Nothing lasts forever. Change is the only constant.

A month ago we stood across the bay from San Francisco on what is known as the Albany Bulb, an artificially made 31-acre spit of land. Its bulb-shaped geology began when truckloads of concrete chunks and twisted rebar were landfilled here for scores of years.

The dumping stopped in 1984. Within a few years local artists began creating art among the mounds of concrete, tangled metal, washed up trash and driftwood. Like our long-ago forebears, they see a hard surface as a canvas for art.

It was ironic that as we strolled on the crude paths meandering through the eruptions of art, that only recently it had been reported that a recent discovery of “new” cave art in Indonesia had been found. The painting of a wild pig and three human-like figures is at least 51,200 years old and are now considered the oldest art known to archaeology. These etchings predate the famous paintings in the French Lascaux cave painting by at least 5,000 years.

Who knows how much earlier humans showed a capacity for creative thought and story telling through images.

Now, more than 40 years later, the art continues and the natural world is slowly reclaiming this once devastated site. Today walking trails radiate in all directions. Among the massive broken blocks of concrete there are sinuous green tangles of vine, bushes, grasses and flowers. Along this maze of trails a multitude of critters reside. Insects, birds, small lizards, mice, ground squirrels, rabbits and the occasional coyote and owl flourish here.  (Over 150 species of flora and fauna have been documented here. I suspect that the real number is substantially greater.) 

Wandering through the sinuous trails I wondered about the concept of “waste.” It occurred to me that there is no waste in the natural world; waste is a human construct and one born only in recent centuries by western cultures. Prior to contact with European settlement, North American indigenous peoples had no name for “waste.” Their shelters were made from organic materials such as animal hides, rock, mud, tree limbs or bark. The natural world would simply take these materials back when the humans were finished with them.

The indigenous understood that even their defecations were food for something else. And given that people were nomadic, there was never a foul  accumulation of feces.

We tend to refer to human feces as “waste.” However for most of the approximately 14,000 years that humans have practiced agriculture we used our feces as well as that of our domesticated animals (cattle, horse, pigs, fowl, etc) as a valuable input for our crops. 

Using chemistry, modern humans have created synthetic materials such as plastics, fiberglass, glass and more to create materials that are stubbornly resistant to natural decay. Consequently we have piled trash on acres and acres of good ground. Cities, towns and villages have departments that deal with the accumulation of our garbage. Fleets of giant garbage trucks move in and out of the thousands of acres that house our accumulated trash. We hide it behind berms and fences thereby pretending it isn’t there. 

Even a tossed cigarette butt can linger for ten years. And plastics are even worse. Plastic islands in the ocean are measured in acres. And since these are so far out in the ocean, out of sight, they are out of our minds. So who cares that sea turtles are eating filmy single use plastic bags thinking they are jellyfish?

Many of the paintings and sculptures on the Albany Bulb stopped me in my tracks. Curved pieces of driftwood melded with twisted rebar bejeweled with old loops of beads, battered phones, or even a typewriter splashed in paint made me smile, wonder, and loudly exclaim. Some were provocative and put me at unease. But that’s what good art is supposed to do. 

Here on the Bulb, the seasonal cycling of birth, death and decomposition is at work. The buildup of organic material will eventually erase all vestiges of the human landfill.  

The Bulb has become a destination for creativity where humans and the processes of the natural world pair together to transform a landscape of ruin into a softer world. A landfill evolving towards rewilding.

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