"New York is a city that will be replaced by another city." Rem Koolhaas
"Further a forest of white plaster, white plaster eggs. Large white eggs on silver disks, an elegy to birth, each egg a promise, each half-shaped nascence of man or woman or animal not yet precise. Womb and seed and egg, the moist beginning being worshiped rather than it's flowering. The eggs so white, so still, gave birth to hope without breaking, but the cut-down tree lying there produced a green live branch that laughed at the sculptor." Anaà ¯s Nin
Growing up in New York, I remember how people would always ominously point out that as the thermostat rises, so does the crazy. They were usually referring to murder rate, specifically, but I think it's more a general sense of frustration and desperation. And it was awfully hot in New York recently"
So maybe it was the intense heat wave that made the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Port Authority and the City of New York decide to go to Prospect Park and kill four hundred geese. Or maybe the decision to kill them was cool and calculated, but it was the heat that made them decide to do it by rounding these geese up into crates, taking them to special facility and gassing them to death. The Times further reports that bodies of these geese will be "double-bagged and dumped in a landfill," so not even their meat or feathers will go to any practical use. Plus, the double-bagging will prevent their bodies from being recycled into the earth by decomposers. And there it is.
Like many people, upon hearing this I was at a loss for words. The primary reason for this action is to prevent any future US Airways Flight 1549-esque mishaps (though plain ol' overpopulation concerns seem to have fed the decision as well). But killing them all like that? Gassing four hundred intelligent, sentient creatures[1] without telling anyone beforehand? Couldn't they have been relocated? Not to mention the fact that however anyone wishes to rationalize the killing of the Prospect Park geese, once there is a sanctioned killing of a certain animal, all the crazies come out and start reveling in the activity. For instance, a similar goose-culling took place in New Jersey and that led to subsequent, unsanctioned, mysterious goose killings in which the birds were bludgeoned to death and shot with BB guns.
This series of depraved acts was just the pinprick to an already-full balloon. I feel I don't have much more to say about it beyond simply expressing my disgust. But I do think it speaks to something deeper. Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to both my former home (New York) and to shared space in general. That is, how we do or do not choose to dwell in a certain space with other people, other species, even other plants? What do we claim to be natural, and how well-founded are these claims? And how does New York in particular a place with so much of our history and nearly all of my history constantly bury its past while embracing the future? How does it sweep unwanted people, species and events under the rug, and what is the result of all that effort put in ordering our surroundings? It is a tremendous outpouring of energy indeed, but try as we might, we just don't seem to be able to resist the entropy of the biosphere,[2] no matter how many geese we kill"or how many geese we bring to New York.
The issue of the geese in New York lies at the heart of a systemic problem facing our cities and suburbs, and that is the extreme and ultimately unsustainable amount of energy we invest in trying to control exactly what animals get in or out, how many get in or out, when they do, why they do, etc. As I mentioned above, this is true of flora and people as well but I'm choosing to focus on animals here. The mass execution of Prospect Park's geese would make one think these birds were the most unwelcome Canadians since those wily canucks who set fire to the White House. [3] But how did they get here in the first place? Well, like most aspects of urban "wilderness," there is nothing wild or natural about Prospect Park at all. The geese were all imported from the Midwest in the 20th century. This was one of many measures aimed to give the park a more bucolic feeling. After all, geese can provide a non-threatening version of wilderness. But of course wilderness it ain't. I love Prospect Park, but it is in no way a natural jewel that somehow escaped the bulldozer during New York's rapid expansion; it is a carefully-planned landscaping project from the immediate post-Civil War era. The park is as much of a human endeavor right down to the trees, grass, rocks and animals as any building. So what state of nature are we striving to preserve?
I should point out that although my thoughts are hovering around New York, I mentioned the problem of overly managing our environment is more widespread, and indeed it is. On September 1st, 2009, wolves were officially taken off the endangered species list, which in Idaho translated to "let's-see-how-many-of-them-we-can-kill". Here is a video about the opening of wolf season. There are a few things I'd like to point out in this video. The woman at 1:11 intimates that since the wolves have been reintroduced, they have been terrorizing Idahoans and she is "ready to do something about it". Right after that, at 1:22, a man bemoans the fact that wolves are taking down other big game in the area (translation: I have to go shoot these things because they're killing other things I like to shoot). Yet the piece makes it pretty clear that wolves are not exactly Hitchcock's birds. The father and son hunting team seen at the beginning of the video with itchy trigger fingers go the whole first day without so much as seeing a wolf. Furthermore, being annoyed that the wolves are better at hunting big game than humans are seems laughably whiney" well, laughable if it didn't mean that wolves are to be shot as a result. That said, I will point out a sober, rational voice at 4:45. This sheep rancher has had problems with wolves but does not call for a hot-headed response. I understand his need for "control efforts" (which I take to mean killing a wolf who is threatening his sheep). I wish some of his level-headedness would rub off on his Yosemite Sam neighbors.
And then there's New Jersey. When some residents of the Garden State aren't beating geese to death, apparently they are looking for bears to shoot. Officials there recently allowed a bear hunt to take place. The putative goal of the hunt is to reduce the number of these shy, mostly herbivorous creatures so that they can't continue their reign of terror. Oh, but the hunt will only last six days. And will be confined to a relatively small, heavily wooded corner of the state (far from suburbs, where presumably the bears would be causing danger"). Call me crazy, but it sounds like it's just enough for a few hunters to bag a bearskin rug.
These are all very different circumstances, but there is a common thread throughout: let's help these creatures out with federal protection plans and reintroduction efforts, and then let's kill them until we have a perfect amount of them. And this, ultimately, is what gets me down: the drive for population perfection. New York's past is like that of any other society: each generation pours its own cocktail of sod, brick, bone, rubber, glass, skin, grass, concrete and gravel on top of the last one, thinking this time the recipe is just right. It makes my posthumanist bone tingle just a bit, I must say. In Sigmund Freud's "Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896), he thinks of a pathology hysteria, in this case as a city. This is helpful to me as I consider some of the traits that make up a city as pathological. In "Hysteria," Freud writes:
"Imagine
that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is
aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of
columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He
may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view" But he
may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with
him" he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning
from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is
crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined
walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or treasure-house" Saxa
loquuntur!"[4]
Are the glass and steel walls of present-day New York City the replacement of ruins, or are they themselves the ruins? Are our city parks and green spaces dangerous illusions that encourage more and more micromanaging to keep up appearances? And what is the cost of all is? What is the cost in terms of water? Of chemical agents used to treat the soil? And for the folks who rounded up four hundred geese and gassed them, what is the moral cost? Are our cities and parks the "remains of walls, fragments of columns and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions" of a harmonic balance once enjoyed? And perhaps there never was a true balance, but it had to have been closer than what we're experiencing now. To use Freud again, are we in a state of melancholia, in that we have lost something but cannot identify that part of ourselves that died in that loss?
When I get to thinking like this about New York, humanity and posthumanism I always come back to Luc Sante and his masterpiece Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the seedy history of New York, particularly lower Manhattan, rendered brilliantly in Sante's evocative, poetic prose. In one passage, from an essay titled, "My Lost City" (some of which was absorbed into the Low Life's preface), Sante wrote something that has always stayed with me. Envisioning the past, present and future decay of New York during the pre-Reagan years, he wrote:
"The New York I lived in, on the other hand, was rapidly regressing. It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were camped out amid its potsherds and tumuli. This did not distress me--quite the contrary. I was enthralled by decay and eager for more: ailanthus trees growing through cracks in the asphalt, ponds and streams forming in leveled blocks and slowly making their way to the shoreline, wild animals returning from centuries of exile. Such a scenario did not seem so far-fetched then. Already in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Columbia, my windows gave out onto the plaza of the School of International Affairs, where on winter nights troops of feral dogs would arrive to bed down on the heating grates. Since then the city had lapsed even further. On Canal Street stood a five-story building empty of human tenants that had been taken over from top to bottom by pigeons. If you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square."
Have the animals started to return from centuries of exile? As a poignant counter-punch to the above examples of animals being driven from their lands, there is also an interesting trend of animals reclaiming land and resources to which they once had access. Perhaps these animals were waiting patiently, figuring humans would soon destroy themselves, if not by bombing each other, than at least by poisoning ourselves with our lifestyle. The New York Times recently ran a piece about a darling Westchester suburb being threatened by coyotes. I certainly don't want to minimize the threat of a coyote around small children (or even a large adult for that matter), but it is striking that the more we tailor our perfect communities to our exact specifications essentially, the more we resist entropy the more vines seem to be growing around our ankles. One bizarre effect Australia's severe drought (a drought most scientists link to climate change" climate change which nearly all scientists link to human industry) is the return of desperate wild camels from the outskirts of their former home. These water-starved beasts could take no more [5], so they entered the town of Docker River and trashed it, looking for water.
In response to the coyotes in Rye, NY, a coyote specialist noted,
""It's not just us encroaching on their territory. They're encroaching
on us." I guess I'm just wondering what territory belongs to whom, and
is that very vision of territoriality the fundamental problem? There's
only so much rug space to sweep our problems under. There's only so
much you bury in the ground before the mounting pressure makes some
ghost of the past squirt back up. Is our past inescapable? Are we
haunted by what lies beneath us as we keep piling new cosmetics on old
bones? Do "stones speak"? I can't say for sure, of course, but
they did just unearth an 18th century ship beneath the World
Trade Center"
- Will
[1] I included the following link in an earlier post as well to illustrate the underestimated self-awareness and sentience of geese definitely worth a read click here
[2] Usually people refer to entropy as the natural progression from order to disorder, and indeed some philosophers and scientists do use the term in that sense. But the definition of entropy I'm using the thermodynamic one simply means that energy (specifically thermal energy) will move from high concentration to low concentration. To prevent this from occurring, you must supply an outside source of energy (2nd Law of Thermodynamics). My question is: how much anti-entropy energy do we have in us?
[3] Actually they were British (not Canadian), contrary to popular belief. Hey, you try coming up with something sinister the Canadians have done!
[4] "Stones speak!"
[5] and you know when six thousand camels are that thirsty, there's a pretty serious water problem.
