Introduction
The South Fork of Peachtree Creek is an unassuming body of water that flows fifteen miles through the east side of metro Atlanta, skirting the neighborhood in unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, where Allyson and I have lived for thirty-plus years. Taking a nature walk along the creek's foot paths and trails is a long-standing ritual for us and a pleasant break from the daily grind. But it became something more than this during the COVID-19 pandemic, which arrived not long after the two of us retired from teaching with big plans to travel and see the world. Those plans went up in smoke as the coronavirus spread, leaving us, in the sage words of the singer Meat Loaf, "all revved up with no place to go." Not a good recipe for mental health or late-life marital contentment.
Fortunately, the creek was nearby, an emotional lifeline. Each morning, right after breakfast, we put the pandemic behind us for an hour or two, and set out to explore the ribbon of trails, paths, boardwalks, and pedestrian bridges that run alongside the South Fork and two of its feeders, Burnt Fork Creek and Peavine Creek. It was as easy as stacking the dishes in the kitchen sink, walking to the end of our block and turning down an unpaved trail that leads to Emory University’s Lullwater Preserve. A few minutes later, we were standing on the banks of the South Fork with miles and miles of urban nature before us.
I say urban nature for a reason: the natural environment of the South Creek is a built environment designed around the requirements of urbanization—capitalist urbanization, to be specific. What I learned from my rambles along the creek is that capitalism produces a nature it can live with, a nature in its own image.
Retracing the same paths and trails week after week, month after month, during the pandemic year of 2020, I became convinced that COVID and the creek were linked somehow, and that putting them together might help me understand how capitalism mediates the interactions between society and nature. This is a big topic, needless to say, but hardly a new one. Marx himself was fully aware of its importance. In Capital, he introduces the concept of “metabolic relation” in order to theorize the interactions between society and nature, and uses it to analyze capitalism’s built-in tendency to produce a “metabolic rift.”
This metabolic relation goes to the heart of the process of capitalist place formation. When humans set out to build a new place or rebuild an old one, they enter into a two-way exchange with the natural world. They concentrate the full spectrum of their powers and capacities on a particular location in order to give their imagined place material form, while at the same time proceeding in a manner not of their own choosing but dictated by the materials and processes of nature. Capitalism does two things that transform this exchange into a site of potential crisis: it raises our powers and capacities to unheard-of levels and turns the materials and processes of nature into “free gifts” that can be used without restraint. The metabolic rift is immanent in capitalist place formation.
In trying to think through the dialectical interplay of capitalism, place and nature, I happened upon Marxist ecologist Andreas Malm's book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency. It appeared in 2020, just as the virus came roaring out of Wuhan's wet market. According to Malm, the zoonotic spillover of the virus furnishes a textbook case of how capitalism shapes the physical landscape of the world in its own image, with no regard for the environmental and epidemiological consequences of its reproduction on an ever-larger scale. Propelled by the logic of endless accumulation, capitalism attempts to solve its internal contradictions through a combination of geographical expansion and spatial reconfiguration, a spatial-temporal fix that engenders what Malm calls a condition of "chronic emergency."
Malm is referring to the double-sided emergency of global sickening and global warming, whose epicenter is to be found in the world's endangered rainforests from Malaysia to the Amazon. Capitalist accumulation strategies of unregulated deforestation, corporatized resource extraction and planetary urbanization (which might more accurately be called slumification) create the enabling conditions for pathogens like coronavirus to jump from their reservoir hosts (bats above all) to human populations. Zoonotic spillover was the inevitable consequence of human settlements coming into ever closer contact with previously isolated wildlife, their habitats and the microorganisms they carry around in their bodies like so many stowaways.
As the capitalist offensive against the rainforest intensifies, we can expect an acceleration of greenhouse gas emission, biodiversity loss, desertification, ocean deoxygenation, extreme weather, rising sea levels—in a word, environmental degradation at every register imaginable. Capital accumulation, global sickening and global warming come together in a lethal feedback loop as human, wildlife, and pathogen populations compete for planet Earth's ever-dwindling supply of livable space. Corona and carbon dioxide, it turns out, are two sides of the same capitalist coin.
What does all this catastrophic talk have to do with the South Fork of Peachtree Creek? Quite a lot. As it courses through the densely developed northeast quadrant of metro Atlanta, this creek offers a good perch from which to observe the contradictory logic of the capitalist production of nature.
This reflection will present the production of nature as a dialectical spatial process encompassing seven distinct but interlinked moments. For clarity’s sake, I am calling these moments metaphorical space, degraded space, infrastructural space, corporatized space, green space, development space and contested space. These moments are lenses through which we view the production of nature along the South Creek.
Nature as Metaphorical Space: Photos 1-16
Let’s begin with a basic question that my fellow documentary photographers frequently avoid: What are we documenting? The world as it objectively exists? The world filtered through our subjective impressions? The greatest minds of every cultural tradition have worried themselves to death over this question. Let the record show that I am a dialectical and historical materialist who believes that the natural world exists with or without me.
Documentary photographers, materialist or otherwise, do not stand apart from the external world they are documenting. Because they are part of that world, just as it is part of them, a subjective element necessarily enters into the creative act of making a photo. This should not be taken as a fatal weakness or flaw which undermines the integrity and truth-value of documentary as such. It simply means that documentary photographers should deal honestly and self-critically with the subjectivity that inevitably creeps into their work.
The photos in this section document my subjective state of mind in the pandemic year 2020. The bruising experience of the Task Force’s breakup and the closing of Peachtree-Pine were still fresh in my memories. So too were the recent deaths of my parents after years of physical and cognitive decline. Now came a global epidemic that made any kind of face-to-face interaction an invitation for contracting a frightening disease.
To make matters worse, my father-in-law, Bill Holt, was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly before the epidemic broke out. For over a year Allyson and I made regular trips to Moultrie, Georgia, a four-hour drive from Atlanta, where her parents and siblings lived. Like so many others, we provided what support we could while observing safe-distance protocols. Allyson and I sat outside in the driveway of their house while Bill and my mother-in-law Pat set up their camp chairs in the garage. These moments of distanced intimacy were incredibly frustrating and painful for all of us. It wasn’t until January 2021, when we finally received our vaccinations, that Allyson was able to go inside her parents’ home and give her dad a hug. Bill died a month later. Allyson and Pat were at his bedside; I had ducked out for a moment to take pictures of the cotton field behind the house.
I am sharing this story with you in order to explain why I could not shake the feeling that defeat, death and disease were all around us, nipping at our heels as we reconnoitered the creek. Dread has left its mark on the photos in this section.
Allyson and I have just returned from seeing Ari Aster’s new movie, Eddington, at the urging of our cinephile son. It’s not an easy movie to watch, but I strongly recommend it if you have the stomach for revisiting the collective insanity of 2020, when the digital mediation of life broke free of all prior restraints and gave Big Tech one more reason to celebrate. Remember how we were all glued to our screens because there was no other way to interact with human beings?
I feel a kind of aesthetic kinship with Aster and Darius Khondji, the director of photography, who have projected onto the high desert landscape of New Mexico the same sense of dread that I see in some of my photos of the urban riverine landscape of Atlanta. On the screen, the fictional town of Eddington, where the story takes place, looks anemic and in need of a blood transfusion. It's nothing like the honey-toned, color saturated New Mexico that Vince Gilligan and his director of photography, Michael Slovis, created in the Pre-COVID masterpiece, Breaking Bad, which Allyson and I started rewatching recently.
In this section, I have organized 16 photos in four groups of four pictures each. Think of these groups as thematic quartets. The pictures in the first three quartets follow the same four-step sequence: (1) spring pollen floating on water as a metaphor for infected aerosol particles, (2) shelf fungus and termite infestation as a metaphor for respiratory disease, (3) decomposing root balls as a metaphor for ravaged lungs, (4) dead trees as a metaphor for human remains. The last quartet shifts from nature to human nature, showing lone figures whom I happened upon during our rambles, another metaphor for the social isolation and distancing that COVID inflicted on all of us.
Is visual metaphor appropriate when doing documentary photography? More to the point, is it appropriate for the work I am doing here? My answer is “it depends.” The photos in this section give you a sense of what was happening in my life when I made these pictures, how my mind was working (or not working) and why I became increasingly convinced that the metabolic relation to nature was a vitally important process worthy of documentation.
By “important” I mean both subjectively as a way to manage my sense of dread and objectively as a way to document capitalist place formation. The subjective and objective are working hand-in-hand in these photos.
Nature as Degraded Space: Photos 17-28
How is nature turned into degraded space? Part of the answer is suggested by the most obvious sign of degradation: trash. It’s tempting to imagine some irresponsible jerk tossing an old box spring off a bridge and into the South Fork, where I found it drifting one day after a big storm (17), or dumping a sofa that floated downstream with the current until it became entangled in a thicket of fallen tree limbs (18). But this reduces the problem of trash to one of individual behavior (or misbehavior), when the degradation of nature is nothing if not systemic.
As is well understood, most of the detritus that clogs urban rivers enters by way of storm water runoff, a problem directly attributable to the impervious surfaces that are the hallmark of urban development. Consider all those plastic bottles I found churning in a dam’s backwash the morning after another violent downpour that swept them into the South Fork (19) or the good Samaritan I met cleaning up the plastified mess that had spilled over the creek’s banks (20). According to Earth Day 2021 organizers, 50 billion of these single-use bottles are purchased by Americans every year, and each one of them takes 100 to 500 years to decompose. If the South Fork is any indication, the degradation of nature is a co-production of urban development and mass consumption.
Economists have a technical term to describe this phenomenon: externalization. They are referring to the powerful incentive capitalists have to offload the economic, social and cultural costs of their products onto the public. I should probably say publics since the burdens of externalization fall disproportionately on the shoulders of some more than others, with those at the bottom of class, race, gender and ethnic hierarchies paying the highest price. And these burdens likewise fall disproportionately on the most spatially vulnerable regions of the world, particularly in the Global South.
Here’s something to think about: some of the plastic bottles you see in these photos will make their way from the South Fork down the Chattahoochee River to Apalachicola Bay, 350 miles away, breaking up into harmful microplastics as they journey south. They will then enter the Gulf of Mexico and diffuse throughout the ocean beyond. This is an example of how externalization, which is baked into capitalism’s DNA, serves as a powerful force driving not only socio-spatial inequality but also the metabolic rift between society and nature.
Another form of trash, visual in this case, are billboards. The South Fork snakes through an urban landscape of busy arterial roads festooned with billboards barking their messages at motorists who cannot even see the creek from their vantage point behind the wheel. But if you happen to be walking along the creek and suddenly encounter the smiling face of a DUI defense attorney above the tree line (21) or a public service message about opioid overdose foregrounded by a gaggle of Canada geese (22) or two young women plastered on the side of a U-Haul storage facility, peeking out from behind a curtain of kudzu vines (24), the effect can be jarring, even surreal.
Billboard defenders in the pay of the advertising industry tell us that critics are guilty of aesthetic elitism, if not outright hypocrisy. They might have a point. After all, many of the critics will go to a high-end art gallery or museum to admire the work of Warhol and Basquiat on exhibit, two artists who eagerly appropriated the imagery of consumer culture and billboard advertising in their own work. Why should commercial art be treated with disdain when it’s displayed on a billboard but embraced when it’s found in some temple of high art? Isn’t this the argument advanced by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in their 1972 work, Learning from Las Vegas, a vigorous defense of the commercial vernacular of billboards, imagery and signs?
In my view, the most persuasive case against roadside advertisements is that billboard owners are social parasites who appropriate for their own private use a visual public space, a commons not unlike the one that Marx analyzed in his chapters on primitive accumulation. This visual commons does not belong to them but to all of us, living and yet-to-be-born. It is being chopped up into pieces and privatized so as to better serve capitalist interests. The mainstream nonprofit advocate Scenic America calls this collective resource “our field of vision,” and hints at the harmful consequences that will ensue should the logic of capital colonize our visual interface with the natural world. Who can forget Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, in which the dystopic city of the future has become a madhouse of talking billboards on which are projected seductive Geishas pitching product?
The last point I’ll make about the degradation of nature has to do with suburbanization, U.S. empire and postwar capitalism. The most imposing physical structure on the South Fork is the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, opened in 1966 in what was then a fast-growing part of suburban DeKalb County.
Allow me to provide a bit of historical context before introducing the photos. After the Second World War the suburbanization of places like DeKalb County quickly emerged as the cutting edge of a spatial-temporal fix designed to absorb surplus capital and labor which, in the wake of demobilization, threatened to plunge the country into another depression. In cooperation with federal and state authorities, local alliances of real estate interests, construction trades, elected officials and homeowner groups implemented the suburban fix on the ground. This fix was highly militarized as part of the Cold War political economy that came into being as the U.S., self-appointed leader of the “free world” against the Communist menace, flexed its imperial muscles.
The Department of Veteran Affairs and medical centers like the one I photographed became the social service auxiliary of the military-industrial complex. At the peak of Cold War hostilities, they projected military might abroad, suburban comfort at home, social mobility thanks to the GI Bill and an indulgent attitude toward the externalized costs of economic growth. The metabolic relation to nature was central to the Cold War imperial project on the home front no less than on battlefields overseas.
Chiming with the Promethean triumphalism and imperial hubris of the time, the architects and engineers who designed the VA parking structure, and the public officials who gave it their blessing, thought nothing of driving pilings straight into the creek itself, in “violation of local building codes, and ignoring the list of don’ts of flood prevention,” as David R. Kaufman observes in his useful book Peachtree Creek: A Natural and Unnatural History of Atlanta’s Watershed. After thinking a lot about the best way to photograph this particular environmental degradation, I decided that the reflections of the parking structure in the creek would give you a sense of just how hellbent the VA was to pour concrete over every last inch of the creek bank (25-28).
I can’t help but think of President Johnson’s Mekong River project, proposed in 1965 and based on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which envisioned the construction of a network of dams providing cheap energy to the people of Vietnam and blunting the Communist appeal. The real VA parking structure and the imagined Mekong project have this in common: both see concrete as a weapon in the pacification and subjugation of nature.
Nature as Infrastructural Space: Photos 29-42
The capitalist production of nature has a lot to do with the escalating crisis of urban infrastructure, though you wouldn’t know it reading the mainstream business press. In a recent piece in Forbes, Rhett Powers, the founder and CEO of “an executive coaching and leadership optimization firm,” assures his readers that this crisis is serious but solvable if we adopt investment strategies “guided by strong leadership, smart technology, and collaboration.” “These three pillars, he goes on to say, “are driving forces behind sustainable growth and the development of future-ready cities.”
Powers is using the familiar neoliberal equation: entrepreneurship + technology + public-private partnerships=sustainable growth. But how useful is this free-market math in explaining or solving an actually existing infrastructural crisis? For example, how well do Powers’ three pillars hold up when applied to the case of DeKalb County’s ongoing sewer crisis? In search of an answer, I went to a mile-long section of sewer line that runs alongside the South Fork not far from where Allyson and I live. While this is a small slice of the 2,650 miles of sewer lines in DeKalb, it will allow us to bring Powers’ high-flying abstractions into contact with concrete realities on the ground.
First the geographical and historical context: Much of DeKalb County’s gravity-fed sewer system follows Peachtree Creek and feeder streams which flow downhill toward the Chattahoochee River. Such systems are less expensive to build and operate, in large part because they reduce the need for expensive pumping stations. The county’s rapid population growth from 136,395 in 1950 to 770,307 in 2024 has put increased strain on an aging sewer infrastructure that is increasingly prone to failure.
In 2010 federal and state regulators brought suit against DeKalb County for failing to address the sorry state of its sewers, which regularly spilled raw sewage into creeks and rivers in violation of the Clean Water Act. The situation was especially dire for DeKalb’s predominantly black neighborhoods in the vicinity of the South River, one of the most heavily polluted bodies of water in metro Atlanta. In a 2011 consent decree, county officials were given until 2020 to make the necessary repairs and upgrades, which costed out at over two billion dollars.
It soon became clear that DeKalb would never be able to meet this deadline given the hefty price tag and sheer magnitude of the crisis. Nor did it help matters when the Department of Watershed Management was caught in a pay-to-play scandal involving precisely the entrepreneurs and public-private partnerships in which Powers invests such high hopes. The historic divisions between predominantly black south DeKalb and white north DeKalb produced a stalemate in the county commission, against which Powers’ strong leadership, smart technology and collaboration were no match. A new consent decree was hammered out in 2017 extending the deadline another ten years. While threatening fines for non-compliance and requiring the county to devise a system for identifying and prioritizing the most urgently needed projects, this seemed to be a case of kicking the can down the road.
One project that jumped to the head of the line was the aforementioned stretch of sewer main located on land belonging to Emory University, an elite institution of higher education and political powerhouse with financial ties to Coca-Cola through the Robert F. Woodruff Foundation, its biggest donor. With a price tag of $5.33 million and an estimated start-to-finish time of nine months, the Emory Sewer Project kicked off in early 2022.
The work proceeded in two stages (29-36). First, crews from such faraway places as the East Tennessee Mountains and the Louisiana Bayou installed temporary polyethylene bypass lines to carry pumped wastewater around the sewer main while it was being repaired. Second, other specialized crews were brought in to thread a resin-saturated felt tube lining into the aging 48-inch ductile iron pipe. The tube was then inflated with steam, causing the lining to adhere to the inside of the pipe, forming a seal as it “cured in place,” to use the industry jargon. The official completion of the project was announced in early 2023, by which time the tube, bypass lines, and pumps had been removed.
What, then, is the verdict on this infrastructural intervention? Put differently, what does $5.33 million buy a county government caught in the crossfire of an aggrieved public, an impatient judge and a rundown sewer system that pollutes the waterways? According to industry spokespersons, the cured plastic lining can last up to a century, which sounds promising. But when we learn that it’s only about a tenth of an inch thick, not much thicker than a Band-Aid, one can’t help but wonder if curing in place is a, well, band-aid fix. It seems to me that the lining isn’t going to be of much use if the pipe rusts from the outside in rather than the inside out. And putting aside the possibility of external corrosion, a fiberglass lining is not going to prevent the pipe from cracking if the soil shifts for whatever reason. I couldn’t ascertain the age of the Emory sewer pipe, but some of the pipes in DeKalb are reported to date back to the 1940s and 1950s, which means that there is a good chance that the repaired pipe is already closing in on its expiration date. Is this like putting brand-new chrome valve covers on a worn-out engine?
While I am not qualified to weigh in on the technical pros and cons of curing in place as an answer to the crisis of DeKalb’s crumbling sewer system, I do know this: all sides agree that the most persuasive selling point of this particular “smart technology” is that it’s a lot cheaper than digging up the old sewer line and replacing it with a new one. Maybe Powers would consider this an example of dumb technology, though it does adhere to the adage, “if you’re going to do something, do it right.”
But the larger issue is Powers’ faith in the free market as the solution to the infrastructural crisis. In today’s neoliberal climate of low taxes, lean budgets, growth at all costs and band-aid technological fixes, the crisis is here to stay. Indeed, barring a radical change in the way we build, maintain and finance urban infrastructures, it will only get worse, leading to continued sewage spills and further contamination of the South Fork. In short, the metabolic rift with nature will grow wider.
I’ll now turn to bridges, another critical urban infrastructure, frequently requiring repair and upgrades. One day, I saw construction activity on a train trestle bridge that spans the South Fork, and spent a few days there taking pictures. One of them is of a worker climbing up the scaffolding of the bridge’s support column, and another shows the same man walking along the trestle like a highwire acrobat (37-38). The guy looked to be about my age. I tried to imagine myself in his shoes, doing such dangerous work.
I also thought about my brother Mark. In 1980 he found a summer job as a roofer in Los Angeles. He was twenty-three-years old, just out of college. A few days into the job, Mark fell through a sky light opening that earlier in the day had been covered by a 4 ft. X 8 ft. sheet of plywood. He broke his back and has been in a wheelchair ever since. According to Occupational Health and Safety Administration standards, the plywood should never have been removed. When five years and several surgeries later Mark sued the subcontractors for failure to observe safety standards, Ronald Reagan, California’s popular former governor, was in the White House, having been elected and re-elected on a pro-business platform that included gutting OHSA, a favorite punching bag of conservative business interests, then and now. The first time, Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in a landslide, winning California by 17 percentage points; he repeated this feat in 1984 against Walter Mondale with a 16-percent margin of victory. The Pacific Palisades home where he and Nancy lived from 1956 to 1981 was just six miles away from the Santa Monica Courthouse where the trial took place.
When the jurors came back with their decision, we were all stunned, but should not have been. They cleared the defendants of all wrongdoing. I will go to my grave believing that Reagan’s public campaign against OHSA affected the outcome of my brother’s case and the cases of God only knows how many other disabled women and men who watched as their rights to a safe and healthy workplace were stripped away in the deregulation frenzy orchestrated by the president of the United States.
Let’s follow the South Fork to another bridge about a mile downstream from the CSX trestle. After the City of Atlanta announced its decision to tear down and rebuild a ninety-year-old bridge on the South Fork which was damaged in a fire on August 4, 2021, I decided to keep an eye on the unfolding project, not only for what it might reveal about the infrastructural production of nature but also because it spoke to the social reproduction of homelessness, another interest of mine.
The Fire Rescue Department reported that in extinguishing the flames, it came across signs of an abandoned homeless encampment under the bridge, complete with butane gas stoves, sofas and other combustible materials. The insertion of homelessness into the story was guaranteed to draw public attention, for five years earlier another fire caused by a homeless person made national headlines when it brought down an elevated section of one of Atlanta’s busiest interstates. Separated by less than a mile, the sites of the two fires were located in an ideal urban environment for unhoused people living “rough.” Numerous bridges crisscrossing the South and North Forks of Peachtree Creek combined with heavily wooded and overgrown spaces along the waterways to provide shelter from both the weather and the police.
In January 2022, I photographed two employees of Atlanta’s Department of Watershed Management, who had been dispatched to remove a champion-size tree floating downstream in the direction of an aerial sewer line that had been left in place after the structurally compromised bridge was demolished (39-41). City officials knew that if this battering ram shattered the pipe and caused a torrent of raw sewage to spill into the creek, they would face a public-relations nightmare and, quite likely, a new round of EPA fines. They were already under the gun not only for delays in the completion of the bridge project but also for their failure to make progress on the homelessness crisis, which for many meant clearing out the encampments. When I asked one of the men how he felt about having to give up his Saturday to clean up the mess, he told me simply, “It’s what we do.”
Eight months later, private contractors sent out another crew to prepare concrete pilings for the new bridge nested in one of the densest concentrations of homeless encampments in the city (42-44). Anyone who knew the first thing about homeless survival strategies could have predicted that this state-of-the-art bridge would end up being, like the one it replaced, a roof over someone's head.
