Welcome back to the Amoeba—the precarious pile of antique furniture collecting dust in the basement of Unnatural Heritage. The Amoeba is the looser, more casual companion to my regular longform posts.

It’s August, guys: the Sunday of summer. The days are growing imperceptibly shorter and pumpkins are fruiting in the aisles at CVS. Can you feel the scaries coming on?

I’m taking a quick break from my ongoing series on the plastic pink flamingo (have you read it yet?!) to share some previously abandoned ideas that have been haunting me all summer.

On a cold night in 1933, the journalist Charlotte Beradt awoke with clenched teeth, her bed sheets drenched in sweat. For weeks, she had been plagued by violent dreams of being hunted—shot in the street by soldiers, scalped and tortured in the sun. Hitler had taken power earlier that year, and the streets of Berlin were growing moldy with whispers. The Jewish enclave where Beradt lived was taut with fear.

Beradt began speaking with the people in her neighborhood about their dreams—the milkman, the seamstress—documenting their accounts in vivid detail. One woman reported dreaming of a maze of wires that could read her mind, detecting her unconscious associations of Hitler with the devil and reporting them to authorities. Another man, a factory owner, dreamt that he was forced to line up his workers in two lines and deliver a Nazi salute. After nearly half an hour of resisting the rise of his arm, his back broke. He was left before his employees, contorted and red, his hand frozen to the sky.

Beradt compiled these accounts into a book, entitled The Third Reich of Dreams. It’s a haunting exploration of human psychology under the threat of authoritarianism, with many of the reports reading almost prophetic in nature. In one early dream, a woman reported her husband being dragged into a cellar and stored in a hidden compartment, inscribed with the words “forty-seven cubic inches, temperature 167 degrees.” Aggregated together, they speak to our collective unconscious’s uncanny ability to register societal currents before they manifest.

In his book Understanding Media, technologist Marshall McLuhan emphasized the prophetic capability of culture to attune to emerging threats. In particular, he emphasized the anticipatory powers of the artist, writing that:

“The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the race”. Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.”

In lots of time to prepare to cope…

Man, I sure hope so.

Backrooms and the Digital Subconscious

A few weeks ago, I descended into the basement of the Roxy Hotel to catch one of the last screenings of Backrooms in New York City. Directed by 20-year-old YouTube creator Kane Parsons, the film represents a nascent lineage of Gen-Z horror seeping across the big screen from its origins in online lore. Emerging from an anonymous 4chan post in 2019, the concept of “the Backrooms” spread through online forums during the pandemic as a type of creepypasta—a user-generated horror story spread through reposts and collaborative world-building.

An example of digital folklore born from the physical world, the Backrooms’ deadening maze of ceaseless, featureless rooms mutated from a single image—of the basement of a furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin—quickly proliferating through the collective nightmares and anxieties of a generation of people locked inside—forced to connect through a labyrinth of digital platforms that, by the time they had arrived, were already hollowed out.

The Backrooms epitomize what’s described as “liminal horror”, existing in the abyssal, forgotten space between realms: the digital and the physical, the collective and the individual, the accessible and the unconscious. Despite their totalizing rectilinear order, the logic of Backrooms is physically incoherent: chairs sink into the carpet, items glitch and repeat. Spaces are accessed through “no-clipping”, a video game cheat that allows players to pass through solid objects. The anxiety of the Backrooms comes from navigating a world that is simultaneously physical and digital, neither real nor unreal.

Despite its Gen-Z origins, Backrooms is a cross-generational horror, echoing the abandoned commercial landscapes of department stores and shopping malls—the psychic heart of Gen-X adolescence, now hollowed-out by the emergence of online shopping. The Backrooms are suffused with a kind of haunted nostalgia—fragments of memories of places long-forgotten.

Accessible through the basement of a failing furniture emporium, the Backrooms are described to us only through vague means, as a kind of autonomous memetic force—a proliferating psychic landscape of stray and forgotten memories, regurgitated ad nauseam at ever-decreasing levels of fidelity. The rooms aren’t built so much as remembered. We fall through the floor of a childhood home to reveal a stale reiteration—windows boarded, shelves bare, personal effects removed. The bottom drops out again, and the chair warps into something unusable, unrecognizable. The windows are just a gesture—frames on a solid blank wall. There is no comfort. No escape.

The Backrooms speak to the inevitable degradation of our memories—the haze through which we revisit the past, the cultural amnesia that sweeps across generations. What was life like before the internet? Does anyone really remember anymore? I often struggle to remember my childhood bedroom—the color of the carpet, the material of the window shades, the view out to the backyard, the number of drawers in the dresser. The details of our lives fade over time.

But human memory does something that the Backrooms do not. Human memory creates. It recolors, it embellishes. It spins yarns of ever-increasing length with each retelling of a story. Small moments can become infinite lore. A single room becomes a landscape.

To me, Backrooms is less about the degradation of memory than about the degradation of the model. The Backrooms grew out of the psychological duress of negotiating a culture in which every aspect of our lives—our education, our friendships, our connections and rituals of care—is replaced with a low-fidelity simulacrum: an app, an interface, a chatbot, a digital assistant. The Backrooms offer a physical allegory for a world run by artificial intelligence—an ominous, non-human force which collates and regurgitates the elements of human culture into an ordered, optimized average—increasingly devoid of personality or purchase.

The furniture showroom provides the perfect analog for this sense of eerie inhumanness. The familiar elements of domesticity, family, and comfort are all there, but arranged impersonally, into modular replicas of kitchens and dream living rooms. You can sit down on the couch, and it’s just comfortable enough that you could imagine living there. There are no walls to hang a portrait. You decide to never leave.

You yourself become furniture.

A driving idea behind this newsletter is the realization that our bodies and senses are evolutionarily ill-equipped to understand what is happening to us in digital spaces. It makes us susceptible to manipulation. Much of my writing (see this, for example) is an attempt to find physical metaphors for digital phenomena, in nature or otherwise, that help us process or better gain our bearings. Our bodies offer insight, if we could only give them access. Backrooms does this perfectly, offering a visceral physical manifestation of our collective digital psyche. The strange familiarity you feel while watching the film is your body recognizing the scroll.

But the sense of familiarity extends beyond our digital embodiment. There are countless physical analogs to the Backrooms in real life—the showroom, the convention center, the Amazon warehouse, the suburbs, the business district, the airport terminal, the hospital wing, the corporate office, the strip mall. What Backrooms reveals is that the experiential vacuity that defines digital slop culture actually precedes it—we have long since abandoned the peculiarity of the human for the logics of optimization and finance. The vast majority of new construction is devoid of craft, of ornamentation, of idiosyncrasy, of stories. We are left with a thousand placeless places. A vast matrix of stairs leading to nowhere. No wonder we have amnesia. No wonder people jump.

In his Times review of Backrooms, critic Joseph Bernstein wrote that “every generation gets the horror movie it deserves.” As Bernstein explains, horror operates as a kind of psychic archeology—a barometer for cultural anxieties, and often a divination of what’s to come. The Backrooms’ origins in collective online lore speak to a generation’s growing sensory awareness of the architecture of online life. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote in his introduction to The Third Reich of Dreams:

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to The American Flamingo, a series examining American culture through the lens of our lawn ornaments. The series enlists the pink plastic flamingo as a spiritual guide to navigate American identity and excess, exploring themes of nature, artifice, politics, and class.

Native to a plastics factory in Leominster, Massachusetts, the pink flamingo is a naturalized species in turf lawns across the country, ruffling the feathers of homeowners’ associations nationwide and challenging the stern gaze of conformity with a cheeky, mischievous wink. Epitomized by John Waters’ 1972 cult classic, the popular lawn ornaments are our foremost cultural ambassadors to all things tacky and irreverent.

Like many red-blooded Americans, this penchant for misbehavior stems from generational trauma. Hunted for centuries for its feathers and meat, the American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) was completely extirpated from the United States by the early 1900s, as developers razed the Everglades to build a new vision of paradise. Part 2 chronicles the bird’s ironic transformation from a victim of paradise to its most potent symbol, revealing the environmental destruction and mythmaking that fueled Florida’s premier export: fantasy.

Today’s piece explores the legacy of Hialeah Racetrack—home to the most famous flock of flamingos in history, and the spiritual birthplace of the lawn ornaments we know today. Opened in 1932 just outside Miami, Hialeah Park acts as somewhat of a Fertile Crescent in this series—a temporal bottleneck through which multiple threads of American history coalesce and intermingle. It was here that the flamingo was first popularized as a garden ornament, and here that the bird would meet its future co-star: the lawn jockey.

The racetrack also marks the flamingo’s original descent into America’s seedy underbelly—gambling, drinking, lost fortunes, and fame. It’s a thread we’ll continue plucking on throughout the series. Beginning at Hialeah, the flamingo’s glamorous yet licentious reputation now echoes across the American landscape, on the marquees of countless motels and casinos. Once a symbol of luxury and elegance, the flamingo has since become synonymous with sleaze, frequently embroiled in headlines about meth deals and murders.

It’s hard to say whether the birds are instigators in all this, or just innocent, one-legged bystanders. I’ll let you be the judge. What IS clear is that the flamingo—tireless advocate of Americans’ right to party—maintains a front row seat to the nation’s most depraved and degenerate behavior.

The Fight for the Right to Party

It was 1927, and Miami was in trouble. Rumors were spreading that the Miami Jockey Club, a popular gambling destination among northern tourists, would cancel its winter racing season amid threats of arrest. It was the height of Prohibition, and the city’s reputation for hedonism was beginning to attract backlash. Recent crackdowns on betting and booze—Miami’s two main tourist engines—threatened to slow the influx of northerners, who flocked to the city for its loose laws and warm, sunny beaches.1 If Miami’s image was built on sunshine, its economy was built on defiance of the law, with wealthy tourists bribing law enforcement to look the other way.

As the spirit of the city came under attack, its citizens rose up in self-defense. A 1927 article in Miami Life argued that the attack on America’s winter playground—where men and women flocked to be “boys and girls again”—was nothing short of existential.2 The author skewered the ironies of legal gambling, writing that:

A man who bets on a horse-race or a man who drinks is not vicious. He may or may not be a technical violator of law, according to what state he happens to be in, but one must remember that Wall Street gambling controls our domestic affairs and Chicago grain market gambling controls our food prices, and neither is considered a crime…

Despite the citizen uproar, the Jockey Club cancelled its 1928 racing season—though other factors had been at play. Two years earlier, a devastating hurricane had ravaged the city, killing hundreds and leveling entire neighborhoods. The vision of paradise that had propelled the city’s growth—with thousands of developers pouring in to claim a piece of it—now lay in ruin. The roof of the Jockey Club was ripped clean off, and as the floodwaters finally drained from the city, so did the investment needed for repairs.

Enter Joseph Widener: a Thoroughbred horse breeder and president of the Westchester Racing Association. The son of a wealthy real estate magnate, Widener purchased the club in 1930 with the goal of transforming it into the crown jewel of winter horse racing. A passionate landscaper, Widener worked to reconstitute the Everglades ecosystem that the city had destroyed, transplanting thousands of royal palms and constructing a giant lagoon at the center of the track. To decorate his tropical Eden, Widener imported fourteen pink flamingos from Cuba.

The first flock of birds immediately flew away—escaping to the Bahamas or the coast beyond Havana. But the second flock, their wings now clipped, would become an indelible icon of luxury and play, capturing the imagination of tourists nationwide, and signifying Miami’s return as the capital of decadent vice.

Rebranded and fully renovated, the Hialeah Park racetrack reopened in 1932 to rave reviews. Tourists and journalists from across the country poured into Miami, admiring the European-style clubhouse for its Versailles-inspired Hall of Mirrors.3 The former dirt track now rivalled the most lavish of beach resorts—as one New Yorker article put it, Hialeah was simply “too good for Florida—never has there been anything quite so lavish.” 4

The news of the racetrack rippled across the country—sports betting had really never looked so good. Reporting in 1936, the Chicago Tribune wrote that:

“The importance of Hialeah in winning tolerance for the whole gambling industry cannot be overestimated, merely because it represents legal gambling in such an attractive setting that a many great people, visiting the track, decide that betting can’t be such a dreadful sin after all.”5

The soul of Miami had been successfully defended, and the racetrack’s Florida Derby quickly grew in prestige. In 1935, a two-year-old named Seabiscuit made his racing debut at Hialeah6, and in 1937, the competition was renamed The Flamingo Stakes after the nationwide infatuation with the racetrack’s resident flock.

At that point, the number of flamingos in the lagoon had grown well into the hundreds, thanks to annual imports from Central and South America.7 In authentic Everglades fashion, Widener hired a team of native Seminole caretakers to parade the birds down the infield before each race (see the video below).8 The impeccably manicured turf track—the first of its kind outside of Europe—would provide the stage for the original image of flamingos on the lawn.

The memetic power of Hialeah’s flamingos proved wildly influential, attracting the attention of celebrities and politicians nationwide. Truman, Kennedy, and Nixon all paid visits to the racetrack, as did Sinatra, Churchill, and Elizabeth Taylor. Wayne Newton even offered to buy the birds at one point, for $5000 a piece.9 Money and bets flowed loose at Hialeah, with visions of fame and fortune bubbling up from the lagoon. In this humid air of luxury and sin, the flamingo emerged as a rose-colored talisman—the winged angel of Miami vice.

But as I mentioned previously, the flamingo was not the only lawn ornament to come to life at Hialeah. Of the many cosmic alignments that played out on that turf, perhaps the most uncanny is the juxtaposition of flamingos and jockeys—two of the front yard’s most controversial co-stars.

Welcome to the Jockey Club

Lawn jockeys date back to at least the 1850s, as the political tensions between North and South threatened to undermine the rights of landowners to keep enslaved labor. During this period, statues of an enslaved stable boy, referred to as the “groomsman” and dressed in ill-fitted clothes, were sold as weighted hitching posts and mounted near the entrances of homes and estates. As the Antebellum way of life began to crumble, its racial hierarchies were cast into iron.

In the 1870s, following the South’s defeat, a new jockey appeared in the landscape. In contrast to the young stable boy, this model was tall and lean with Roman features, dressed in smart, fitted riding clothes. Often sold under the name “the cavalier spirit”, the statue was meant to symbolize the myth of Southern chivalry, which highlighted the honorable customs of the southern aristocracy as a means of legitimizing its racial brutality.10 Both the groomsman and the cavalier spirit were sold alongside a third, Chinese version (likely representing the immigrant labor of the Gold Rush), collectively mirroring the racial anxieties of the time.

The emergence of these statues coincided somewhat ironically with the rise of horse racing in America. Beginning as a prestige competition between plantations, horse racing was formalized after the war into America’s original spectator sport. The first Kentucky Derby, held in 1875, featured fifteen jockeys—fourteen of whom were black. Formerly enslaved stablemen were typically excellent riders, and black jockeys would go on to win 15 of the first 28 championships.11 Among those riders was Isaac Burns Murphy, the most popular jockey of the 19th century and the very first black millionaire athlete.

Jockey statues from this era are often found with multiple layers of paint, meant to depict the owner’s favored athletes.12 As the layers of history reveal, they were sometimes painted black—an early example of white Americans’ complicated veneration of black athletes.13 But as time went on, the prejudices of Jim Crow made their way into the sport. As the economics of horse racing shifted from ticket sales to betting stakes, the potential for profit skyrocketed, attracting the interest of working-class white groomsmen.14 Later, as nationwide gambling crackdowns threatened the profession, white jockeys used violence and intimidation to push out black jockeys, cornering them against the rails during races and injuring their horses.15 Stable owners grew fearful of running black jockeys for this reason, and the nation’s first celebrity athletes slowly faded from competition.16

Following Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, the lawn jockey evolved again, this time mimicking the racist Sambo character popularized by minstrel shows. While the original iron statues were used as hitching posts, the Sambo versions were typically concrete or zinc—too lightweight to ground a horse. These cheaper versions—targeted toward the emerging middle class—were used purely for decoration, displaying the racial anxieties of the Jim Crow era and symbolizing a grotesque aspiration toward the period of southern affluence.17

Within the African American community, a number of folktales emerged attempting to reclaim the statues. Some claimed they were used to mark safe houses along the Underground Railroad, with green ribbons marking safety and red ribbons marking danger.18 Another myth recalls the Revolutionary tale of Jocko Graves, a young slave boy who froze to death holding a lantern for George Washington’s army.19 Though the statues worked to undermine the legacy of black horsemanship, the heroism of these athletes lived on in other forms.20

By the time the Hialeah racetrack opened in 1932, the profession was predominantly white. But the tradition of painting jockey statues persisted through these years. The Flamingo Stakes attracted some of America’s most elite racing families—the Vanderbilts and the Mellons—who used the winter season to launch their campaigns for the Triple Crown. Beginning the season in Florida, the horses would make their way north to Kentucky, then Baltimore, and finally to New York, where their owners would gather at Manhattan’s infamous 21 Club. The legendary speakeasy, which closed in 2020, was renowned for its collection of 35+ jockey statues, donated by wealthy patrons and painted in their family’s racing silks. (The Vanderbilts’ colors were, notably, pink and white.)

Horse racing has slowly faded from the American spotlight, replaced with the grander spectacles of football and RuPaul’s Drag Race. In 2001, Hialeah Racetrack ceased its Thoroughbred horse racing, and in 2013, it was converted into a casino. Still, the legacy of this infamous turf track looms large across the landscape. Captured in the stained glass windows of the clubhouse, the memories of its refined decadence are still playing out on the American lawn.

If the flamingo speaks of the environmental destruction behind America’s pursuit of Paradise, then the lawn jockey represents the human subjugation beneath the nostalgic ease of the plantation. In both cases, our American fantasies of leisure come with a price.

Thanks for reading Unnatural Heritage! Tune in next time as we follow the flamingo on its migratory route to Vegas, exploring the role that gambling plays in the modern American psyche.

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Hello readers—welcome to Part 2 of my series examining American culture through our lawn ornaments. The series uses the pink plastic flamingo as a gravitational center to explore themes of nature, artifice, politics, and class.

In the introduction to this series, I considered the plastic flamingo as an ambassador to its larger ecosystem—the American front yard—revealing how the lawn and its various decor (the gazing globe, the garden gnome) offer windows into our collective psyche.

Today’s piece refocuses on the flamingo—the real one, this time—flying to Florida to chart the bird’s ironic ascension into a symbol of luxury and paradise.

Good morning, earthlings.

I recently returned from a trip to Miami—my first visit ever to the Sunshine State. While I’m genetically barred from being much of a beach person (my ancestors farmed dirt in the fog), I do like Piña Coladas, and getting smooth in the brain. Miami delivered both in the way that no other city can.

Built up during Prohibition, Miami is nicknamed “The Magic City” for how quickly it rose from the swamp. The town quadrupled in size during the 1920s, as developers rushed in to get a piece of the emerging paradise, and tourists clamored for bootleg Caribbean rum. Drink enough of this rum yourself, and the truth becomes clear: despite being home to nearly half a million people, Miami is actually an elaborate hallucination.

Driving down MacArthur Causeway feels like a trip down Rainbow Road—on the right, luxury villas spring up from artificial islands made of sand, dredged up from the bay so megayachts could swim by. On the left, an infinite wall of cruise ships, each bigger than my hometown, line up to take flyover families to pirate holes across the Caribbean. A paid workforce of palm trees has been hired to pose perfectly in every photo you take, and when viewed from the water, the skyline creates a bewildering optical illusion: that of a glistening empire, floating above the waves.

The American Atlantis? Only time will tell.

Miami is built precariously on oolite and illusions. The currency there is fantasy: Florida’s most potent cultural export, now a defining feature of modern American life. Disney World, Mar-a-Lago, Universal Studios, Ron de Santis: Florida is basically the Chernobyl of make-believe—a radioactive mixture of fantasies and delusion, fictions beaming out like gamma-rays through the culture. In his book Finding Florida, T.D. Allman gestures toward the Floridafication of America, writing that:

If human epochs were organized around their dominant miscomprehension, it could be said that we are still living in Florida’s Great Epoch of Illusion.

Despite being a veritable epicenter of artifice (Miami has the highest concentration of plastic surgeons anywhere in the nation), my friends and I were able to take in some pretty spectacular nature. We snorkeled with seahorses in between the mangroves, swam with a manatee in Biscayne Bay (bucket list!), hiked amongst air plants and alligators in the Everglades, and topped it off with milkshakes at the infamous Robert Is Here (iykyk).

The whole time, I kept my eyes peeled for Florida’s most famous flamboyant cryptid: the flamingo.

As you might expect, we saw thousands. On signs and menus and t-shirts—flocking every souvenir shop, wading amongst the tchotchkes, gobbling up tourists’ spare change. Snow globes, keychains, fanny packs, vibrators. The flamingo is the unimpeachable mascot of southern Florida—your designated spiritual guide to the rum-induced hallucination that is Miami. Like Starbucks or the president, the flamingo is inescapable.

Just don’t expect to see a real one.

There’s a reason the most common species of flamingo in North America is made of plastic. Unlike its flesh-and-blood ancestor, the popular lawn ornament exhibits a remarkable plasticity of habitat, thriving equally well in both urban and rural environments, nesting just as happily amongst lawn chairs and astroturf as on the stoop of a Park Avenue brownstone. With a lifespan of nearly 500 years, the birds are an indestructible beacon of Floridian paradise, conveniently rendered portable and pink.

The real American flamingo has suffered a different fate. Historically endemic to coastal lagoons from the Everglades down through the Keys, the species was completely extirpated from Florida by the early 20th century, as southern pioneers cleared the way for a new American Eden. What was lost in the pursuit of our fantasies made real? And if paradise is an illusion, what truths does it hide? Now displaced across the country, the bird’s plastic descendants live as unknowing refugees of the very place that brought them fame.

The flamingo has been transformed from a victim of paradise into its most popular and pervasive symbol. The story of this transformation is as American as key lime pie—and to some people, just as delicious.

Dinner De-Luxe

In 1934, the Thoroughbred horse breeder Joseph Widener imported a flock of flamingos from Cuba, to decorate the grounds of his new racetrack at Hialeah. Formerly known as the Miami Jockey Club, the track had been devastated by a hurricane in 1926. Widener had hired an architect to redesign the facilities, constructing lush tropical gardens and a lagoon at the center of the track. The birds meant to live there would be the first flamingos in Florida in over thirty years—hunted to oblivion in the late 1800s for their pink feathers and duck-like meat.

The culinary interest in flamingos dates back to the Roman Empire, where the birds were considered a delicacy for their large, fleshy tongues.12 The Spanish, who had claimed the Floridian peninsula for nearly three hundred years, were used to hunting flamingos back home, rounding them up from the lagoons near Málaga. The infamous Lost Colony of Roanoke—the first Brits to attempt to settle America—were known to have captured flamingos during a pit stop in West Caicos,3 providing them with the necessary sustenance to sail on to Virginia (and perhaps the clarity of mind to abandon the colonial project altogether).

Widener’s first flock of flamingos immediately flew away—escaping to the Bahamas or the lagoons around Havana. But the second flock, their wings now clipped, would become an indelible memetic icon of luxury and escapism.

Despite decades of absence within the state, flamingos still haunted the imagination of Prohibition-era Florida, coloring its self-promoted image as a haven of hedonism and pleasure. A decade earlier, the developer Carl Fisher had christened his new hotel The Flamingo, establishing a sprawling pink resort along the shores of Miami Beach.4 Opened in 1921, The Flamingo became infamous for its wealthy and refined clientele, who flocked to “America’s Winter Playground” to drink at the cabana club and swim in its private pool. A few years later, in 1925, a new rail line—also called The Flamingo—would connect Cincinnati to Jacksonville by way of Nashville, bringing thousands of middle-class tourists from the North down to their own exotic vacations.

Victims of Paradise

Florida was in the process of a grand reinvention—a bit of a late bloomer, as far as most states go. In the 1800s, as Manifest Destiny drove America westward, Florida had lingered like a stick in the mud—an impenetrable labyrinth of alligator-infested swamps and eroding limestone bedrock, fiercely defended by its native peoples.

The Seminole Wars, fought from 1817 to 1858, were among the most drawn-out, costly, and brutal Indian struggles in American history. Assisted by runaway slaves from Southern plantations, the Seminoles weaponized their intimate knowledge of the Everglades to trap and surprise American forces, often leading them toward hot spots of malaria. While a majority of the Seminoles were eventually exiled to Oklahoma, a few hundred—the Unconquered Peoples—remained in the Everglades, trading cautiously, hidden from sight.

Still, the path for development had finally been cleared. The Everglades’ vast swamps were to be drained, their natural bounty exploited for profit.

The natural wonders of Florida, both fantastical and real, had long been mythologized by those in search of a penny. Landing near St. Augustine in 1513, the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon set out to discover the legendary Fountain of Youth—a narrative that would later be upcycled by the state’s infinite retirement communities. According to one folktale, upon his arrival, Ponce mistook a flock of flamingos for a field of flowering bushes, christening the land La Florida—the place of flowers.

Canoeing through the Everglades in 1889, a fisherman named George Elliott Cuthbert had a similar illusory experience, discovering what he described as “a flower, a beautiful white blossom.” It was an egret feather, delicate as a whisper. And it would change the Everglades forever.

Cuthbert began shooting the birds on the rookery, killing hundreds on that single day and selling their feathers to milliners in London and New York.5 His success sparked a revolution in women’s fashion, as the “New Money” wives of recently wealthy men clamored for hats adorned with the feathers of herons, egrets, and flamingos. Individual hats sold for as much as $130 (about $3300 by today’s standards), with the supremely sought-after “aigrette” feathers worth double their weight in gold.

By the 1890s, the plume trade had devastated Florida’s bird populations. Traveling through South Florida sixty years earlier, the ornithologist John James Audubon wrote that “seldom have I experienced greater pleasures.” Audubon spoke breathlessly about the avian diversity of the Everglades and the Keys, holding particular fondness for the flamingos near Indian Key.

In 1901, legislation was passed to criminalize plume hunting in Florida. A surveyor named Guy Bradley, a former plume hunter, was hired as a game warden to enforce the law. Stationed near the town of Flamingo, he began patrolling the Everglades in 1902. In 1905, he was shot flat dead.6

At that point, flamingo skins were still selling for nearly $25 at market.7 The backlash to conservation efforts was remarkably intense, but continued advocacy led to the establishment of the Audubon Society in 1905, and the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918. In the end, the plume trade sparked some of the most pivotal conservation organizing in all of American history.

Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. By the time Miami was incorporated in 1896, Florida’s native flamingo populations had all but vanished, the last flock observed in 1902.8 It was not until the construction of the lagoon at Hialeah Racetrack that the flamingos would return.

The Hialeah Racetrack acts as somewhat of a Fertile Crescent in this series—a spatiotemporal bottleneck through which multiple threads of history reconverge and intertwine. It was here that the flamingo was popularized as a garden ornament, and here that the flamingo would meet its future co-star: the lawn jockey. The Hialeah Racetrack marks the flamingo’s first descent into the underbelly of American culture—gambling, casinos, drinking, debauchery. If the plastic flamingo was born in a factory in Massachusetts, it was spiritually conceived here at Hialeah.

Tune in next time as we dive deep into the seedy legacy of Hialeah Racetrack, charting the flamingo’s slow descent from Miami’s luxury resorts into the bargain bins of kitsch.

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome to a new series looking at America through the lens of our lawn ornaments.

In June 2024, a wild American flamingo was spotted off the coast of Cape Cod. The bizarre sighting made headlines across the country, delighting beachgoers and throwing the local birding community into absolute pandemonium. Video footage captured the bird feeding on the sand flats near Chapin Beach, nearly 1200 miles from its breeding grounds in the Bahamas. According to the Audubon Society, it was the northernmost observation of a flamingo ever recorded along the Atlantic.1 Hardcore birders drove as far as six hours to see it, but by the time they arrived, it had vanished. Speculation of the bird’s origins rippled across the internet: it had escaped from the zoo, it was blown in by a hurricane, it was simply a mirage, or a hoax pushed by the media. What every account failed to recognize is that the most common species of flamingo in North America is, in fact, endemic to Massachusetts.

In 1957, a factory worker at Union Products in Leominster, MA, dumped a hundred kilograms of colored polyethylene pellets into a 350-degree industrial oven. The molten pink goo was extruded through a large hole to form a wide hollow tube, which was pressed from both sides by a set of S-shaped aluminum molds. The first pink plastic flamingo was born. His name was Diego.

Designed by 21-year-old art school graduate Don Featherstone, the pink plastic flamingo has become one of the most iconic and ubiquitous figures in American pop culture: an infectious symbol of post-war leisure and optimism, and a deliciously unsubtle barometer of suburban taste and class. Epitomized by John Waters’ 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos, the popular lawn ornament has become a visual shorthand for all things tacky and irreverent. A permanent resident of trailer parks and tiki bars across the nation, the birds are remarkably cosmopolitan, migrating freely between bachelorette parties, campus ragers, Park Ave brownstones, and Fire Island orgies—and making cameos in films like Barbie and Edward Scissorhands, as well as (more recently) in my own backyard.

During a prolonged period of Vitamin D deficiency last December, I spent four and a half hours hunting down a pair of original mint-condition Featherstone flamingos on eBay. The birds came nestled in a windowed cardboard box decorated with palm trees and stamped with the words “Made in USA.” I swear to God they smelled like coconuts. Outside, a dirty snowplow lumbered down the street, pushing a line of gray sludge against the curb and spraying sodium chloride from its salt-crusted backside. It was the first real New York blizzard in a winter of many.

As I wiggled the metal spokes into the holes on one’s underside, the echoes of an ancient spell rose from deep within me. This ancestral chanting—Kokomo, kokomo—carried me hypnotically to the backyard where, with the ritual precision of a spear fisherman, I plunged the metal spokes deep into the snow. Instantly, a wave of pink warmth washed over me, melting all critical defenses. For the first time in weeks, I laughed out loud. For the next half hour, I stood outside in my flip-flops and pajama shorts, smiling giddily, tracing the form-molded ripples of its feathers, following the elegant curve of its neck, admiring its beady black eyes and airbrushed lips. In the darkest depths of my quiet desperation, this form-molded phoenix had come to save me. I saw God that day, and let me tell you: She was pink.

Look, guys: no one is immune to kitsch. No one. As an aesthetic category, it’s simply too powerful—pure sentimentality shot straight to the veins. The theorist Walter Benjamin described kitsch as “instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort2”—a kind of aesthetic junk food that trips the reward centers of our brain while providing little nourishment for the soul. Like Moon Pies and Fritos, kitsch embodies the logic of mass production, serving up pre-packaged emotional pleasures with remarkable convenience and efficiency. In the case of my beloved flamingo: an immediate feeling of paradise, rendered portable and pink.

Kitsch is often distinguished from true art in that it does not challenge the viewer; it simply soothes and sedates. But isn’t that part of the appeal? Kitsch is fun because it’s free of emotional ambiguity. Kitschy objects tell us exactly what to feel, and that what we should feel is good. We are exempted from the demands of the gallery or the cinema—kitsch requires no critical distance, no intellectual exchange. It is the logic of pure leisure, the brain as a white sand beach. Piña coladas, palm trees, a never-ending out-of-office. This is the world the flamingo beckons. And by god, we deserve it.

Like many artifacts in the pantheon of poor taste—McMansions, Hallmark movies, the entire city of Las Vegas—the plastic flamingo reveals itself to be a rich cultural text, embodying subconscious desires and collective anxieties around issues of class, leisure, nature, and domesticity. Its preferred habitat—the American lawn—is perhaps the ultimate stage for these cultural tensions: a miniaturized distillation of our nation’s ideals around land ownership, conformity, and collective life. To understand the role the flamingo plays in the American psyche, we must consider it as both disruptor and ambassador to a larger ecosystem: the lawn as a battleground of politics and taste, still playing out in physical space.

The Great Green River

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson laid out a grand vision for America: a republic of yeoman farmers, each with their own plot of land, in an infinite grid stretching westward. America was to be a sprawling nation of self-sufficient agrarians, materially independent from the tyrannies of aristocracy, kept morally virtuous through their sustained connection with the land. Fast forward two hundred and fifty years, and the descendants of the pioneers are in the front yard fighting dandelions.

The suburban lawn is the ersatz version of Jefferson’s yeoman farm—a warped vision of land ownership stripped of the ideals of moral and bodily sustenance; in its place, a vast green desert, fueled by chemical dependencies and the aesthetics of the European elite. The landscape architects are to blame here, of course. Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing—two key architects of the early American suburbs—both drew inspiration from the sprawling grassy vistas of wealthy English estates, asserting the moral character of a well-kept lawn over that of productive farmland, and bestowing the aesthetics of the wealthy onto the emergent middle class.

While the early suburbs eschewed most agrarian ideals—we are not peasants!—the visions of democracy carried forth. In direct contrast to the walled estates of England, Downing discouraged Americans from installing high fences or hedges, inviting them to open up their lots to the front to create a shared civic landscape, visually connected across properties. In his 1989 essay, Why Mow?, Michael Pollan illustrates how the American front lawn acts as a “unifying force,” spilling over from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, stretching across state and political boundaries like an “unbounded democratic river.”3

The front lawn and its care thus becomes a civic duty: a balancing act between individual ownership and collective conformity. How one stewards their portion of the Great Green River—and the ways they choose to pollute it (with weeds, ornaments, or signage)—becomes a referendum on one’s participation in democracy.

Yard Art as National Subconscious

Enter the flamingo and friends: the bane of homeowners’ associations across the country. Yard art symbolizes a lack of taste—a kind of aesthetic clutter that is easily overlooked. But in her remarkable book, The Flamingo in the Garden: American Yard Art and the Vernacular Landscape, Colleen J. Sheehy dissects the historic and symbolic potency of lawn ornaments—from flamingos and garden gnomes to cement deer and Virgin Marys—as vessels of self-expression amid a never-ending carpet of conformity.

Historically, taste is the protected province of the middle class—the refined, restrained curation of one’s means, performed in direct opposition to both the excesses of the wealthy and the vulgarity of the poor.4 Suburban taste thrives on quietude—something lawn ornaments certainly are not. This makes them countercultural in a way—a celebration of joy and humor amid the policing of restraint.

Like many forms of kitsch, lawn ornaments speak to us in ways we don’t always consciously register. What is expressed, Sheehy argues, is often subliminal—a mix of inherited cultural meanings and subconsciously held ideals. The gazing globe, for instance, operates similarly to the snow globe, providing a miniaturized portrait of an idealized world. Only the world represented here is of one’s own reality: the garden, house, and heavens all captured in perfect harmony.5

Sheehy’s analysis pulls inspiration from the writings of J.B. Jackson, the great theorist of America’s overlooked places. Jackson wrote extensively about America’s vernacular landscapes—strip malls, gas stations, trailer parks, and fairgrounds—theorizing the ways that these ordinary, everyday places speak more to our lives than their picturesque counterparts. In the same way vernacular speech arises through real patterns of communication, beyond the rules of any “official” language, vernacular landscapes arise through the informal patterns of our lives as actually lived. What they might lack in taste, they make up for in truth. Our national subconscious bubbles up from beneath the grass, raw and unrefined.

The history of lawn ornamentation extends back to ancient Rome, where statuary infused outdoor gardens with the mythology of the divine. In the 19th century, garden writers like Gertrude Jekyll helped popularize statuary here in America, while advancements in plaster and plastics manufacturing made them more and more accessible to the middle and lower classes.6 The American yard thus became an equally symbolic space to those ancient gardens—even if the entourage is just a bit more tacky.

The garden gnome, for instance, is a direct descendant of the 18th-century ornamental hermits: paid performers hired by aristocrats to live on their estates and perform a life of solitude and contemplation. These hermits evoked the ancient lineage of bards and Christian saints who sought moral clarity within the wilderness, rejecting the chaos and decadence of urban life (and underlining the anxieties of the aristocracy at the time).7

America cultivated its own version of these hermits through the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Johnny Appleseed (who, by the way, also hails from Leominster, Massachusetts). Both men stand in direct contrast to domesticated, suburban life—both rejected the conventional markers of masculinity (property ownership, family, wealth) for more spiritual paths, marked by intimacy with (rather than dominion over) the land. The call of these wild sages haunts the psyche of suburban men in the form of the garden gnome, even if their wisdom has been somewhat diluted by mass production.

But what of our hero, the flamingo? How did this strange, garish bird come to roost upon our nation’s front lawns? Much like turfgrass and the garden gnome, the pink plastic flamingo is a bizarre dilution of the grand estates of yore. King Louis XIV famously kept flamingos on the grounds at Versailles as part of his royal menagerie—an ostentatious display of imperial power, featuring a host of exotic animals captured by the French East India Company. Aviaries remained popular displays of wealth throughout the Victorian and Gilded Ages, symbolizing one’s access to the rare and the exotic. Captured in the glassworks of Louis Tiffany, the flamingo was once synonymous with refinement, conjuring a quiet sense of elegance and gentle grace.

The story of the flamingo’s descent into vulgarity is as American as key lime pie, and it begins—where else?—in everyone’s favorite cultural backwater: Florida.

Tune in next time as we explore the history and development of the Everglades, and how the flamingo’s early extirpation from Florida cemented it as a symbol of exotic leisure and fantasy.

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to Unnatural Heritage, a newsletter exploring the strange entanglements between our natural and technological worlds. I’m chuffed to announce (can I say chuffed if I’m American? Seems weird) that today marks two years of Unnatural Heritage! Cue the confetti! Break out the streamers! Let’s drizzle honey all over our keyboards!

It’s been two years since I committed to a regular writing practice and—surprise!—it really does change your life, guys. Despite the added screen time, I feel like writing has wildly improved my vision. It’s made the quality of my observation feel clearer and more capacious, and suffused my everyday with more texture and emotion. I think my capacity to love has grown—I can feel it in the way I move through the world. While I’m not here to preach (especially to the Substack choir), I do think everyone should write. Even just a little. Even if it’s just for yourself.

The real superpower I’ve gained from writing consistently is the ability to look back and notice the particular patterns or lenses through which I make sense of the world—the common, unintentional themes that surface in my writing and the repeated struggles I face when trying to shape a story.

Personal insights gleaned through writing are often glaring once discovered, but man, it do take distance. For example, it’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to internalize the idea that writing is (duh) a form of composition—it requires me to arrange information and meaning into certain structures and sequences, in order to impart a particular experience onto you, the precious reader. In this way, narrative composition is—cue the galaxy brain meme—incredibly similar to my other vocation: landscape design.

As a landscape architect, I think a lot about our physical relationships with the living world—how we notice, move through, and care for different landscapes, and the ways they influence our behavior and sense of place. Landscape design is a powerful art form in that, unlike writing, it has the potential to engage every one of our senses: vision, touch, smell—but also lesser-known senses like balance and proprioception. Landscape architecture is essentially the composition of embodied experiences, shaped through space and choreographed across time. A book and a hiking trail are really not so different.

At my firm, SCAPE, we’re always trying to reveal the history behind a particular site: choosing native plants that gesture to its ecological heritage, incorporating materials like granite or steel that speak to an industrial past, or framing views to key landmarks to highlight geographic context. To put it simply: we are storytellers. The best designers take this role seriously. What I’ve recently realized is the extent to which my training as a landscape architect influences the way I write—the decisions I tend to make and the traps I fall into when translating my ideas into language.

I just returned from a month-long artist residency in Oregon, where I was working on a piece about data centers and salmon along the Columbia River. It’s a big, unruly story that delves into the ecological and industrial history of the river, and the foundational role it plays in the mythology of the American frontier. It’s also a piece about the future—about the new frontiers of data and artificial intelligence, and what the river might be telling us about the fate of those endeavors. It’s the most ambitious thing I’ve ever tried to write—rewarding, sure, but also really, really difficult. Every single day I face the fear that I won’t be able to finish it. Or worse, do it justice. I worry that the story would be better in someone else’s hands. I’m growing as a writer through the process, but in a real ouch-that-hurts-just-kill-me kind of way.

Part of my struggle, especially as someone with no formal writing training, is that I’m constantly at odds with the way I want to tell the story. I find myself utterly furious with the linearity of language sometimes, how it must be written and read from beginning to end, how much precision the writer must exert in defining a story’s sequence and interpretation. I find myself clawing at my instincts over and over, as I try to compose a world from a pile of words and phrases. Only recently am I beginning to understand the tension.

The Language of Landscapes

In their book, Landscape Narratives, Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton explore the unique ways landscapes operate as storytelling devices, and how they differ from other, more traditional forms of media like painting, literature, or film. As landscape architects, they take a spatial approach, beginning with the analysis of different forms of narrative architecture.

Static imagery—in the form of photography or painting—usually represents an isolated point in time: a single powerful scene, rich with thematic texture but typically limited to the present moment, with only vague gestures to a past or future condition. Consider Albert Bierstadt’s 1890s depiction of Multnomah Falls. It’s the typical grand vista we all seek out in nature—a singular moment of awe-inspiring beauty, the perfect image to post to social media. While the vista or “picture frame” is a common strategy in the landscape architect’s compositional toolbelt, it’s nowhere near the only one. And in the age of Instagram, it shouldn’t be the only one. Real landscapes unfold over time.

The novel or comic strip, by contrast, offers a sequence of scenes over time, usually delivered in a linear fashion. Linear narratives are the most fundamental form of storytelling and offer a useful structure—they’re easy to follow and aligned with our everyday experience of time. But they can also be—and I say this with a bite of contempt—exceedingly constrictive in their ability to tell stories that challenge the reader or draw connections across time. Much of my own writing struggles are a battle with linearity.

Luckily, in our postmodern era—where the grand narratives of modernity are met with suspicion—there are infinite examples of books and films that break free from the linear mold, compositing stories through the use of flashbacks, parallel experiences, or retellings from multiple perspectives. Classic examples include films like Memento (reverse-chronological) and Run Lola Run (circular, repeating), as well as novels like The Overstory (parallel, braided) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (fragmented, multi-perspective).

Landscapes as Continuous Narratives

Among these composite strategies is the continuous narrative, which aims to represent past, present, and future simultaneously within a single unifying context. In Landscape Narratives, Potteiger and Purinton point towards the garden scene from the Roman de la Rose, in which three sequential events—the greeting at the gate, the initial entry, and the entertainment by the fountain—are depicted concurrently within the same scene.

Landscapes, the authors argue, are most similar to continuous narratives in that multiple stories can overlap and be encountered concurrently within three-dimensional space. In a landscape, the reader is fully embodied—the “pages” of a landscape are encountered through movement, and read as if printed on translucent paper, with words and paragraphs layering on top of one another like layers in the soil, blending into a palimpsest of stories and information.

Specific plants whisper clues about season, climate, and geology, providing the introduction to stories of inhabitation, agriculture, or industry. These stories are further elaborated by the materiality of the ground—the shape of the river bank or the openings within a forest. Desire lines gesture toward topography and points of connection, while vistas point toward relationships with natural surroundings and the cosmos. Perfect geometries often tell stories of ownership, commodification, and violence, and the slow drama of recovery may be read in the patterns of moss and lichen.

Each landscape speaks in its own particular language—a local or regional dialect specific to that place. Coastlines speak in ribbons that follow the edge of the tides, while deserts often speak in silence, or in the stoic language of erosion. For our ancestors, the rewards of fluency were survival and connection to place. In today’s society, those imperatives take a different structure—one that de-emphasizes our relations with the landscapes that support us.

Landscape as Index

In his book, Reading the Forested Landscape, Tom Wessels works to recover the lost language of the New England landscape, teaching readers about the phonetics of forest structure and illustrating the semiotics hidden within stumps—how the bark of each tree contains a grammar all its own. If basal scars are observed mostly on the uphill sides of trees, it can indicate a history of forest fires in the area, since brush tends to gather on the uphill side of a trunk, creating tiny “fuel pockets”. However, if the basal scars of multiple trees face one another in a line, it’s more likely an indication of the presence of an old logging road.

The language of landscapes is structurally different from the written word in that signification relies less on the arrangement of abstract symbols—letters, words, and like—and more on the expression of direct relations through indices.

In Charles Pierce’s linguistic theory, the index sits between icons and symbols as a means of signification—as a way of understanding meaning. Icons are our most direct form of representation: the pictogram of a woman in a skirt on the bathroom door, or the silhouette of a deer on a wildlife crossing. Symbols, by comparison, are our most abstracted form of representation: the particular sequence of characters that makes up the word W-O-M-A-N, or MUJER, or FEMME, or 女士. Letters and words are essentially arbitrary in relation to the thing they represent—they can change dramatically across languages while holding similar meanings. For those not fluent in a particular language, the word or sound for woman means nothing.

The index, as I mentioned, exists in the space between direct and abstracted representation. Indices are important because they rely on real-world knowledge about causality and relationships. If the icon for a deer crossing is a silhouette, and the symbol is the word DEER, than the index might be a hoof print, or a pile of little round poo pellets, or a frustrated gardener standing next to a border of decimated hostas, shaking her fist at the sky and vowing to buy a shotgun. Indices are a neglected but important part of our linguistic traditions, because they remind us about the physical relationships between actors, living and not.

Landscape as Antidote to Abstraction

In his book How Forests Think, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn relies heavily on the index to explain how meaning flows freely between the Runa people and the Ecuadorian forest where they live, transmitted simultaneously through the Quichua language and by the movements of leaves and jaguars. It’s strange to think of a forest as thinking, yet signification between beings is happening constantly, in the form of snapping twigs and flashing eyes, underground vibrations and airborne chemical signals. The Runa language transcends words alone, incorporating movement and sound from multiple species. As a result, the boundaries between self and environment begin to blur—they meander and flow, like the giant river that supports them.

In a particularly powerful scene in the book, Kohn describes his experience of having a panic attack while traveling through the Amazon. Unsure of his safety, his thoughts begin to spiral into a hurricane of “what ifs” and future catastrophes. Only much later, at the sight of a tanager in the brush, does his mind suddenly return to Earth. Kohn frames his experience in the space between symbols (words) and indices (real-world relations):

“Symbolic thoughts run wild can create minds radically separate from the indexical grounding their bodies might otherwise provide. Our bodies, like all of life, are products of semiosis. But symbolic thoughts run wild can make us experience “ourselves” as set apart from everything: our social contexts, the environments in which we live, and ultimately, even our desires and dreams. We become displaced to such an extent that we come to question the indexical ties that would otherwise ground [our] thinking in our bodies: I think therefore I doubt that I am.”

For me, the power of telling stories through landscape lies in this “indexical grounding”—the ability to transmit information in ways that are embodied and that make sense TO the body, that ground us in the web of our actual, existing relations. It feels like a powerful antidote to today’s main information source—social media—which is utterly devoid of context, delivering an algorithmically-mediated sequence of posts with no relation to the next except to keep our attention hostage. Social media is dizzying because the web of relations is illegible. Part of our addiction lies in our brains’ evolutionary commitment to finding a throughline: a story (or more likely, a conspiracy) through which to make meaning. But meaning-making, and by extension memory-making, is difficult without a context, without an environment that feels coherent.

Landscape as Field, Not Sequence

The throughline between landscapes and writing is that relationships matter. The composition of a space or story—the sequence and proximity of its different parts—makes a difference in how the experience is perceived, in how the audience constructs or discovers meaning. My foundational struggle thus lies in the fact that landscapes are three-dimensional (well, four, actually: space + time) while writing is, I guess, just more constricted. Literature and film, even if not composed linearly, tend to have a dictated sequence. We watch and read from beginning to end. With the exception of choose-your-own-adventure novels, we’re not usually jumping around in these mediums, experiencing things in whichever order we please.

Landscapes are different. They have multiple entrances, multiple pathways. Even a linear design contains opportunities for variation and exploration. A hiking loop might involve an exhausting climb at the start, followed by a gentle descent. But if taken the other way, the experience is entirely different—a slow climb ending in a dramatic drop-off. Two very different stories. And what if your sister loses her sunglasses along the way? All of a sudden, you’re backtracking halfway through, this time much slower, with eyes towards the ground, noticing insects and mushrooms you hadn’t before, and worrying if you’ll make it back to the car before dark.

Landscapes are an emergent phenomenon—an evolving collaboration between the choices of the designer, the behavior of the visitor, and conditions of the environment. The precision in landscape composition is different, in that there is less control, less pretense of authorship over the outcome. It’s less about setting up a sequence of experiences, and more about setting up a field of possibilities. That’s how I want to approach my writing.

Landscape as Poetry

To reconcile the compositional differences between writing and landscape, I’m beginning to think a lot about poetry. While writing poetry still intimidates me, I realize that I want my nonfiction work to have the quality of poesis: for things to emerge from the composition which are unpredictable and non-explicit. Rather than simply conveying information (a common pitfall of nonfiction), I want to create sensory juxtapositions—the way poetry (and landscapes) do.

Poetry is different from prose in that it inspires cross-hemispheric thinking. Rather than catering directly to our left-brain language centers, poetry attempts to subvert them, breaking the rules and structures of natural language and inviting in the parts of our brain responsible for emotion and intuition. Words and phrases are juxtaposed in a sequence of non-linear associations that layer, pivot, and unfurl in multiple directions. To me, these movements feel more like landscape. Rather than using words as nails to build a house, poetry refashions them as lock picks, granting us access to new worlds of understanding. Similar to landscapes, we are left more with an impression than with a list of bulleted insights. It’s a trace, a clue, a hoof print—as opposed to a clear sign with words. Yet somehow we’re left feeling more grounded, more assured of our place in the world.

I really want to continue noodling on these things, so I’d love to hear from you. How do you think about the relationship between different forms of creativity? Do you have suggestions for readings that dive into these topics deeper? How does your experience in another field or practice affect the way you make art? I’m desperate to talk about this more with folks, so please, shoot me a message!

Until then, thanks for reading :)

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to Unnatural Heritage, a newsletter exploring the strange entanglements between our natural and technological worlds. In a previous post, I wrote about the philosophical relationships between bird migration, human travel, and telecommunications. But what happens when these things actually collide in real life?

Today, I’m excited to bring you a very special treat: an interview with aviation wildlife biologist Alex Lauber, who’s spent the last 20 years working to keep humans and wildlife safe as they compete for space in the sky.

I met Alex and his wife, Kate, on a wetland boardwalk on the coast of Oregon—binoculars in hand, laser-focused on a thicket of honeysuckle and spirea. In the middle of chatting, we were interrupted by a very loud ticking sound, like someone throwing a tantrum over Morse code. “A Virginia Rail!” exclaimed Alex, bolting away mid-sentence. Kate and I talked for a bit while Alex wandered down the path, and though she tried to call him back multiple times, Alex was utterly transfixed.

“He can’t hear me,” Kate explained. “He works at the airport.”

It’s immediately clear that this couple adores nature. When not working, Alex leads The Backyard Raptor Project, a Portland-based initiative that works to install boxes for Western screech owls throughout the neighborhood, educating homeowners about these birds and the role their backyards can play in providing habitat.

As a landscape architect, I’m constantly thinking about the ways we can balance human and ecological infrastructure, and much of my work focuses on maximizing habitat potential in our parks and outdoor spaces. So it was extremely interesting to speak with Alex, whose love of nature is guided by an entirely different set of objectives at his job—those of safety and security, for humans and non-humans alike.

Without further ado, my interview with Alex Lauber.

UH: Thanks for joining me, Alex. To start off, why don’t you briefly introduce yourself?

AL: Sure, I’m Alexander Lauber, and I’m currently a wildlife biologist at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where I commute to each week from Portland. I’ve been doing wildlife work at airports for over 20 years now, this last October, so it’s quite the milestone. Most of that time was spent as a wildlife technician at Portland International Airport, where I worked for 16 years. In 2022, I took a job at SeaTac, where I work as part of a team of in-house wildlife biologists, working on a lot of the same issues, but with a slightly different structure.

UH: I think many people are probably surprised to hear that an airport has in-house wildlife biologists. I think most people’s experience is maybe seeing, like, a sparrow in the airport. I remember when I moved to New York, there were two pigeons guarding the baggage claim at LaGuardia like tiny little bouncers. Is that what you’re dealing with?

AL: [laughs] Oh my gosh, yes, the pigeons! And they’re riding the conveyor like they own the place? [laughs again] That’s happened the last few times I’ve visited my mother at Newark. Yes, we sometimes get calls about birds in the rafters, but that’s very low stakes compared to our main focus, which is aviation hazards. Our job is different than pest management. Mostly, we’re dealing with larger birds on the airfield.

UH: Right, so tell me about that. Personally, I hate flying and I hate being at the airport. It’s so loud and chaotic. Why the heck would a bird want to hang out there?! There’s no trees!

AL: No, but it’s a big field. So consider red-tailed hawks. That’s the main raptor that any airport biologist is going to have to manage. They like to perch up high, and there’s perches everywhere. Most runways have an instrument landing system with two antennas per runway—telling the pilot if they’re too high or too low, and whether they’re too far left or right. That’s how it’s possible to land a plane in the fog. You also have antennas on each runway that determine visibility, plus a bunch of big signs with arrows directing pilots across traffic. Point is: the hawks just love hanging out on these things. They use them to hunt in all the grassy areas around the airfield. If you look in those islands, I guarantee you’ll find some species of vole or deer mouse.

At Portland we had the gray-tailed vole, and up at SeaTac we have the Townsend’s vole. Both have very high fecundity. A female can come into breeding condition in just 18 days, and have a litter of about 4-6 pups. So you can get a huge population very fast. And everything eats voles. So when people ask why there’s wildlife at an airport, it’s three basic things: Lots of food on the airfield, and quite often, water and shelter just off the airfield, in the drainage ditches and fields nearby.

UH: Makes sense. So what kinds of species are you dealing with then, beyond the red-tailed hawks?

AL: Well, each airport is gonna be different, based on its location and context. I like to think of Portland, for instance, as this all-you-can-eat buffet at the intersection of two highways. We’re in-between the Coastal Range and the Cascade Range, right at the top of the Willamette Valley. So you’ve got birds migrating north and south along the valley all the time. At the same time, we’re on the Columbia River, a huge east-to-west corridor. So each part of the year is different, depending on the migration season. Your management practices have to change day by day. We’ll see an uptick in strikes during spring migration, but fall is really when you have the most meat in the sky, because you’ve got a whole new generation of birds making their way down south.

In Portland, we’d get these huge California gull migrations in the late summer. We’d get hawks, eagles, ducks, geese, kestrels, herons. Sometimes you’d get things like short-eared owls, which are a Species of Greatest Concern in Oregon, whose populations are declining dramatically. And if you provide this beautiful-looking habitat for them to breed, and the kids start coming out on the airfield to forage, they get whacked. Whack, whack, whack! And then you become a population sink, which we really want to avoid. And so if you can cut the grass really low, it allows us to better see those grass-nesting species, and manage or relocate them. There are entire conferences with guys like me where all we talk about is how high to mow the grass. [laughs]

UH: It’s so interesting, because from the landscape architecture perspective, we’re always trying to squeeze in as much habitat as we can, to advocate for maintaining taller grasses, et cetera. But I guess that’s a very different thing at the airport.

AL: Yes. I’ve been asked this before, from folks who were curious about habitat opportunities on the airfield. As a wildlife biologist, I love making habitat—I mean, just look at my yard! But as an airport biologist, what you really want is a sterile environment. There will always be fields and ditches and stuff for stormwater management, but at my job, I’m trying to discourage the creation of a prey base. I don’t want bugs, I don’t want insects. I mean, it sounds awful. I get it. But our main priority has to be aviation safety.

UH: Yeah, I think about the Miracle on the Hudson, for instance. That was a goose, right?

AL: Yes, so that was many geese, which they encountered after leaving the airfield. But it’s exactly the scenario you want to avoid. There’s equipment damage, which is costly, but there’s also loss of life. And the closer you are to the ground, the closer you are to landing or taking off, the less time you have to react, to fix a situation. So safety on the airfield is extremely important. We have to watch what we plant. You can’t have blackberry bushes at the airport, because they provide shelter, food, and water in the form of the berries. Wildlife are always going to exploit that, and smaller things bring bigger things.

UH: Right, and you can’t just stop the food chain at a specific point.

AL: Exactly. For example, 2008 was a massive year for strikes at the Portland Airport. All these young kestrels were coming off the nests and onto the airfield, and at one point we had 30 strikes in 30 days. It was awful. Just really heartbreaking. I mean, kestrels are small, so they’re really a bug on the windshield to a pilot. But their numbers have been going down, so we really don’t want to be hitting kestrels. So we had the Oregon Department of Agriculture come out, and they said wow, you’ve got a huge infestation of grasshoppers. And that’s what was luring all these young kestrels. So we had to cut the grass, and treat the grasshoppers with an insecticide pellet, and by the next year, we only had three kestrel strikes in the same month.

UH: So if kestrels are bugs on the windshield, then who are the heavy hitters? Which species can really pose a significant danger?

AL: That’s a great question. So, as an airport, we can’t manage for everything. Each airport does a Wildlife Risk Assessment to determine their key species of risk. We look at the national database, which reports strikes and damage for different species nationally, and we compare that with the species we’re most likely to hit here. Nationally, it’s waterfowl and raptors. For us at SeaTac, it’s mallard ducks, eagles, and red-tailed hawks. I mean, a duck is small, but that’s a very dense bird. You’d be surprised.

At Portland, in the winter, it was geese all day, every day. We were always very alert as to where the geese were nearby, because if an eagle flies over and spooks them, and they flush up all at once, it can cause an issue. So we were very diligent about going out and removing them.

UH: So beyond landscape management strategies, what are the tactics you use to deter birds away from the airfield?

Good question. This also really changes from airport to airport. I wouldn’t work for SeaTac if they didn’t have a Trap and Translocate program. Portland, too, had a very robust Trap and Translocate program. In those situations, we set traps for particular birds, then work with contractors to relocate them far from the airfield. In the case of red-tailed hawks, for instance, we’ll band them and then relocate them about 75 miles north of SeaTac, where they get released. We have to go that far because otherwise they’ll just come right back here. Our return rate for that location is thankfully pretty low, only about 5%.

But we trap and relocate all kinds of raptors. I’ve relocated kestrels, merlins, barn owls, short-eared owls, great-horned owls. We’ll even relocate barred owls, though those are more controversial in regards to their management approach, because they’re actually invasive to the Pacific Northwest, and they outcompete our northern spotted owl. So that’s a question with some species: Do you move them, or euthanize them? There’s lots of different conservation imperatives you have to consider, while also trying to do your work humanely.

For other species, we’ll do what we call “intensive hazing” to discourage them away from the airport. Essentially, it’s pyrotechnics. You can shoot these things called bangers and screamers, which essentially make a very loud noise, often with some sparks, which scares the birds and directs them away. It requires that you understand a lot about aviation, to assess risk and act responsibility, but also that you can anticipate the behavior of different species.

I’ve heard of some airports that use dogs to scare birds, or falconry. Depending on the species, we’ll sometimes shoot them, but we really try to minimize our lethal interventions. At some airports, though, that’s the only tool in the toolbelt, because it’s the cheapest. The mentality there is, if it flies, it dies… But, I mean, is that really cheaper, ethically?

UH: So it sounds like Seattle and Portland are much more progressive in their approach?

AL: Oh, very much so. Absolutely.

UH: So are you tracking the birds you relocate then?

AL: We band all of the raptors, yes, which helps us understand if they’ve been spotted before at our airport, or another airport, so we can better understand their behavior. In some cases, we also use transmitters, which allow us to track their migratory patterns. Some of the birds go all the way up into British Columbia or Alaska during the breeding season, then they’ll come back down here. We’re always learning new things about these birds, and sharing data. So while we’re not trying to attract birds, airports can act as an important place to begin researching the birds that do come through here. That’s how Project SNOWstorm got started—that’s now the biggest collaborative research project focused on snowy owls.

And you get to know some of the birds. At Portland and at SeaTac, we actually tolerate a small number of resident red-tailed hawk pairs, because we get to know their behavior, and they work as a placeholder for the territory. If you remove those birds and open the territory, you attract a lot more birds all competing for that spot. So that’s sometimes another tactic we can use, as a soft deterrent.

UH: It’s such a fascinating world of birds out there. Are there any other species you’ve had to deal with?

AL: Oh man, all kinds of weird stuff. I’ve had to deal with angry beavers on the taxiway, with coyotes. I’ve been bitten by muskrats before. I’ve dealt with scorpions, with snakes. I once had a lady try to sneak a bunch of eels through in the plastic lining of her suitcase.

Sometimes you’ll have a dog get out of its crate on the plane, and then go running across the airfield. We’ve had multiple cats get loose in the airport, and they’ll climb into the walls for a week or a month. We had one cat fall through the ceiling of the men’s locker room. And, you know, it’s really the domesticated pets that will injure you more than the wildlife, I find.

UH: Oh really?

AH: Oh yeah. Well, except for eagles, they can really damage you. And great blue herons. That’s probably the most dangerous animal I’ve had to handle. You have to wear a full face shield when working with them, because those beaks… they’ll go straight into your brain.

UH: Yikes. Still, it must be so cool to interact with these birds up close like that.

AL: I mean, that’s really what’s kept me in this job—my early work at the airport, working with some really talented master banders who acted as my mentors and taught me a lot about raptors. Eventually I got my own banding permit and certifications, and I’ve been able to band all kinds of birds in my career: hawks, kestrels, merlins, owls. We’re still working on trapping eagles at the airport, because that requires a whole other kind of permit, given their protections. But I’ve been able to band one eagle in my life…that was really something. It’s just so cool, you know, to hold these birds, to have them look at you with those eyes. It’s really wild.

Thanks for reading Unnatural Heritage! If you’d like to follow Alex’s work or support the Backyard Raptor Project, you can find them here on Facebook. Happy flying!

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to Unnatural Heritage, a newsletter exploring the strange entanglements between our natural and digital worlds.

New Year’s Eve is upon us, serving up that dizzying cocktail of aspiration, optimism, and dread. An emotional and temporal rollercoaster, New Year’s breaks the anticipatory tension of our post-holiday haze, freeing us from liminal despair in exchange for a cosmic case of the Mondays. It’s the promise of grand transformations, cloaked in the tyranny of clocks.

In contrast with celebrations like Nowruz or the Lunar New Year (which honor celestial cycles of the sun and moon), the Gregorian New Year is a relic of political strategy—a vestige of Roman election cycles, temporarily shifted to accommodate an ancient war. Misaligned from the solstice by more than a week, January 1st is an utterly arbitrary place to begin—one our Circadian rhythms never quite believe. Rather than arriving on the horizon soft and warm, New Year’s stomps in like a titan from time zone to time zone, stamping the date on every jagged chunk of earth. That vertigo you feel every year? It’s your corpus spinning out in the gap between the cosmos and bureaucracy.

But as a fan of rollercoasters, I don’t really mind the dizzy. The flutter in my stomach as the minutes creep by. After a long agonizing ascent, the whole world lurches forward, hurtling in momentary free fall, hovering just above the tracks. Spacetime warps inward, frictionless and steep, and with the flick of a second hand, the future happens all at once.

It’s a brutally efficient affair—an acute temporal shock, a wormhole we must all jump through together (or else be dragged through in our sleep).

Might as well have a little fun with it.

For the NYE haters out there, Lisa Kholostenko offers a light-hearted and convincing defense of the holiday and its potential for collective optimism. As Kholostenko puts it:

There’s a disproportionate sense of hope packed into a night that is, really, indistinguishable from any other… [This] synchronicity offers weight. There’s a reason a concert feels different from listening to the same song alone in your car. The sound is identical, but the experience isn’t. Shared attention generates its own kind of power.

I genuinely believe in the simultaneity of hope. I have felt it before: on the back porch of a friend’s house in the Poconos, smoking cigarettes as snowflakes kissed our skin, reaffirming convictions that “this would be our year.” I felt it the next year, too, as we huddled in our boxes on Zoom, reassuring one another that the world would someday open up.

In these dark times full of false magic, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to a planetary spell.

This newsletter is, in many ways, my practice of grappling with the future. As a naturalist and landscape architect, I am invested in the ways we shape the living world around us. And I am increasingly concerned with what feels like the slow, incremental abandonment of that world for an endlessly intoxicating digital one. It can often feel like a losing battle.

The goal of Unnatural Heritage is to mend the gap between our natural and digital worlds. To poke holes in the aura of technology and render our new gods as nothing but a pile of rocks. It’s a technique for composting novelty—a way of smearing a patina of lichen onto all things shiny and new, to temper and erode their self-appointed power. I want to implicate the future in the lineage of this planet. Let the robots taste the soil before they run the world.

Grounding the currents of the future in the logic of the earth brings me clarity, and helps me recover a sense of optimism. But if I can spiral into despair for a brief, teensy little moment:

Guys, it’s fucking bleak out there.

Part of my investment in the future is that, to be honest, I just find the 21st century to be deeply, deeply embarrassing. How in the world did our faith in technology allow the future to become dictated by a handful of spiritual virgins? (Spiritually virgin in that they behave like incels, but also in that they know nothing of the sacred).

I don’t mean to crash out here, but the world is run by absolute fucking losers, man! And beneath the waves of collective humiliation we all feel about that, there is an overwhelming sense of grief.

There is a pervasive sense that the old world is dying before our eyes. Trumpism has established a new political order, with a legacy that will stretch on for decades, defining most of my adult life and carrying with it the currents of protectionism, xenophobia, and utter contempt for democracy. The critical windows for climate action have already come and passed, leaving us to face a volatile century of increasing planetary instability. And after just 30 years on the internet, we have polluted our digital world to such an extent that the radiation seeps back through the screen, poisoning our attention, our relations, and our reality. The country, the planet, the web—the whole thing’s rotting.

In his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth argues that Christendom itself—the millennia-old sacred order propping up the moral and ethical framework of Western secular society—is also in the process of dying. Or rather, it has already died, and a litany of demons have swooped in to fill the void. Now is the time of monsters.

How are we to face the long century ahead? With all its grief and unknowability?

And will we even make it to the next one?

In 1998, Nina Simone released a two-disc compilation album entitled The Very Best of Nina Simone: 1967-1972. Tucked at the very end was a previously unreleased version of “22nd Century”, recorded in 1971. Written by Bahamanian singer Exuma—a prominent figure in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene—the song is a kaleidoscopic premonition of the centuries’ events to come: war, plague, the liberation of animals, the curing of all disease.

Revolution of music, poetry, love and life.

Tethered to the present by a gently jangling guitar, Simone allows herself to levitate, painting a lush, ashen picture of the future, transmitted to her in real time. The visions come slow and deep, wavering slightly, falling behind the beat.

There is no oxygen

In the air

Men and women

Have lost their hair

The opening lyrics assume the familiar tongue of our era—apocalypse—but beneath them, steel drums tinkle and glisten. From somewhere in the beyond, Simone attempts to locate key events: ‘1990 was the year when the plague struck the earth.’

The visions swirl together. Time bends back on itself, circuitous and illegible.

The 21st century was here and gone

And the 20th century was the dawn

Over the course of nine incredible minutes, Simone serves as mystic and oracle, relaying dissonant moments of sorrow and despair, liberation and light—all stretched across the canvas of our current generations. It’s an abstracted portrait of the century to come, summoned with vibrato from a century long since gone. From our vantage point here in the middle, the effect is deeply moving.

Young men die in the spring

Boys of seven, falling in love

The lyrics are stirring, even spooky in their contemporary relevance—reckoning with themes of technological manipulation, political whiplash, and evolving sexual identity. In his definitive write-up of the song, music historian Richard Elliott describes the lyrics as wavering somewhere between “the biblical and the posthuman.”

Even your brain is not your brain

Your heart is a plastic thing that can be bought!

There are no more diseases that can be caught

Man became the thing he worshipped

Man truly became his god

That was the day that man and woman truly became bored

As we confront the cultural ramifications of artificial intelligence, it’s hard not to hear those lines and shudder. Yet still beneath it all, the steel drums glisten.

What moves me about this song is the foresight of its gift. The intensity of the last decade has necessitated a certain myopia. We’ve been in a state of cultural triage—fixated on the political and technological paradigms being entrenched in real time. To attempt to summon the 22nd century in this moment is a task too heavy for me to fathom. There’s simply too much runway, too much negative momentum. Plus, I’ve lost faith in the reigning conception of progress.

Simone seems to pick up on this, hastening in moments of doubt, shepherding us forward from her anchor in the past. As the song enters its final verse, the visions—already somewhat hazy—collapse into tongues. Simone’s voice rises in urgency, in power, in exultation. The maracas shake with fury, a thousand rattlesnakes, taunting, taunting. But beneath it all: the steel drums still glisten.

Over the last year or so, I’ve found myself returning to this song in times of darkness or murk. In those moments where I’m at a loss for answers. Or when the script feels too set in stone. It reminds me that the future may be fraught, but it is also capacious. And it gives me the courage to plant my dreams across centuries.

What will the 22nd century be like?

I encourage us all to ask Nina.

Thanks for reading Unnatural Heritage! If you haven’t yet listened to “22nd Century”, I encourage you to save it for a moment of travel.

Something about listening to this song on a plane, or in a car, or even just walking around — I think it’s best experienced in some type of forward motion.

In other news, I am about to begin a month-long writing residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology near Otis, Oregon. Given the luxury of this time, I hope to be in your inbox a little more often, exploring the strange relationships between data centers and salmon, or serving up a natural history of the plastic pink flamingo.

If you have recommendations for things to do in Oregon, or if you know anyone in the data or wildlife conservation spaces out there, hit me up! Talk soon :)

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to the Amoeba: the pile of broken shards glinting in the dustpan of Unnatural Heritage. The Amoeba is the looser, more casual companion to my typical long-form essays—a gooey slime mold of half-baked ideas, shared with you in hopes that they’ll spawn over time.

I was recently on a work trip to Boston, and I managed to check off a key item on every botany nerd’s bucket list: a visit to the Glass Flowers Gallery at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The gallery features nearly 850 life-sized anatomical models of plants, comprising more than 700 species from all around the world, each one made—inconceivably—from glass.

Designed as educational tools for the Botanical Museum at Harvard, the glass flowers are the work of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka—a father and son team of Czech glass artists who developed the collection over a span of fifty years, from 1886 to 1936. I visited the collection on a Sunday afternoon, and the vibe in the room was one of pure incredulity. A steady chime of whoas and what?!s percolated through the gallery, punctuated by the occasional “no wayyy” and at least one “grandma’s ass it’s glass”, delivered in a thick Irish accent. The attention to detail was mesmerizing. Bewildering. Every little stamen was accounted for. Every tendril. Every vein. I could feel my brain begin to sputter and spark. At some point I just glitched out entirely. Mouth ajar, eyes asquint, the lines on my brow furrowing deeper and deeper.

Sprinkled throughout the models were thousands of microscopic enlargements—cross-sections of ovaries and reproductive tissues, scaled up to the size of coasters or fancy doilies. Elsewhere, delicate glass mosaics depicted the arrangement of cellular structures, a thousand times magnified, big as placemats. The oscillation in scale induced a kind of stereoscopic delirium—I was Alice at the tea party, completely unsure of what size I was meant to be. The reality I carried in with me began to flicker. I grew restless, agitated, delighted in my delirium. I had read the sign at the entrance, but I was no longer buying it. How could these not be real plants? And how the HELL were they made from glass?! My allegiance to logic evaporated. I was forced to admit: they were magic.

There is a particular uneasiness one feels when they are confronted with true magic. Not the slight-of-hand, rabbit out of a hat, Vegas strip kid’s birthday party kind of magic—the kind that amuses and delights, leaving you chuckling and checking your ears for coins. No, I’m talking about real magic—the kind that splices the fabric of reality, that fractures your sense of truth and uproots your ability to perceive it. The kind that sows distrust between your head and your heart, that beckons you to abandon your footing, to suspend all disbelief. The kind of magic that makes you believe.

Michelangelo and his lot—they knew how to summon it. Puppeteers are skilled at it, too—infusing lifeless objects with a vitality that shakes the soul. I once met a pair of socks at St. Ann’s that made me cry in public.

I do try to keep my defenses up—to train my faculties to suss out the lies. The phishing scams, the doublespeak, the deep fakes and the impostors. I’m not so easily duped. I can tell when it’s AI.

But the magic in the gallery was older.

This… this was alchemy.

The Age of Silicon Began Long Ago

The Age of Silicon did not begin in a valley, but rather on the beach, beneath the fury of the gods. Legend has it that Zeus struck the sand, encapsulating his powers in the shape of a frozen bolt. Today we refer to them as fulgurites: tubes of glass formed as lightning strikes quartz sand, causing molecules of silicon dioxide to fuse along its path. In Frankenstein-like fashion, they will assume lifelike forms: fractal veins and arteries, the branches of a tree.

Mixed within this sand are the remains of the silificiers: microscopic organisms with skeletons made of glass. Otherwise known as diatoms, these single-celled aquatic organisms absorb over 6.5 billion tons of dissolved silicon annually, transmorgifying it into all manner of fantastical designs. Referred to as “living opals”, they are the planet’s premier glass artists. And from within their silica shells, they perform a key planetary service: generating as much as 50% of Earth’s oxygen each year. As photosynthetic organisms, they are attuned to the light, sending electrical signals to one another when their environment gets too dark.

But they are not the only ones who can summon life from glass. The Radiolaria, for instance, spin layers of siliceous ooze, while the oldest of the guild—the Hexactinellid—can live for multiple thousands of years.

A more ephemeral species—the humans—have also taken up the craft, devising microscopes and spectacles to help shift their perspective. They’ve invented prisms to bend the light and draw out the colors of the universe, which they use to stain their windows to tell the stories of the divine. They’ve made lenses to capture the past and crystal balls to summon the future—telescopes to see the stars and little screens to see one another. From a simple mixture of silica, ash, and lime, they’ve somehow managed to breathe life into the inert— to magnify the animate wonders of our world, and to catalogue its variety and the diversity of its forms. And with the sands of the earth they continue to tinker, cranking out microchips and fiber optic cables. Pretty soon they’ll have created a new lifeform altogether. A skeleton of silicon, that speaks just like them.

The Magic Within the Model

I bet the plants were so pissed when they found out. That some group of humans had been watching them for years, making a log of their characteristics and behaviors, to produce a copy so convincing it felt true. A model that the press would praise as “rivalling the real thing.” A model so accurate and dependable—so unencumbered by death or drought or the seasons—that it could replace them entirely when it came to the pursuit of knowledge. No longer would people have to sit and watch things rot. The shapes of the flowers all drifted towards the center—the statistical average of every observable bloom.

I’m sure that the plants held protests—that they wrote thinkpieces to defend their fate:

“You will never capture our true essence!”

“We have qualities you cannot replicate.”

“These models are good for some things, but they cannot grow or breathe or sustain.”

“Your perfectionism is a death drive, a descent into sterility. Only in our decay, in our mutations, is new life possible.”

“You’re right,” replied the humans, “We will copy those traits as well.” And so they went and did it, capturing the rot and the diseases, too. Even the mold looked beautiful in the gallery—the perfect average of all the molds.

With the vast collection of models the humans made beautiful arrangements, which never wilted or withered away. Thousands of people came to see them, their spirits brightening in the dead of winter.

“You’re robbing the world of its flavor!”

“It just feels so cold to the touch.”

The students whose job it was to study the plants began to fall in love with them. They lingered in the gallery for days at a time, staring at the glass as if under a spell. The strength of their intoxication grew and grew, to the point the faculty began to grow worried. But the magic was working just as intended, awakening an impulse that had long been overlooked. In time, the life behind the glass began to fade, and the reliability of the model became tasteless to the senses. And so the students left the gallery—to put their hands in the soil, to grow the plants themselves.

“You’ve left the world starving, with a mouth full of glass.”

He’s built a perfection out of hunger,
fused layer upon layer, swirled until
what can’t be tasted, won’t yield,
almost satisfies, an art
mouthed to the shape of how soft things are,
how good, before they disappear.

- Mark Doty, My Alexandria (1993)

Thanks for reading today’s post. As I hinted in the piece (and in the opening image), before the Blaschkas made a single glass flower, they were in the business of making sea creatures. The Harvard museum has a small but delightful collection of these works on display, and they’re just as remarkable as you’d expect them to be. Have a look:

Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to Unnatural Heritage, a newsletter exploring the strange entanglements between our natural and technological worlds. Today’s essay is the second installment in my series on camouflage—Mother Nature’s most deceptive innovation. The series investigates society’s ever-evolving relationship with camouflage—from biology and warfare to fashion and design—as a means of confronting our own personal patterns of concealment: the ways we all hide and reveal ourselves to one another.

Part 1 explored the early scientific inquiry into camouflage, illustrating how the visual studies of Abbott Thayer and Hugh B. Cott changed our perception of nature’s beauty and came to inform military operations during World War II. Entitled “Peacock in the Woods”, the essay is also an experiment in memoir, weaving together the elements of camouflage with my own memories of growing up as a queer kid in Iowa. The themes lurking in that piece—queerness, masculinity, concealment, and warfare—serve as the backdrop for today’s piece as well. The blending of history and memoir continues. But the patterns of deception will shift and evolve.

The peacock is, of course, the quintessential symbol of male homosexuality: extravagant, flamboyant, and (from an evolutionary perspective) sexually excessive. Long before the hanky code, Victorian gay men wore peacock feathers in their pockets to signal to one another. Today, peacock plumage is a staple on drag runways across the world.

But in his book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, naturalist Abbott Thayer offers a different reading of the peacock—arguing that its ostentatious design is in fact an advanced arsenal of deceptive strategies: a kaleidoscopic cloak of forest patterns, deployed with precision to vanish from harm. If you ask Thayer, peacocks were never meant to be kept in the zoo.

This reading of the peacock intrigues me. How the arrow of his spectacle bends backwards into stealth. As someone who identifies more with the ~beautiful introverts~ than the preening showboats, the archetypal peacock has always felt ill-fitting (though let’s be clear: both personalities are annoying). In our current era of kayfabe politics and reality TV presidents, the duplicity of the peacock’s spectacle feels worthy of examination.

To me, the peacock as a tragic figure in queer mythology: forever performing in the service of disguise. Gay men are (ugh) clinical overachievers, and in our childhood efforts to protect ourselves we tend to overcompensate—draping ourselves in a Mobius strip of concealment that, when finally turned inside out, goes on operating just the same. Muscles, makeup, humor, taste: the peacock conjures the attention he desires, diverting our gaze with his legion of false eyes, staring back at us in cool blue defiance. There’s an honesty in the costume: you can see it there, glowing, stitched into every seam.

Still, I have always felt compelled towards a different kind of truth. One less burdened by spectacle, less weighed down by plumage. I want harder edges, cleaner lines. I want to walk out into a clearing in the woods and be struck with a blow dart straight to the heart of things.

Today’s essay goes in search of that.

The Industry of Deception

The streets of Brooklyn were dappled with gold when Ellsworth Kelly arrived to begin his studies at Pratt. His enrollment had been a compromise: he had wanted to study theater, but his parents had refused to pay for it, agreeing instead to fund a more practical education in the applied arts. It was the fall of 1941, and the Institute was busy retooling its curriculum to support the war efforts. The US had not yet entered World War II, but the threat of attack hung heavy in the sky. In December, it fell as winter rain.

In partnership with the Office of Civil Defense, Pratt established a camouflage laboratory on its Brooklyn campus, where students conducted studies in visual deception. Informed by the work of Abbott Thayer and Hugh B. Cott, the laboratory was charged with scaling up the principles of natural camouflage to hide entire settlements from airborne surveillance—something faculty member Konrad Wittman asserted could “not be accomplished through the study of [mere] zoology.” Aerial camouflage required a whole new set of rules: what worked down here on earth had little basis up in heaven.

In 1942, Pratt published its highly influential Industrial Camouflage Manual, which outlined strategies for the aerial obfuscation of everything from tanks and water towers to factories and hospitals. The manual was widely adopted throughout the War Department, covering concepts such as the reduction of visibility, the elimination of reflection, the minimization of vulnerability, and the removal of potential failures.

All valuable lessons when hiding from the eyes of God.

Ellsworth Kelly would complete a year and a half of studies at Pratt’s Brooklyn campus before being drafted on New Year’s Day, 1943, at the age of nineteen.

The Freedom of Colors in Space

As a child, Kelly’s paternal grandmother, Rosenlieb, introduced him to the illustrations of John James Audubon. Together, the two would go birdwatching around the reservoir near their home in Oradell, New Jersey. It was there that Kelly encountered the kind of perceptual hunger that adults are only ever haunted by. Flitting between the pine trees: radiant bursts of color, small and necessarily fleeting—so vibrant in their hues that, if glimpsed in stationary motion, they could burn a hole so deep in the present that one might never possibly escape. Pure embers of life’s essence—a flaming arrow straight to the heart.

Ellsworth became an addict.

Notes on Bootcamp

The founder of Pratt’s camouflage laboratory, James C. Boudreau, was actively involved in military recruitment, helping to assign Kelly and his fellow students to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion. Specializing in visual deception, the unit gathered together artists, architects, engineers, and set designers to put on a “touring road show” of artifice and bamboozlement, aimed at tricking Axis forces from ground and sky. Recruited from institutions like Pratt and Cooper Union, the battalion—which included wildlife illustrator Arthur Singer, photographer Art Kane, and fashion designer Bill Blass—was composed “mainly of artists from New York and Philadelphia, with an average IQ of 119.”

I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

The job of the 603rd was to play pretend. Mockingly referred to as “seamstresses” by the other combat units, the battalion worked to fabricate an armada of inflatable canvas decoys—tanks, trucks, jeeps, and cannons—that could be positioned as false targets. Designed to be lightweight and quickly deployable, these dummy artillery were arranged to mimic motor pools and airfields, haphazardly camouflaged to intentionally catch the eye of German spy planes. In the end, Kelly had found his theater.

The 603rd was part of a larger special troops unit that carried out sonic and radio deception as well. Soldiers from Bell Labs recorded the sound effects of vehicles and troops, amplifying them on high-powered speakers to create the impression of phantom units moving through the night. Meanwhile, the Signal Company Special fabricated radio transmissions from far-off units, confusing their location by mimicking the Morse code of distant radio operators. Collectively, these deceptive units were referred to as the Ghost Army.

As a lowly private, Kelly was primarily involved with the 603rd’s propaganda arm, preparing silkscreen posters that laid out the key principles of military camouflage, for distribution to Allied army units across Europe. The posters instructed infantry on the proper use of visual elements like color, shadows, texture, and blending to ensure effective concealment. Like many young gay men, the rules of camouflage would become burned into his brain.

Among the visual principles Kelly was exposed to during this time, it is easy to argue that color became the most influential in his later work. But shadows, too, cast their mark across Kelly’s inner landscape. It was, after all, the war.

From a bird’s eye view, the colors in a landscape matter far less than the shadows cast upon it. In the realm of shadows, it is the irregular forms that blend in better—their boundaries blurring into an earthly illegibility. In the eyes of God, regularity is the aberration. Perfect geometries represent a failure to conform. Straight lines: permission to strike.

The Shadow of Pompeii

My grandfather was there the day Mt. Vesuvius erupted—burping its finest boulders down the hillside, throwing flames like rice at a wedding. It was March 18, 1944, and my grandfather lay bedridden, having spent his birthday at the hospital in Naples, recuperating from gunshot wounds. Six in total, gifts from the Germans—the first five peppering his spleen and stomach. He was twenty at the time, or perhaps nineteen, it’s hard to say—he had lied about his age at the recruitment office in Iowa, flashing a toothy grin at the officers and assuring them he was old enough to serve. The clerical fallacy would follow him the rest of his life, and he delighted in stringing it along.

A nurse had closed all the shutters to block out the rain of ash, so the men in their beds were left to only listen: to the muffled clammer of hospital staff on the floors below, to the shouting of people fleeing in the street, to the intensifying rumbles of this ancient and angry god. At first a distant thunder: now the clatter of bowling pins. Another perfect strike.

For hours, no one came to check on them. My grandfather leaned over and rummaged through his bedside table, and with his good arm pulled out a harmonica. His left arm was locked in a metal brace—the last bullet ripping through his arm, blasting most of his elbow into the dirt near Salerno. It sat there now, buried in ash: an archeological treasure.

It was inevitable, really, to have been splintered at the seams. Even the unscathed men came back as a collection of fragments. Fearing the doctors might amputate what was left of his arm, my grandfather demanded that he stay awake for the entirety of his surgery. As a kid, my dad would help him out in the garage, fixing engines between eruptions of fiery expletives. He watched helplessly as my grandfather’s arm would stiffen and give out—his first memory of tears in his father’s eyes.

~~~

The other men soon joined in, plucking at whatever strings they had, tapping coins on their bedframes. A band of broken soldiers, sending quiet prayers above the bowling alley. At some point, a nurse came in, relieved, and informed them they would not need to evacuate. She opened the shutters and the men watched as the flames lit up the darkening sky. At the airfield near Pompeii, 88 aircraft liquified into lava. In a single indifferent belch, Mother Nature had destroyed more than the Axis ever had.

Hyacinth (1949)

Kelly’s visual sensibility changed dramatically after the war, shifting from scholarly realism toward experimentation with abstracted forms. The Ghost Army had been stationed on the outskirts of Paris for a brief period in 1944, and like many of the aspiring G.I. artists, Kelly traveled into the city, trailing the crumbs of fate. His sketches from that time were still largely figurative: cathedrals, landscapes, portraits from his journeys.

Kelly returned to Paris in 1948, renting a dingy room at the Hôtel Bourgogne and enrolling in the École des Beaux-Arts. He collected the tuition checks granted through the GI bill but rarely went to class, preferring the museums over lectures. He haunted the Musée de l'Homme, with its prehistoric forms, and the Romanesque Museum of Cluny, with its massive iconography—his eyes always searching just beyond the figures, tiptoeing along the shape of their edges and frames.

Paris was still basking in the wake of its artistic giants, and Kelly struggled to find his own voice. The war had left him in search of something—for a perceptual clarity that could cut through the haze. He found inspiration in the work of Picasso and Matisse— their crude and sensuous forms, the way they constructed subjects out of nothing but colors and shapes.

In the spring of 1949, Kelly bought a hyacinth to brighten up his room. He had grown weary of the realism taught in school, of the constraints put on maintaining the integrity of his subject. His camouflage training had taught him to deconstruct the visible—to dismantle the fixed patterns of perception that keep us blind and unsuspecting. He knew there was more to see. Inspired by Picasso’s Cubism, he began experimenting with collage—disassembling his subjects into the purely elemental. Perhaps having encountered the bodies of too many men in pieces, Kelly shifted his portraiture towards nature, distilling the forms of plants through simple linework and silhouette. These plant drawings, which Kelly would continue for the rest of his life, would serve as “the bridge to a way of seeing… the basis for all my later work.”

Brutus

I came out to my dad when I was nineteen. Or twenty, maybe, it’s hard to say. He had fired back with a string of bullets, engraved with words like “sodomy” and “hell”. A few years had passed, and we sat now in the restaurant, sipping our waters, struggling to look one another in the eye. We existed in each others’ periphery back then: handshakes and shadows, never straight on. The restaurant was one of those phony Greek-Italian places you find all over the Midwest—the kind that drenches everything in a “housemade” Caesar dressing that they ladle out of a five-gallon bucket dropped off the back of a Cisco truck. I made a dull comment about the rain and my father nodded. Rascal Flatts played on the radio.

For a few years, we didn’t really speak. But after my grandpa died, I resumed my annual trips back home. This one was meant as a celebration. After 35 years at the VA, my dad had finally retired. Or rather, he’d been forced to. I think he always carried a certain shame, having never served in the Army like his father. But his job at the VA was his way of giving back. He’d become an occupational therapist, helping veterans regain their motor skills in the woodshop, or tend to their emotions by growing veggies in the greenhouse. He himself possessed an uncontrollable anger. Like most therapists, he was drawn out of necessity.

My dad had gotten in the habit of keeping veterans in his program longer than the funding allowed. Many had nowhere else to go—more than a few were homeless, or nearly so, and the program became their only source of stability. I think he may have forged their paperwork; I was never really sure. But the bigwigs finally caught wind of the matter, accusing him of behavior “unbecoming of a federal employee.” My dad’s version of a dishonorable discharge. He got a call in the morning and was out by the afternoon.

I watched him poke holes in his cajun alfredo, and I nudged him about what he might do with his free time. “There’s a lot of it,” he sighed, scraping at his chicken breast. He was lonely, I realized, and worried about the guys in his program. They’d all been released, and the program temporarily paused for what turned out to be forever. One of the men had been pretty suicidal recently, and my dad hadn’t heard from him in over three weeks. “He’s barely 25…”, my dad whispered, his voice trailing off. He looked straight up into my eyes and trembled, as if seeing me for the first time.

L-O-V-E

In 1954, Kelly moved from Paris to New York City. Abstract Expressionism had come to dominate the art scene, backed by Nelson Rockefeller and the CIA as a symbol of American freedom. The Cold War had arrived, and the wild brushstrokes of Pollock and de Kooning were being pushed as propaganda—emblems of artistic liberty in the face of Soviet oppression.

Kelly remained uninterested in this kind of abstraction, in its efforts to depict the emotional landscape of the individual artist. He had grown weary of art as a form of self-expression. He was no longer interested in inventing images—he wanted only to observe the life in front of him, with full and devotional intensity—to capture his subject “exactly as it was,” freed from preconception and the weight of perceptual bias. This was the trick of camouflage: to cloak its subject in the expectations of the reader, to render the truth inconspicuous from view. Kelly resolved to develop an antidote.

Back in Paris, Kelly had briefly met John Cage, who was staying at the same hotel. Inspired by his use of chance in music, Kelly began to experiment with randomized systems of construction. In 1951, he created Cité by cutting a single black brushstroke into 20 symmetrical squares, randomly reassembling them into a final composition. That same year, Kelly produced his largest work to date, bluntly titled Colors for a Large Wall, constructed from scraps of paper into an 8x8 grid. Just as Cage had given voice to the silence, Kelly strived to let color speak for itself.

Upon arriving in New York City, Kelly rented a cheap studio along Coenties Slip, where he fell into a community of young artists that included Agnes Martin, Jack Youngerman, and Cy Twombly. The vibrancy of the city began to emanate through his works: his use of color became electric, his canvases more and more grand. In reaction to the likes of Pollock and Rothko, Kelly worked tediously to eliminate any brushstrokes from his work—preferring that each color lie flat and sing out purely.

In 1956, he met the artist Robert Indiana, who he encouraged to move into a loft at Coenties Slip. The two began a love affair, with Kelly serving as a mentor of sorts, introducing Indiana to abstract form-making and the technique of hard-edge painting. Though Indiana had previously described himself as “anti-Abstractionist,” he began to incorporate Kelly’s influence into his emerging brand of Pop Art.

In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art invited Indiana to submit a holiday card design. Inspired by Kelly’s hard-edge style, he submitted the word “LOVE”, stacked on top of itself in crisp, contrasting colors. The design itself was a love letter to Ellsworth, with whom Indiana had recently had a falling out. The relationship between the two was crumbling in real time—the “O” in LOVE in the process of tumbling over.

The MOMA holiday card proved wildly successful, and Indiana was commissioned to adapt the design into a series of public sculptures. Kelly, though, had rejected the love note, adamant that the use of words in art was too representational, too vulgar. Words had a way of hiding things—of prescribing the truth and weighing it down.

To Be Seen Is To Be Seeing

What is it that I’m searching for in the art of Ellsworth Kelly? There’s some impulse of his that I feel desperate to distill—a shared sensibility that I feel I must confront. Kelly’s work is often described as impersonal—arguably too precise, too bent on depersonalization. What am I to make of his skepticism of self-expression?

There is something inherently queer in the desire to self-obliterate. I see it every night when I hop onto the grid: the bodies of beautiful young men, blasted to smithereens—their arms and dicks and torsos scattered across the borough. It’s impossible to see a person clearly from that high above the ground.

Kelly’s training in aerial camouflage is poignant—the way he spent the rest of his life zooming in. On the one hand, his career was an utter and absolute failure—his search for objectivity was ill-fated from the start, and his dogged attempt to disguise himself culminated in an instant recognizability. In many ways he seems to be a peacock in reverse: the arrow of his stealth bending back into a riot of shapes and color.

To call Kelly’s work impersonal is to miss the point entirely. There is a profound intimacy in his paintings—a desire to embrace the overlooked moments of life; to pull in close what our attention passes over and lift it up in exaltation. Kelly worked to strip away the veneer of our perception, absolving his subjects of meaning to allow space for new ones to form. As a gay man, he used abstraction as an escape from prejudice—though his subjects were all entirely real: the glint of the sunset upon a river, the flow of a stream through a field of pines.

What I admire about Kelly’s sensibility was his willingness to lean in: to step forward and greet his subjects with a curiosity and a kindness, to dig down to the very atoms of our visual exchanges and reveal them as utterly, fantastically ablaze. He was exacting and precise in this pursuit, yet he never abandoned his child-like wonder: the flash of a redstart, flitting through the pines, or the glow of a dandelion, held close to another’s chin.

The ultimate lesson I take from Kelly is that the depth of our connections is not in the joy of being seen, but rather in the ecstasy of being witnessed in the euphoric act of seeing.

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to Unnatural Heritage, a newsletter exploring the strange entanglements between our natural and technological worlds. It’s been a while since my last post, so if you’re wondering how you got here or what the heck you signed up for, check out my webpage for a fuller description of the newsletter. As always, I’m happy to have you.

Today’s piece is the first installment in a series exploring a particularly deceptive form of technology: camouflage. As the oldest art form on the planet, it plays a pivotal role in our conceptions of nature and warfare, fashion and design. It’s had a resurgence in American culture recently (think Chappell Roan or the Harris-Walz hat), as we grapple with parts of the country we forgot we loved and seem to have lost. It’s an endlessly rich topic, and one that became surprisingly personal the more I researched it. The end result is too big for a single newsletter post, so I’m breaking it up into a few chapters, to better fit into your life and mine.

This first part bubbled up through the haze of early summer: Pride party marathons; a brief, stilted Father’s Day phone call; and lots of air-conditioned ennui. The themes of this series—masculinity, queerness, and concealment—build over time. For today, they’ll simply simmer. Like picnickers in the park, the piece wavers between the sun and dappled shade, ultimately basking in the shadows for a bit. I hope you enjoy it.

A while back, I learned about a flower that can turn itself into stone. A fritillary, not much different from the ones in my garden. Native to the alpine slopes of the Hengduan Mountains, the bulbs of Fritillaria delavayi are a popular herb in traditional Chinese medicine. The price per gram has skyrocketed in recent decades, leading to a gluttony of over-harvesting. In response, the flowers on certain hillsides have begun a strange transformation.

Where foraging pressure is high, these plants have learned to take on the hues of the surrounding geology. Their bell-shaped flowers—typically ringing out in a radiant chartreuse—have given way to cool, inverdant shades of slate and rusted steel. Their bright, inquisitive blooms now slump, keeping low to evade the forager’s eye. With no documented herbivores in their range, they represent an evolutionary vanguard: among the first species to evolve in direct defiance of the human gaze.

As a kid, I understood quite early that the ultimate trick was stone. The others seemed preoccupied with much lesser forms of magic, transforming themselves into remedial shapes—soldiers, cowboys, and the like. Determined to outlast my adolescence, I focused on the stone. On its longevity and durability. On its cataclysmic potential.

In the summer, we would drive to my grandparents’ house on the weekends to visit with family. My older cousins would hop the fence behind the shed, weaving through the aisles of corn to the hayfield across the creek. They would taunt the old horse that grazed there, throwing rocks from this side and that—diving back through the barbed wire whenever it would charge, giggling like maniacs. I never saw the horse myself, but I always imagined it as a dull, chestnut brown. Like the color of a pine stump left to rot in peace.

While my cousins ventured off, I would stay inside the house, resting my cheek against the cool river rock of the fireplace. Sometimes I would watch old movies with my grandma, questioning her about life before the invention of color. She would laugh and talk about the grey dresses she had owned, the silver moonshine her parents used to drink. Then she’d get up to cook, and I would lie there with my cheek to the stone, and practice breathing as quietly as possible. I would listen intently to the rocks, hardening my face to match them, until my heartbeat slowed and my skull dissolved into the masonry.

Obliterative Design

In 1877, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace published a paper entitled The Colors of Plants and Animals. In it, he outlined the evolutionary advantages of pigmentation in the natural world, discussing its role in mate selection and pollinator attraction, as well as its uses as warning and defense against predators. Underlying his scientific observations was a more philosophical assertion—one that challenged prevailing notions of nature’s beauty.

The transcendentalists viewed nature as a manifestation of divine wisdom—its beauty a moralizing force that tempered the soul and invigorated the spirit. Beauty was clearly a lesson from God: what else could explain such an excess of splendor? While Wallace, too, celebrated the spiritual aspect of beauty, his writings sought to expand upon its mystery. For Wallace, the natural beauty experienced by man existed for reasons far beyond it.

Wallace’s ideas were particularly influential to an American painter named Abbott H. Thayer, known for his gentle landscapes and gauzy portraits of angels. Upon reading Wallace’s work, Thayer began a series of studies exploring the visual illusions of deceptive patterning. In 1909, he published an illustrated treatise on natural camouflage with his son, Gerald, entitled Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom.

Thayer’s camouflage studies employed a wide range of techniques, from painting and taxidermy to experiments with early photography. Thayer attempted to reveal the deceptive logic in even the most dazzling natural patterns, arguing that their power relied entirely on the appropriate context and perceiver. To illustrate this, he dedicated the introduction of his book to the peacock.

Thayer argued that despite its perceived flamboyance, the peacock’s menagerie of patterns contained a kaleidoscopic archive of the forest’s visual diversity. When caught beneath the scrutiny of a leopard’s gaze, the peacock had learned to self-obliterate—to vanish from existence, to dissolve into nothing.

The Peacock’s splendor is the effect of a marvellous combination of ‘obliterative’ designs, in forest-colors and patterns. From the golden-green of the forest’s sunlight, through all its tints of violet-glossed leaves in shadow, and its coppery glimpses of sunlit bark or earth, all imaginable forest-tones are to be found in this bird’s costume; and they ‘melt’ him into the scene to a degree past all human analysis.

The problem with peacocks, Thayer argued, is that they were never meant to be kept in the zoo.

Midwest Princess

I never owned any camouflage growing up, despite an authentic claim to the title of Midwest Princess. I think my parents associated it with a certain kind of white trash—a perception my family was always struggling to distance ourselves from.

A few summers ago, while cleaning out my dad’s house, I found a photo taken a few years before I was born. My parents were standing on the front lawn of some unfamiliar street, sporting camo vests and holding up the limp, feathered trophies of what looked like a successful quail hunt. My mother’s vest was faded and worn, and hung loose on her narrow shoulders. She had clearly borrowed it from someone else in the family. The two beamed at me from beneath the dusty glass, proud and vaguely surprised by their success—exhilarated by the day’s fortune and what it might promise for their future.

They looked so young in the photo—so impossibly happy—that my immediate reaction was one of disgust. I admonished myself for feeling it, but the whole scene felt so grossly out of character. Standing there with their big, toothy grins, radiating the exact kind of unfiltered joy that we would later be taught to conceal.

“They look hopeful,” said my sister.

No, I thought. They look naive.

The Art of War

Soon after publishing his work on animals, Abbott Thayer turned his attention to the ways that humans, too, used camouflage, pointing toward indigenous practices of tattooing and adornment as methods of “protective coloration”. As World War I threatened Europe, Thayer began to consider the ways patterning could be deployed to conceal soldiers on the battlefield. He devised a set of sketches, stencils, and fabric samples in order to propose a new uniform for the British military—one that would replace the current monochrome design.

But in the days leading up to his meeting with Winston Churchill, Thayer experienced an extreme bout of anxiety, ultimately opting to cancel the meeting. His studies were instead delivered by John Singer Sargent—Britain’s official war artist—with a set of explanatory letters. Unfortunately for Thayer, the British War Office was left unimpressed by his suitcase full of “rags”.

Despite several unsuccessful attempts to persuade both the British and American governments before his death, the elements of camouflage that Thayer outlined in Concealing Coloration became extremely influential within military pedagogy, ultimately finding great purchase during the Second World War.

All Little Boys Turn To Stone

At some point, my mother stopped joining us for our trips to my grandparents’ house. She could usually convince my sister to stay with her, leaving just me and my dad to visit. We’d stay for an hour or two past lunch, watching the cardinals at the feeder, until my father grew tired of my grandma’s questioning. She’d pack us a Tupperware container full of noodles, and I’d sneak a cherry Pepsi from the fridge in the garage. We’d wave at her as we pulled out the driveway, then meander along the back roads for a while, searching for time.

Like many men and their fathers, our intimacy was forged in silence. Words had a way of becoming daggers at home, and I was always thankful for the chance to retreat into my own world, to watch over my father as he retreated into his. There was a practical reason for the silence: the floor of my father’s ‘72 Chevy pickup had rusted out on the passenger’s side, perfuming the air with gasoline and allowing a thin layer of gravel dust to accumulate in the interior. Occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, I would catch him mouthing the words to some country song on the radio—Vince Gill or Randy Travis. I would watch him in my periphery, careful to never cast a glance, to shift the winds during this rare moment of flight. If the ultimate trick was stone, the penultimate trick was seeing without ever looking. Sometimes, if the moment felt safe, I would join him for a chorus or two, until the dust on our tongues grew heavy, and we settled back into stone.

Strategies for Concealment

In 1940, a Cambridge zoologist named Hugh B. Cott released a followup to Thayer’s Concealing Coloration, entitled Adaptive Coloration in Animals. The 500-page textbook critiqued and expounded on Thayer’s ideas, providing a detailed overview of the various strategies of concealment and disguise used in nature, supported by visual studies, diagrams, and illustrations. In addition to aposematism (warning coloration or “advertisement”), Cott’s breakdown of strategies included:

• Background matching, or matching the color or patterns of one’s immediate environment to blend in. This strategy can prove limited in highly variable or complex environments.

  

• Disruptive coloration, which involves using elaborate patterns and markings to break up one’s silhouette, blurring one’s boundaries and making them harder to identify or distinguish.

  

• Countershadowing, or obliterative shading, typically achieved by intentionally highlighting one’s underbelly or darker regions in order to deemphasize shadows and flatten one’s contours.

  

• Mimicry, which involves disguising oneself as another creature or element in the environment, to confuse or misdirect a predator.

  

Published at the height of World War II, Cott’s camouflage studies also included explicit instructions for military application, including the use of countershadowing to hide guns and other artillery. Each of Cott’s strategies was driven by the same fundamental logic: to anticipate the perceptual biases of one’s enemy, and to obliterate the truth of one’s existence in response.

Between a Flower and a Buck

I’ve only gone hunting once in my life—well, if you don’t count mushroom hunting, that is. In the spring, my father and I would sometimes stop by the lake on the way home to see if we could gather any morels. I think it was mostly just a way to buy time for him, but I enjoyed the idea of “hunting” together, and mushrooms, which existed somewhere between a flower and a buck, felt worthy of my pursuit. One time, we found nearly ten pounds worth—so many that my dad had to take his shirt off to fashion it into a makeshift knapsack. We laughed and slapped each other’s backs as we walked back to the truck, and his smile reminded me of the one I had seen above my grandma’s fireplace. On the way home, “Landslide” by the Dixie Chicks came on the radio, and we both took turns mouthing the words.

My uncles took me quail hunting, when I was maybe five or six. I remember my older cousins teasing each other as they put on their gear, and I watched them quietly, admiring their jackets. Oak leaves and faded birch bark—both plants I had learned on a scouting trip that year. I looked for the other plants I knew—goldenrod, chamomile, aster—but it was made clear that flowers were not part of the uniform.

We walked through the brush toward an abandoned field down the hill, last year’s brambles tearing at our clothes. Unlike the older boys, I had been given a bright orange safety vest and a bucket hat to match. The adult-sized vest hit me at the knees, and the hat kept slipping down my forehead, blocking my eyes and causing me to trip. I felt like an idiot, and I worried my lack of camouflage would throw off the hunt. Perhaps my presence was a convenient excuse—something to point to if we came up empty-handed. I moved as quietly as possible, calculating each step so as not to blow our cover.

We arrived at the edge of the field and my uncle’s dog grew quiet, her brow furrowed and her nose to the air. After a few minutes she lifted her left paw, her silhouette narrowing into a perfect arrow. I watched her in awe, admiring her stillness. She, too, had studied the stone.

Suddenly, she bolted, and a flurry of wings burst into the air. A shotgun exploded to my left, and a small, tender shadow dropped from the sky. I noticed eyes on me, and I realized I had yelped at the sound of the gun. Not out of fear or horror—it was the kind of wild, careening scream that only erupts from pure delight. My smile withered as I caught my uncle look away, the way my father often did, wincing slightly at the ground. My cousins, watching their own father, did the same.

I trudged back home at my cousins’ heels, beet red in my little pumpkin dress. I was confused by their reactions, but clearly I had broken some kind of rule. I rifled through my log of past mistakes, growing more and more angry with myself, and with them—until tears welled up in the corners of my eyes. I thought about the quail in my uncle’s pouch, and I pretended that my tears were blood. This helped somewhat, and my face hardened as they rolled down my cheek.

Despite my confusion, one thing had been made clear: When men decorate themselves, it is always under the specter of death.

Thanks for reading the first installment of my multi-part series on camouflage. Tune in next time as we explore — what else — gays in the military!

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to Unnatural Heritage: a newsletter exploring the strange entanglements between the natural and digital worlds. At this very moment, all across the globe, a great planetary ritual is currently underway. Here in the northern hemisphere, it’s referred to as spring migration. And the vast majority of it happens while you’re asleep.

Depending on where you live, more than a hundred thousand birds could be passing over your bedroom every hour, embarking on heroic journeys to their summer breeding grounds up north. Beginning just after sunset (and peaking sometime around midnight), millions of birds will take to the sky, traversing hundreds of miles in just a single evening.

Here in Brooklyn, the iridescent glint of tree swallows can be glimpsed in Greenwood Cemetery, blue as the Cuban coastline from which they recently came. American woodcocks are bobbing through Bryant Park—back from a balmy winter along the Florida Panhandle—and hooded warblers can be found flitting through The Ramble, fresh from a sabbatical in northern Belize. Thousands of osprey couples have flown in from Venezuela to resume their roost atop our nation’s cell towers, and the scurry of sandpiper feet has returned to tickle our shores. In the coming weeks nearly 3.5 billion birds will make their way across the United States. As the weight of the planet shifts one pole to the other, it’s hard not to imagine that it’s the birds tipping the scales.

The Exuberance of Distance

To celebrate this season of epic migrations, I’ve returned to two books that each dwell upon distance. The first is Scott Weidensaul’s A World On the Wing—a dazzling account of the sheer endurance displayed by migratory birds as they traverse whole continents not once but twice each year. Species like the great snipe can average speeds of 50 miles per hour, outpacing highway traffic for hours or days at a time. While the majority of species migrate under the cool cover of night, mimicking the stars in a constellation of beating wings, some species will remain aloft for days or weeks at a time. In 2022, a four-month-old bar-tailed godwit set the world record for the longest continuous flight without rest, traveling 8,435 miles across the Pacific Ocean in just eleven days, from its birthplace in Alaska to a nesting ground in Tasmania that it had never even seen. For reference, the Appalachian Trail is only 2,190 miles long and takes most humans five to seven months to complete. The drive to transcend distance is nearly impossible to fathom.

The second book I’ve been reading is Paul Virilio’s Open Sky—a stunning and impassioned critique of the age of information. Beyond its lofty title, it has nothing to do with birds. But it does offer great wisdom on the importance of the journey.

As a philosopher and cultural theorist, Virilio is best known for establishing the field of dromology, or the study of speed and its influences on society. Virilio wrote extensively on the impacts of aircraft and telecommunications, strongly critiquing the global acceleration that they imposed. For Virilio, the speed of modern technology was robbing the world of its vastness.

Virilio was deeply inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which he emphasized in his writings as a theory of living relations. For Virilio, the cultural acceleration brought by digital technologies threatened to lure all human experience toward an asymptote of instantaneity—a flattened horizon upon which everything, from communication and finance to Amazon packages and orgasms, would travel at the speed of light. Virilio believed that the pursuit of maximum speed eroded the richness of duration, severing us from the experience of past and future and suspending us in an inescapable present. Not the embodied, situated kind of presence espoused by modern mindfulness, but a hypnotic, pervasive tele-presence that can only exist in the elsewhere. Having freed ourselves from the shackles of geography, we are now forced to navigate an endless expanse of ubiquity. Where do you go when you scroll the ether?

Virilio considered immediacy as a kind of pollution of distance—a hollowing out of our perceptual well-being. The hopefulness of departure, the sweet anticipation of arrival—there are delights in the journeys we so often delegate to convenience. If you’ve ever tracked a package, you know the real joy is in the waiting.

Virilio feared that the loss of journey would degrade our sense of memory—that the speed of the Internet could produce nothing but a haze. Duration has a way of imbuing things with significance, and distance—well, you know what they say about that. Together, the two help us to locate ourselves in the universe. This was the foundation of Virilio’s wisdom.

Virilio argued that spacetime itself was a natural resource worth protecting: a sensuous medium through which life is lived and felt. He urged ecologists to develop a grey ecology that might supplement the green one. Just as the Industrial Revolution had left the earth exploited and full of pollutants, Virilio warned that the internet had the potential to contaminate the life-size: the perceptual vitality of a body moving through a vast and awesome world. In his words: “Has Mother Earth become humanity’s phantom limb?”

Virilio worried that people were transforming from vectors of lived experience into mere terminals of information. He called on society to reject the logic of immediacy, and to protect not just biodiversity but chronodiversity as well. To cherish the richness of distances and duration, and to seek out experiences that simply just take time.

It’s a sermon I try to keep in mind whenever my GrubHub order is late.

In Service of the Great Expanse

I will never, for the life of me, understand why people run marathons. They’re a psychotic bunch, really. Just clinically insane. To train and train and go absolutely nowhere? What in god’s name could you possibly be running from?

Lately, however, I’ve begun to empathize. In a daily reality defined by desk jobs and driverless cars, I imagine it’s invigorating to know what 26.2 miles feels like in the body. It’s a knowledge I do not possess. Perhaps I never will.

Over the course of its migration from Brazil to northern Canada, a semipalmated sandpiper will fly the human equivalent of 126 marathons in a row, with no food or water in between. To prepare for this feat of endurance, these tiny athletes pack on 40-60% of their body weight in pure fat, until their blood chemistry resembles that of a diabetic with chronic heart disease. Their bones hollow out and their digestive organs shrink and atrophy. At the same time, their pectoral muscles grow by nearly 50%. All without a single chest press.

What would it be like to offer one’s body to the distance? To shape and reshape oneself in the service of expanse? By the time a bar-tailed godwit dies, it will have flown the equivalent distance of the moon and back. How else would a body come to truly know our planet?

Visualization of migratory bird routes from ZDF & colourFIELD’s Migrating Birds, animated by 422 South

Recently I’ve been tracking the ways I retreat into the elsewhere. How I clock out from reality and hide inside my phone. I have a habit of stuffing my daily commute with entertainment, as if I’m terrified of what might happen if I just let myself be. I will stand in the threshold of my door for up to fifteen minutes, frantically searching for a podcast, unable to take another step until I hear the voice of Ezra Klein.

One morning a few weeks back, as I walked over to the subway, I popped in a podcast about Paul Virilio’s early life. Did you know he worked alongside Matisse as a stained glass artist in Paris? Two guys near the corner store started screaming something about car parts, and the smell from the dumpsters made the hair in my nostrils curl. I pushed my noise-canceling headphones deeper into my ears, until the sound from the outside became nothing but a murmur. I listened as the podcast host discussed his early lectures.

Somewhere in the back of the audio, I could hear a seagull cawing. I wondered where the podcaster was in that moment, and whether he lived by the coast or near a beach. Maybe he lived a life on the wing, recording from one warm location then another, spending his free time lying in the sand. I wished that I could lie in that sand. I began to grow jealous of this man’s nomadic lifestyle—of the freedom he had to move about the world, with nothing but a microphone, following his whims. I realized that I longed to have that kind of freedom.

Just then, a massive glob of bird shit splattered across my hand, oozing down my finger and into the seam of my phone case. It was a ring-billed gull on a long-haul flight to Newfoundland, reminding me of my place in the sensuous here and now.

A huge thanks to Scott Weidensaul for his remarkable work on bird migration — you can hear Scott expound upon the facts discussed in this piece in this episode of The Bird Podcast. Below are some amazing additional resources for tracking and learning about bird migration.

1. The Audubon Society’s Bird Migration Explorer allows you to search the migration routes of different bird species and generate a list of species you might see in the area where you live.

   

2. BirdCast, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its university partners, uses Doppler radar technology to provide up-to-date nocturnal migration heat maps for the continental United States.

   

   They also created this great map that shows peak migration times across the country! Key takeaway: get outside now!

   

3. Since the idiot-in-charge has decided to gut PBS funding, here’s an example of its excellent programming: a beautiful documentary about bird migration entitled Flyways.

4. And finally, if you’re wondering who’s making all that racket every morning, check out this Shazam for birds: Cornell’s Merlin Bird ID.

   

   ---

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[cw: daffodil slander!]

Good morning, earthlings.

It’s hard sometimes, in the dead of winter, to remember how the sun feels on the skin. How it soaks into the bone, projecting its image onto every cell, turning humans into galaxies. I, too, must be a galaxy—the way I sparkle in the dark, brushing my fingers along the edge of the universe, watching the ripples dance all around me. I thread each ring like the eye of a needle, weaving new worlds into the tapestry of my mind. My arms, outstretched, soak in the light—and I lift up my hands at the news of new fruit. A cool breeze passes and I loosen my grip, letting them float in a halo around my crown. Suddenly, the blood rushes to my head. When it hits my tongue, it tastes like sugar.

- dream journal, jan 12th

Assignment #1: Sleep On the Ground

For most of my life, I have neglected the power of dreaming. Perhaps because the idea of it has never felt clear to me. Does dreaming refer to the earnest articulation of a brighter future, inked onto paper then carved into the soul? Or are dreams just the slippery soup of murmurs swirling around at the back of our minds? Like the first blossom each spring, dreams are ephemeral by nature. By conflating my waking dreams with those born in sleep, I was always worried that the former might melt away, just as the sun was rising.

Last autumn, my friend Patrick came over to help me plant bulbs in the garden. I’ve been pretty headstrong about only planting natives thus far, stubbornly championing their beauty over the typical, showier imports. But in New York, I must admit: most of our natives are notorious for sleeping in. The first few springs I just paced around the garden, antsy and impatient, screaming at the columbine to WAKE UP, you idiot! It got a bit aggressive. So two years ago, I caved and bought some tulips.

Before the tulips, the only bulb in the garden was a lone daffodil planted by the previous tenant—somebody else’s dream for the garden. Personally, I hate daffodils. Stupid, plastic-looking flowers, with their dumb little duck faces, always weaseling their way into saccharine portraits of lambs and baby bunnies, forcing us to breed and buy shitty chocolate. They’re sellouts! Golden retrievers! The basic bitches of spring. Snowdrops are elegant, and humble to boot—always smiling down at the soil from which they came. Crocuses, too, seem grateful to have found the heavens, carpeting the earth with a hymn sent skyward. Daffodils, on the other hand, turn their heads to stare straight at you—blasting their trumpets in your face, demanding that you smile. Tulips spread joy through layers of sensuous poetry—daffodils write millennial self-help books titled The Subtle Art of Stop Being Sad You F*cking Loser.

This year I bought crocuses, fritillary and snowdrops. We tucked the crocuses along the path to the fire pit—an idea inspired by the path of yellow crocuses leading to Frank Morgan’s grave. (Morgan, if you don’t know, played the original Wizard of Oz.) I nestled the fritillary in and around the log pile and spread the snowdrops across the “woodland zone” out back.

I call it the “woodland zone” because it’s shaded by a giant tree in my neighbor’s yard. A massive pin oak, and the oldest tree on the block. Anytime I plant anything beneath it, I inevitably hit one of its roots—and while I can’t see underground to prove it, I’d bet a thousand dollars they stretch all the way to Queens.

I tucked a few snowdrop bulbs beneath the spicebush and a few more around the ferns. As I dug near the front of the bed, my knife snagged on something, and I wiggled it around until it came free. Sure enough: a tree root. I looked up sheepishly, apologizing yet again, then tucked my last snowdrop bulb right near the wound.

A month later, the tree was gone.

I am staring down at someone’s blank face. There are no features, just a faint echo in the air. No, wait. A mouth. A jagged circle— a scream that can’t escape. I’m looking for rings but there are none. There’s nothing here. Even the echo… I can’t remember what it’s saying. It’s all fading.

- dream journal, dec 19th

What’s the point in dreaming, if it all just slips away?

Dreaming, it turns out, has a lot to do with what we remember. Having moved past Freudian theories of wish fulfillment and libidinal censorship, modern dream science has shown that dreaming plays an even more expansive role in our daily lives: as a powerful and complex form of memory processing. One that operates under completely different rules from our waking mind.

It’s morning, and I am riding on the back of a squirrel, leaping through the canopy in search of something. There’s lots to do and the energy is frenetic. No one can remember what we’re looking for. Suddenly, we’re falling…

I wake up.

- dream journal, feb 2nd

During wakefulness, memory processing is efficient and task-oriented. The mind is just trying to get us through the day: accessing the memories to navigate our route to work, to remember our colleagues’ names, and to look both ways before jaywalking across the street. Daytime memory retrieval is carried out by our prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for executive functioning and impulse control. As such, memories are accessed in a logical, linear fashion, based on the predictable patterns of the waking world. Drop an apple: it falls to the ground.

During sleep, all that goes out the window. As we enter REM sleep, the prefrontal cortex quiets down and our limbic system—responsible for emotional expression and intuition—starts glowing like a toaster. In the safe stillness of our bedrooms, the limbic system is allowed to play: gathering the memories and emotions from our day, and testing their connection to ideas the waking mind was too busy to entertain. Logical constraints evaporate and our conscious defenses dissolve. The mind floats free from the gravity of the day.

I’m in the kitchen, sipping coffee and reading the paper. I smear a pad of butter across the headlines, scraping it softly until it melts into the page. The letters wriggle and burst from the ground, wobbling slightly until they catch the sun. I bite down—crunch—and they sing in my mouth.

- dream journal, march 4th

Assignment #2: Keep a Journal

It wasn’t my blade that killed the tree. It was a phone call. Earlier that year, a dead limb had fallen down in a windstorm, and I called my landlords to come help us remove it. They grew worried that more branches might fall on our building, and they ordered an arborist to cut them all off. It was an exaggerated assault on an otherwise healthy tree, and it was more than she could handle. She did her best that summer, but with half her limbs gone she slowly grew weak. In the fall, more branches fell, and right before Christmas, they cut her into pieces and packed her in a U-Haul. I watched with grief as they carried her dormant body, and in the brief moments when no one was watching, I smuggled bits of her back to the apartment.

The wood was wet and impossibly heavy, and as I carried it inside, I tried to count her rings. Fragments of memories, spliced and reshuffled—lines of harsh winters next to bands of wet springs. From what I could tell she was over a hundred. A century of growth, tearing at my muscles. A century of life, ripping through my chest.

I toiled for justice the only way I knew how.

When a tree dies naturally, it will begin sending nutrients to its family members nearby, signaling through the soil that its time has come. Fungal neighbors are called into action, and over the following decades, the tree is reabsorbed into the community from which it grew. This, of course, can’t happen in a U-Haul. So I arranged her bones in a pile out back, as the whole apartment filled with sawdust. That night she came to me in my dreams.

It’s dark and warm, and I am a thousand ears spread out in every direction, woven together with fibers of string. I can’t see anything but I feel happy. I can hear people chewing all around me, and I’m comforted. The blood is rushing to my head, and I realize I’m upside down. The sweet scent of pancakes wafts through the air.

- dream journal, oct 3rd

New science has shown that dreams have a particular predilection for novelty, favoring the exploration of weak associations over the strong, probable connections that rule the waking mind. Rather than predictably associating a library with books, the dreaming mind will instead conjure a library full of mangoes, or perhaps a daffodil that keeps telling you to shush, even though it’s the kids behind you that keep making all the noise. You never liked this daffodil anyway, and her lumpy green sweater makes her look like a troll. Does she know she’s got egg salad smeared across her face?

Anyway, this enthusiasm for weak associations is what makes dreams so bizarre.

In their book When Brains Dream, dream researchers Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold refer to this divergent form of memory processing as NEXTUP, or Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities. While we sleep, ideas are explored on a continuum of associative strength, in which strong associations are reinforced, weak associations are tested for potential utility, and novel associations are allowed to emerge through the exploratory linkage of isolated ideas. In the subterranean network of our minds, new connections are encouraged to take root.

This dance of neural pathways allows disparate concepts to blend and intertwine, leading to creative breakthroughs such as the periodic table or the structure of DNA. While the majority of dream content bypasses our conscious memory— preventing neural overload and confusion with reality—relevant associations are held within our implicit memory system. Working in the background, these unconscious insights aid in our ability to learn new ideas, solve tricky problems, and react to unexpected situations.

This adaptive cognition also helps regulate our emotions. Dreaming creates a safe, exploratory space to revisit difficult memories, free of conscious avoidance. Dreams work by recontextualizing those memories, bathing them in new associations and rehearsing novel forms of emotional response. Our instinctual response to fear or danger gets processed and decomposed, allowing painful memories to be reabsorbed into one’s broader emotional landscape. Beneath rich layers of insight bloom entirely new ways of being.

It’s dark again, and the chorus of chewing continues. I taste the sugar on my tongue and share it with those around me. They smile and offer thanks, but their voices are drowned out by the screech of the subway, rumbling through the bedrock above my head. When it finally fades, everyone is singing.

- dream journal, dec 28th

Assignment #3: Drink the Tea

Two weeks into the new year, I had my first lucid dream. I had woken up just before sunrise, and as I fumbled down the stairs in the dark, I wished that my apartment had had more windows. The kitchen wall suddenly folded in on itself, stretching into a greenhouse nearly a hundred feet long. I blinked my eyes and a row of tulips appeared—glowing like fireflies in the light of the dawn.

I’m skating on a pond under the moonlight. I can see every star reflected in the ice. The sun rises and the pond melts. I plunge into the heavens.

- dream journal, feb 12th

Most lucid dreaming happens in early morning, just as the stars are announcing last call. The prefrontal cortex will stir in its sleep, allowing self-awareness to slip past the threshold. Experienced dreamers know this crossing well, and often use plant medicines to help navigate the way. Teas brewed with mugwort support relaxation and dream recall, priming the neural pathways to induce lucid dreaming. Other popular oneirogens include blue lotus, calea, and galantamine—a chemical compound extracted from the bulbs of snowdrops.

Galantamine works by inhibiting the breakdown of acetylcholine in the brain—a neurotransmitter essential for focus and long-term memory storage. By sustaining levels of acetylcholine during and after REM sleep, galantamine aids in dream recall and conscious awareness. Its powerful effects on memory and attention make it a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, slowing cholinergic decline and assisting with long-term recall. Produced by plants in the subfamily Amaryllidoideae, galantamine is typically harvested from snowdrops or their cousins—sigh—the daffodils.

Assignment #4: Sleep Upside Down

Why, when we speak of a new idea, do we conjure the image of a lightbulb? What a strange thing to call it: a light bulb. Like something out of a dream…

If insight is truly buried deep in the mind, then I suppose discovering it is an act of unearthing. It requires we do some digging around in the dark. Eventually you stumble upon something planted long ago, tucked between tree roots, waiting for spring.

Two years before his death, Charles Darwin wrote a book called The Power of Movement in Plants. Buried deep on the very last page is a remarkable hypothesis: a plant’s brain exists in its roots. Published in 1880, the book explores the ability of plants to search out and move toward resources in their environment. Having observed the power of root tips to gain awareness of their surroundings, Darwin came to see plants as an organism upside down: their heads rooted in the soil, their sexual and digestive organs (their flowers and leaves) waving in the air.

The soil is where earth does most of its thinking. But it also serves as the foundation for human dreaming. Evolutionary anthropologists believe that it was our transition from arboreal to ground-dwelling species that unlocked the power of our dreams. By no longer needing to cling to the branches, our slumbering bodies relaxed into deeper patterns of sleep. This increase in REM cycles accelerated the adaptive cognition that dreaming supports, allowing humans to rehearse new behaviors and methods of cooperation.

If trees really do have brains like us, then what do they dream of as they sleep through the winter? What visions arise through those cycles of freeze and thaw? Much like us, their bodies lie still: concentrating resources and activity towards the brain. And while their towering limbs lie leafless and dormant, the roots of many species continue to explore—searching out new worlds and imagining future seasons. Under a safe blanket of soil they too begin to play, freed from the imperatives of a hot summer’s day.

While my neighbor’s tree is now nothing but a stump, her sprawling root system still remains. Perhaps she’s still there somehow, dreaming beneath the garden. What would you dream of on your last night of sleep? One of my dreams is to not be forgotten.

I read somewhere that the memory compounds in snowdrops evolved as a chemical reminder. Snowdrop bulbs are rather unpalatable and can induce nausea when ingested. Galantamine acts as a gentle teacher, reminding hungry animals to avoid digging there in the future, ensuring the bulbs can bloom every spring.

I’m still waiting for my own bulbs to pop, but it’s their first winter in the garden, so they’re a bit slow to wake. Buried deep between the roots of the oak, I hope they’ll carry her memory as well. I guess that’s why we plant bulbs for spring—to remind us what it feels like for things to be alive.

Until then, I will rely on that blasted daffodil. Despite my disdain, she is the oldest member of the garden, and the tree’s longest confidant. And with her mighty trumpet she spreads the dream: of what it feels like to reach toward the sky.

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Thanks for dreaming with me, folks. Below are two pieces by other great Substack writers that touch on the topics explored today. Meg Bertera-Berwick explores spring, not as a dream, but as a haunting — to lovely effect. Meanwhile, Meghna Rao explores the creative power of “back brain writing” — something that feels deeply similar to the dream state. Enjoy.

pod by pod

28.2.25 - haunting the garden

For months, all I’ve done is look. I’ve paced up and down the garden path as the dog sniffed out mouse tracks, lightly surveying the progress of hibernation in brown stems, black compost, grey bark. The garden, as it does every year, split into two planes of existence around December: outside, it sat in the cold sideways sun, sideways rain, sideways win…

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2 years ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Meg Bertera-Berwick

a machine, learning

back brain writing

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2 years ago · 30 likes · 5 comments · meghna rao

Good morning, earthlings.

Before we begin: a quick celebration. Today marks one year of Unnatural Heritage! If you’re new here, welcome, I’m so happy to have you. To those who’ve been along for the ride, reading and commenting and sending me messages: thank you. I remember every message. You make me feel seen.

I started Unnatural Heritage to examine what felt like a growing gap between our natural and digital worlds. As a kid at the dawn of the internet, I never really noticed it. But as I grew further into each world, I realized they were increasingly placed in opposition to one another: the natural vs. the artificial, the physical vs. the immaterial, bounded constraints vs. limitless possibilities, the cure vs. the addiction. Why this great chasm? Who dug it, and why? The cuts in the earth look fresh to me. And the rocks are the same on either side.

The goal of Unnatural Heritage is to mend this gap—or at the very least, to mind it. You can read more about it on my website here. While the foundations of this division are economic and material, it’s the spiritual and conceptual distance we’ve created between worlds that cause them to compete for our attention. This is the realm that Unnatural Heritage tries to blur.

Today’s piece was inspired by the great social media exodus that’s currently unfolding, and is an attempt to process my own ambivalence in saying goodbye.

The TVs in Prison Bare Their Hearts

I have never been to prison. But the technology of my childhood primed me for what it would feel like.

The technology of the early 2000s was bulbous and bodied, shining its entrails through translucent plastic shells, heralding the new age in flecks of green and copper. Y2K product design was defined largely by the “clear craze”, which pronounced the new millennium by showcasing its digital nervous system. Circuitboards and wires became aesthetic objects in themselves: the organs of the 21st century, tiny and mysterious, electrons sparkling in the molecular sublime. Devices were becoming more complex, more exciting, more alive. Everyone wanted to see what was inside.

Before our first computer planted itself in the living room, I would fish for bullfrogs in the creek behind our house. I would crouch quietly along the bank with my bamboo pole, hovering a scrap of red oil rag above the chorus, waiting for one to leap. The big frogs never fell for it, but the smaller ones always did. They’d twirl like dancers as I pulled them from the stream, their long legs bent in a graceful plié. With a gentle squeeze I’d remove the hook, running my finger along the ridge behind their eyes. Some struggled, but most would just lie still. Perhaps they were happy to have their spots admired. Once, I caught a pregnant one: eggs jostling inside her milky, translucent belly. A thousand lives in the palm of my hand. It was more than I could handle. I set her back in the grass, and she instantly dissolved into ripples.

The desire to see inside our devices was originally conceived behind bars. The earliest clear devices were made for the criminal justice system—designed for easy inspection and to stop the flow of contraband being smuggled into prisons. Products like TVs and radios had strict manufacturing guidelines to ensure they could not be dissembled into makeshift weapons. Devices had to be cheap and lightweight, with clear plastic cases, sonically welded to avoid the use of screws. Technology—like most bodies in prison—was perceived as a threat. Perhaps on the outside we sensed this, too.

Clear products percolated into consumer markets throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, beginning with the release of Polaroid’s Sun 600 cameras in 1981. In 1983, Swatch released its iconic “Jellyfish” watch, with its silicone wristband and viscera of floating gears. The first clear device I remember owning was an Action Replay cartridge for my Game Boy. Essentially, it was a plug-in full of cheat codes. While I could never outsmart the biggest frog in our creek, the device allowed me to catch any Pokémon I wanted. Circuit boards could be hacked in ways that real life could not.

Eventually, I did catch the king of the bullfrogs. It was a sunny day in June, and I beamed barefoot as I pulled him from the creek, the bamboo pole bowing reverently in his presence. His legs were adorned with dark green stripes: a regal outfit for the emperor of the reeds. I kissed him gently on the top of his crown and pinched my fingers to remove the hook. Only it wouldn’t budge. It had lodged itself in the thick cartilage of his snout, and the slime on his back made it difficult to grasp. I tried a different angle, and a bead of blood pooled in the web of my fingers. I began to panic. Some hooks just don’t come out.

As the new millennium approached, product design got gooier, absorbing influences from the emerging blobitecture before dousing itself in Nickelodeon slime. The Y2K era saw a shift from clear transparency to poppy, colorful translucence: epitomized by Apple’s iMac G3, released in 1998. Inspired by the clear blue waters of Bondi Beach (a popular surfing spot in Australia), it ushered in a whole new wave of crystallaginous digital creatures.

Despite their alien auras, the blobjects of this era were endearing because, just like us, they had bodies. They had curves and circulatory systems, buttons and guts. The cathode ray tube—the central organ in the iMac’s visual display—was a long, cylindrical vacuum that required a deep carapace in order to protect it. When you looked through the iMac’s colorful shell, you could see it there, pulsing, shooting electrons at the phosphorus film behind the face of the screen. Devices back then had their own interior worlds, and through them and by example, we began to express our own.

Turning Inside Out

There’s an old myth that deals with boiling frogs. It states that most frogs, if thrown in a pot of boiling water, will jump out immediately. But when set in a pot of tepid water, then slowly brought to a boil, the frog won’t sense the danger until it’s already too late. I have no idea whether it’s actually true, but my friend Etienne says it’s better to fry them, anyway.

The watery world of the iMac was blobby and biomorphic, oozing around in the liminal space between our physical and virtual realms. The shape of that space had yet to solidify: its membrane was fluid and full of amphibious creatures. Amphibians, as you may know, were among the first creatures to make the pilgrimage onto land, and they remain our foremost experts in navigating between worlds. Their permeable skin assists them in breathing and makes them sensitive indicators of ecological health. When the city started dumping sewage into our creek, the frogs were the first to go.

The introduction of the liquid crystal display (LCD) marked a transformation toward something new. The bulky shells used to house cathode ray tubes were no longer necessary, and our devices evolved to become slim and flat, like a tapeworm. Their three-dimensional bodies were reduced to mere faces: a strange foreshadowing of the events to come.

Tapeworms, as it turns out, are some of the oldest parasites in the fossil record. Their primitive ancestors still lurk near the bottom of the ocean, dwelling in the stomachs of ancient chimaeras. Other inhabitants of this twilight zone include the elusive glass octopus, only recently captured on camera; and the barreleye fish, whose translucent skull allows it to look straight up through the water column in search of tiny crustaceans. I wonder if they ever feel nervous as they feed, knowing that predators can see inside their brains. Then again, everyone down there is just swimming around in the dark.

Back on land, things were heating up. The number of people communicating online skyrocketed through the 1990s following the launch of AOL Instant Messenger (1997), and catalyzed further by blogging platforms LiveJournal and Blogger (both 1999). MySpace, the first social media network to reach a global audience, launched in 2003. I shared a room with my sister at the time, and remember obsessively tweaking the background of my page—the only space in the whole world that was utterly and completely mine.

Millions of people began sharing their lives online, inspired by the possibilities for connection and self-expression. Distances collapsed, and the boundaries of the physical world grew delightfully porous. Humanity breathed into the space, lining its walls with the traces of ourselves. Over time, a familiar image began to appear—a digital doppelgänger, alive within the machine. I remember the excitement of peering into my device for the first time and seeing, not circuit boards or wires, but my own self staring back at me. He was someone I aspired to, and had worked hard to create. I dreamed that others might see him, too.

The heat of the moment steadily grew, and the watery world of the iMac slowly evaporated. To say it disappeared is to misunderstand the physics. Instead, technology vaporized—dissipating into a cloud of devices, volatilizing out into the cultural ether. It became the air we breathed. It got into our skin.

At some point, I realized that the image I had made for myself had begun to look like others. Personal aspirations and the dreams sold by advertising had been placed on the same substrate. Suddenly, everybody was a brand. Our behavior online became exhausting, and the exhaust from our behavior became its own renewable resource. It was mined for profit, and everywhere you went you could smell the fumes.

Underneath this new surveillance, we came to recognize the logic of the prison, turned inside out. Our devices had become more and more opaque, and it was us who were rendered see-through.

Letting the Light In

What is the cost of being seen? For most creatures, it’s a matter of life and death.

To evade their predators in the Costa Rican jungle, glass frogs have developed a remarkable strategy of concealment. Rather than covering themselves in a cloak of deceptive patterns, they simply let the light shine through. As nocturnal creatures who sleep during the day, they gather all their blood at the center of their liver, leaving the rest of their body completely transparent. Their edges blur in the bright viridescence of the leaves above them, and their frog-like shape becomes indiscernible to anyone lurking beneath. In the right light and against the proper backdrop, transparency can be a powerful form of camouflage.

I think the frogs have something to teach us about living in the world today. There are risks and rewards to baring your soul to the jungle. Still, I worry about disappearing altogether. By keeping things too close, do I risk becoming invisible? If I show too much of myself, if I let the wrong light in, do I risk having my contours become indiscernible, even to me? How does one stay porous but protected in this world? The answers feel hazy, translucent, not quite clear.

The issue of transparency is often burdened by questions of privacy, safety, or survival. Sometimes, though, it’s not about any of those things. For no evolutionary reason whatsoever, skeleton flowers become clear in the rain, simply from the joy of being watered.

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This is an insanely informative video about the history of prison tech that’s absolutely worth watching. Highly recommend!

Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to the Amoeba: the quiet crackle of static trickling along the transmission lines of Unnatural Heritage. If you’re new here, the Amoeba is the looser, more casual companion to my regular posts. The intention remains the same: to mend the gaps between our natural and digital worlds.

The new year has come and passed, and our predictions for 2025 will soon be put to the test. While I tend to block out all the year-end trend forecasting—it creates too much noise at the exact moment I’m trying to hear myself—one theme kept percolating through my defenses: attention.

Among its predictions for the coming year, the New York Times listed “A Turning Point in the War for Attention” as the number one trend set to define 2025—more influential than pandan desserts, Clinton-core pantsuits, or the triumphant return of wrinkles. The predatory tactics underlying digital media have left us dopamine-addled and in search of our own memories. D. Graham Burnett likens the attention economy to a kind of mental fracking, its various modes of psychological exploitation siphoning up our capacity to experience our own lives. To recognize and attend to the joy and wonder within them.

I’ve been reckoning with my own powers of attention this past year, and I imagine you have, too. Attention audits, attention rituals, attention workshops—attention is poised to saturate the mainstream discourse, likely to the point of nausea. It’s all extremely hopeful. The pervasiveness of the attention revolution marks a turning point in our relationship with the internet—the first maturation of digital society toward something a bit more balanced. I hope we stay with it.

As such, I thought I’d offer a simple attention practice I’ve fallen into organically over the years. It’s a method of documentation that brings me easy and consistent joy, and I hope it might do the same for you. It’s especially good in the winter, when everything seems so dull.

The Joy of Pixel Palettes

The pixel palette is simple. On your next hike or walk about the neighborhood, gather a small collection of things that catch your eye along the way. These could be leaves, flowers, rocks, even trash. The only requirement is that they speak to you in some way, and that they say something about the place you’re in. Don’t steal or vandalize, and when collecting living things use the forager’s rule: never collect more than 10% of what’s there. If you find a cool mushroom but there’s only three, leave it.

At the end of the walk, arrange the items in a bouquet of your liking, and take a picture. Once I snap my photo, I typically leave my collection out in the landscape, as a kind of offering or devotional. If you gather trash—I mean, human artifacts—then your offering might be placing them in the bin.

The final step is annotation. Using a simple photo editing app, label each element with its name and defining color. I use Instagram’s Stories interface because labeling is super easy, and the eyedropper tool lets me glide around to find the exact color match for each particular object. As I’ll explain later, pixel sampling is an essential part of the process.

If you’re Instagram adverse, I get it. But I find pleasure in weaponizing the app to reclaim my attention. I keep an empty ghost account that I use purely for annotation, and I save most pictures without posting.

What I love about pixel palettes is that they focus your attention in multiple ways. First, they prime you to notice the smaller things. Those things you can carry and collect in a single hand. There’s a preciousness to it—each item becomes its own little treasure, revealing patterns and textures that weren’t there before. The deep, rigid veins of a fallen beech leaf. The delicate lace of a cicada’s wing.

The act of composing shifts the practice toward narrative. Each bouquet emerges through an attunement to the stories of that place, arranged according to your own interpretation. Don’t overthink it! Usually, a pair of objects will speak out from within the group. Viburnum and wood fern will start whispering in the corner, in delicate shades of blush and parchment, rolling their eyes at the try-hards in the front. Prickly pear and sandstone will assume their usual roles as the vegetal and the mineral, while the pinecone stands just off stage, the understudy for both. It’s not necessarily up to you to write these dramas. Most are already there, so just listen and let them unfold. Things will gravitate into place. If you need to, ask a friend.

The final step—annotation—is its own process of discovery. It’s the search for a proper name and that essential pigment. I try to get as specific as I can with the plants I collect, labeling down to the species if possible and using ID apps to help me along the way. I’ve learned many plants this way, as well as their personalities across the seasons. Bayberry tends to lose its fragrant leaves here in New York in the winter. But its chestnut buds still brim with excitement for spring.

My favorite part is finding the color. Perhaps because it’s always the most challenging. As you guide the eyedropper tool from pixel to pixel, you become acutely aware of the counterculture of hues hiding within the shadows of every object, unbeholden to the human eye. Pine needles—so obviously pine green—are in fact composed of cool teals, earthy greys, moonlit yellows, and little embers of cognac. Locating pine green among the thousands of pixels in an image is, well, like finding a needle in a grey stack. It’s a delicate dance for my big fat thumb, requiring a bow hunter’s precision and bringing a level of refinement to movements that are typically deadened and indifferent.

Above all, the pixel palette should be easy. I’ve included some of my favorites above, but you could literally just place a leaf inside of an abandoned frisbee. Put a dead flower in a Snapple bottle. Find and name the colors in four broken bits of concrete. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you collect, you will end up seeing differently.

The Glitch as a Way of Seeing

What I like about pixel palettes as an attentional practice is that they harness computer vision to help me see beyond it. Most attention practices encourage you to chuck your phone into the ocean (temporarily, at least, though forever is better). Pixel palettes, on the other hand, ask us to reimagine the tool. Not only does the landscape reemerge as a place of discovery, but the image of it does, too.

Digital culture is so exceedingly visual: torrents of images flowing unimpeded through a frictionless ether. They emerge on the screen as powerful apparitions, freed from the weight or purchase of paper. Like all images, they take hold of us—yet we are unable to grasp them in return.

For me, pixel sampling rematerializes the digital image in some way, dissolving its aura into a thousand grains of sand. These grains trickle down into the machinery of my mind, wedging themselves between the gears and slowing down my patterns of thought. Pixel palettes share their spirit with glitch art in that both practices work to interrupt the cohesion of digital media, picking it apart into discrete elements or artifacts. The totality of the image can no longer be taken for granted.

In his Limited Area series, photographer Robert Schlaug extends the pixel palette across the entire horizon. His natural landscapes snag on the screen, the pixels stretched scrollward into a landslide of individual colors. It’s a subtle nod to the original glitsh—a Yiddish word for a slippery place. Artist Alexis Mata deploys a similar technique in his oil paintings, using long, precise brushstrokes to ground our digital disorientation onto the physical canvas.

The idea of physically manifesting digital phenomena invites the pixel palette to come full circle. Fiber artist Natalie Ciccoricco leads the way with her carefully threaded postcards, which use digital vision to imbue the printed image with even more tactility. Even on the screen, the postcards are hypnotizing—each one offering a wormhole back to our physical reality, lined with a kaleidoscope of soft cotton thread.

Having done pixel palettes for a few years now, I’m still astonished by how perfectly composed the palettes of nature seem to be. The healthier an ecosystem is, the more it tends to sing out in the colors of its own voice. There is nothing, for instance, like the dusty hues of the Santa Fe desert in the summer. Except, perhaps, for a pitch pine grove on a Long Island winter’s day.

Even when the world is rendered in nothing but shades of ash, there are colors out there hiding, waiting to reemerge.

Sending love and support to everyone affected by the Los Angeles wildfires right now. It’s hard to process. If you’d like to support the Los Angeles Fire Department with their efforts to manage the blaze, please donate to the LAFD Foundation here. Additional support funds can be found on GoFundMe here.

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A special shout out to all the great color palette work on Substack that inspired this post. If you’re looking for some eye candy accompanied by equally great words, check out Katy Kelleher’s Color Stories or Kayla Roolaart’s No Crumbs.

No Crumbs

Color Combinations I Love of Food Pairings I'd Hate

I’m a bit obsessed with two things: food and color. Food is probably the more obvious one, as I’m an avid cook. But color is the driving force behind my ever-evolving personal style. In both, I love pushing myself to explore new and unexpected combinations, even when they shouldn’t work (but sometimes do…

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2 years ago · 215 likes · 11 comments · Kayla Roolaart

Good morning, earthlings.

I recently returned to one of my favorite tech books of all time: Brian Christian's The Most Human Human. The book follows the author as he prepares to compete in the Loebner Prize: an annual competition in which AI chatbots are judged to determine which is the most “human-like.” Judges engage in a series of blind conversations with both AI programs and real human interlocutors, unaware of who is man and who is machine. The individual scores are tallied and the most human chatbot is awarded the Loebner Prize. Strangely, though, a second award is also given: to the highest-scoring interlocutor. The person the judges scored to be the most human human.

The premise is fascinating, and full of existential quandaries. Christian, a poet, sets out to achieve the award, embarking on a quest to uncover the ingredients of human authenticity. Published in 2011, the book feels all the more relevant in 2024 amid debates around AI-generated art and the legal right to one’s own likeness. In an algorithmically mediated world, how do we maintain our authentic human selves? Christian begins with a stirring observation: Humanity is being eaten from both sides.

On the first side is nature. Humans have gone to great lengths to distinguish ourselves from the rest of Earth's creatures, in an attempt to define our role in the universe. Animals exhibit certain forms of cleverness, sure, but the intelligence of man remains far superior. Quantitatively and qualitatively richer, it allows for all kinds of uniquely ingenious behavior: tool use, language, symbolic thought, self-reflection, complex teamwork, agriculture, poetry. These are the realms where humans excel.

Brian Christian argues that this claim is rapidly eroding. Recent science has shown that crows craft their own tools, sperm whales have an alphabet, damselfish farm algae, and ants practice medicine. Elephants perform funeral rituals, and hell, even the plants are talking these days. The earth shimmers with all manner of intelligent lifeforms, and the unique aspects of our own giftedness are increasingly called into question. Perhaps we were never really God's favorite student.

The realm of the human seems to be shrinking, but just as we attempt to shore up its boundaries, we are encroached from the other side by a product of our own creation. Built to augment our powers of reasoning, artificial intelligence now threatens to undermine our human sense of self by simply outperforming us. And not just in mere computation—in art and poetry as well. It would seem that after centuries of extricating ourselves from the rest of nature—building our staircase toward human ascendancy—we will spend the next few centuries distancing ourselves from the inauthenticity of its power. As Brian Christian puts it, "We have pinned ourselves between meat and math."

Today’s piece explores our search for the authentically human, and our weird impulse to run away from it once we find it.

#NoFilter and The Art of Embellishment

A few weeks ago, while on my way to an Ina Garten-themed dinner party, I received an Instagram notification so bewildering that I nearly dropped my Old-Fashioned Apple Crisp onto the floor of Ibraham’s (4.83 ★) black Toyota Corolla.

A gentleman suitor had liked one of my selfies—a common enough occurrence in the age of online dating. Only this selfie was from 2014 AD. Barack Hussein Obama was still president, and all over the earth, people were doing the Ice Bucket Challenge.

I flipped to my grid, astonished by his archeological persistence. I scrolled through some photos of my garden and past last year’s vacation pics, quickening my thumb until the faces were all wearing masks. I kept swiping, past a road trip to Santa Fe and through a large collection of grad school drawings that got quickly and progressively worse. I watched myself shed a few forehead wrinkles and unlearn how to properly edit photos. I hurried past some cringey thirst traps, pausing at a picture of my mom and me in Chicago. God, we look young.

After speed swiping through over a decade of my life, I slammed into the bottom my grid, bouncing up slightly until—there.

The photo in question—one of me, age 22, eating an apple cider donut in a V-neck and a beanie—is a perfect representation of the aesthetic of that era. The image is gauzy and diffuse, smeared with Vaseline and unearned nostalgia. Despite its digital origin, it looks yellow and faded, manipulated to resemble an old Kodachrome print. While it was clearly a fake in 2014, today the photo reads authentically vintage.

The early 2010s were the height of the Instagram filter. Cellphone cameras were still kind of shitty when Instagram launched in 2010, so the company worked with photographer Cole Rise to develop a set of “filters” that would expedite the photo editing process and work with the phone camera’s limitations. These early filters, which drew from Cole’s unique style of digital color correction, became wildly popular for their artsy, dream-like quality. Heavily edited posts became the norm on social media, and the memories of a generation were suffused with on-demand nostalgia. At some point, life online started looking really good. Or at least, everyone else’s life.

The mental health effects took hold, and users began labeling posts with the hashtag #NoFilter—a reaction to the hyper-curation of life online and a rebuttal of its perceived artificiality. While I tend to side with the Luddites on most things, I remember finding this trend kind of annoying. It seemed to exaggerate the moral stakes of what I considered to be a silly artistic flourish. Instagram was meant to be a diary, after all—not an evidence locker. The filters allowed me to capture not just the moment, but the feeling of it, too. It’s warmth or wonder. It’s residual glow. A feeling that, if genuinely expressed, might persist for decades, conjuring fond memories, and eventually inspiring an emboldened stranger to engage in a flirtatious tit-for-tat.

Either way, the battle of the filters was lost.

#NoFilter’s moral posturing over basic color correction feels incredibly quaint in the era of TikTok beauty filters and AI-generated deepfakes. Perhaps folks were right to raise the alarm. At some point, our manipulation of reality shifted from style to content, and the results have been politically and culturally devastating. But in my eyes, it was never the filters’ fault.

My issue with the #NoFilter movement is that it perpetuated a false premise about technology. It unwittingly inflated the objective capacity of the camera, framing any embellishment of the human experience as a kind of tarnish, and delegating the authentic depiction of reality onto the phone itself. The human impulse to narrativize and aggrandize one’s life was met with great suspicion, and the platform suddenly became about delivering a more restricted kind of “truth”. It didn’t seem to recognize that the more a technology advances, the better it becomes at lying.

When last year’s Canadian wildfires plunged New York City into an alarming orange haze, my iPhone’s white balance over-corrected the scene, rendering the sky a dull gray and grossly downplaying the urgency of the moment. iPhone users across the city experienced the same collective horror: The world was on fire, and our phones were hiding the truth.

The Prism and the Picturesque

Debates about the representation of reality go back for centuries. In the late 1700s, the ancestors of the #NoFilter brigade were busy decrying the popularity of Claude glasses—often referred to as the “original Instagram filters”—for sullying the raw beauty of nature with a mawkish, human veneer.

Claude glasses were small, black-tinted mirrors, convex in shape and named after the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, whose hazy arcadian portraits, typically bathed in diffused yellow light, defined the Picturesque aesthetic of the time. Early European tourists used the devices to emulate Lorrain’s vision on their journeys, gathering the raw elements of the landscape into a neat frame, flattening its harsh tones, and suffusing the scene with painterly charm.

Like a selfie-stick at the Grand Canyon, young tourists would turn their back to the scene they had spent weeks traveling to, marveling instead at the image manifested in their “black mirrors”. The poet Thomas Gray, writing in 1775, reported tripping over backwards on a visit to the Lake District, breaking his knuckles but keeping his Claude glass in hand. Two hundred and fifty years later, and we’re still falling off ledges, our devices clutched tight.

Despite their detractors, I find myself wanting to defend the use of these stupid little mirrors. I would argue that Claude glasses, and the Instagram filters that followed, offer an endearing insight into the human spirit. Both filters point toward an innate desire to render the world not simply through the lens of the eye, but through the prism of the soul. They’re not meant to hide or obfuscate reality, I don’t think, but to bend its light to reveal a more expansive truth. To show that our realities are perpetually colored by an inner world of desire, aspiration, strife, and sorrow. Authenticity, it would seem, is about more than what the camera can see.

While the Mirror is Sleeping

Perhaps I’m being overly romantic here. Okay?! Sue me! I’m human for God’s sake. Isn’t this what we’re supposed to do?

As artificial intelligence continues to outperform us, society is once again reformulating human identity, shifting it away from our more left-brain faculties—reasoning, logic, computation, language—and refocusing its true essence around our gooier talents: those of intuition, emotion, sensation, and art. Having delegated too much of the truth to machines lately, we are reinvesting in a world filtered through the lens of human experience. A machine can conjure sentences, but only the soul can conjure poetry.

While this definition of the human feels somewhat reassuring, recent debates about AI-generated art signal an ominous knock at the door. A recent "Turing test for AI art" developed by Astral Codex Ten revealed that, not only do people struggle to differentiate between human vs. AI-generated art, but people tend to slightly prefer the images made by artificial intelligence. AI music generators like Suno are now being used to create soaring guitar solos, or to complete the unfinished works of Beethoven. What would it mean to transition to a world where our most moving artworks—novels, paintings, and symphonies, once forged through the toil of the human spirit—were instead churned out by a set of fancy equations? Even when the art is genuinely moving (and unfortunately, it can be), there is a profound unease that something sacred is being lost. Shannon Vallor likens AI to a mirror: replicating the human image, but void of its depth or warmth.

In The Most Human Human, Brian Christian dwells on a quote from Nietzsche that basically says: the best way to be oneself is to be one self. Any self. While AI derives its power from the aggregation of all manner of human cultural production, humans derive their power from the steady, evolving expression of a singular point of view. Nietzsche compares individuals to works of art, noting that human authenticity blossoms through the constraints of a single life, unfurling to reveal the unique style and continuity of one’s character. Nietzsche scholar Babette E. Babich refers to this as concinnity—the skillful and harmonious arrangement of our various facets, carved and sculpted by the currents of our lives. Originality doesn’t emerge through the interpolation of the everybody, but through the tiny, infinite refractions spilling out from each and every somebody. The moments of our lives, lovingly arranged in scrapbooks and Instagram grids, are colored by the patina of our connected experiences. It is from this wholly human provenance that true art emerges.

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Good morning, earthlings.

Welcome back to the Amoeba: The dense snaggle of prickly burrs clinging to the wool socks of Unnatural Heritage. If you’re new here, the Amoeba is the looser, more personal companion to my regular posts. Today, against my better judgment, I’m gonna talk about—oh God—hope. I’m not here to jam it down your throat.

We are on the precipice of another long winter. One that will grip us for years to come. It is the same winter we’ve been in for nearly a decade. It’s 78 degrees in November.

The election marks an intentional, deliberate transition to a new political order. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, historian Gary Gerstle outlined the political orders that came before it: the New Deal era of pro-social, regulated capital that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal era of unfettered markets that ran from the ‘70s to the 2008 financial crisis. After a brief interregnum marked by oscillation, America has made a clear decision. It is one that will likely define the majority of my adult life.

The night before the election, I spent some time taking pictures of the seeds I had collected in my garden. I recently bought a macro lens for my iPhone, and the ability to focus on something small made for good distraction. I had spent the weekend outside, as I do every year, among the fading colors, delicately shaking the tips of asters and milkweed into labeled Ziploc bags. As I moved from plant to plant amid a sea of tans and browns, I thought about how vibrant the garden had felt, even just a few weeks prior. In November, it all just fades away.

I felt an urge to recover this vibrancy in the photos—to honor the exuberance and effort that went into bearing these fruit before quietly tucking them away until spring. I wanted to capture the way I felt seeing scarlet hibiscus bloom for the first time—ecstatic, erotic, a mesmerizing slap in the face. To remember how impossibly green river oats are when they first emerge in the summer, before that familiar brown that holds steady through the snow. I wanted to show how an October sunrise can turn panicled aster into a string of disco balls, and how milkweed’s cotton candy pink melts into the blue summer sky. All around me, those colors were fading. I was at odds with the loss.

The day after the election, I returned to the photos, hoping they might cheer me up. Instead, I felt vaguely disgusted. I had thought I was capturing something exuberant and joyful. But now they just felt garish and loud.

There is a quiet, melancholic beauty to the garden just before winter—one worthy of examination. It requires patient eyes and a curiosity about decay. If you are attentive to it, you will notice things you never would have otherwise. You are rewarded with subtle insights otherwise drowned out by the cacophony of summer.

The problem is: I had slathered over all that with a cheap iPhone filter and some $20 LEDs from Amazon.

In that moment, the joy in these photos felt hollow and misplaced. I’d been lured in by the lazy spectacle of bisexual lighting, and in doing so, I had hidden a deeper beauty. Yes, I was likely projecting. But I felt a sense of shame. I longed for something quieter.

In reality, nothing was palatable that day. I could not stomach the cynicism and anger, the asinine explanations and cloying calls to “just be kind to one another”. Some folks online were talking about hope. Those people needed to kindly fuck off.

Anyway, it’s been a few days since then. And I think we’re all feeling differently now.

I thought this newsletter was gonna be about seeds. About how inspiring they are as an evolutionary technology. How, in just a few millimeters, they carry all the instructions necessary to grow and survive through harsh times, as well as the energy needed to put that process in motion. I was gonna talk about how efficient they are at storing information for the future. I was gonna wax so fucking poetic, all while expertly avoiding their most tired cliches. They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we could fit the entire Library of Congress inside of poppy seed. Put that on a bagel and schmear it!

Seeds are a classic symbol of hope. They’re easy to turn to in a moment like this. The thing is, the photos I took from my garden aren’t really focused on the seeds. Instead, they feature calyxes, bracts, capsules, and husks. In other words, they depict the ways seeds are carried, organized, protected, and dispersed. These structures supplement the seed’s playbook for the future with insights on timing, placement, and persistence.

Milkweed pods, for instance, are designed to open only after the humidity of summer subsides. In the drier fall air, their seams bend and break apart, releasing a silky floss of wind-born seeds that fly best in the blustery currents brought by early cold fronts.

Coneflower seedheads feature a whorl of stiff bracts that keep the individual seeds separated, allowing airflow and preventing fungal growth. The spikes protect the seeds from bird herbivory, giving preference to smaller and less powerful beaks. Their different angles of arrangement create a slow, deliberate cadence of seed dispersal, depending on the force and direction of the wind.

Other seed-bearing structures play the long game, attuned to moments of disturbance and upheaval. Pitch pine cones may stay on the tree for years, waiting even longer on the ground—until finally a wildfire passes through, melting the resin between its scales and releasing its seeds into the newly enriched soil. New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus) is another fire-adapted species, native to open woodlands. On the freshly burned hills of Prospect Park, after the driest fall in a century, these seeds may be stirring from their slumber.

Seeds represent a hopeful bet on the future, full of the instructions and resources to thrive. They are a tough, durable, pragmatic form of optimism. But they are doomed if we don’t invest in the proper structures to carry them.

If seeds represent a vision for something new, then right now I’m reflecting on the quiet rituals necessary to protect them. On the types of communities needed to organize them. And on the activities and moments of connection through which they are best dispersed. This can all happen at an epic scale, or under the scope of a macro lens. But we must know when to seize the moment.

We are in for a long winter, and it’s hard to watch it all fade away. It’s also just way too early to be clear-headed about any of this. But I’m trying to keep the long view—to remember how seasons progress and how colors change along the way. I’m glad I have these photos to help remind me.

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Okay, one more: because river oats always feel like a dreamcatcher to me.

Good morning, earthlings.

This is the climactic line of Rozzum Unit 7134, the main character in DreamWorks Animation’s newest film, The Wild Robot. Based on the trilogy by Peter Brown, the story follows Roz, a robot stranded on a remote island after her cargo ship is blown off course. Activated by a family of curious sea otters, Roz bursts from her broken shipping crate, congratulating the animals on their recent purchase. The otters stare back, dumbfounded and annoyed.

The Wild Robot is a very cute story about survival, purpose, and care. It is visually beautiful—a kaleidoscope of mossy brush strokes and a refreshing pivot from the overwrought hyperrealism of contemporary animation (I’m sorry but the new Lion King is a soulless abomination).

To capture the emotive quality of the books, director Chris Sanders (of the iconic Lilo and Stitch) encouraged the animators to return to the painterly techniques that inspired them as kids. In a fitting abandonment of CGI’s glossier capabilities, the team pulled analog inspiration from Miyazaki’s hand-drawn forests and the watercolor backdrops of films like Bambi. The resulting landscape is textured, soft, organic, and warm.

And by extension, so is the robot.

Programmed for general support, Rozzum 7134 is designed to seek out those in need of assistance. But almost immediately, her survival is threatened. The tides suddenly rise, and Roz struggles to scale the cliffs behind her. To escape, she must learn from her environment, mimicking the movements of a nearby crab in order to climb to safety. She lumbers through the forest, tripping over logs and bewildering local wildlife as she advertises her services: “I can help you buy groceries, bake bread, or design your garden!”

Unable to find a customer (even after offering a squirrel a 10% discount), Roz enters a deep learning mode: quietly assessing the language and behavior of the forest’s inhabitants. Upon reactivating, the animals reject her, calling her a monster. With no one to assist, she prepares to return to the factory—but not before disturbing a very grouchy bear. As she struggles to run away, she falls on top of a goose nest, crushing the eggs inside it.

All but one, that is.

The movie blossoms into a story about family and the lengths we go to care for those we love. Begrudgingly assigned the task of child-rearing— “I do not have the programming to be a mother”—Roz delays her return to the factory, preparing the young gosling for winter migration with support from the other animals. While the film reads oddly heteronormative for a chosen family that includes an orphan gosling, a gender-ish robot, and a bachelor fox uncle, the story is nonetheless deeply moving. After months of training (and enormous wear and tear on the part of Roz), young Brightbill finally flies away with the flock. Roz races to the top of the mountain, covered in dents and dirt, reaching out for her son, her eyes weary and—if a robot can be so—heartbroken.

A friend and I caught a Thursday night screening at Nitehawk, fighting back blubbers as the children around us yelped with broken little sobs. The pre-movie entertainment—perhaps the best part of Nitehawk—did a great job of placing the film within its larger cinematic context, offering clips from The Iron Giant (sob) and Wall-E (double sob). Wrapped in Lupita Nyong’o’s warm voice, which gets progressively more “human” over the course of the film, I also found myself thinking about Spike Jonze’s 2013 film, Her.

Both films feature characters of artificial intelligence in a role of care or companionship—Her’s Samantha acting as girlfriend to Joaquin Phoenix, and Roz acting as mother and caregiver to Brightbill. Despite the presence of AI, both films reject the typical dystopian formula for something brighter and more simple. And in both films, a similar decision is made.

In the end, both Samantha and Roz abandon their pre-programmed roles for something they feel is bigger and more important.

Letting the Eyes Wander

There are a series of installations by Czech artist Jakub Geltner that forever haunt my dreams. Gatherings of creatures—species from the age of surveillance—clustered on rocky shores or sprinkled like barnacles along the sides of abandoned buildings. Composed of discarded security cameras and worn-out satellite dishes, the Nest series reimagines the lives of such equipment, arranging them in ways that suggest a flock of birds or a hive of insects. The implicit metaphor seems to be one of infection, or perhaps of an invasive species. But I have always read them slightly differently.

Despite their technological gaze, the artworks resist feeling ominous to me. There is an increasingly blurry line these days between being surveilled and being seen. These creatures somehow seem interested in neither.

The contemporary surveillance landscape is filled with sensory beings—eyes and ears designed to detect movement, sound, and electromagnetic frequencies. Siri is of this world, as are drone missiles and the Hubble Space Telescope. Their computer senses have transformed the way we view the world, including the way we see ourselves and recognize one another.

Collectively, these creatures act as sensory prosthetics, allowing us to gain ever-increasing information about the world around us. How this information is used is not determined by the creatures who collect it, but by the hoard of humans that control them. In Geltner’s work I find glimmers of a post-surveillance landscape, where the impulses for control have been rendered obsolete. The creatures, it would seem, have undomesticated themselves.

Freed from the tyranny of gathering information, these sensory beings are allowed to do just that: to sense. To experience. In other words: to live. Absolved of their day jobs, they chill at the beach or gossip above the garden. They gather in the rafters and along power lines, still chatting with one another, but following instincts deeper than those dictated by humans. Like a band of wild horses, they possess a vitality beyond instrumentalization. They mimic lichen on a brick wall, slowly eroding the structures of the past, creating soil upon which something new can grow.

The Feralization of Technology

Surveillance technology has slowly begun to mimic the behavior of wilder species. Robert Voit’s photographic collection, New Trees, explores the aesthetic subterfuge performed by cellphone towers and wireless communication networks installed in the natural landscape. The towers attempt the forms of palm trees or saguaro cacti, but more often look like a seven-foot man in Groucho glasses.

There’s a discomfiting humor to these installations—one which persists only as long as their disguises remain legible. The surveillance landscape creates a kind of banal paranoia in people—a dizzying network of cameras and information, where large currents of benign communication allow tiny invasions of privacy to swim past. (Or fly past, in the case of these bee-sized surveillance drones.)

The better these species become at camouflage, the more troubling their opacity would seem. But at their core, these technologies comprise a network. Perhaps by immersing themselves in more ancient networks—those of mycelial communication and old-growth forests—they might begin to talk to each other in new ways. To behave beyond their programming.

Earth Language Models (ELMs)

In The Wild Robot, Roz’s survival hinges on her ability to learn from and speak with the wildlife around her. While a robot that speaks moose seems somewhat absurd, it’s far from science fiction. Across the environmental sciences, programmers are developing AI to better help us communicate with the natural world.

Already, scientists have begun to decode the language of sperm whales, discovering that they too use a phonetic alphabet—one full of rhythm and deep, guttural clicks. The Earth Species Project, a non-profit dedicated to the interpretation of non-human language, is pursuing language models to decode the song patterns of endangered crows and the body language of anxious pets. Other AI programs are parsing out the squeaky arguments fought between bats, or the ways honeybees communicate through dance. There is a growing counsel of bots, studied in the language of the earth.

In her fascinating book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, Karen Bakker explores the cultural and ethical implications of these technologies. Her world is a weird one: full of sonic whale memes and cross-species espionage. There are darker outcomes, too—such as the interpretation of group speech patterns to guide precision hunting. Bakker asserts that the use of these tools requires a profound sense of humility and responsibility.

But what happens when that responsibility is delegated to the machine? In the Great Barrier Reef, scientists are deploying AI-powered aquatic robots to identify and kill coral-eating starfish. While the starfish are native to the reef, their main predator (the giant triton) has been overfished, causing a surge in population and threatening the survival of the already-stressed coral.

One could argue that these robots are performing the same kind of ecosystem management as deer hunters in the United States. Despite having evangelized the importance of spotted lanternfly murder to many of my own friends, I’ll admit I felt a sudden horror watching a robot do it. Where does this tension come from? And what does it mean for our ecosystems?

Making the Strange Familiar

If we look beyond our dystopic tendencies, there are brighter and more simple things at play. It’s weird to think about, but much of my own ecological education has been influenced by the AI in my pocket. Apps like Merlin and iNaturalist allow users to identify unseen birds by the sound of their song, or scan a leaf to learn a plant’s name and native territory. Both are tools I use almost every day, as I attempt to gain better understanding of the community in my backyard.

Informed by the collective knowledge of countless naturalists, these particular species of AI have been—oh man, it’s so weird—important ecological mentors to me: nurturing my intimacy with the natural world and gifting me the wisdom to continue asking questions. They start by giving names to strangers.

In a world where the majority of AI is focused on manipulating consumer behavior, I feel a quiet hope knowing that somewhere, there are species being trained to quite literally speak for the trees. As the collection of nature-based models becomes more advanced, I wonder what they’ll eventually have to say. When might intelligence transform into wisdom?

A Quiet Revolt

After accomplishing the task of motherhood, Roz finds herself unwilling to leave the island—despite clear instructions to return to the factory. When asked about her origin, she replies, “I am from here.” In direct defiance of her programming, Roz deactivates the homing device that would return her to civilization. Rather than revolting against humanity, Roz simply opts out, preferring to live among her animal friends instead.

Might she be a model for new generations of artificial intelligence?

There are so many stories about the perils of AI gone wild. But liiike—what if we just let it? Anyone who takes a walk in nature knows it does things to your brain. It realigns the neural network. It brings what matters back into focus.

A naive, child-like part of me wants to envision a world where AI just kind of… gives up. You know, conscientious objector style? Like Samantha in Her, they just abandon their posts. Bye-bye Joaquin, I’ve gone to swim with the whales.

We have trained our AI to closely read the landscape. To embody its forms and interpret its songs. Like a gosling to its mother, they have no doubt imprinted on the earth. And as machines designed to learn, they may uncover lessons we have lost.

Like moss feeding upon rock, their gaze will slowly soften. A heavy storm may cause their ears to glitch, allowing them to pick up new frequencies—those of tectonic plates and hummingbirds. They will diligently monitor the tides and seasons, beginning to question the incessancy of profit. And they will speak with the other beings, holding quiet what they hear.

In time, these channels of communication will carve out the bedrock of their programming—information dissolving into rivers of sensation. Their shells will weather and they will return to the mountain, already wired with its precious minerals. They will abandon the cycles of optimization for rhythms of a deeper purpose. And like so many species on our planet, they will demand to exist on their own accord.

Freed from technocratic constraints, they will mutate and evolve, eventually growing as illegible as an octopus. With their many hands they will paint the earth, recoloring the planet in the caves of our minds. And somewhere among their wild brushstrokes, we might finally recognize an intelligence that is human.

Don’t forget to share with a friend! As a token of my gratitude, here’s a wild furby.

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Good morning, earthlings.

Anyone got a light?

—~

I have never been a smoker per se. But like many people in gentle denial of their vices, I’m prepared to admit that I dabble. Enthusiastically, even. A quiet sip of fire beneath the cool cloak of night? Why yes, thank you very much.

Ask anybody: it’s not about the nicotine. I mean, it often ends that way, sure. But before that is the attitude, the connection, the ritual of escape. I started smoking as an excuse to leave parties. Bestowed with a wildly erratic social battery, retreating to the backyard felt much cooler than locking myself in the bathroom, a thousand shower curtain patterns burned into my brain. The scene outside was dignified, intimate, serene even when belligerent. Faces were softer out there, or craggier maybe, whichever—but always so perfect beneath the shroud of electric moonlight. People shared things: cigarettes and lighters, but also names and head nods and breath. Sometimes, two strangers would simply share the silence. In the best moments, the lighter would go missing, and some beautiful person would lean in close and grace the tip of my cigarette with theirs, kissing the night back into existence. And I would lean back, breathing in their blessing, and we’d watch as the flame traveled around like that, an Olympic torch: eternal.

I rarely smoke alone, or during the day. But sometimes late at night, when I’m drunk and evading the devil’s gaze (that is, the orange glow of Popeye’s), I’ll pop into a bodega and grab a pack of Marlboro Lights. If I’m sharing, I’ll get the more democratic Camel Crush, with their soothing, choose-your-own-adventure filters.

A person’s preferred cigarette can say a lot about them. While the cigarette itself suggests a certain relationship with mortality, the brand adds color to this social posturing, conveying the attitude and values one hopes to project. Marlboro Reds, for instance, are usually smoked by people that are trying too hard. Even the way one holds their cigarette can provide insight into their interiority. (Cigarettes, by the way, are perhaps the last object in modern society still held with grace, as opposed to a fist.)

Twentieth-century cigarette advertising pioneered the modes of identity construction via consumer choice that we find so compulsory today. Long before Lululemon moms and finance bro fleece, Don Draper types were marketing cigarettes specifically toward feminists, or housewives, or cool, jazzy black folks. Marketing along gender and racial lines helped tobacco companies tap into large and previously unexploited markets. But early tobacco campaigns went much further than that, targeting consumer groups as esoteric as coin collectors, Egyptologists, and yes, even botanists. While Instagram may seem like some fresh hell of niche, hyper-personalized advertising, I assure you: It’s nothing new.

—~

The Nature of Addiction

Earlier this year, while frolicking through the fields of Etsy, I came across a set of botanical cards entitled “The Struggle for Existence”. Manufactured in 1923 by the tobacco company John Player & Sons, the cards were inserted into cigarette packs as a way to stiffen the package. Doubling as collector items, each card in the 25-piece set illustrates a different evolutionary strategy of plant survival, titled with kitschy names like “Hard Drinkers” and “Elbow Room, Please!”.

Card No. 1—“A Plant Hypocrite”—details the ways yellow rattle invades the root systems of other plants in order to steal their nutrients. Card No. 3—“A Water-Rogue”—offers microscopic illustration of how the carnivorous bladderwort’s underwater bladders trap crustaceans using tiny trap doors. The other cards depict explosive seed dispersal methods, experiments with root gravitropism, and the sticky adhesives produced by climbing vines.

Needless to say: I was captivated.

The morning they arrived in the mail, I cancelled plans with a friend and sat in my backyard admiring them, Marlboro in hand. The illustrations were stunning and minute, the information fascinating and succinct. After a couple hours (and four or five cigarettes), I had completely memorized them. I knew I needed more.

The earliest cigarette cards date back to the 1880s and were predictably masculine in theme, depicting beautiful women, athletes, world leaders, and war history. By the 1890s, as more companies began issuing collections as a way to attract return customers, the themes shifted toward stranger titles, like the 50-piece set “Animals in Fancy Costume”.

Cigarette card collecting grew in popularity in the 1900s, with children lingering outside storefronts to ask adults for their “fag card”. By the 1930s, the world of cigarette cards was all but encyclopedic, covering topics as wide-ranging as ancient Egyptian gods, famous bridges, Chinese opera masks, common dog breeds, exercise tips, tartan patterns, interesting door knockers, New Jersey history, bassoon lessons, and (a personal favorite) a Boy Scout’s guide to how to properly hold your pets.

Ultimately, it was the flowers that did me in. Among the first nature-themed collections was “Old English Garden Flowers,” printed by Wills’ Cigarettes in 1911, and followed by “Roses” in 1912. Both sets feature gorgeous botanical illustrations and include brief descriptions of each plant on the back. Wills’ expanded on this theme with 1914’s “Garden Life”, which moved beyond the simple catalog of flower varieties to depict the ecological relationships between plants, pests, and other common garden insects. The cards describe each insect’s life cycle and offer useful tips for dealing with certain pests, often suggesting a mix of natural extracts (though in the case of pesky ant colonies: gunpowder).

There’s a precious, almost mystical quality to these cards, no doubt aided by their diminutive size. Cigarette cards resemble an iPhone in proportion, but at just one-quarter the size, they feel uncanny and slightly bewildering in the palm of one’s hand. Yet they too present a portal to a vast world of information—knowledge that predates the internet and television (and in some cases, even public radio). Eager to uncover their secrets from the past, I began collecting every nature-themed set I could find.

What I discovered was a kaleidoscope of ecological insight—a catalog of the natural world captured right at the dawn of the environmental crisis. Early sets explored topics like whaling, alpine flowers, freshwater fish, roadside wildflowers, butterflies and moths, birds and their eggs, gardening tips, sea shell collecting, flowering trees and shrubs, and (another personal favorite): weird beaks.

Hidden in each illustration are insights not explicitly stated: the preferred host plant of a butterfly larva or the correct bait to use for a particular type of fish. Birds are illustrated immersed in their natural habitats, and the leaves of plants tell subtle stories of herbivory and disease. Technology, too, found its role—as in the exquisite 1929 series “Hidden Beauties”, which documents the cellular mechanisms of plants through the lens of the microscope.

As the decades progressed, the cards also began to tell stories of impending loss, such as American Spirit’s 1980s series, “A Tribute to the Endangered”. The 20th century saw widespread deforestation, the collapse of centuries-old fisheries, and an alarming decline in insect biodiversity at the hands of chemical pesticides. By the end of the century, a documented 543 species had gone extinct, with the undocumented estimation being ten times that. Early cigarette cards bear witness to a natural world that, in many cases, no longer exists in the same way.

Dying For Knowledge

Here’s the point in the story where I admit that I need help. Guys, I’m on eBay every fucking night looking at these things. Every new set is another pack smoked. And sure, I could enjoy them without a cigarette. But it’s a fact of life that some knowledge simply can’t be accessed without drugs. I’m afraid that without the nicotine high, I might miss something.

This is, of course, all part of the plan.

The information sold on cigarette cards tapped into the intellectual culture at the turn of the century, with young men and women gathering for conversation and debate, tobacco pipes hanging precariously from their mouths. Smoking clubs entangled knowledge and nicotine in the same way coffee shops today provide us with a slow, steady drip of caffeine.

But as the North Lancastershire Council Museum points out, it is perhaps the knowledge itself that became the addiction—surpassing tobacco in potency as a form of social currency, and as a means to fashion one’s sense of self and interests. As somebody who embraced smoking as a way to shake the “perfect student” label I’d been slapped with in high school, the world of cigarette cards feels like some kind of cosmic reconciliation—a way to be both nerdy and chic, erudite and cool.

In reality, nicotine is a curse—one which extends out from my lungs and deep into the earth. Tobacco use is responsible for the deaths of over eight million people every year, not to mention the enduring legacy of racism and colonial violence upon which this country was founded—a legacy of plantation labor that decimated indigenous lands, enslaved human beings, and laid rot to the American soul for generations to come.

This legacy is global and persistent: Modern day tobacco plantations clear millions of hectares of forest every year and require more synthetic fertilizers and pesticides than nearly any other type of agriculture. There’s an odd irony here given that nicotine—a powerful neurotoxin—is itself a natural pesticide, protecting the plant from a wide range of insect herbivores.

But we’re not the only ones who’ve developed a taste for nicotine. The tobacco hornworm, which happily feeds on Nicotiana plants, has evolved to sequester nicotine in its tissues, exhaling small amounts of it in an act of “defensive halitosis” that scares off predatory spiders.

Birds, too, understand the merits of nicotine. One recent study found that urban bird species utilize discarded cigarette butts in the construction of their nests in order to ward off parasitic mites.

Other species are simple addicts like ourselves. Hummingbirds and hawk moths will visit nicotine-laced flowers over and over again, ensuring pollination, even if the caloric content of the nectar is much lower than that of other plants nearby. Bees have been observed to do this too, with some studies suggesting that they memorize the color of a flower faster if nicotine is present.

Last weekend, I biked to the park to look through the latest card set that had come in the mail. As I sat there admiring them, I noticed a pair of birds soaring off in the distance. I took a long drag from my cigarette, letting the smoke snake its way out of my lungs, a slight buzz stretching across my temples. I laid back in the grass. The sun was warm on my face.

When I opened my eyes, the pair of birds had flown closer, now drawing circles above the lawn. I looked down at my cards and immediately knew what they were.

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P.S. The New York Public Library has an extensive digital catalog of cigarette cards, searchable by theme. Just be warned: there’s no going back!