An Interview with Scott Kellogg
Scott Kellogg is the educational director at The Radix Ecological Sustainability Center in Albany’s South End. He is also a man of many talents, a deep thinker, and a visionary ecologist.
Scott is the co-author of Toolbox for Sustainable Living: A Do-It-Ourselves Guide (South End Press, 2008) and is visiting faculty at Bard College, where he teaches in the Masters in Environmental Education program.
His new book, Urban Ecosystem Justice Strategies for Equitable Sustainability and Ecological Literacy in the City, was just published by Routledge as part of the series “Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City” (Editors: Julian Agyeman and Stephen Zavestoski). Merging together the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and urban environmental education, Urban Ecosystem Justice promotes building fair, accessible, and mutually beneficial relationships between citizens and the soils, water, atmospheres, and biodiversity in their cities.
FoSCI’s Reif Larsen caught up with Scott for an interview about the book, in which they covered a wide range of topics, including the evolution of environmental activism, how to build an insectarium, why Scott left Austin for Albany, the opportunities of shrinking cities, sustainability as “an opioid for the masses,” ecological alienation, and how we can reconnect with the Hudson River.
The video, audio, and transcript of the interview can be found below.
VIDEO:
AUDIO:
TRANSCRIPT:
REIF LARSEN: First of all, this book is quite an achievement, so congratulations. How long have you been working on this?
SCOTT KELLOGG: In one form or another, probably since 2012. I wrote a book in 2008, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living, that was very practically oriented and hands on. And I wanted to write a follow up to it. The first one was like DIY urban sustainability for the backyard, but I wanted to go beyond the backyard and engage with all of the environmental processes going on in the city and apply the same kind of DIY ethos to that. I had a book contract and wrote a manuscript and it was rejected on the grounds that it was “too theoretical” and wasn't actionable enough. And I realized that I had gone down this rabbit hole of ideas and I was having a difficult time reconciling the more practical approaches I had taken previously.
RL: In the book you locate this false dichotomy between the activist and the scholar. You say that both sides can can mutually learn from one another and that the exclusion of one from the other can have consequences where people are either talking out of their ass or maybe acting on unsound theory.
SK: There’s this concept called “praxis,” which is the synthesis of theory and practice and I think it's really important for me, at least, to situate myself there. It’s easy for us to get caught up in either cycles of action or reflection but ideally theory informs what you actually do, and in turn what you actually do grounds that theory. And you may get to the point where you realize that a lot of these theoretical ideas that you’ve held fall apart or just don't translate cleanly to action or the other way around. It's particularly important to understand the how and the why of what we do as relating to the bigger picture, and to make these connections between the individual and the neighborhood and the meadow and the municipal scale and then the global scale. But academia, for the most part, frowns upon approaches that are too pragmatic or too hands-on or practically oriented, which I think is unfortunate.
RL: Absolutely. I think there should be more academic texts like yours that have these very practical “how to” asides that ground the text. It’s like “I'm gonna drop some theory on you but then I'm going to tell you how to make an insectorium.”
SK: It makes it much more palatable and you feel like that there's consequences to the ideas. But this is really experimental in academic writing right now—it’s unusual to find this practicality in your typical academic textbooks. For me it's like an act of translation, taking the knowledge in this higher theoretical realm and then actually making it available to people on a grassroots and community-based level.
RL: What I also appreciate is that you you open the book with a psychological, almost philosophical journey that you yourself have gone through. You start off with your journey through the activist environmental community back in the ‘90s and what's interesting is that your mindset has changed alongside the discipline of environmentalism.
SK: I came to a lot of this work through activism in a variety of forms. I was involved with Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails—movements based around ideas of homelessness and social justice issues. And towards the end of the ‘90s, we saw the alter-globalization movement really taking off, and a catchphrase of that movement was “Another world is possible.” And I was curious to know—what is that other world? How do we eat in that other world and how do we purify water, how do we move around, how do we educate people, how do we deal with our waste—all these types of questions.
Austin in the Oughts: Scenes from Rhizome
And I wanted to to put it to the test, just to see what that would would actually look like so that kind of gave birth to the Rhizome Collective, a nonprofit organization that Stacey Pettigrew and I were co-founders of in about 2000. We had a warehouse in Austin that was a center for community organizing and also a demonstration of urban sustainability. It was a big asphalt parking lot that we ripped up. We built garden beds and rainwater collection systems and grey water systems and at the same time we provided low rent or free space to activist organizations like Books to Prisoners and Food Not Bombs and independent media and in doing so were really trying to explicitly draw the connections between ecological justice and social justice. At the time—and maybe this has gotten a little bit better—but there there was a dualism there, another false choice—that you have to be working for ecological movements or social movements. Instead we have to see how these two things are necessarily interconnected with one another. If we're going to really develop a robust and broad political movement that's going to bring about cultural and socio-political transformations like we need then you need to be addressing all those issues simultaneously. And we're starting to see this with the emergence of concepts like climate justice, which is becoming a rallying point for these types of ideas. So I am hopeful in that regard.
Artificial Wetlands at the Rhizome Wetlands
RL: What was Austin like in in the ‘00s? I visited a couple times for various music festivals back then and it seemed like a very exciting place that was also in deep transition. And you talk a about this a little bit in the book, about the contrast between the two A’s where you’ve lived—Austin and Albany.
SK: Austin's a city that's just like you said has gone through a ton of transformation and just explosive growth in a really short period of time. This is happening in a lot of places but generally as the north and east are depopulating a lot of people are moving to sunbelt cities. Austin's always been this oasis of progressive ideas and, honestly, just freakiness. The city's motto was “Keep Austin Weird” and and it was a place with warehouse parties and just a lot of creative arts and interesting things happening, surrounded surrounded by the state of Texas.
I first landed there in 1998 and growth was starting but it hadn’t quite gotten to the fever pitch that it is right now. There was still affordable spaces to rent and a fair number of vacant parcels. A lot of the really challenging and experimental sustainability design that we were doing ultimately contributed to the downfall of that particular space. We would receive regular visits with code inspectors during that whole period from 2000-2009. They saw everything that we were doing like tearing up the asphalt and building gardens and building composting toilets in the backyard and disconnecting the washing machine and hooking up to a grey water system. And it was never an issue, nobody had a problem with it—until about 2009, when all of a sudden it became a problem. I think that there was a wave of gentrification passing through the city that decided that the part of town that we were living in would be better suited to provide condominiums to people. They wanted us out of the way. So they really brought the hammer down on us and created a condition where we had no choice but to to get out.
That rapid growth creates a lot of tension. Particularly in the years since I've left, I’ve seen a lot of tension between groups advocating for affordable housing or for greenspace or agricultural space. And there’s just tension about what to do with that little bit of space that's still available there with this incredible downward real estate pressure that's being exerted, particularly in the east end of Austin, which historically has always been a community of color. Up until the 1930s Austin had a forced policy of segregation where people of color were actually required to live in that part of town. So people feel a lot of ownership there and an incredible amount of resentment when they can no longer afford to be living in this community that they built.
So at least culturally I felt like there was a lot more acceptance and support in Austin around the type of sustainability work that we're doing from the population as a whole, so that was a bit of a harsh transition when we finally came to Albany, which is not really thought of as a center of progressive thinking. It's certainly not the most backward-thinking city I've ever been in—it’s probably somewhere in the middle. But even Albany has come a long way in that regard and is probably more characteristic of what most of America is like, which is a useful barometer right in gauging cultural transformation. Just the fact that in the years that I've been in Albany I've seen chickens be legalized; I’ve seen the city of Albany go from being philosophically opposed to the idea of composting to actually embracing it full heartedly and supporting our composting programs. These ideas that were considered fringe and radical 20 years ago are now becoming mainstream.
RL: One of the things that you locate in the book is the opportunities of these shrinking cities as opposed to the rapidly growing cities like Austin. The tongue-in-cheek motto of Albany is “Keep Albany Boring” which we all kind of laugh at but there is this kind of status-quo culture here where it's like, “Don't rattle things too much.” We’re complacent in our lifestyle choices such that it’s hard to find the kind of radicalism that you write about. But at the same time these “shrinking cities” offer a lot of opportunities for the work that your doing, right? Did you know that coming in to Albany?
Albany County Land Bank
SK: Perhaps it became clear over the years of being here but in a city where there isn't that incredible downward pressure being exerted, we have the opportunity to be really proactive about doing things like creating land trusts and really taking the ethos of the urban commons, or the idea of cities for people not for profit and trying to establish land trusts or working with entities such as the Land Bank which have programs like “mow to own” that make it a realistic option for a city resident to acquire a vacant lot and get $1,000 on top of that to create some type of community space. Those types of things probably would not be realistic options for people in a “Star City” or one of these incredibly fast growing mega cities that get most of the media attention. The “second tier” or shrinking or plateau city gets a lot less attention but probably most cities in America are more in that category than they are in the handful of star cities that we tend to think of when we do metropolitan studies or urban studies in general. The fact that we can simultaneously be working for greenspace and affordable housing here in Albany, and that they don't have to be at odds with another is really an opportunity. Ideally the time to create Land Trust and to take property and remove them from market speculation is before gentrification begins. But once it already has begun then it’s going to become much more difficult to do.
RL: You also locate the urban-rural transect in small cities. You can be downtown and easily get to the outdoors and to farmland. You know this used to be the argument for the suburbs, but maybe we can kind of turn that argument on its head from an ecological perspective.
SK: I think having a small urban to rural gradient is a plus. A lot of my interest is trying to create interchange and interconnection between urban and rural places. Having that that small gradient is beneficial. In the case of Albany, if you go to the east or to the south, there's basically no suburban zone, or it's very small, and you're very quickly in farmland, or just fields and forests, and that facilitates this interchange. The fact that you can have farmers owning land affordably in in the “peri-urban” sphere and growing food for urban residents goes a long way towards localizing food production in a realistic way versus what you happens in cities with much larger suburban zones is that the suburbs are built on what was some of the best farmland in the country. And when it's just turned into strip malls and into tract homes, its potential to grow food is largely lost.
In addition, having that close urban to rural gradient can be conducive to building solidarity between urban and rural populations who are, in the present political climate, being pitted against one another, and often told to blame each other for their issues. And that's what's driving a lot of the polarization and regressive political activity in this country right now. But I think building a really broad and progressive political movement is key to developing solidarity between urban and rural populations and making them realize how many shared issues they have in common, particularly around matters of equity and fairness.
RL: We've been talking about shifting ideals, shifting fields, shifting norms—even in the time that you were both in Austin and Albany and I think one of the things that you locate in your prologue Is this the kind of mainstreaming of sustainability ideas, and all the spin offs of “sustainable development” and all the problematics of that terminology. You zero in on the danger of this complacency and the pernicious language of capitalism can just paper over and greenwash everything, as you call it, “an opioid of the masses.” And you can recognize some of the same tropes that you've seen again and again but perhaps in a new form.
I'm aware of this as someone who's just trying to shift the Overton window and get people talking about sustainability concepts. In some ways I'm almost resigned to the idea that greenwashing might be the first step of recognition. How do you reconcile that? How do you shift people from a place where they're just giving lip service to them maybe moving deeper to real practice? How do you reconcile with that transformation?
The Radix Center
SK: It’s tricky because you know that sustainability originally is about being mindful of the economic, the environmental, and social dimensions of life. Particularly in the past 20 years I've been really active in this field and I've definitely seen a drift in mainstream sustainability discourse where at the same time it's become a more mainstream concept or more of a household term, you've also seen sort of a shift in the discourse around in that corporate interests have realized that it's a marketing term as well. Just like “green” or “eco” this or that, that it's nebulous enough that it can be molded to sell different products and particularly with concepts that they aren't so strictly codified, and it's easy for it to be turned into something that's different from what the original definition really meant.
I've seen a greater emphasis be put on on the economic and technological environmental aspects of sustainability. While there's really been a de-emphasis or really no emphasis at all on matters of of equity and fairness, race and class—the social issues. In that regard it makes sustainability more compatible with with global capitalism because you can just put a slightly greener veneer on it and make it slightly more inclusive and slightly more diverse, but it's not really doing anything to fundamentally challenge the deep inequities that are present in this in society. Those things are easy enough to sweep under the rug because they're uncomfortable to talk about, right? It would require having some very uncomfortable conversations which which people don't want to have. But I think it's really important to be very explicit and and intentional about re-centering that social pillar and talking about matters of equity and access and fairness and justice and race and class as they pertain to soils, water, nonhuman life, air. Or else it will just really become another marketing term, another buzzword that's devoid of any substantial meeting.
RL: And I think we're even moving to the next phase—the state of New York has made some efforts on a macro scale to engage with questions of environmental justice and the new climate law has this equity component where at least 35% of all clean energy investment has to go to disadvantaged communities—
SK: We hope so! Yet to see if that actually happens!
RL: I guess that's my point, as we’re moving to this next phase of marketing where you're hearing executives and commissioners use the vernacular of “environmental justice” but I wonder how much are they really actually grappling with questions of equity as opposed to just seeing it as another kind of currency.
SK: There's totally that potential for people who know how to talk the talk, who know the right words to use, to use the language of the environmental justice movement to do—let's call it an “environmental justice washing” of whatever project or whatever initiative. It's hard to always know—is it really fully and genuinely inclusive of the populations that it's purporting to to be in solidarity with? It really has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. I could totally see the emergence of sort of like a professional class of consultants who could tell corporations these are the words you need to use to make it seem like you're more substantially engaging with environmental justice issues. That potential definitely does exist and could contribute to the paradox of environmental justice—that if a community is for instance successful in shutting down a corporate polluter their “reward” is that there is an increase in property values that ends up and displacing them. So it's tricky stuff that we really need to have complex conversations about.
RL: The two factors that you locate as contributing to this “opioids for the masses” are “social sustainability exclusion” and “ecological alienation,” and they both seem deeply entwined in that they're both an act of exclusion or removal. You’re arguing for an inclusion of ecological wisdom back into our social systems and also a confrontation with inequity which itself requires a de-alienation of poverty and race. We have to confront our natural systems and we have to also confront our inequities. The kind of pedagogical model of Radix is like “Come and see the the differences in people and populations and also how we decompose our waste.” And the twinning of those seems really important, right?
Scott at work in The Radix Center
SK: Yeah! That’s it in a nutshell right there. To identify these two issues—one is the de-centering of the social pillar of sustainability and then this other is sort of ecological alienation or ecological estrangement that I see a lot in working with urban populations. And particularly urban youth often internalize these negative attitudes towards the places where they live. A lot of that's really stemming from the ways that we still conventionally talk about “the environment” or “nature.” I teach in the field of environmental education and I kind of blame that attitude on the way that environmental education is conventionally taught as well, which still very much thinks of nature as something “out there,” in the Catskills or the Adirondacks, not right in the middle of the city. Obviously there are significant qualitative differences between an urban ecosystem and the Adirondacks, but a city is still an ecosystem! We define an ecosystem as being a community of organisms interacting with the living and non-living aspects of their environment. And by that definition cities most certainly are ecosystems—not necessarily healthy or high functioning ones but they meet all the criteria nonetheless. Once we identify them as ecosystems we can ask the questions, “How can they be healthier? How can they be improved? How can they be higher functioning?”
As a pedagogical model we need to work with kids, looking at the spaces in the environment that's right around them and showing them that the nature in the cities has interest and value and can be an object of study. We need to take a page from the environmental justice movement, which extends the definition “the environment” to include both human social and political processes. The whole urban, ecojustice pedagogical approach is an attempt to to reconcile those two issues—the de-centering of the social issues of sustainability and urban ecological alienation—by saying “Let's look at how questions of equity and fairness and race and class apply to the soils, the air, the waste cycles, the non human life, the water that is right within the urban environment.” In doing so we will be teaching the importance and the relevance of urban ecosystems as a field of study.
RL: It's particularly pertinent in Albany which, even though it's a riverfront city, has basically cut itself off from the river and almost purged it from our consciousness. People in Albany go far afield to have their “nature time” when there's actually an opportunity to have a waterfront right here. But through a whole host of cultural and infrastructural choices we've walled ourselves off from the river.
SK: Right, it’s a particular irony that I talk a lot about—ostensibly the reason that humans lived in the Hudson River Valley, the Mohican people, was because of the incredible abundance of the Hudson River, and within the span of less than a generation we've poisoned it and made it so that it's unswimmable and it's unfishable. And again, why do any of these river cities exist? Albany, Troy, up and down the river—it was because of their connection with the river, primarily for transport, and later for industry but fishing as well. And we've really just forsaken that in the case of Albany by building an interstate that runs parallel to the river that's physically cut everybody's access to it. It's now quite difficult to access the river. There's only a few places where you can actually get down and touch the water if you want to and if you don't know where they are it's hard to figure out how you would even do that. So for instance youth in our program, despite having grown up here, have never actually been to the river. And on top of that they're told—often with good reason—not to. There is this perception of the river as being this deeply toxic and unsafe and hopelessly polluted place.
We say to a lot of youth, “Yes the river still has issues, however, it has gotten significantly better in the past 30 years.” You can talk to old-time fishers and they’ll say “Yeah, well, the river may not be great but you should have seen it before the Clean Water Act was passed.” They always said you could tell what color they were painting the cars because you would see the the colors of the paints just floating down the river. So there has been significant improvement—it’s still got a long way to go but I think it's really powerful just to push back on the narrative that it's hopelessly polluted, to know that small actions can make a big difference.
Artificial floating islands on the Hudson
One of the things that we do a lot with the youth is to go on canoeing trips in the Hudson. To actually go to it and see it, and we build artificial floating islands which are basically these floating structures that have water plants attached to them whose roots dangle down in the water column and the plants uptake extra excess nitrogen phosphorus out of the water that's
typically resulting from the combined sewage overflows while at the same time creating habitat for zooplankton who are eating the micro algae that might be contributing to harmful algae blooms. And these islands are diversifying and complexifying the Albany shoreline which is pretty much just a giant concrete bulkhead. So a lot of their value is educational and symbolic, showing kids through means that are fun and participatory that they can actually take steps, partnering with biological allies, to make the river a healthier place. They are fostering that sense of love and connection and reciprocity between people and the wellbeing of the river. Because ultimately you’re going to be so much more highly motivated to work in the defense of something that you love and you care about and you feel a sense of interconnection with rather than something that you just stand in front of and feel anxious about. Love before knowledge, essentially.
RL: Well, this is all awesome and I recommend the book to everyone. Thank you for all the work you're doing with Radix and the South End and there's more to come. Change is slow but I love that quote that you have from Timothy Morton, that “Places contain multitudes” and that the parts of the cities are greater than the whole. We tend to say the opposite but you can't know the whole and that “chaotic bricolage,” as you call it, makes them beautiful.
SK: “The whole is less than the sum of its parts.” I had to really think about that one for a long time but but if you think about it in a fractal sense right it's true. We have this tendency to look at the whole picture but avoid the tendency to over generalize and realize that cities are made up of, tons of little micro stories and that's kind of really what makes them interesting. •