(Continued from Part 1)
Photos 37-40 focuses on what is arguably the most critical component of the South Fork’s green infrastructure after the trails themselves, namely pedestrian bridges and boardwalks that cross over the creek, its wetlands, and obstructions like railroads. The political backstory of these structures illustrates my point about the hazy boundaries separating the public and private domains under neoliberalism. Photos 37 and 38 show the boardwalk stairs and pedestrian railroad bridge of the South Peachtree Creek Trail, a 3.6-mile corridor built in several phases between 2010 and 2018, and extending east from the campus of Emory University along the South Fork and its tributary Burnt Fork Creek. While the land through which the trail runs together with the physical improvements on the land are owned, managed, and maintained by DeKalb County, a public authority, the trail itself is the brainchild of the PATH Foundation, a private nonprofit organization which claims to have spearheaded the construction of over 300 miles of multi-use trails in Georgia since its establishment in 1991. This public-private partnership pays dividends to both parties. By delegating the planning and oversight of the project to PATH, the county avoids being drawn into the NIMBY-fueled controversies that invariably flare up when the interests of private homeowners seem threatened by decisions regarding public land use. For its part PATH garners the kind of public attention and positive publicity that translates into more donations from deep-pocket foundations and corporate philanthropists who are wary of DeKalb’s racially supercharged politics and therefore reluctant to entrust their money to county government and its elected officials. Photo 39 shows Lullwater Bridge that spans the South Fork on the property of nonprofit Emory University, another example of green infrastructure that operates in the liminal space between the private and public spheres. Installed by Emory in 2008 so that medical personnel, faculty, and staff can make the pleasant 10-minute walk between the VA Medical Center and the campus rather than battling the traffic congested streets surrounding the campus, the bridge has come to be regarded by nearby neighborhoods (like ours) as a public asset belonging to everyone. This claim envisions the creek and its improvements as part of the neighborhood “commons.” Indeed, the decision to build Lullwater Bridge was in part a response to the public criticism occasioned by the removal of an earlier bridge, an act which reinforced the perception of Emory as a bastion of Coca-Cola privilege, gated off from the larger community. On which more below.
Photo 40 offers a third variation on the public-private ambiguity inherent in the neoliberal state and its preference for stakeholder governance, showing how nonprofit conservancies have no choice but to play nice with neighborhood homeowners and public authorities if they wish to get anything done. What you see here the Cheshire Farm pedestrian bridge that crosses the North Fork of Peachtree Creek in the shadows of the Interstate 85/Georgia 400 interchange, which in 2014 was expanded by the Georgia Department of Transportation to include a flyover ramp. Nearby residential neighborhoods and businesses, which have been on the receiving end of disruptive GDOT projects in the past, rallied around the Lindbergh LaVista Corridor Coalition, a local nonprofit whose stated mission is “to protect our homes from out-of-control redevelopment.” Seeing an opportunity to advance its own agenda of conserving creek banks, removing invasive species, restoring natural habitat, and expanding the network of creek trails in the area, the South Fork Conservancy, another nonprofit newcomer founded in 2008, jumped into the negotiations and emerged with two concessions from GDOT: a half-mile trail extension that included the Cheshire Farm bridge, and the inclusion of the most directly impacted neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Places. A few years later the Conservancy would score another, equally significant victory with the unveiling of the Confluence Bridge (Photo 28).
Photos 41-44 examines the Conservancy’s showcase project, Zonolite Park. While DeKalb County owns the park, it has entered into a shared-custody arrangement with the Conservancy similar to the one it negotiated with the PATH Foundation and the South Peachtree Creek Trail, three miles away. From 1950 until 1970 the park was the site of a processing plant operated by the W.R. Grace Co., which processed the mineral vermiculite, mined in Libby, Montana, into a profitable attic insulation material marketed under the trademark name Zonolite. After the EPA discovered that the vermiculite contained natural asbestos fibers, knowledge of which company executives had covered up since the late 1970s, a federal grand jury indicted Grace and the top corporate brass in 2005. A few years later the parties agreed to a cash settlement of $250 million—the largest in EPA’s history up to that time—$2 million of which was eventually earmarked to cover the costs of hauling away 27,000 tons of contaminated soil at Zonolite Park. From the ashes springs the Phoenix, as the official symbol of Atlanta tells us. Today, the rehabilitated 12-acre site includes a sandy “beach” along the creek (Photo 41), a meadow and wetlands, a community garden named after a settlement of freed black people who are said to have lived there after the Civil War (Photo 42), a first-growth forest where the Conservancy puts its sentimentalized conservation principles on display (Photo 43), and a pavilion where “pop-up” meetings are held to keep neighborhood property owners informed about the Conservancy’s halting progress in extending the creek trails from Emory University to the Confluence Bridge (Photo 44). Zonolite Park might be compared to the model farms popularized in the nineteenth century, where progressive agricultural techniques were demonstrated to the citizenry and officialdom in the hope that they would strike a chord and spread more generally. In the case of Zonolite, what is being demonstrated are best practices in the field of nature conservation, especially the removal of invasive species and the restoration of native plants and wildlife. Another practical benefit of the park is that it is good advertising, keeping the nonprofit Conservancy in the eye of both the public and the donors whose support is essential for habitat restoration to continue.
Photos 45-48 shows how the medley of green infrastructure discussed here—paved paths, unpaved trails, boardwalks, pedestrian bridges, remediated brown field land—serves to connect public parks whose origins go back to the Golden Age of Capitalism. W.D. Thomson Park (Photo 45) is a 29-acre space tucked away between several upscale residential neighborhoods, offering a no-frills playing field, two tennis courts, a swing set and monkey bars, covered picnic tables, and one lonely basketball hoop. In contrast, the behemoth, 120-acre Mason Mill Park, which is located a mile away from Thomson, boasts an oversize playground (Photo 47), a 17-court tennis complex and club house (Photo 46), a brand-new community garden, a senior citizen center, and a beautiful and well-used public library within easy walking distance of the senior center (Photo 48). Calling these South Fork parks “neighborhood amenities” or saying they enhance the “quality of life”-- to borrow the euphemistic language of real estate flyers and neighborhood association newsletters--does them a disservice. These parks represent substantial public investments whose return is measured in local property values and tax revenues. As the PATH Foundation and the South Fork Conservancy well know, the political appeal of green infrastructure is based in large measure on the belief that knitting these public investments together with paths, bridges, and boardwalks will generate a virtuous circle of ever-rising home values, not for the county as a whole, much less the metropolitan region as a whole, but for those neighborhoods fortunate enough to be within walking, jogging, or cycling distance of the parks. If all politics is local, so too is all accumulation. Marxist geographers argue that the capitalist mode of production left to itself produces more and more social inequality, which registers at every spatial scale from the neighborhood to the planet, resulting in uneven geographical development. What does uneven development mean for the politics of urban nature? It means that whenever some new green infrastructure is proclaimed by its promoters as a victory for neighborhoods and quality of life, we should ask them point blank, whose neighborhood and whose quality of life are you talking about?
Photos 49-64, Fabricating Corporate Nature
Nestled into the South Fork's network of green infrastructure is Lullwater Preserve, a spectacular "campus in a forest" that shines a bright green light on the role corporate power plays in the fabrication of urban nature. Before discussing the photos in this section, I'd like to devote a few paragraphs to the history of this place and its owner. Lullwater belongs to Emory University, a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code. Big money, insider connections, and brand name recognition underwrite the oversize power this corporate principality exercises in Atlanta. The legal entity called Emory University encompasses a sprawling archipelago of educational and medical enterprises: two college campuses with over 14,000 students and 1,402 instructional employees, eleven hospitals, scores of clinics, and a battalion of physicians and healthcare professionals. To get a sense of its gravitational pull in the urban economy, consider that Emory began the calendar year 2022 as the largest employer in metro Atlanta with a full-time workforce of over 33,000. But this does not disclose the extent of its economic might. In addition to the tax-exempt revenue streams that have helped fund a complete physical makeover of the Atlanta campus in recent years, Emory University boasts an investment portfolio that would be the envy of any institutional high roller in the Age of Global Finance. In fiscal year 2021, Emory ranked 15th on the endowment list of US colleges and universities, posting a whopping $11 billion on the books, much of it provided courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company via its founder Asa G. Candler, his children, and its long-time CEO Robert W. Woodruff. Were it not for perennial rival Duke University topping out at $12 billion, Emory would have claimed the prize as the most amply endowed institution of higher education in the South. Yet the impact of Coca-Cola on Emory and its institutional culture goes well beyond money. Like its brand-conscious corporate benefactor, the university learned early on the importance of having a good communications and public relations department on the payroll. To this day, the university spares no expense in promoting its public image as a liberal, cosmopolitan, and high-minded center of learning and culture, as can be seen in its well-publicized wooing of two global celebrities, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and President Jimmy Carter.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that during my time at the Task Force for the Homeless, our lawsuits identified Emory University, whose Midtown hospital was across the street from the shelter, as a principal ringleader in the campaign of "tortious interference" directed against our business operations. Though the defendants were careful to cover up the money trail when they cut us a check for nearly $10 million, there was no question in anyone's mind that only one of the parties we were suing could get its hands on that kind of cash--Emory the Endowed. Nor was there any doubt as to why Emory was prepared to pay this princely sum rather than meet us face to face in court: a jury trial would have exposed its long-standing, illegal efforts to shut down a facility that served thousands of poor, overwhelmingly black men every year. In the birthplace of MLK Jr., such revelations would have hurt the brand, and so the incriminating chain of confidential emails that circulated among Emory bigwigs and came to light in discovery was buried in the evidentiary boneyard of an out-of-court settlement.)
So much for the player—what about the place? In 1958 Emory University paid in the neighborhood of one-million dollars for the 185 acres that would become Lullwater Preserve. The seller was Walter T. Candler, son and heir of Coca-Cola's founder. The well-preserved, hardwood-forest estate that Candler dubbed Lullwater Farm spilled over both sides of the South Fork and included the following amenities: the 11,000 square-foot Tudor mansion called Lullwater House; the 11-acre, artificial Lullwater Lake (later renamed Candler Lake); pasture for cattle; dams on both Lullwater Lake and the South Fork; a hydropower plant providing electricity for the big house, bath and pool houses; and a practice track for Candler's stable of prize-winning race horses. The tract adjoined the main campus to the west, providing the institution with ample room for expansion and valuable real estate for future development and sale. Within a few years Emory had sold 26 acres of Lullwater to the Department of Veteran Affairs for a new hospital, and set aside the same amount for the Yerkes National Primate Research Center which was looking for an institutional home after leaving Yale.
There things stood until 1986 when a perfect storm of controversial business deals and questionable land management decisions put Lullwater and its first-growth forest in the political limelight. In that year, Emory bought another 44 acres next to Lullwater for student housing which would eventually anchor its residential Clairmont Campus. It also sold off a small but symbolically significant piece of Lullwater to an educational accreditation organization, igniting suspicions that larger plans for developing the preserve were afoot. Then came the last straw: the university administration went forward with a plan to dredge the thirty-year-old Candler Lake, which was (and remains) subject to chronic siltation owing chiefly to the rapid development around the preserve and the erosion of several small creeks that empty into reservoir. Over the objections of environmentally-conscious faculty, the sediment deposits were dumped behind an earthen spoils dam on the slopes above the lake. When the dam breached and tons of contaminated silt went pouring down the hillside and back into the lake, all hell broke loose. Overnight, the administration found itself on the defensive as its commitment to the preservation of Lullwater and its forest came under question. In an effort to contain the political fallout, the president and his team signed off on a new campus governance structure designed to head off future embarrassments by steering political dissent into bureaucratic channels that could be managed from the top. A Faculty Senate Committee on the Environment was created, which would soon become the semi-official green conscience of Emory and the institutional watchdog of the administration's environmental policies. Any future decision regarding Lullwater's development would now have to run the gauntlet of student environmental activists whose numbers and visibility were growing rapidly, and faculty sympathizers who rallied around the Committee on the Environment.
The balance of political forces on campus was clearly shifting as the environmentalist cause gathered momentum. Chastened by the 1986 imbroglio, the university administration set out to find a workable balance between two competing priorities: (1) pushing forward with the physical expansion and upgrading of the campus, and (2) repairing its damaged reputation with a show of managerial competence and environmental sensitivity. Ten years after the dam broke, a golden opportunity to put itself on the right side of the environmental issue materialized in the form of two adjoining, hazardous waste sites located at the southwest edge of Lullwater Preserve, next to the ill-fated earthen works. In 1996, spurred by a recommendation from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the university successfully remediated both sites to the satisfaction of state authorities, removing a stockpile of 55-gallon drums containing hazardous chemical waste products which had been buried there in the 1970s, and replacing soil contaminated by radioactive materials used in botanical experiments at its cinder-block Radiation Research Field Station.
What these sites look like today can be seen in Photos 49-52. They show the long-abandoned and dilapidated Field Station. We see its radiation control panel nested in autumn leaves (Photo 49), the still-bolted front door with its trefoil radiation warning symbol barely recognizable through the rust and chipped paint (Photo 50), its jimmied backdoor adorned with pro-Earth graffiti (Photo 51), and outside equipment used in the radiation experiments (Photo 52). Looking at them now, these forlorn images form a memento mori for the atomic age. But at the time the remediation work was being done, the university administration could point to these projects as proof of its commitment to atone for and clean up the mistakes of the past.
But if the administration reckoned it had garnered enough good will among campus environmentalists to revisit the issue of Lullwater's development, it was sorely mistaken. In 1998 it released a breathtakingly ambitious master plan that would in short order bring to campus an army of cranes, jackhammers, and hardhats working on 14 separate capital projects at the same time. Without question, the most controversial component of the megaproject was a new, 2,000-space parking deck on the Clairmont residential campus which would be connected to the main campus by a shuttle road and bridge spanning the CSX railroad tracks. While the administration did not deny that the proposed road, if approved, would cut through Lullwater, it argued that the route chosen minimized damage by hugging the western edge of the preserve, and that the environmental benefits of getting drivers out of their gas-guzzling cars and into battery-powered shuttle buses would outweigh the cost of losing a small slice of the forest. The local student chapter of the Southeastern Environmental Coalition immediately cried foul and circulated a petition against the proposed project which gathered over a thousand signatures. For its part the Committee on the Environment announced that while it was prepared to accept the parking deck, the road and bridge should be put on hold: there were other ways to integrate the two campuses which did not involve cutting a swath through Lullwater and replacing it with an impervious surface guaranteed to worsen the erosion/siltation problem. By a vote of 12 to 0, it recommended placing a five-year moratorium on any further discussion of the road and bridge, during which data would be collected for a comprehensive assessment of the project's pros and cons. Determined to implement the master plan in every particular, the administration mustered enough support in the Campus Development Committee and Traffic and Parking Committee to win the approval of the Senate, after which the shovel-ready projects proceeded without delay and according to plan.
In Quartet 53-56, we see the results: the gated entrance to the controversial shuttle road, christened "Starvine Way" in recognition of a rare plant native to the Lullwater Preserve (Photo 53); the sinuous bridge (whose lovely lines are visible only from below) across which a permanent parade of shuttle buses carry their passengers to and from the main campus (Photo 54); the parking deck on Clairmont Campus which forms a steel-reinforced backdrop to Hardman Cemetery, established in 1826 by the earliest white settlers of the wooded lands that would become part of the Emory portfolio a century-and-a-half later (Photo 55); and the highly eroded creek that flows under the Starvine bridge, carrying silt and all sorts of debris (including, apparently, a discarded Goodyear tire) toward Candler Lake (Photo 56).
What, then, is the legacy of the shuttle road controversy? Hard feelings, in the short run; cultural hegemony, in the long run. Over the last two decades the administration has overseen a cultural makeover of the university that is no less all-encompassing than the physical makeover it trumpeted in its 1998 Campus Master Plan. The official designation of Lullwater as a "preserve" in 2000 signaled the consolidation of a new hegemonic bloc, to use Gramsci's terminology. In lockstep with many other institutional power centers of contemporary capitalism, Emory has embraced the ideology of "sustainability" and refashioned its identity around it. Sustainability is the dominant development discourse of the Neoliberal Age, according to which economic growth, social equity, and respect for the environment form a team of three horses working together to pull the capitalist troika out of the ditch and toward a brighter future for all. These days, the language of sustainability supersaturates policy-making circles on the Emory campus, which is testimony to the administration's success at incorporating the environmentalist challenges of the years 1986-1999 into the routines and disciplines of bureaucratic governance. In 2006 the university established an Office of Sustainability Initiatives which is charged with "helping to restore the global ecosystem, fostering healthy living and reducing the University’s impact on the local environment." Touting its 10-year "Sustainability Vision and Strategic Plan," and pointing with pride to a 2016 study of over 100 research universities which named Emory No. 5 in terms of "greenness of campus," the Office's website is itself a fabulously diverse documentary ecosystem of initiatives, action plans, projects, programs, info sheets, check lists, guidelines, frameworks. In this imagined community of forward-looking policymakers, there seems to be a place reserved for every Emory student, faculty, and staff member. This is precisely the unifying effect that hegemonic ideologies aim for. Sustainability presents itself as one big tent under which the most diverse range of experiences and outlooks can find shelter; it is the environmentally-sensitive metastory into which each individual affiliated with the institution can insert her own personal narrative of aspiration, achievement, and self-actualization. But there is one telling omission. What you won't find on the Office of Sustainability Initiative's website is the word capitalism, much less a serious interrogation of its relation to sustainability. This is another feature of hegemonic ideologies: a respectful hush in the presence of the underlying structures of power.
Having woven the ideology of sustainability into every facet of formal governance, it would appear that by the first decades of the new millennium the Emory corporation was in an exceptionally strong position to manage the natural oasis of Lullwater as it saw fit. Yet this would ignore the limits and contradictions of capitalism itself, against which corporate Emory was powerless. Photos 57-60 examines this point more closely, focusing on how Emory's attempts to translate the rhetoric of sustainability into a coherent program of habitat restoration at Lullwater are undermined by the reproduction requirements of capital. The safety-vested man in Photo 57 is treating the hillside between the Lullwater House and Candler Lake with a pesticide that kills invasive plant species, the most prevalent of which are English ivy, Chinese privet, and kudzu. The problem is that pesticides like those being used here have been shown to kill desirable things as well, such as pollinating bees and even human beings, if the carcinogenic effects of Roundup and other herbicides are any indication. I will leave the scientific debate over the hazards of these chemicals to the experts, and note only that the removal of invasive species and the protection of pollinators, both of which are university policies applauded by the Office of Sustainability Initiatives, seem to be working at cross purposes. A similar contradiction is evident in Photo 58, which shows a privately-contracted team of aquatic specialists removing the invasive alligator weed from Candler Lake, a plant native to South America that thrives in the shallows. The problem is that Candler Lake is fast on its way to becoming 12 acres of shallows due to the systemic problem of siltation. The unwanted but predictable environmental consequences of boosting the bottom line by scaling up Emory's main campus, rebuilding Clairmont Campus from the ground up, and running Starvine Way through Lullwater and across the creek that flows into Candler Lake—all of which have contributed to erosion and siltation—are now being remediated by an alligator-weed removal project packaged as a sustainability initiative.
Another way to appreciate the contradictory nature of habitat restoration in Lullwater is by putting the spotlight on Canada geese (Photo 59) and one of their favorite grazing areas, the prized lawn that spills down from the president's mansion to the shores of Candler Lake (Photo 60). In the Lullwater Comprehensive Management Plan of 2002, we find this statement: “Geese have detrimental effects on Lullwater: They graze on the shoreline of vegetation and destabilize the soil; and their excrement discourages recreation on grassy areas around the lake.” The report recommends that “appropriate control measures” be taken to reduce the number of Canada geese on campus greenspace, which presumably includes trapping and relocating them, a procedure I observed being carried out over several weeks in 2022, only to discover that a short time later the unwanted geese had returned in full force. One may not like goose excrement (one member of the landscaping crew with whom I spoke referred to it as “guacamole”), but it would be a stretch to label these migratory birds as an “invasive species” unless the advocates of sustainability are prepared to define migration per se as invasive. Nor would it be fair to say that Canada geese are no longer migratory but have become permanent residents of Lullwater without also adding that the worldwide migratory patterns of multiple species of birds have been dramatically altered by climate change, itself a byproduct of fossil capitalism. The Committee on the Environment seemed uneasy on this score, and so elsewhere in its report, settled on the less bellicose term “nuisance species.” As for the “grassy areas” allegedly under siege by the geese, it should be pointed out in their defense that (1) the fine fescue grass is itself a non-native species seeded, fertilized, and manicured as if it were the Augusta National Golf Course during the Masters Tournament and (2) with every rain the fertilizers and herbicides applied to keep the lush green carpet in tip-top shape flow into the lake (where they probably contribute to deoxygenation and the growth of alligator weed), and from there into the South Fork. I’m no authority on pollutants, but I’ll venture to say that such toxic chemicals are a more serious threat to Lullwater's environmental sustainability than goose shit.
I'll end this discussion of the corporate fabrication of urban nature with a final contradiction that's hard to miss at Lullwater. Photos 61-64 shows trash that has collected in a short stretch of the South Fork around Candler Dam. Urban detritus is continually swept into the waterways, carried across hard surfaces and into the creek and its tributaries, reaching a peak during the “first flush” of a storm. In Photo 61, we see a box spring, the morning after a violent downpour, that is about to tumble over the dam on its journey to God knows where. Photo 62 frames a tangle of tree trunks, branches, and construction materials that, to my untrained eye, has the look of an Old Masters Dutch still life (Photo 62). But the most troubling urban castoffs are the virtually imperishable plastic bottles like those that have been sucked into the backwash at the foot of the dam, churning and churning in the vortex (Photo 63). I arrived to take this picture not long after a storm sent untold quantities of rubbish down the creek. According to Earth Day 2021 organizers, 50 billion of these single-use bottles are purchased by Americans each year. On a more uplifting note, Photo 64 showcases a Good Samaritan I encountered on a cold January morning as he was filling his 55-gallon trash bag with refuse left on the bank after a storm the day before. When I asked him what organization he belonged to, he said, "No organization. I'm on my own."
His response goes straight to the heart of a contradiction that is inherent in the capitalism's drive to commodify the "free gifts" of nature. While corporations like Emory have near absolute power over their own properties, and can transform them into picture-perfect natural oases like Lullwater if they so choose, they have no power over nearby property owners who externalize the environmental costs of their businesses. Go back and have another look at Photo 31 of the discharge pipe at the Parkside development which empties stormwater into the South Fork by way of Burnt Fork Creek. This stormwater carries all manner of Parkside litter which, we can easily imagine, adds to the trash heaps we see in Photos 61-64, about two miles downstream. In other words, the benefits of externalization reaped by one South Fork corporation (Parkside) are a cost offloaded on another (Emory). But before we shed too many tears for Emory as a victim of externalization, it is important to note that this cost is purely aesthetic. Emory is in no rush to dip into its endowment to pay for cleaning up its portion of the South Fork. In its Lullwater Comprehensive Management Plan, the Committee on the Environment makes several recommendations for improving the condition of the South Fork, including "cleaning up debris on a regular basis." Nothing seems to have come of this sensible proposal, which means that creek cleanup remains a hit-and-miss affair that Emory offloads on individuals like my Good Samaritan or volunteers organized by the nonprofit South Fork Conservancy and the Chattahoochee River Keepers. To sum up, the multiple contradictions embedded in habitat restoration at Lullwater should come as no surprise given that they are all rooted in the global dynamics of biodiversity loss, which are in turn a hallmark of capital accumulation in the Anthropocene. But capital accumulation is a topic about which Emory and its Office of Sustainability Initiatives have nothing to say.
Photos 65-76, The Creek and Its Users
Our concluding section presents the South Fork from the perspective of three distinct sets of users: graffiti artists, homeless people, and individuals seeking escape from a pandemic that claimed over a million lives in the US and over five times that number worldwide (as of the time of this writing in January 2023). While we have encountered graffiti under the I-85 overpass and on Cheshire Bridge Road, I haven’t said anything about the complicated political terrain on which street art operates. Photos 65-69 allows me to correct this omission. The tagged structures you see in the first two photos are located a hundred or so yards off the South Fork Trail. In Photo 65, we see one of several surviving structures from the original Decatur waterworks, a facility that opened in 1907 and remained in operation for a half century, providing drinking water to the small municipality of Decatur. Photo 66 shows the CSX railroad bridge that originally spanned the reservoir which was created by damming the creek in order to supply the waterworks with dependable source of water. Faced with the growing problem of siltation and contamination, which would require regular rounds of expensive dredging, and having recently opened up a new waterworks on the Chattahoochee River, the DeKalb County in 1960 decided to dynamite the reservoir’s two dams. Photo 67 takes us back to Lullwater for a view of the tagged hydroelectric powerplant that Candler built in the 1920s on the South Fork to run the lights in his mansion. It’s not terribly surprising that taggers would see these abandoned structures as easy pickings. What does require explanation is why county authorities, Emory University, and the PATH Foundation failed to respond, if not with police action, then at least with a fresh coat of whitewash. The answer, I suspect, has something to do with the incorporation of street art into mainstream place-branding, a process that was well underway during the Neoliberal years, embraced by real estate developers as a relatively cheap way of jumpstarting investment in neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification. By 2006, when the waterworks was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the historical significance of the old structures had become conflated in the public mind with the graffiti covering them. Yet in some quarters, the concession to street art was made only grudgingly, if at all, as the South Peachtree Creek Trail palimpsest in Photo 68 shows. The idea that graffiti should be permitted to migrate from gritty streets to unsullied green space evidently did not enjoy universal support.
In Photos 69-72, we meet another familiar actor in our gallery—homeless people, or to be more precise, the encampments they make under the numerous bridges that span the South Fork. Here, I am prepared to make an exception to my general rule that photos can’t be expected to speak for themselves: if these images don’t make you want to scream “enough needless misery,” you have remarkable powers of self-restraint. Photo 69 was taken under the I-85 overpass, close to the spot where on March 30, 2017, a fire set by Basil Eleby, a homeless man, attracted national and international attention when it led to the collapse of a large section of the freeway. Photo 70 shows another encampment near the confluence of Peavine Creek and the South Fork. But it’s Photo 71 that speaks most powerfully to me, especially when paired another. You may have wondered how the box spring in Photo 61, which I used to illustrate the contradictions in the corporate fabrication of urban nature, ended up in the creek next to Candler’s old dam and power plant. Did you think some thoughtless jerk threw it off a bridge? That's what I would have thought if I hadn't taken Photo 71 five days earlier, which shows a mattress and reading material under Clairmont Bridge. This bridge is a quarter of a mile upstream from the dam and power plant. In the interval between the two shots, several tremendous thunderstorms caused the slow-moving creek to become a raging torrent as it passed under the bridge and overflowed both of its banks. When I returned to the bridge a few days later, there was no mattress to be found. What I surmise is that the mattress was swept up in the floodwater and carried away. What happened to the reader who slept on it? I don’t know. But I wonder if this box spring wasn't also the bed of somebody who camped under a South Fork bridge, somebody who lost everything in a storm.
Photo 72 has a backstory that illuminates the stormy political waters of homelessness and gentrification. This creekside backyard with its menacing sign, “WARNING. SECURITY CAMERAS IN USE,” is located in the Clairmont Heights neighborhood, across the creek from the South Fork Trail. When the PATH Foundation was rolling out its blueprints for the trail in 2008, several Clairmont Heights residents who lived on the opposite side of the creek from the proposed boardwalk, announced their opposition and tied up the project in court. They argued that the park’s ecosystem would suffer irreparable damage from construction of the boardwalk and the pedestrian traffic that would come with it. Some supporters of the Trail suspected this was a red herring. What was really driving opposition to the trail was the desire of affluent homeowners to keep outsiders where they belonged—outside. As one journalist remarked at the time, “And with the stalemate comes the conundrum of preserving nature versus making it accessible—and whether the fight to preserve the park is a case of NIMBYism or eco-consciousness.” If the sign we see in this picture belongs to one of the Trail’s critics, it indicates that the mistrust and bad blood that erupted in the Trail controversy continues to simmer fourteen years later. The fear in some quarters that homeless people might use the trails, boardwalks, bridges, and other green infrastructures to infiltrate upper-income, predominantly white neighborhoods is not to be underestimated. This racialized siege mentality has become a feature of cultural politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism, energized in this case by rival claims of users to the new pockets of urban nature opened up by green infrastructure.
Photos 73-76 brings this essay to a close on an ambiguous note. Let me return to the nature walks Allyson and I incorporated into our COVID routine. We saw lots of people along the trails, usually at a distance and often alone. What were they looking for? Peace of mind? Connection with nature? Clean air to breathe? I don’t know, though I have a hunch about the motivations of the masked-up woman in Photo 73. This is Allyson. As the two of us nature-walked our way through the pandemic, it was often the kids who made the biggest impression on us. Like the little boy in Photo 74 bending over to examine--what? A bug? A rock? A twig? Or the little girl in Photo 75 who seems to be pulling back as she nervously contemplates the mysterious circle of soda cans in the creek. These three pictures of isolated figures were snapped in April 2020, when the pandemic was hitting on all cylinders.
Let's take a step back and reflect on the larger story of the South Fork. Once upon a time, before our species began using tools to shape their environment, "nature" was governed by its own metabolism free from the interventions of humankind. Then came the Stone Age, the Neolithic Revolution, the rise of class-based societies, empires, and all the rest. Step by step, humans came to see that tools were power—power to create and destroy, liberate and subjugate, not only nature but their own human nature. Mediated by technology in the broadest sense, this Promethean consciousness was expressive of a new form of social metabolism. For thousands of years natural metabolism and social metabolism co-existed, if not in happy harmony, then in mutual forbearance since the technologies at the command of society were not of sufficient power and sophistication to bring about a qualitative, planetary-scale transformation in the relationship of nature to society. This changed with capitalism. The birth, consolidation, and globalization of this new mode of production shifted the balance of power from nature to society, creating what Marx called a "metabolic rift." That rift now threatens to extinguish broad swaths of life on planet Earth, including human life. Not in the distant future, but soon. International stratigraphers are currently debating whether to give their official blessing to a new epoch called the Anthropocene in recognition of the decisive impact of recent human activities on the earth's geological record. Given the glacial pace at which scientific bodies work and the rapidly approaching tipping point for global warming, the Anthropocene might be over before it is officially launched.
The end of life? Hard to imagine, but it's worth trying. Look at Photo 76, the last in the gallery, which was taken on September 12, 2022, when the worst of the pandemic seemed to be over. This is the cross-country team of Druid Hills High School on a beautiful fall day, out for a training run along the trail that encircles Candler Lake. For me they are a picture of life and a reminder of all we stand to lose if capitalism continues to have its way, fabricating the built, natural, and cultural environments of places like the South Fork.