Those observations made me wonder whether the urban variants we see around here are adapting to the engineered watershed, in the same way the cottonwoods grow to high-rise heights around the mouths of drainage pipes.

Saturday morning Fifi and I went back to investigate that theory, on the third day of a four-day rain. It seemed to hold up to closer observation of the Anthropocene topography—our neighborhood Mimosa occupies a depression between two bulldozer-flat industrial sites, next to a drainage ditch along a major thoroughfare. Similarly, we found Neptunia growing where the first flush of water runs off the pavement and onto the berm. The thickest patch was in the median between onramp and offramp, where the slope directs the largest quantity of runoff. Walking there we noticed another water-loving ground crawler creeping its way through the construction fence along the subtly sloped edge of another off-ramp: frogfruit, a plant whose common name tells you what kinds of conditions it prefers.

Friday’s July 4 print edition of the Times had an especially old school feature: The Declaration of Independence on the back page of the front section. It made it unusually readable, and I was struck by the conflation of nature and the divine order of things in the opening recitation that grounds the argument for human liberty and equality in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—something different than “natural law,” especially in the way it abstracts the deity as an expression of observable nature.

Turns out a number of historians have noted that phrasing, attributing it to the deism of principal author Thomas Jefferson. Reading about Jefferson’s religious beliefs, or lack thereof, got me to finally click through some links about presidential perfume preferences in the era before long showers. No one seems to know if Jefferson wore a scent, but they do know Bay Rum was especially popular. My search led to an article about how Jefferson loved the fragrances of a good flower garden, and to the revelation that if you ask Google about his 1785 remark in a letter to a friend that the “blood of tyrants” is liberty’s natural fertilizer, you will get an entire page of links selling you right-wing T-shirts.

The native wildflowers that volunteer by the sides of our roads are a persistent reminder that the diverse life that was here before European colonization has not been completely erased. The resilience of those species always makes me think how easy it would be to help bring some of that biodiversity back with just a little bit of stewardship, and how we would find that repairing our damaged relationship with the land would help us remedy some of the broken things in the human community. Getting there will probably take a different species of volunteers.

The Roundup

Our thoughts this weekend are with our neighbors in the Hill Country, and especially the young summer campers and their families. My wife attended one of those camps as a girl. In East Austin we have been lucky thus far, as the dams along the Colorado and the half-empty lakes seem ready to accommodate the inundation, but our friends and neighbors in the northwest suburbs have been not been as lucky.

The rain here started Thursday morning, and continued until dinnertime Saturday, in a season that is usually quite dry. I woke Saturday to a slow drip on my head at 4 a.m., from the crack around a light fixture, hazard of living in a subterranean house covered with an experimental green roof. By 6 p.m., the river finally came up above its banks, and filled the floodplain right up to the base of the bluff we live on. On my way back from a Saturday night hardware store run for leak mitigation provisions, I checked out the river where it empties out of Longhorn Dam, and it was pretty epic:

The gates on that dam are manually operated, and when I stopped the operators from the municipal power company were out getting ready to adjust them as needed. I took it as a good sign that the guys I saw were relaxed and having some laughs.

Thanks to Daisy Alioto and the team at Dirt for including Empty Lots in their summer reading list, in my favorite category name ever:

Congratulations to Field Notes friend Henry Wessells on the publication of a new edition of his short story collection Another Green World, in a beautifully designed paperback edition that arrived in this week’s mail with blurbs from Guy Davenport, Joanne McNeil, and Guy Davenport. Also in this week’s mail was a book I was lucky to blurb (alongside some greats including Jonathan Lethem and Cal Flyn)—Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound. And I’m excited to get my hands on Ed Park’s new collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, coming out July 29.

Evidently we’ve been land snorkeling and didn’t know that’s what it was.

In archaeology news, evidence that the city-state of Çatalhöyük 9,000 years ago was a matriarchy.

In secret North American history, they found a runestone in Ontario.

And in surprising environmental news, a long read on how Los Angeles learned to consume less water, even as it kept growing.

Monday’s Austin American-Statesman had a great story from Michael Barnes about the 3 boys from Abilene who paddled the entire length of the Colorado River in 1937—and again in 1991.

In other paddling news, experimental archaeologists in Japan got their Thor Heyerdahl on, chopped down a big cedar tree with traditional tools, made a dugout canoe, and demonstrated how far earlier humans could get in such simple watercraft across the expansive Pacific. (The videos at the link make a good case for how the digital paper can be better.)

“From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”—the cogently argued report of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese on corporate capitalism and ethnic cleansing, published Monday.

RIP Lalo Schfrin.

Lastly, it turns out the original title of this Jefferson Airplane song that regularly earworms its way into my head was “Volunteers of Amerika.”

Field Notes will be on holiday the next two weekends, back in late July. Stay safe.

The full moon brought more rain again this month, and a few days after, on Saturday, we got another microburst. We had company, colleagues of my wife from the architecture school and their spouses. It was sunny and muggy, almost wet bulb temp, and we had the idea to get in the pool when suddenly the sky darkened and a single, loud clap of thunder announced what was coming. We kept talking in the kitchen as the wind and rain blew through over twenty short minutes. And then, before it had even really cleared, weird birds started circling the house.

I was the only one who saw them, at first. Our house is an unusual platform for watching the sky: half-buried in the bluff above the urban river, with a wild green roof, the conditioned space comprised of two small pavilions across a narrow patio that works almost like a box canyon, a canyon of glass that reaches twenty-some feet at the peak. It opens up in the direction of the river and woods, facing south, framing a corner of open sky and providing a fun house of reflective planes that often let you see things in motion behind you or beyond your periphery. The ambient life moving through that tableau, mainly birds, planes, insects and helicopters, is constant and remarkably diverse. But these were birds I had never seen, raptors different than our usual hawks, osprey, black vultures and caracara. And their wings looked slightly wrong, at least on one of them—like the wings of a wraith.

I was deep in conversation with our friend Igor, who must have wondered what I was so distracted with as I kept looking up and tracking. And then I spotted one of the birds sitting still, through its reflection at the top of our bedroom window. It had alighted in one of our trees. I excused myself to go take a closer look.

I’d heard stories from friends earlier in the year of visitations by strange grey raptors, and had glimpsed what I thought were some during a late spring visit to a park on Onion Creek, one of the wilder tributaries of the Colorado that flows south of us. And now, I realized, one of the Mississippi kites had decided to stop and visit, sitting in the mostly bare upper branches of our catalpa tree. A tree that had been planted by our neighbor Emily Lott, of a species more common to her hometown of Navasota, half way to East Texas. That we had just learned of her passing, taken finally by the cancer she had resiliently and cheerfully held at bay for sixteen years, made the appearance of the grey ghost in that tree seem a little bit like a visitation. Or, when I realized there were two birds, one with its wings spread out to dry, and then more started arriving, like a wake.

I counted five at the peak. They were intensely backlit, so shadowed that it was hard to make out their details initially, even through field glasses and zoom lens. But they let me get pretty close, which helped confirm my suspicion that several of them must have been unwary juveniles learning their way in the world we made (more ornithologically knowledgeable readers will no doubt share their views in the comments on what my photos evidence). They looked like they all had gotten caught in the storm and tossed about. Trying to get dry, trying to fix their feathers, and generally recover their composure. It was a little like bumping into a group of joyriding teens recovering from some scarier-than-expected test of their youthful immortality.

One flew across the yard to a hackberry, where the light was more direct, and I could make out its crest in profile, like the combed-back bangs of a pompadour. The sort of bird you think could absolutely rock a black leather motorcycle jacket, before you realize it’s already wearing an even cooler light gray one.

I pointed them out to our guests, but I don’t think my effort to articulate the wonder of the moment really landed. To the naked eye, the birds were not big, mostly shadowed, and unremarkable if you hadn’t just seen them on the wing, when they revealed their nature as raptors tuned for the sharp sudden turns of a flying insect hunter. I wondered if that’s what they’d been up to, chasing the bugs that take to the air in shimmering swarms right after the rain passes and the sun breaks through.

Mississippi kites are seasonal visitors here. They used to be rare—in his 1925 guide to the Birds of the Austin Region, George Finlay Simmons called them “very rare”—but they are one of those species that seems to benefit from the Anthropocene habitat created by urbanization. They are not super picky nesters, content to share territory with others of their species, and tend to produce small clutches of eggs. They seem to have thrived in the lost era when they could spend their summers following the clouds of insects that accompanied the bison herds, and begun to recover their population west of the Mississippi when they figured out the opportunities created by small towns surrounded by animal agriculture and the insects that attracts. They hunt cicadas, whose season has also arrived—I spotted my first cicada killer wasp of the season on Wednesday, droning around our walnut trees—and must enjoy the smaller airborne insects that make the city such comfortable habitat for swallows, swifts, and bats, especially around the river and creeks.

I wonder if Emily got to see them, in her month of home hospice. She would have liked them. Maybe even related to them, as a bit of a Southern bird herself, elegant and goofy at the same time. She was gregarious like them, a librarian turned botanist who, with her husband, helped this little side street at the edge of town, a vestigial pocket of residential lots between factories and riparian forest, grow into both an urban wildlife portal and a quasi-commune of her own creation. She had small town manners, descended from early Anglo-American settlers of Texas, and when she would show up at your front door unexpectedly you could not help but be happy to see her. She knew all the creatures of this place any many others, having spent extended periods of time inventorying the flora of Oaxaca, and I was often entranced hearing her share her scientific knowledge in her Navasota vowels. She brought people together with her love of all of them, and helped them all to see the wonder of the other life around us. We will miss her deeply.

It is a coincidence, no doubt, that unusual-looking juvenile birds, creatures in the process of formation, seem to appear when important people in my life pass. That does not lessen the power of such experiences, as a way of coming to terms with life’s seasons. Especially when the departed is someone who helped you see how the wild world hiding in plain sight can help you find your own way through the storms.

Flag(s) Day + summer solstice roundup

The Saturday evening after the kites appeared, my wife and I had date night. When she arrived, our babysitter shared her excitement at the news that there was a big protest scheduled at the State Capitol grounds, relating how she had wanted to go but her immigrant parents had asked her not to. She told us the sign she had wanted to carry would say “My Dad Works Harder than the President.” So we kept our plans to attend despite the heat, and were happy we did. The crowd was good and the energy positive, even as some of the troopers looked to be itching for an excuse to get rowdy, which they got long after we left. I sent our sitter a picture of a blended bandera, which I thought was a powerful reconciliation and distillation:

Later in the evening we saw our friend Jesse Ebaugh, whose wife Mishka was the one who first told me to watch out for kites, play with his new free jazz x post bop group Sahara Quartet at Monks in East Austin, releasing their first vinyl LP. Saxophonist Damien Valenzuela blew us away, the whole group was super tight, and it was inspiring to hear a group of hard-working musicians from other genres exploring new territory of free improvisation—especially in such an amazing, intimate space. Check out their album here at Antone’s.

I enjoyed my conversation with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anthony Mohr about A Natural History of Empty Lots, which was published this week in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative’s Social Impact Review. Empty Lots also was, I learned only after voting had been closed, a finalist for the Austin Chronicle’s 2025 Best of Austin awards, as one of the Best New Books by an Austin Author (alongside my friend Fernando Flores for his new novel Brother Brönte).

I’m excited about Southlands, the new print magazine of writing about Southern nature and the outdoors Boyce Upholt is pulling together for publication this fall, my contribution to which I was revising this week. This promises to be a beautiful production, like The Bitter Southerner gone out for a paddle—140 pages of fresh takes on fascinating regional places, people and things, with exceptional design and photography, printed on premium stock in a 9.5” x 12” format. Boyce is one of those great writers who is also an exceptional editor, recruiting a diversity of voices to assemble something new and exciting. If it sounds of interest, I encourage you to check it out, get in on the ground floor, and consider joining the project as a founding member.

And if you haven’t read yet Boyce’s outstanding debut book, The Great River, a deep history of the Mississippi (and our complicated relationship with it) that just won the Willie Morris Award, check it out.

My piece for Southlands focuses on the Anthropocene habitat of the petrochemical Gulf, especially around Houston, where this week the Chronicle reported about a flourishing of invasive hammerhead flatworms after the summer rains, making for one of the weirdest and creepiest newspaper advice columns I’ve read in a while:

If you come across a hammerhead flatworm, do not touch it without covering your hands. The worm secretes chemicals through their skin, making them noxious to predators, irritating to human skin and harmful to animals if eaten. This chemical is meant to aid in the digestion of earthworms.

The worm can be killed by placing it in a plastic bag with a salt and vinegar mixture or freezing it for up to 48 hours. These methods insure that the worm does not crawl away during treatment and that the handler is not exposed to the worm's toxic chemicals. Thoroughly wash your hands after treating the worm and avoid getting its mucus in your eyes or mouth.

Do not squish or cut the worms. The hammerhead flatworm asexually reproduces, meaning if it is physically split it will create more worms.

Do not touch it with bare hands or allow pets to ingest it. The worm is toxic to humans and animals.

Over at Ars Technica, news that new dating research appears to confirm that the human footprints recently found at White Sands are from people who walked through there 22,000 to 24,000 years ago, 10,000 years earlier than the Clovis culture previously thought to be the earliest human presence on this continent. Let that revelation wander around in your head for a while.

In other ancient human news of the week, the NYT has the reconstructed face of a Disney-ready Denisovan, and CNN has a report on reconstructions at the University of Ghent of the faces of early Belgians, including this groovy 10,500-year-old lady I think our friend Emily would enjoy hanging out with:

Congratulations to Brendan Byrne and the team at Melbourne’s Wanton Sun for this week’s publication of Brendan’s short story collection Another World Isn’t Possible.

This week is the bicentennial of the first Rocky Mountain Rendezvous—an annual convention of America’s early 19th century “Mountain Men,” convened near McKinnon, Wyoming around this date in 1825 under the leadership of fur trader-turned real estate speculator and then politician William Ashley. Thanks to Jeff Kacirk’s Forgotten English desk calendar for the tip.

Lastly, speaking of ancient faces, here’s a wiggy 1970 documentary for kids I stumbled upon last week about forager Euell Gibbons, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, out in the field with a young sidekick not long before he became the widely parodied commercial spokesman for Grape Nuts cereal:

For a more on Gibbons, a pretty fascinating American character, check out John McPhee’s epic New Yorker profile from April 1968.

Have a great week, and stay cool.

In Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the narrator, an English hunter who decides to take a shot at Hitler and misses, then gets caught, tortured, tossed from a cliff and left for dead, only to piece himself together and survive, finds himself in the last section of the book hiding from the Nazi who has hunted him across Europe by burrowing a man-sized den in a hedgerow. I loved that book in my 20s, but I never really understood that part of it until our trip to Ireland last week, when I almost burrowed a rented German sedan into several different hedgerows. And then got out of the car, and walked them on foot.

The hedgerow, as I experienced it along the wild Atlantic coast, is a curious model of interstitial nature as it manifests in a landscape that has been dominated by pastoral culture for millennia. Mounds of earth, turf, rock and wood that demarcate distinct land uses, the hedgerows are like unenclosed terrariums dense with diverse flora that also provide animal habitat. And no doubt a few magical beings, like the ones our 6-year-old daughter learned about at Dublin’s National Leprechaun Museum before we headed out into the country for a week of exploration that culminated in her big brother’s wedding.

Photography does not really suffice to capture the greenness of Ireland. It has some of the geological barrenness of Scotland, but it’s so much more temperate and close to the gulf stream that, at least at the beginning of summer, it has a vegetative intensity that feels like some cold country mirror of the tropics, much of it provided by lush ferns that seem to grow everywhere. Even in the manicured public parks of Dublin, and more intensely so in County Clare and County Kerry on the western coast. The bird and animal life seems abundant, despite the predominance of pastoralism, and one gets a sense that the people live closer to the land, and the deep memory it harbors. That closeness is manifested the physical details of the human imprint on the land, including in the way the plants are almost encouraged to reach out and grab the passing cars. Maybe it’s that connection to biodiversity, and a religiosity that seems tied to the land, that makes the country also seem intensely modern, multicultural, and welcoming of all.

In the Icelandic sagas, the Norwegian settlers who arrived at the that rocky isle in the 8th century often learned they had been preceded by Irish hermits, who would usually be found in coastal caves. The images those passages conjured always entranced me, as I tried to imagine living that way, that long ago. Walking stretches of the Irish coast, visiting a few sites of monasteries and forts of similar vintages, and even some ruins from the pre-Christian era, took me closer to that place.

So did my daughter’s insistence, the minute she saw a beach near the town of Ventry on the Dingle Peninsula, that we swim in the surf on a windy afternoon just barely bumping up against 60°F. The water was probably closer to 65°F. It was awesome, and a reminder of how much of our sense of coldness is learned.

As a three-generation family group traveling for a casual week culminating in a wedding, our experience of the place was no more than surface impressions—Ireland as the land of magical VRBOs. Filling out our week without any real clue where we were going, we lucked out on two nights in an insanely beautiful stone cottage on a bluff over the ocean, a short walk from the trail to the Cliffs of Moher and the village of Doolin, and a view of the Aran Islands. In Dingle, we walked out the front door to find an ancient pilgrimage trail across the street, which rewarded me with this good luck greeting an hour into my early morning amble:

And over the back fence, the ruins of a Norman castle built by the Knight of Kerry on the site of an ancient ring fort, access to which was through the backyard of a family that happened to have this heritage site on their land, and welcomed visitors with a solicitation for a small donation:

I picked up the Irish Times most of the days we were there, and one day there was a report about how the AirBnB-ification of the country has begun to change the social landscape of some areas so much that some are concerned that a failure to regulate vacation rentals will soon lead to protests and the possible demise or diminishment of the “Irish Welcome.” It helped me think about our presence with a little more perspective, and what lessons and memories we would take home to Texas with us.

Hugo and Neha’s wedding was at the end of that pilgrimage trail, at the Gallarus Oratory, a thousand-year-old stone chapel built by early Christians. Neha’s brother lives and works in one of the bigger cities of the eastern coast, and when Hugo and Neha visited together last year and traveled around, they immediately knew this magical little sacred structure was where they wanted to consecrate their bonds. So they invited family from Texas and Maharashtra to meet them there the last Saturday in May.

As celebrant, they found Julí Malone, a Druid from Dingle with permission to officiate weddings at the Oratory (who they learned the day after had also been the officiant of Sinead O’Connor’s memorial). Maybe that is why they got a gorgeous sunny day when the forecast called for overcast skies. The ceremony was really beautiful, with a call to the four winds, to the trees, to the mycelium, and to the gods of all those present, and deeply thoughtful and moving vows written by bride and groom that helped us know each of them and their life as a couple better. In that little space, Julí bathed them in the sonorous vibrations of a cymbal, literally tied the knot, and invited the couple to leap out over the threshold and into their new life.

As we celebrated outside in the sun after the exchange of vows, we saw a small bird flying back and forth from the shelter of one of the corner crevices in the Oratory, carrying nesting materials. Then, as we walked to the cars to reconvene at dinner, a sudden, intense, and hyperlocal burst of rain and wind drenched us, just as Julí had spoken of the cleansing of the past. And when we arrived in town, the clouds began to clear, and a full rainbow appeared over Dingle.

Back in Austin, we knew from our house sitter that our home had been pummeled by another microburst—this one the kind that our overheated Earth cooks up at the other end of the gulf stream, with 85 mph winds and baseball-sized hail that reportedly had people bleeding in our neighborhood grocery store after running from their cars. She sent pictures, but they weren’t good enough to tell what had really happened, so we wondered what awaited us as we boarded our flight back Monday.

We were lucky, even as we were saddened by what we found. Three mature trees downed on our lot. Luckily none fell on our house or guest house. But we lost one of our most beloved trees—a gnarled, 75-year-old mesquite that anchored our front yard, it was completely uprooted and tossed across the yard. It’s the tree that anchors the opening chapter of my book A Natural History of Empty Lots, in a recounting of the lessons I learned from it, and the sense of loss is intense, even as we are planning ways to preserve its memory through use of its wood.

Down in the woods of the urban floodplain behind our house, the arboreal carnage was intense. One of the majestic cottonwoods grown a hundred feet tall at the mouth of a municipal drainage pipe also was taken completely down, its fresh downy seed snow splattered across the forest floor, which was also littered with the limbs of hackberries. But the tall sycamore that hosts the great blue heron nests closest to us was undamaged. When I stood under it I could see the nest, and over the week I heard the fledglings running their reassuring motor mouths all morning and night.

Thursday morning as I stepped away from my desk in the guest house, I saw a magical being at the window: a painted bunting. I had glimpsed the bird earlier in the week, flitting around in the stubbier trees and freshly broken branches along our west fence, but it was wary and elusive. This time it couldn’t see me, and was protected by the glass, and I got to fully experience those extravagant colors.

Saturday morning, the parakeets came around to eat the sweet seed pods of that mesquite, just as I describe in the book, “Leprechaun colors” and all, tossing the used shells the way we toss empty beer cans to the bin. Invasive birds who prove how deserving they are of the life they have made here by being the only species I have seen that eats the mesquite pods—a vegetable protein that evolved to be eaten by the mastodons and other native megafauna of this region who went extinct around the same time as humans showed up on the continent.

That fallen tree won’t grow any more pods, but the younger one next to it already does, right in the path formerly occupied by the petroleum pipeline that bisected this lot when we found it. And maybe, when I finish my days-long date with the chainsaw and see what’s left under the fallen trunk, I’ll find a fresh little tendril coming up from what’s left of the root bed.

Saturday afternoon I noticed more magical beings congregating on that fallen tree. Golden-armored dragonflies, alighting en masse on its already-dead brown branches. When I identified them in the field guides, I learned they were widow skimmers, so named for the way the black patterns on their wings recall human adornments of mourning.

We don’t have any Druids in Texas, but we could use some. They’d have a lot to work with, even if they might not be able to appease the winds we have awakened.

The Roundup

Thanks to the Writers’ League of Texas and Becka Oliver for having me as one of the readers for Tuesday’s One Page Salon at Radio in South Austin, where I got to read something new about jaguarundis and robot Jaguars (part of an exploration of ways to combine nature writing and technology criticism), talk about Empty Lots, and meet and new work from a bunch of really cool local writers including Rachel Monroe, Carolyn Cohagan, Josh Alvarez and Renee’ Burleson. What a cool event.

Our latest local jaguarundi sightings have been in Seguin, a town in the Austin-San Antonio interzone.

My conversation with Australian author and environmentalist Anthony James for his RegenNarration podcast is now live and available for download. This was a fun one, as we recorded the conversation while walking around the East Austin edgelands.

Speaking of Australia, thanks to Jesse Sublett for this story about the cockatoos of Sydney who have figured how to operate public drinking fountains (video proof included).

And thanks to Bruce Sterling for this story about the bird nest found in the Ukraine battlefield made of a mix of natural materials and fiber optic cable, and this photo essay about how rapidly the Klamath River valley is rewilding after the most recent dam removal project.

The other magical conjuring to report from the week is that during our flight home, as I thought about watching a movie, I fed Google a query about the imaginary movie I wanted to see, one a friend and I concocted in a recent lunchtime conversation: Werner Herzog’s adaptation of the Relación of Cabeza de Vaca. To my immense amusement, the AI Assistant now embedded in the search engine hallucinated that the movie is a real one, and told me all about it.

If you ever need a Druid, click here.

Have a great week, and stay cool.

Last Sunday morning my daughter woke up wanting to get out on the water. It was an exceptionally beautiful day, the kind of sunny but cool spring weather we rarely get in Central Texas. I put the canoe, snacks and water on my back, she lugged the paddles and PFDs, and we put in right after breakfast, working our way upriver with frequent stops for swimming and investigating. At one point Octavia got the idea to sit half-submerged on the limestone bottom and meditate, as one might expect from a kid who attended a preschool where they gave out prizes for yoga.

Despite being a short distance from downtown, and in a densely urbanized area, the stretch of the Lower Colorado between Longhorn Dam in East Austin remains a remarkably wild and natural corridor, thanks largely to the foresight of locals who worked beginning in the 1980s to protect it for future generations. The plan was simple—push gravel dredging further east, implement setbacks and height and density limits to keep the built environment at a modest distance, and let the river rewild itself. It worked, as you can see in the above photo our friend Michelle took when we saw her and her family out for their morning walk along the high south bank.

The water is clear and clean, or at least the cleanest stretch of urban river in Texas. The bird life is abundant, especially in the tail end of migration season. We saw our first green heron of the season, admired the baby great blues in their nests behind the old warehouses, and nearly got crapped on by cormorants while doing so. In the past two weeks we’ve had close encounters with painted buntings, summer tanagers, redstarts, multiple species of flycatchers and warblers, and an indigo bunting. The waterfowl evidences a healthy fishery, and the canoe is a great way to see the swimmers up close, including Octavia’s first alligator gar. But the feeling that you better enjoy it while you can is hard to suppress. Especially when you also find yourself wondering, as you keep the bow in the channel, whether you may need to relocate your family to another country entirely to provide your kids their best shot at a healthy and happy future. Assuming you could even find a safe sanctuary from what’s coming.

The week that followed affirmed that anxiety, as Monday’s full Moon brought an abrupt and freakish August heat wave in the middle of May. It started with three days of triple-digit temps and smartphone heat advisories from the emergency management authorities, the first of which came on Tuesday, annotated by my wife:

Of course we all know what’s going on. And feel largely powerless to do anything about it, and increasingly resigned to the failure of our major institutions to change our course. We try to make sense of our rapidly morphing local and planetary realities with what information we can glean from a fragmented and untrustworthy media environment, stitching together a patchwork of algorithm-driven news clips, headlines from friends, bills in the mail, freakish changes in the weather, faces on the street. And the signs the natural world gives us, if we can manage to break the trance and give it a moment of our attention.

I’ve been settling into a new office in the guest house my wife designed and we built together over the last three years. Like our main residence, it’s a concrete bunker, but cozier and above ground, with an aesthetic deeply connected to the 70s, the kind of place that’s eager for a big terrarium and some hanging plants. Maybe that’s why, after I got my books onto the new library shelves and my stereo set up, I found myself digging into my archive of cassettes, which do a similar kind of splicing together. The way a mixtape made for me by my dead brother encodes otherwise unarticulated sentiments, or how sampling one’s own collection of purchased recordings accretes into some semi-coherent summation—a late capitalist ecology of memory.

When I unpacked the above used bookstore find from a few years back, a very British 1970s DIY guide to “Musique concrète for beginners,” I got to wondering whether I might be able to conduct some similar experiments over the summer. Perhaps with field recordings from the simultaneously wild and brutal Anthropocene soundscape around our neighborhood. Idle dreaming, no doubt, as 2025’s doesn’t feel like the kind of summer likely to indulge time-consuming home hobby diversions.

After my event at First Light Books last Friday, I picked up the new issue of The Paris Review, curious to see what the cool kids are up to. When I cracked it open Saturday morning over coffee and read the first story, I was amazed to find myself suddenly dropping acid with Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas in the emergency bunker, while John Roberts weeps in the corner about the disaster that has occurred in the negative space of the story—“Crystal Palace” by Amie Barrodale. I was pleased to find such a potent Ballardian riff instead of the navel-gazing interiority I expected, and impressed by the characterizations, having worked around several actual members of the Supreme Court in my first law job as a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer. It was interesting to read such a clever narrative bend on the idea of states of emergency, as the real Supreme Court dithers over whether to call bullshit on the self-evidently specious ones currently being tested out.

The story got me thinking how we live in a moment of declared political emergencies that are nothing of the sort, while a very real planetary emergency unfolds in ways we all feel, but happens in such slow motion that it’s as if no one fully believes in it. We try to do our part, working to replenish biodiversity in our own home and garden, reduce our consumptive profile, and collaborate with our neighbors to cultivate and protect the health of our post-industrial corridor. But the political environment, with its angry silverback resurgence of insatiable extractive appetite powered by capital and paramilitary force, makes such efforts feel quixotic and quaint. As does the absence of a coherent alternative vision of how else we could live.

During the week I reread another book that I had unboxed over the weekend: a beat-up paperback of In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner I bought after hearing him speak at Tulane in 1984. The lecture and the book both made a lasting impact on me with their erudite, allusive riffing on the big question that loomed over the second half of the twentieth century: how did the European cultures that achieved a hundred years of peace and prosperity between Waterloo and the assassination of the Archduke also produce the mechanized barbarity that killed 70 million people and culminated in the Holocaust? Steiner never really answers it, and some things in the text age badly, but it’s still a tremendous essay, with more touches on environmental issues than I remembered. It also ends with a remarkably prescient glimpse into the future from the vantage of 1971. A reminder that we can usually see what’s coming if we pay closer attention to the early indicators hiding around us in plain sight, even if we can’t change the weather our grandparents bequeathed us.

When Octavia and I got to the dam, we paddled over to visit some ducks loitering on a pile of rocks near the spillway, where the egrets and herons line up to catch the big fish that pour out from the floodgates. We stepped out of the boat to clamber around after the ducks finally flew off, and in the glistening water I noticed an old bottle of Corona, which triggered more 80s memories, including that awesome song of the same name by the Minutemen, which was not really about the beer. I could hear D. Boon’s plaintive opening line:

The people will survive
In their environment

The way he sings it, you can tell he believes it, but in the way of a conjurer trying to will a better future into being. I believe it, too, grounded in my witness of the resiliency of nature, of human beings, and diverse communities. The promise, and the problem, is that to get there we have to get through the summer that’s coming.

The Roundup

Thanks to the wonderful crowd who came out to First Light Books for my conversation with Abrianna Citta of Urban Austin Reads. That shop has quickly acquired an amazing energy as a vital community center, a kind of cultural oasis, and the way the design of the shop (by our friends at Thoughtbarn) can quickly morph from retail display to event spaces is remarkable. If you’re in Austin and haven’t checked it out yet, you should. And if you’re interested in getting a signed copy of A Natural History of Empty Lots, give them a call.

The other book I picked up there after my event was American Bulk by Emily Mester, a collection of essays about excess. I just started it, and the opening piece about the author’s Midwestern childhood going to Costco and the slowly revealed accumulative secrets of her sweet grandma from Iowa really grabbed me—a clever way to use memoir to more deeply interrogate our addiction to the accumulation of surplus.

The folks at Timber Press hooked me up with a copy of Wild NYC by Ryan Mandelbaum and Chelsea Beck, a wonderful guide to finding nature in the five boroughs. It’s really cool to experience the city through that prism, and the book does a great job of providing deep historical context for the rich field guide entries. I’m excited to get back and explore some of the places the authors describe.

If you’re looking for edgy futuristic fiction that’s not afraid to tell the truth, check out the new story collection Another World Isn’t Possible by Brendan Byrne, forthcoming later this month from Australia’s Wanton Sun.

Telling the truth about what’s going on right now in the real world, Michelle Nijhuis had a great op-ed in the NYT Friday about the battle lines developing around the idea of starting to sell off the U.S.’s public lands.

And over at 4Columns, a great review by Mark Dery of Robert Macfarlane’s new book on the idea of the rights of nature, Is a River Alive?

One of the old cassettes I listened to this week was 60 Horses in My Herd by the Tuvan band Huun-Huur-Tu. That got me thinking about Genghis Blues, an exceptional documentary I saw at a SXSW screening around its release in 1999. It tells the story of how blind bluesman Paul Pena, listening to Russian short wave radio in his apartment in 1980s San Francisco, taught himself the art of throat singing, and eventually managed to travel to Tuva and meet some of the voices he had heard over the airwaves.

I was delighted to read the news from across the Bay that Les Blank Films and the Arhoolie Foundation succeeded on acquiring their building, which also houses the amazing Down Home Records, on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito. I got to check out the building and the shop in February while visiting friends who live down the street, and look forward to going back and getting this T-shirt I left behind.

That also reminded me of a recent lunch conversation with a friend in which we found ourselves imagining the Werner Herzog adaptation of the Relación of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. In the meantime, I’m going to check out Juan Diego’s 1990 Spanish-language version, which is now available free for streaming (with subtitles):

Sorry for the later than usual installment this week—some weekends it’s hard to carve out the time. Field Notes will be off the next two weeks, returning in June with a report from farther and greener fields.

Have a safe week.

I can hear the baby herons at all hours right now, in the trees behind our bedroom door. Asking for more, I guess, though their manner of doing so is rather mellow compared to our young. The bird books call it “tik-tik-tik,” which is about right, but doesn’t really convey the constancy of it, or the machine quality. It’s like the sound of a two-stroke motor at low idle, and when they’re at it, one hears a lot more than three tiks. An indication, I suppose, that our new neighbors have a lot of young mouths to feed.

There are a lot of unfamiliar sounds in the air around here right now, as the migrants move through, drawing bands of curious human fans with extra eyes:

The great blue herons are year-round residents, a very common sight along the urban river, even in more densely urbanized stretches. But this is the first time we’ve had a nest this close to our home. Two of them, actually, in one of the tall cottonwoods that grow in the floodplain. We can’t see them from our back door, now that the trees are fully foliated, but the hatching of their fledglings means we can hear them all the time.

For several years now, there’s been a bigger rookery of a half-dozen nests established in a solitary sycamore behind the ruins of the muffler shop where you could also get your taxes done—I devoted a subchapter to it in Empty Lots, and have written about it here before—and it seems more pairs are moving in. It’s affirming that so many of these birds have found viable habitat ten minutes from downtown Austin, in a tree-lined stretch of urban river between a municipal dam and the next big creek that discharges the filth of the human settlement. Then you get to wondering if they’re here because it’s the only place they could find.

Walk out of our front gate, and you find yourself in what seems at first to be exceptionally unlikely habitat—a neighborhood of old factories, warehouses and machine shops along major east-west thoroughfares. But even there, the upland savanna this must once have been persists. One of the secondary streets mostly holds the back side of businesses. On weekday mornings you can see the tanker trucks come and go carrying loads of new motor oil to keep the machines running, hear the compressed gas tanks blowing off pressure from the Air Supply depot, and dodge the municipal buses deploying from the yard. As warm weather arrives, you can also see the black-bellied whistling ducks who come here to breed cavorting in the tall pecans and hackberries that line the expansive back yards of those businesses.

Sometimes they gawk around on the dead trees we line the street with:

Saturday morning the new puppy and I walked down that corridor. When we turned the corner to the abandoned lighting factory, where the sparrows have colonized the eroded fiberglass underside of the loading dock cover, we found the gate that secures the site wide open, so we poked our noses in to admire the outlaw murals that line the cavernous interior walls. As we continued down the street, I heard unfamiliar bird calls, so I tried out Cornell’s Merlin app, and with its aid spotted my first great crested flycatcher, fluttering around in the lush foliage of a big pecan behind the chain link of the old truck yard. This one had a more pronounced and narrow crest than the ones in the guidebooks, more punk mohawk than new wave coif.

The app also claimed to have heard a northern pygmy owl. I didn’t see it, though we did see a barred owl out hunting before nightfall Friday right over the Valero station on East Cesar Chavez, perhaps prowling for mammals on the move as the storm blew in. Other friends and neighbors have reported seeing spectral grey hawks over the skies of East Austin the past couple of weeks, likely Mississippi kites.

When I looked up the great crested flycatcher in the field guides, it said they are typically found in mature forests. I wondered if this post-industrial riparian upland is a remnant of one, dotted with a few surviving trees, or just good enough for birds who can no longer find enough of their prime habitat. I also thought about the piece I read in the business press a while back, announcing the purchase of that huge urban acreage for redevelopment as a mixed-use project, and wondered if the birds will keep coming if and when that happens.

Looking at this picture of one of the abandoned lighting factory from Monday morning, when I suspect one of Austin’s lesser-known masked crimefighters had been working late, you can see how neither the Chamber of Commerce types nor the Sierra Club types would think much of the current condition of this neighborhood, even if you showed them the pockets of habitat hidden behind the urban blight. But I wonder what it will take to get our planners and promoters to start to place real value on creating habitat for other species as they build more shelter for us, and for the capital we accumulate as if it were the most valuable resource on Earth.

Just because May Day came and went and no one else seemed to notice doesn't mean you should stop dreaming of revolution, and admiring the flowers, and realizing they go together.

The Roundup

The best bit of news you can use from our animal neighbors last week was the research report just published in Communications Biology by Harvard ecologist Martin Surbeck and colleagues who spent three decades of grueling field work figuring out how female bonobos have learned to use coalition-building to manage aggressive males and achieve matriarchal power. The recap from the NYT:

Scientists have long wondered how female bonobos maintain their matriarchies. In a study published Thursday, researchers who tracked six bonobo communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo over nearly 30 years provided the first evidence-based explanation for how female bonobos gain and sustain dominance over the males within their communities. Females, they found, form coalitions against males to tip the balance of power in their favor.

When a male bonobo steps out of line, nearby females will band together to attack or intimidate him. Males who cower in the face of such conflicts lose social rank, while their female adversaries gain it, affording them better access to food, and mates for their sons.

One wonders how quickly our species might figure out how to do the same, learning from these cousins with whom we share 99% of our DNA.

It also reminded me of Audrey Schulman’s incredible novel Theory of Bastards, about a woman studying bonobos at a research facility in the Midwest when a disaster strikes, which I was lucky to read as a judge for the 2019 Philip K. Dick Award (which award the book won).

At the other end of the spectrum, the 283 eligible voters in the unincorporated tip of South Texas proposed to be turned into the city of Starbase voted to do just that. Yes, most of them are SpaceX employees.

Are there tariffs on Mars?

I had a blast talking with Mark Lynch at WICN radio in Worcester, Mass., for his show Inquiry. And I’m really looking forward to joining the folks at Urban Austin Reads for a discussion of A Natural History of Empty Lots this coming Friday, May 9, 7 p.m., at First Light Books.

Lastly, here’s a not-bad phone video of the caracara visiting friend Douglas Ross and I saw last weekend enjoying Sunday brunch on the Colorado:

And some of the first full retama bloom of the season, a signal that summer is coming soon:

Have a great week.

The almanac writers, who work hard to turn your desire to see the full moon into a compulsion to click through to their site and pass your eyeballs over their ads, label April’s orb as the Pink Moon. The truth is it’s not pink at all, and it’s not even that remarkable as moons go, because it’s as far as it gets from us. But there are a lot of things the algorithms don’t bother to mention, like how they determined which sports team tattoos license Border Patrol brownshirts to disappear you, or the fact that this year Easter falls on Hitler’s birthday.

The names the copywriters give the moons draw from diverse traditional associations of different seasonal moons with important environmental changes—Indigenous and farm country ways of using the moon itself as the almanac, a mnemonic repository of cultural knowledge about how we live off our environment. In the Great Lakes and the northern Plains, April’s full moon was variously remembered as the time when the ice starts to break, the ducks come back, frogs start croaking, and the fish start biting. The Pink Moon refers not to the color of the object in the sky, but the wild phlox blooming on the ground. As it did here this week, right on cue, more abundantly than last year:

Ours is not the phlox the almanac writers meant, and it only recently started to appear on the rocky urban riverbank behind our home, which has been rewilding a little bit more every year we have been here, after having been used as a gravel dredging site for much of the 20th century. The bluebonnets always come up in that spot, in varying degrees of abundance. Last year there were just a couple of the phlox mixed in with the lupines, but this year there are dozens, in a Pantone album of showy pinks and flamboyant star-shaped petals.

A little research indicates it’s likely a mix of Phlox cuspidata and Phlox drummondii, which are said to have a knack for cross-breeding and producing new variants. New flowers, perhaps, for the new climate that has arrived in this zone, with swampy springs that precede brutally hot summers.

The full moon also had the mama turtles on the move, out looking for spots to lay their eggs. Saturday the pup and I saw one taking a rest in the shade near that patch of phlox, and Monday I spotted another one crossing the road behind Zilker Park under the Mopac freeway bridge, the wet mud still visible on the back of her shell. I had an instinct to help her make it safely to the other side of the double yellow lines, but she seemed like she had it handled.

The turtles often travel far from the water, looking for safe spots to lay their clutches. They sometimes show up in our yard, up a steep bluff a quarter-mile from the river. Which seems like a good adaptation, as this is also the season when you will often find the rubbery white shreds of turtle eggs that have been dug up by raccoons.

Monday while I was showing my visiting colleague Pam Penick around the place, I spotted a newly hatched red-eared slider trying to find its way across our front yard in the direction of the water. I decided to help that one, in consideration of the evolutionary handicap I had encumbered it with by having our dogs out, and worried that our four-month-old terrier would find it if I didn't.

The turtle conservation groups are quick to note that you should generally assume a turtle knows where it is going, even if it is crossing a road away from a body of water and towards some rocky embankment. And even the hatchlings have highly evolved homing, despite having no learned knowledge of the landscape into which they are born. When I find one, if there are dogs out, I usually set it just outside our back gate on the path to the river.

When I turned the baby turtle over, I was struck by the beauty of the pigmented pattern on its plastron. Like a face with bat ears, or two hands making the heart sign. The scientific literature explains that the shape of the plastron, concave or convex, is a good indicator of the biological sex of the turtle, and the first part of the carapace to have evolved, in a slow evolution and expansion of the sternum into a kind of under-armor. But while the patterns, which are as individualized as human fingerprints, provide biologists with an easy means to identify subjects for study and censuses, their purpose thus far has only been guessed at—camouflage, mating attractor, distinctive mark of identification within the species.

Research also revealed that this turtle was hatching ahead of schedule. Evidence of another adaptation to a warming climate, perhaps, or to the challenges of this family’s urbanized habitat, or maybe just an anomaly.

When I got the photo back from the lab and the intense beauty of these markings really registered with me, I thought about all the tiny turtles that will be hatching in the coming months, and trying to find their way across the city to safety without being intercepted. Maybe that’s just a sympathetic projection of the feelings in the human air, of all the folks in our community who are now afraid to leave their homes at night for fear of being detained and separated from their families, and have to navigate a landscape of danger every day when they go to work. Or maybe I have the promise of Easter and its pagan precedents on my brain.

The day after my mom and I drove past the scene of three men hanging on three crosses outside the Church of Cristo el Rey in East Austin as we drove to family dinner, a rehearsal of the Passion Play that will be re-enacted today, I spotted a new cardinal nest in the crook of a young tree right by our front path. Those nests have become easy to identify after 15 years in this house, for the way they ingeniously use industrial packaging and other anthropogenic materials available in this neighborhood of factories, warehouses and woodlands to keep their nests drier and warmer (I’ve written about them here more extensively before, and there’s a subchapter about them in my book A Natural History of Empty Lots). This one mixed plastic sheeting with dead leaves on the outside, in a spot around six feet above the ground. Taller than me by a few inches, so I decided to reach up and take picture to see if anything was in the nest:

When you’ve lived through five decades of seasons, you accumulate a better feel for their signs and contours. The recent seasons, though, have felt different than any that came before, even as they have some of their own weird emergent patterns, like the way the cardinals nests reveal the cyborg we have made of our world. This week leading up to Easter I got that sense of another brutally hot summer to come. I also got a stronger sense than ever of the human pressure building, as people’s sense of justice is daily tested and taunted. Someone should make an almanac that predicts when that kind of pressure boils over into mass action.

I wonder if the animals that share our habitat with us know how to see the developing human weather better than we do, like the elephants who were caught on zoo cam last week circling up to get ready for the earthquake. I’m pretty sure they’re already showing us glimpses into what’s on the other side.

The Roundup

Thursday, May 9, I’ll be at First Light Books in Austin, discussing A Natural History of Empty Lots with Megan Kimble for the Urban Austin Reads series. RSVP here if you’d like to attend—should be a fun and interesting conversation.

Thanks to Matthew Miller at Cool Green Science, the blog of The Nature Conservancy, for including Empty Lots in this roundup of environmental reading for Earth Day 2025. And for a different perspective on the rambles I mostly chronicle here, check out Pam Penick’s report from our walk on Monday.

Over at The New Yorker, D. T. Max visits the lab where Colossal has bred puppies with the DNA of dire wolves. And thanks to Chiara Sunshine Beaumont for tipping me off to this video about the Karankawa’s collaboration with Colossal around the cloning of a ghost wolf.

The Guardian reported an important new study out of Australia on the “extensive and multifarious” adverse environmental impacts of domestic dogs—much of which is attributable to the behavior of the dogs’ owners, especially letting dogs off leash in areas where wildlife are active.

Ballardian and Borgesian at the same time, this week’s NYT had a fascinating report on the capybaras that have flourished in a gated community in metropolitan Buenos Aires, and the ways their affluent human neighbors are responding.

Also at the Times, I was moved by this field dispatch by Daryln Brewer Hoffstot about gardening in time of climate crisis, and blown away by the accompanying photos by Kristian Thacker, which really captured the feeling of winter’s end and spring’s early beginnings in these weird times. You can see more of his work here.

I was lucky to get an advance reading copy of Joanna Pocock’s new book Greyhound, forthcoming this fall. It’s the story of a woman in her fifties’ journey across the U.S. by bus in the aftermath of Covid, retracing a similar trip she took almost 20 years earlier, and revisiting novels of the great American road trip along the way—all while aiming a keen eye at the landscape, human and natural. Erudite, empathic and intensely engaging, the book reads a bit like a visit from a time traveler, and stuck with me especially in the way it bears witness to how the damage we feel in our own lives and communities is rooted in our damaged relationship with the land on which we live. Greyhound also includes some amazing photos by the author—in black and white, but here’s one in color she kindly shared with me:

For a great short fiction about coming to terms with a dictator, track down a copy of “Somoza’s Dream” by Daniel Orozco, about the assassination of the deposed Nicaraguan ruler while he was in luxurious exile in Paraguay, told from the POV of Tachito himself. I reread it last night after finding my copy of McSweeney’s No. 18 (from way back in 2005) while unpacking boxes of books from storage to shelve in our new guest house library. It’s as good as I remembered, and a masterful example of a story that finds its way into the political through a craft-focused fidelity to literary truth. I couldn’t find an online version, but it’s included in Orozco’s collection Orientation, which is still in print and available at many libraries.

Also on my topical re-read shelf after escaping from the storage locker: The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, which looks at the the ways in which economic inequality has been successfully (if always temporarily) reduced in a meaningful way over the long course of human history since the stone age—through the “Four Horsemen” of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues. Door number two?

Have a safe week.

At 1:25 a.m. on All Fool’s Day, I was awakened by screams in the woods. Our bedroom door opens directly to the outside, on a small patio facing the wooded floodplain of the river, and when the action is close it’s hard not to hear it. It sounded like flying monkeys—abrupt laughs in escalating high-pitched tones, mixed in with the occasional long slow hoooo. Sounds nothing like what the guidebooks and online databases tell you to expect from that species. Maybe they are learning a new language, living in the sonic landscape of the city.

I’ve heard barred owls hooking up before. One morning in the summer of 2023, up early working in the trailer before sunup, I heard similar sounds. When I went out to investigate, I could tell the sound was coming not from the woods behind the fences, but from the streets outside them. They were in a gnarled but mature sidewalk tree, taking advantage of the darkness of this double dead-end where human lovers often park, maybe a hundred feet from the entrance to the tollway onramp. They noticed my eavesdropping, and finally revealed themselves to me as they flew together across the street to a white sycamore by the back gate of the door factory. I tried to call to them, but they weren’t having it.

I recorded Tuesday’s pair on my phone. On playback they seem more distant than they were, especially next to the sounds of me fumbling in the dark. In fact they were there in our yard, as close as my wife and daughter were to me in that moment. The only audible urban sounds were a few cars and trucks rumbling their way over the bridges in the background. Every time I hear one of those big owls nearby, it’s an affirming reminder that wildness can persist in the margins of our rampaging sprawl. Even better when you hear two of them have found each other amidst this damaged habitat, and are making more.

Signs of spring coming up in the ruins are all around us right now, providing a nice counterbalance to the onslaught of headlines so outrageous that, as someone who has written dystopian novels with eerily similar plot lines, I find myself feeling like the fantastic is somehow bleeding into consensus reality. The night after I heard the owls, I heard a group of men conducting what sounded like military drills in the park across the river—a different kind of call and response, the kind you hear between a sergeant and his soldiers. Not the first time I’ve heard that, either, in the past couple of years. What conception of springtime they are preparing for, I don’t know. It probably does not involve as much yardwork as mine.

The only development on our lot when we found it was a petroleum pipeline, wheel-hatched valve box and all, that had been built in the 1940s and abandoned in the 1990s. For many years it was unfenced, and the yard was littered with large quantities of demolition debris and other trash, including huge chunks of old roadbed, sewer pipes and walls. Before we bought the place, someone pushed most of that to the back of the lot with a bulldozer, mixed in with a lot of dirt, resulting in a bluff at the edge of the riparian floodplain that is essentially an unpermitted little landfill. Somehow it is also a grove of the healthiest looking hackberries I have ever seen, under whose shade every spring begins with an explosion of purple and pink spiderwort.

The phytoremediative qualities of certain species of spiderwort have been scientifically studied, most notably Tradescantia pallida, native to the Gulf Coast of Mexico, which has been shown to remove cadmium and other heavy metals from the soil. I don’t know if our plants, which must be Tradescantia virginiana (or some locally evolving variant of that rapidly hybridizing genus), do the same work. But when you see them coming up between the old chunks of curb cut, it easy to think they occupy that blighted ecological niche for a reason.

Last weekend after I got done weeding I grabbed my dad’s old Canon F1 film camera, put on the macro lens he used to use to take pictures of his patients’ teeth, and experimented with capturing the details of some of these gorgeous early wildflowers. I’ve mostly been keeping the camera loaded with CineStill 800T, a tungsten film designed for low light that works well on early morning walks. One of the pleasant quirks of the film is the blue tint it brings out, especially in the greens of the foliage. I like the results, which convey an emotional truth, even as they alter reality in subtle ways.

Pictured above is evening primrose, one of the first full sun native wildflowers to appear in Texas springtime. Famously hard to cultivate intentionally in the garden, but remarkably prodigious in places like roadside rights of way, drainage ditches and empty lots, it’s maybe the best exemplar of how the prairie ecologies we have largely erased from this landscape are not entirely gone.

After we built our little house, tucked into the ditch that was left when we removed the remains of the old pipeline, we worked to restore some of that native ecology, installing a green roof over our heads seeded with 70 species of flowers and grasses associated with the Blackland prairie. In subsequent seasons we did similar seedings across the rest of the yard, after solarizing it with big sheets of black plastic to try to mitigate the invasive ornamentals, and the results were remarkable.

Maintaining the balance of native and exotic species is a challenge. We are not puritans about that distinction, and even suspicious of it. But we have witnessed the indisputable biodiversity that the native plants seem to conjure from the ether in previously lifeless zones, and that’s our main objective. Busy with parenting and careers, we have slacked off a bit in the past five years, especially in the fight against brome grass, which comes up in winter and crowds out the natives.

We spent the past three years building a guest house, and the construction decimated the work we had done in the front yard. So this spring we have begun a new phase of rewilding, informed by the revelation over the course of the past 15 years that this weird little spot at the edge of the woods behind the factories does not want to be a prairie so much as a forest. With luck, we will be able to nurture it into something that recalls the sacred grove, even as it still shows the scars of our abuse.

Last Saturday I stayed up late reading a memoir of the Fourth Crusade I found while unpacking boxes of books that had been in storage. When I finally headed to bed, I stopped to listen to the sounds of life in the woods. I heard the call and response of a group of animals, and understood after a minute listening that they were not birds but frogs, who must have liked the spring rains we’ve been having.

I listened for a while longer, staring into the dark, locating each of the calls in space. I realized there were no more than six frogs, maybe as few as three. Then I remembered how when we first moved here in 2010, living in a little rented cottage next door while we figured out how to build our crazy house, we would hear hundreds of frogs croaking along the river all through the hot nights as we hung out on the porch. Maybe they will be back, when spring matures into summer. But amphibian life always seems like one of our most powerful indicators of ecological health, and I worry the river, after a decade of intense new development in its surroundings, may no longer be as clean as it was.

Friday night I heard one of the owls again. It was in a tree on the far bank, near the beach where I had heard those men assembled as if preparing for battle.

The next day I found myself thinking about the myriad ways human cultures have appropriated the owl as symbol, often focused on its gifts of navigating through the darkness. We’ve associated it with everything from military victory to alien abductions, both devil and redeemer, using it as a mirror for the aspects of our own minds we can’t quite fathom. The owls probably can’t help us navigate through the dark human moment that is emerging. But they and the other life around us have a lot to teach about the world we have made. And the world that could be, after the dying old beast currently thrashing around on our screens and in our heads has lashed out for the last time.

The Roundup

Welcome to all the new subscribers who have found their way to this newsletter thanks in large part to Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist and other bestselling guides to living a richer and more creative life, who reported last week how two people in two days recommended he check out A Natural History of Empty Lots—and shared an amazing image of an inchworm crawling across his copy.

Thanks also Akash Singh and the folks at STIR World for this lovely piece on the book, and the great selection of photos they included.

For those encountering this work for the first time, Field Notes is a mostly bi-weekly letter from the urban outdoors, usually from the edgelands of Austin, Texas, where I live with my family, and occasionally from farther fields. My most recent book digs into similar material at longer length. Before starting this newsletter in 2020, I was best known for my SF novels, and I also practice law. For a sampling of the most popular posts, check out the archive. All posts are free, all photos are by me unless otherwise noted, and I may repeat myself from time to time.

For the reader who asked for a picture of the new puppy we recently adopted, here’s the 3-month-old terrier our daughter named Fifi:

The London Review of Books has been really on its game of late, with some incisive perspectives on the headlines, including Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168, Perry Anderson on what comes after the deadlocked conflict between neoliberalism and populism (and whether it can happen without a new theory of political economy), Deborah Friedell on what two recent write-ups of the makeover of X reveal about what’s going on in Washington, and Thom Dyke on the Gitmo tribunals today.

When I went to get my haircut Thursday, the barbers had two different Val Kilmer movies on in memoriam: Maverick in one chair and the wonderfully insane 1996 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau in the other. RIP.

I was also sorry to read this week of the passing of Gai Gherardi, the lead designer and entrepreneur behind L.A. Eyeworks, whose frames I have been wearing for 30 years.

Kudos to our friend and colleague Meghan McCarron for her amazing piece in the Times about the decline of the casual family restaurant and its central role in American culture.

Thanks to Mishka Westell for teaching me that the preferred term for bird-watchers in England (at least some of them) is “twitchers.” And that they’ve been seeing a pileated woodpecker in Austin’s Roy Guerrero Park. In other local birding news, thanks to Jennifer Bristol for the heads up about the legislative threat to the golden-cheeked warbler’s habitat.

In environmental news, this NYT piece about the toxic algal blooms off the Southern California coast had the most bummer paragraph I’ve read in a while:

Local governments have put out advisories warning the public not to come close to stranded animals. As the springtime weather brings crowds out to the beaches, parts of the shoreline of Southern California have had a grim feel. Creatures that typically give children and adults a thrill when they’re spotted splashing in the water now turn up in the sand dazed or dead, spreading a sadness that clashes with the bright sunshine and ocean breeze.

Better news from Nebraska, where a record-high 736,000 sandhill cranes migrated through last week (with no observed cases of bird flu). Here’s a CBS Sunday Morning video from the Platte River near Grand Isle:

Have a safe week.

Last Friday morning when I went to put the trash out a little after sunup, I found someone standing in our driveway just outside the front gate, right where the sidewalk ends. A woman, with her back to me, wearing a well-used black day pack over a plaid shirt and jeans. She was looking down, recording notes. I stepped out to greet her. She said how cool it was we live in an earth shelter, and asked how long we’d been here. I told her, and then asked what she was up to. Turned out she had been out all night, watching the Blood Moon come and go.

The total lunar eclipse of what the almanac writers call the Worm Moon began at just after midnight that Friday and continued for a few hours, though it was gone when I got up at five. I didn’t ask where she had watched it from, but it sounded like she had stayed close to the river. I asked her what the Moon looked like, and the answer was in her eyes. You could tell she was looking to get more of that wonder on her walk home. I mentioned some cool hidden spots she could check out along the way, but it’s hard to imagine anything cooler than what she had spent her night doing: soaking up the celestial majesty that still manages to outshine the electric hubris of the human city a few nights of the year, even if it does so when only a few of us are looking.

I later wondered if she’d heard about the 128 new moons of Saturn. I had read about the previously unobserved celestial objects in the news the day before. The discovery had been officially certified by the fellows of the Minor Planet Center, in a series of electronic circulars titled like chapbooks of experimental poetry even though they are not:

THIRTY-THREE NEW SATURNIAN SATELLITES

Each observation is expressed mathematically, in encrypted notation that I suspect would translate well into an album of ambient music. The right to name the moons, in accordance with the practices of the International Astronomical Union, is given to the scientist who led the discovery team, Edward Ashton of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan (whose other publications include the awesomely titled “Lightcurves of 371 Trans-Neptunian Objects”). The expectation seems to be that, like the other outer moons among the 146 previously identified, they will be named after the Jötunn of Norse mythology. Begging the question of how many such names are even known to us from the surviving written records.

Turns out there are a lot, from Aurvandil the luminous wanderer to Ymir the seething clay. And Aurvandil is already in the sky. Or at least his toe, ever since Thor tossed it up there when it froze as he was carrying the giant across the river. We just don’t know which star. Even though, or maybe because, Aurvandil aka Ēarendel lived on in the sky as the redeeming angel of Advent. We do know that it is one of the stars that appear in the morning to early risers, making me wonder if I have seen it and did not know.

The Worm Moon lived up to its name this year, appearing just as the first native wildflowers began to bloom and the warm weather insects began to appear, in the week of the equinox. I found evening primrose opening up along the loop road, across from the ruins of the old dairy plant. A big patch of bluebonnets spread across the high berm between the tollway onramps, brightening the view for the morning commuters. The first orange bracts of the plant the settlers called Indian paintbrush came up outside the recently abandoned temporary Austin headquarters of the social media wasteland formerly known as Twitter.

Closer to home, I spotted some Corydalis, the early bloomer known as scrambled eggs for its nodular blossoms of bright rich yellow, poking through last year’s growth on our green roof. And in the back of our yard, where the soil is still littered with chunks of concrete demolition debris and other trash illegally dumped here decades ago on what was an empty lot, the deep green clumps of phytoremediative spiderwort have burst with their velvet blossoms a little later than usual.

The everyday miracle of native plants surviving in the brutalized landscape of our erasure sometimes induces me to try fresh variations on facile remarks about the eternal certainty of springtime’s return. This season I’m more preoccupied with how persistently the worst qualities of human tribalism, territoriality and addiction to patriarchal power structures reassert themselves whenever the possibility of meaningful change starts to express itself in the culture, as it did in the aftermath of the Great War and the global shutdown of pandemic. The wildflowers and butterflies sneaking their little remnants of faerie into the Texas hellscape does remind me, though, of how those divergent things are connected—how our CEO cults and the warlord models they descend from are ultimately rooted in our control over wild nature and ability to extract surplus through that dominion. And how the path to our own liberation must run through the wild, biodiverse garden we have the capacity to bring back to the world.

Our six-year-old daughter helps us stay yoked to a more promising vision of the future that could come after the current clowns in charge are long gone. Friday she insisted her mom take her down to the river to swim, maybe drawn by the knowledge of the bluebonnets in bloom along the banks, or by some more primal call of that wild stream that connects us to deep time. Saturday I took her back, in the canoe, and she learned for the first time how to find the birds by their songs, how to spot the turtles in the water after they slide off the rocks, and how to properly paddle your way forward against the current, one stroke at a time.

When we got to the dam, we got out so she could run along the rocky limestone bank, where you can still see the ruts worn by wagon wheels when this was a low water crossing. As she splashed in the puddles and looked for the little holes where the eels live out their hermaphroditic adolescence before they return to the Sargasso Sea to breed, I went to check out a flash of yellow further back. Golden pom poms of the huisache tree, growing up from rocks and concrete rubble at the base of the bluff behind the International Bank of Commerce branch. Those blossoms of our American acacia are among spring’s most ephemeral and beautiful manifestations around here. The bark of the tree is said to produce a potent hallucinogen, but I’m happy to just smell the flowers.

When we returned home, I went to check on our own huisache trees at the edge of our yard. We have three, which had grown pretty big and bountiful over the years, until the winter storm of 2021 and the hard freeze of the following winter. They turned black afterwards, and seemed entirely dead. But after pruning back most of the dead branches, over the seasons they slowly produced new growth. And this year, finally, one produced blossoms again. Go tell Aurvandil.

Spring Break Reading

Happy birthday to my son Hugo Nakashima-Brown, one of the finest exemplars of humanity I am lucky to know (yes, I am biased, but others can vouch), who turns 30 today. You can check out his amazing work here.

Seeking less polluted night skies, we made a three-day run last weekend out to West Texas, and made a coffee stop at Front Street Books in Alpine, which may be the best-curated small town shop I’ve ever seen. We met new owner Kendra DuBois, who just took over the store, and hope to get back out there for an event soon. If you’re looking for spring reading, especially on desert ecology or Western history, check out their inventory.

On the way out, we stopped at an Exxon station that is the only remaining human habitation in the ghost town of Bakersfield, which existed briefly at the base of the landmark known as Tunas Peak—a mesa along the ancient trailway that I-10 tracks known for its resemblance at most angles to the bosom of Gaia (which resemblance earned it some other names). That got me reading up on the fascinating archaeological history of the site.

When we returned, my daughter and I took Oma to check out the exhibition on children’s literature at the Harry Ransom Center, which has some amazing artifacts from classics of the genre, as well as remarkable examples of juvenile writing by great novelists—including a kid’s notebook filled with Norman Mailer’s unpublished story of the Martian invasion.

At the end of last year we finished construction on a new guest house on our lot that my wife Agustina designed, to provide space for big brother and his bride-to-be and other visiting friends and family, as well as proper home offices for Agustina and me, and space for our books. In the evenings I’ve been unpacking them box by box, and enjoying the rediscovery as I figure out my shelving system. A few of them provided source material for this post, including Hilda Davidson’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, my copy of which is a used Penguin first edition as old as me but less beat-up, Brutalist Plants by Olivia Broome, and R. Crumb’s graphic novel adaptation of the Book of Genesis.

For a really cool Texas library, check out Donald Judd’s in Marfa, which now has a pretty great online facsimile.

I was delighted to see the audiobook of A Natural History of Empty Lots narrated by yours truly included in this Audiofile magazine roundup of “Spring Awakenings: Stories of Nature, Renewal, and Connection.” And I loved the take Akash Singh had on Empty Lots in this piece for the design site STIR.

Lastly, while we were in Alpine our 3-month-old puppy and I went out for a little Sunday morning hike last week on the hills behind Sul Ross State University, where we discovered the desk students dragged up there for outdoor study in the early 80s, and experienced the wonder of the sun rising over the Big Bend, which I captured on my dad’s old F1 film camera:

Have a great week.