Dear Reader,
Greetings from the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts.
Summer crowds may be coming but they haven’t arrived yet. The hiking has been spectacular. And it’s been fun meeting my neighbors out here.
I gather that black bears have been pretty ambitious about exploiting local trash bins, which is on point for this week’s book. I bought my copy of Landfill early in the planning process for Frugal Chariot, but it’s taken me some time to get to it. What a delight for me to discover that Tim Dee is not just a deeply informed naturalist, but a true man of letters, as well.
Review
Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene
Tim Dee
Chelsea Green, 2018
236 pages
$25.00
It’s a story often told in my town. A group of friends take the train to the seaside from the city for a day at the beach. They arrive with towels, sunscreen, a frisbee, and a grocery store bag filled with their picnic. When they kick off their flip-flops and head to the water, it’s my turn as a local to save their bacon, not to mention their lettuce and their tomato. Gulls who have already been quietly casing the joint, swoop in for plunder as soon as the treasure is unguarded. Unless I or another neighboring beachgoer jumps up to shoo them away in time. If I bring food to the beach, I bring it in a hard-sided cooler, but I generally don’t. These birds are pros. They can take the sandwich out of your hand inches from your face.
The gull as scavenger has been honored in some of our most profound recent works of cultural expression. I refer, of course, to the animated series Family Guy, specifically the iconic Mr. Booze episode. Peter, after nearly killing himself in a drunken car wreck, resolves to cut back on his drinking and throws some of his unopened beer cans in the garbage. The episode ends with two gulls at a landfill getting super toasted on Peter’s brewskis and grossing each other out with dumpster diving revelations.
What more can we know of these ubiquitous birds? How has the human-gull relationship evolved? And what does that relationship say about the era we live in: the Anthropocene? These are the questions tackled sharply and sensitively by Tim Dee in his 2018 book Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene.
In my lifetime gulls have come towards us. . . . Calling them seagulls is wrong - that was one of the first things I learned as a novice bird-boy. They are as much inland among us as they are far out over the waves. . . . Over the past hundred years, human modernity has brought gulls ashore. They have lived in our slipstream, following trawlers, ploughs, dust-carts. In this way they are more our contemporaries than most birds. They live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Of course they also lay eggs and fly, but they have taken a place in the chapters of our lives as few other animals have.
Naturalist Tim Dee has led, in his own formulation, an “evolving wordy-birdy life.” A scholar of literature, especially poetry, he’s been a radio producer for the BBC for over 30 years in their arts and culture area. He has also been an avid bird watcher since childhood, researched the birds of Madagascar, and written or edited several nature books, including The Running Sky, The Poetry of Birds, and, most recently, a travelogue on the theme of Spring, Greenery. He’s lived much of his life in the gull-rich area around Bristol, UK.
If I had to draft a provisional credo for my highly personal Frugal Chariot canon, it might read something like: realism and reverence without cynicism or syrup. Achieving that requires at least these two things: the right approach to the subject and the author’s ability to reticulate multiple viewpoints with a devoted and humble eye. Landfill is a case study. Dee has chosen to meet the gulls where they mostly meet us: at our trash heaps. And he seeks insight from amateur birders, ornithologists, poets, ordinary people; these viewpoints can be quirky, provisional, at times orthogonal, and often profound. He goes to band birds at the dump, to visit his parents (who should be taking more of their stuff to the dump), to explore the specimen drawers of scientific collections. He flies off, and circles back. And then there’s the writing: erudite, funny, warmly personal, yet unsentimental, such as this report from a breeding colony off the coast of the Bristol Channel.
We were some way into the season and the gulls’ nests were now more teenage bedrooms than cradles for newborns. The chicks weren’t especially keen on being in them and were wandering around squeaking. They were dressed in spotted pyjamas of dirty-colored down. Their feet and beaks were as clownishly big as they ever would be, all else was still catching up. If they strayed too far, the next door neighbors shouted and sent them home. Sometimes the adults are less kind and kill the chicks.
In an odd coincidence with respect to our author’s surname, I found myself reflecting on the letter ‘d’ in the English language. Does “d” have a special valence for our mortal relationship to the material earth? As Dee traces our historical relationships to gulls through the prism of literature, we move in a world of dirt, dust, dung, dumps, decay, detritus, despair and death. In a compelling chapter, he recounts the history of waste management in Victorian London citing Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and the work of Thomas Mayhew, who was a kind of 19th century Studs Terkel. Mayhew chronicled and classifed the scavengers of the age: bone-grubbers and rag-gatherers, pure-finders (“pure” being dog poop used for tanning), sewer-hunters, mudlarks, dustmen and so on. Mayhew concludes they were not exactly workers with occupations.“They were begging of the earth.” Isn’t that what the gulls feeding at the strip-mall dumpster and the open landfill are doing now?
One thing is sure: gulls are responding constantly and opportunistically to how we move and what we consume, sometimes to the point of absurdity.
As we have evolved, so have they. In 2016, a herring gull was dyed orange after it fell into a vat of curry in Newport, South Wales. In 2018, herring gulls were reported drunk along the Devon and Dorset coasts. [cf. Family Guy]
Questions of the absurd do come into play at this edge of value and uselessness, of existence and death, of environmental tipping points. Landfill takes a poetic turn. Dee looks to his bookshelves: to Coleridge, to Chekhov, and to Samuel Beckett’s plays End Game and Happy Days, where characters live in trash cans or are half-buried (in who knows what), “depressed ecologists and moribund romantics.” Another chapter builds on his earlier discussion of the challenges of classifying and naming fast-evolving gulls, and reflects, via the work of Jorge LuisBorges, on the impossibility and necessity of trying to organize our understanding of the world, of the gulls as they rapidly interbreed and evolve. “And we are right to tell the difference because the difference tells.” Even when we know we still don’t have it quite right.
When humans compost more food waste to prevent reduce harmful methane emissions, the gulls lose a food source and have to adapt. As one scientist tells Dee, “Gulls are caught in an ecological trap with us. And what will happen next depends on how we manage our urban environments.” Indeed. Having turned the planet from a treasure trove into a trash trap, we depressed ecologists and moribund romantics have our work cut out for us. With “slow-turning heads and cold knowing eyes” the gulls are watching.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Tim Dee provides a detailed and somewhat alarming account of learning to capture, band, and release gulls. (Concert pianists, do not try this.) It made me think about how weird and impossible it seems to me to hold a living gull—fierce and wild—in my hands. Of course, that’s just what anyone who wants to rescue a bird must do. This painting, “The Wounded Seagull” by Jules Breton is in the St. Louis Museum of Art. The Breton woman in the picture seems calm and determined, as the situation requires.
Poem of the Week
Poet Samuel Tongue, wrote “What Is It Like To Be A Herring Gull” after the philosopher Thomas Nagel, whose essay “What is it like to be a bat?” is “a thought experiment that explores the impossibility of entering the conscious mind and subjective experience of another animal.”
Tongue comments:
This poem was prompted by the herring gulls that are such a ubiquitous part of Glasgow’s urban wildlife. I was taken with the fact that these birds, endangered in their natural coastal habitat, have done such a good job of making the city their home. One particular character insisted on using our chimney as a vantage point across the cityscape and its harsh cry echoed down the flue and out of the fireplace into the sitting-room. Not quite alien, but certainly uninvited. I wanted to explore what the gulls see when they circle the streets – and yet, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel attests, it is impossible to access the mind of another animal. This tension became the main conceit of the poem. But maybe it’s not about gulls at all.
For Your Reading Radar
The Australian novelist Richard Flanagan’s new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, has been released in the US. In The Guardian, critic Beejay Silcox writes that the book “combines the moral righteousness of a fable, the wounded grief of a eulogy, and the fury of someone who still reads the news. And smouldering underneath it all is the red memory of last summer’s reign of fire.”
For Your Calendar
Richard Flanagan is doing a virtual reading on June 16th at 7 PM Eastern via Books & Books in Miami.
Jennifer Grotz has curated a dynamite June lecture series for the Breadloaf Environmental Writers Workshop that kicks off June 6th. Speakers include: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Dan Chiasson, David Hinton, and Kazim Ali. The events are ticketed, and scholarships are available.
Bookshop of the Week
I had a spectacular range of options when I went to chose an independent bookshop in Tim Dee’s hometown, Bristol, UK. That city is bringing the A-game when it comes not just to the number of shops but also their names: Dreadnought, Bloom & Curll, Hydra, Here, and, in a nod to Douglas Coupland fans everywhere, Beware of the Leopard.
I settled on Stanford’s because it specializes in outdoor, travel and adventure books, as well as maps, and there’s nothing like planning a trip with a paper map. The original store (est. 1853!) is in Covent Garden. The Bristol location was opened in 1977 by the great writer Eric Newby and it features a 1:5,000 scale map of the city covering an entire wall between floors of the shop. It makes me happy that they also sell globes.
A quick music note: Angelique Kidjo has released the title single for her new album (out June 18), Mother Nature (ft. Sting). David Honigmann, the excellent world music critic for The FT, writes, "The virtual collaborations that make up Mother Nature team her up with a new generation of musicians from Africa and the diaspora, tackling big themes from climate change to her home continent’s role in the world.” From 2020, here’s Kidjo in an iconic collaboration with Yemi Alade collaborating on “Shekere”. Dare you not to dance.
En fin, Grace Panetta shared with me a compilation of TikToks, in taste every bit as questionable as Family Guy, from a bloke who is feeding a gull outside his window.
More soon. xo Nicie