‍A Flooding, A Remembering

I rode my bike to 94 when it was a lake and I was like, "Damn, a freeway does not have to be a freeway!" And it can happen in less than 24 hours. A freeway can become something completely different.

By now, you probably recognize that as the voice of Nate Mullan, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education. This conversation with Nate was recorded in the summer of 2021, when Detroit saw two major floods that turned Interstate 94, which runs east to west across the city, back into a body of water.

And, so I —for a point of reference here, you can see on this overpass here on 94, just a couple blocks from Livernois, it says 14ft is the clearance. And based upon that clearance, we're guessing this is about 8 or 9 feet of water. You can see the trash truck, the "think green" is still in the same spot. That it was yesterday. We still have submerged vehicles here on I-94. You can see the back of one right there through the trees. So, not much has changed here since yesterday. And as we look down the road, you can see semi trucks, vehicles still sitting here in water.

And and these floods were bad, bad. The week after each one driving around the city, you'd see sidewalks filled with bulk trash from people's basements where everything had been submerged, often with sewage contaminated water. There are many different kinds of floods. But what we've seen in Detroit over the last few years have been predominantly pluvial, surface water floods caused by extreme rainfall.

And it's like, when I spend time with some of the natural spaces of the city, you know, since since your‚— since the flooding happened and really impacted the work at Feedom Freedom because I've been thinking incessantly about the waterways of the city and how so many of them have actively been covered and turned into streets.

You heard that right. The city of Detroit sits on top of a bunch of submerged waterways. Nate's talking about what are sometimes referred to as "ghost streams." Since 1905, Detroit, like many cities, has removed or covered up over 86% of the total length of streams that existed in that year. These ghost streams are waterways or wetlands that were either buried or filled in to support urban development. Here's Jacob Napieralski, a geology professor at the University of Michigan Dearborn, discussing ghost dreams and WDET's Created Equal with Stephen Henderson.

So we can just basically define a ghost stream or wetland as a structure or a feature that existed in the past that functioned like a wetlands, flowed like a river. But then after European settlers come, we begin to sprawl and develop and we see this as an inconvenience and so we drain and remove. So, a river can be removed by simply dropping it underground so that it still actually is flowing, but it's no longer visible on the surface or in lots of situations. We literally just removed it from the landscape. So a lot of times there are rolling hills in your community that are not random hills. They are a stream valley that no longer fills with water. But that landscape does remember what it's supposed to do, even though we've tried to change it. And of course, that's...

Rivers' memories are much longer than ours. There's a series of what have been called "meander maps" of the alluvial valley of the Mississippi River that I've been obsessed with for years. And I'm obsessed with them because they're visually striking. They're stunning, undulating drawings of curves exploding on a map. In them, the Mississippi River emerges from the knot of swirling pathways as a negative space rather than the bright blue fixed line we typically see in geological or geographic depictions of rivers. These maps were drawn by Harold Fisk, a geologist and cartographer working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s. What they represent visually is the historical behavior of the river rather than the river at a fixed point in time. In other words, they depict the river's fluctuations through space and time. A blogger named Jason Kottke writes that Fisk's maps "represent the memory of a mighty river with thousands of years of course changes compressed into a single image by a clever mapmaker with an artistic eye. Looking at them, you're invited to imagine the Mississippi as it was during the European exploration of the Americas in the 1500s, during the Cahokia civilization in the 1200s, when the city's population matched London's or when the first humans came upon the river more than 12,000 years ago, and even back to before humans when mammoths, camels, direwolves and giant beavers roamed the land and gazed upon the river."

While these maps depict the Mississippi River, and when I mention ghost streams, I'm talking about a bunch of smaller waterways connected to the Detroit River, the takeaway here is that water remembers where it ran before, and sometimes it returns to those paths. Water doesn't care what humans have tried to do to corral it, even if it emerges as a phantom of the waterway that once rested there. You'll hear us talk about time elsewhere in the series, and this observation about water's memory connects us to that theme by challenging our understanding of waterways as static or fixed simply because we only know them as we've witnessed them in our comparatively brief human lifespans.

These maps and Detroit's historic flooding evoke the carceral fiction that we can and should exercise unrestrained control over our landscapes.

Bumper

Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. Making Room for Abolition first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home and a future without police and prisons.

This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufacture better lives for ourselves‚—whether that's healthier food, safer neighborhoods, new technologies for moving through conflict‚—it's usually described as an act of survival or desperation, rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. Each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible.

So, in each episode will look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being. My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.

About this Episode

In this episode, we'll explore the capitalist, colonial and carceral fictions that convince us we can control nature and the consequences of doing so. We'll talk about how we attempt to exercise that control over water; how water responds; and how our manipulations of both water and land constitute a meddling with time that echoes through time, as well. As I mentioned in part 1 of this episode, when I talk about nature, I'm referring to elements of nature that concern urban space and Detroit, which means in large part, I'm talking about the land beneath the city, the water all around us, and the wider dynamics of climate change that manifest in our environment. I'm also talking about our relationships to these elements of nature in the context of our focus in this series on carceral abolition: namely, how our carceral conditioning shapes our interactions with nature; how our responses to what we experience as crises of nature and reflect an abandonment of our responsibility to care for one another; and how developing a different orientation to time might help us relate differently to our environment, as urban as it may be.

Before we begin, here's a dispatch from another world: Stevie's always studying these days. Her Water Steward textbooks and vials and test strips stay scattered around the living room. She's learning about the way the landscape changed, how there used to be 500-year floods, that became 50-year floods, that became daily floods so massive that they permanently transformed the composition of water to land in this region. What used to be the Midwest of a larger landmass called the United States is now the northeastern most corner of a region with many different names, among them: Waawiyatanong. The last big flood happened when her late grandma had been a baby, but long enough before Stevie was born that it still seems so foreign, so far away. There's not much left of that world. So much of it was swallowed by water. She's heard stories about it, the catastrophe, the fires, the destruction and the futile attempts to stop the water from rising. But even those feel like a novel or a movie about some fictional place, since she's never known what it's like to live without water surrounding her on all sides. She flips through her notebook, highlighting her meticulous notes to prepare for her exam as she peers out the window of her stilted home at the sun setting below the shoreline. She's nervous because to be a steward is a lot of responsibility, but not because she doubts her knowledge or is worried about the test. She's been preparing for this, like everyone else in this place for her entire life, protecting water is just what we do.

A Flooding, A Remembering con’t

Jefferson Chalmers is the neighborhood where Feedom Freedom Growers is located. Feedom Freedom is a community garden set against a canal on Detroit's east side. Founded by Myrtle Thompson-Curtis and her partner Wayne Curtis, to, in the words of the mission, quote, "nourish ourselves, other marginalized Detroiters and our relationships with each other and the environment." In Myrtle's words, it was a response to the violence perpetrated against Black folks in Detroit:

The least that I can do, is to the sound of warning bell. To educate, to understand that we can grow food that is not violent towards our very bodies. And so I started to understand that my body was rebelling against the food I was putting in it. And if I can have that understanding, why not share that with others? And, in that work‚— my partner, who has a lifetime of activism and caring for others, and that's what that activism is, it's caring for self and others to utilize the resources that we had available, which were plots of land. And so to understand that growing our own food‚—and I advocate everyone to have a backyard garden, a side lot garden, a pot garden‚—to grow something, to understand that connectedness and to build those relationships with that form of kin. It starts to undo some of the damage and violence that is perpetrated against us.

To that end, as the mission continues, quote "Feedom Freedom grows and shares political power, social consciousness, healthy food and a culture of collectivism and interdependence through gardening, stewarding land and water, providing mutual aid, encouraging artmaking and hosting critical conversations."

And Feedom Freedom was hit hard by these floods.

It’s no accident | It’s by design

In the context of Detroit's ghost streams and flooding problems, there's a few things related to power in urban space that we have to call attention to, because it's no accident that these floods have been more devastating to some Detroiters than to others. As an aside, there's a twisted irony embedded here too, that connects to some fictions we explored in another episode of this series on Safety and Interdependence: understanding how rich Michigan and the wider Great Lakes landscape is in water makes it really hard to swallow how the state has tried and, in many ways succeeded, to convince us that it's a scarce resource that must be taken away if residents can't afford to pay for it.

But back to the task at hand. Part of the fiction we intend to unseat in this episode is that people can corral or contain nature for our benefit and without restraint. It's important to point out that these forms of control are akin to carceral tactics for social control. We contain, cage and police nature, much like we do people.

The point here isn't that humans can't affect nature. Rather that we cannot and should not strive to control nature as certainly and resolutely as our urban landscapes would have us believe. Detroit's waterways, for example, will not let you forget their presence. They'll swiftly remind you of the fact that a freeway isn't necessarily a freeway or that a wetland isn't necessarily solid ground.

Nature will make fictions of our best laid plans.

That said, there are absolutely ways in which humans, through our social, political and technological systems, intentionally can and do shape nature's movement. In essence, it's no accident that nature's remembering—its flooding—affects more vulnerable populations more severely. Here's an excerpt from an interview by Ari Shapiro on NPR's All Things Considered:

Professor Carol Miller of Wayne State University in Detroit has been studying water infrastructure for decades. And she tells me people used to ask her about contaminants, whether the local fish they caught were safe to eat. But these days?

The questions that are being asked at dinners and out with friends is a question questions relating to flooding. Like why is this happening? Why is it that disadvantaged people in the city have to go into their basements several times a year to pump out or pail out sewage that has gathered in the basement from a storm?

Let's talk about three reasons why this is happening.

First of all, climate change is making these floods more prevalent. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2022 State Climate Summaries, extreme rainfall events in Michigan, meaning when it rains more than two inches in a day, are on the rise, with a wettest consecutive five year period occurring between 2016 and 2020. The kinds of very heavy rain events that make up the heaviest 1% of storms now drop 31% more precipitation in the Midwest than they did 50 years ago. This is undeniably‚—well, unless you're a climate change denier, that is‚—a product of human intervention, pollution, and extraction from the environment. Global warming overall increases atmospheric water vapor across the planet, which causes more extreme rainfall and more extreme floods.

Secondly, flooding devastates more vulnerable populations more often because Black Detroiters, for one, are concentrated in higher flood risk areas of the city, a direct product of the ways racism has been used as a tool of social and economic power. In large part, the reason for this racialized vulnerability is that high flood risk areas align with redlining maps which long dictated where Black residents were allowed to buy homes. And still, to this day, align with racial segregation patterns in the region. Here's Jacob Napieralski, again:

We looked at history and we wanted to look at the history of the landscape, but also history of the people. And in one particular aspect to our research, we were interested in what we did in the 30s and 40s, which was called redlining, where bankers and lenders were very curious to know what the risk was for investing in communities all over the United States. I think there's over 200 some cities that had this done in their own city. So in Detroit we have a really large metro, Detroit's large. So we have large areas that underwent this determination of of economic risk. And if you were scored an "A" that meant you were in a community that was definitely worth investing, banks should certainly give you great deals. It was worth investing in, living in. If you were in a "D" neighborhood you were considered in, in some of the more difficult neighborhoods. A lot of times that was low income minorities, immigrants, non-English speaking and so on. So that practice was eventually outlawed. But we were very interested in whether the remnants of that still have some contribution to flood inequity, so why some communities get hit harder with floods than others. And so just to give you some background, you know, we looked at social and environmental indicators, so if we just looked at "A" versus "D," so the "best" versus those that were considered the "highest risk." "A" communities right now, if you live in an "A" community, there's about 10% poverty and there's about 8% vacancy. If you compare that against all of the "D" communities that we have in Detroit, that is about one third. So it's about 36% poverty rate, 24% vacancy. And the median home income is less than 25%. So it still remains an issue, so we think that there must be a connection‚— if that's the case, there must be an environmental connection, and sure enough, if you look at tree canopy cover, if you live in an "A" neighborhood, it's really green, it's lush, over 25% tree canopy cover compared to 8% in "D" neighborhoods. So we went at this and asked the question, well, if that's the case, then we probably have more concrete, we have far more summer heat, and so we have communities are probably going to get hit much harder with these floods than really comfortable, green, lush neighborhoods. And it turns out that tends to be true.

And finally, the city hasn’t done much to protect residents from these floods. What it feels and looks like is that they leave Detroiters to fend for themselves and recover by themselves after these storms. The severity of some recent floods—particularly the ones in 2021—was unquestionably a function of aging, unmaintained water and sewer infrastructure and floodwater management systems in the city. This isn’t to say that, with better infrastructure, we “can” conquer or control nature, rather that it takes incredible investments in infrastructure to keep up with increasingly intense rainfall events amid climate change.

When I talked to people who lived on the east side about floods that summer, it was almost as if the Great Lakes Water Authority, which manages regional storm water, had just sat by and watched it all happen. People described watching the water levels rise high enough to submerge their cars parked on the street all night. And then sometime after midnight, the water suddenly just began to recede like someone had unplugged a giant bathtub drain. It was as if someone was either asleep at the helm or they purposely let the water rise up until that point. But the water authority denied every last one of the 24,000 claims filed by residents and insurance companies after the floods on June 24th and 25th of 2021. Here's Fox 2 News coverage in that year:

But the GLWA report concluded that the amount of rainfall, about seven inches in five hours was beyond the system's capacity of 16 pumps, especially here at Connor's Creek pumping Station on Jefferson.

It says they had a total of 16 storm pumps. They admit that for a bulk of the time, only three were working. Then, at best, five were working. So how they can say with 3 or 5 working, that doesn't cause or substantially aggravate all this flooding, that that just strains credibility.

Yet, GLWA says, even if every pump, piping and equipment was working, flooding would still have occurred because.

Once the storm pumps started running, the water quickly left.

And even though the report acknowledged electrical problems affecting operations at the Freud and Connor Creek pumping stations, GLWA said this, "even before the release of the final report from the independent investigators, GLWA began working to implement key infrastructure and process improvements to help address the stresses put on an infrastructure system not built for this level of rain."

That's going to be the fight in this case, whether it was a substantial cause of the flooding.

Well, Charlie, it doesn't really all add up. I mean, if the GLWA admits it has been working to fix the infrastructure and it was previously and that wasn't built for extreme rain, how can it just blame the rain and not the equipment? I mean, it seems pretty simple.

It is pretty simple, but it's actually it's not, though. The problem is, is that they are saying basically that there's a lot of it's too much rain‚—we had too much rain and that ANY place would have flooded. It doesn't matter. And so they also have another argument. I don't want to get into it too much, but it's governmental immunity. Basically. You can't sue the government unless you show that it is a major defect and it's more than 50% the cause of all the damages. So that's a legitimate argument too. So, listen, they do have arguments and listen, they admit that their pump stations weren't working. They admit that they had some electrical problems. We covered that. They also admit that they fixed them later on. But on the date, these two days, June 24 and five, back last year, right here, they say it just wouldn't have mattered. It was just too much rain. I don't know if a jury is going to believe it, but that's their story. And apparently they're sticking to it.

The focus on pursuing blame for this infrastructural failure seems to be an attempt to address grief and loss, to repair damage caused by human negligence, and to acknowledge that we need more from the system. The emphasis in this account and in many others is on assigning culpability through the legal systems and getting the water authority to pay for damages. And at the end of the day, the authority failed to protect people and is doing all kinds of acrobatics to avoid responsibility here. It's suspicious that now in this predicament, we're willing to admit that we can't control nature. Right? "It must have been an act of God herself that overpowered our systems. There was just nothing we could do." As Jacob Napieralski points out, there might be some truth to this.

But in other words, could we could we build our way out of these problems, in your opinion?

Oof, that's a that's a very good question because I think it's human nature for us to think that we can outwit and outsmart Mother Nature.

Right?

And I don't think that that's always possible. And I think we would be playing with people's lives if we take that gamble and think that we can out-engineer and capture all the water and minimize flooding. The reality is flooding is actually a normal process. It's just something that's inconvenient to humans and the way we see life.

But let's be real. The truth is that we could never really predict and out-engineer nature. Not that there's nothing we can do to live alongside it resiliently and in relation to its fluctuations. Acknowledging nature's persistence and strength doesn't mean we don't come up with other ways to live with nature, that might not look like out-engineering or outsmarting it.

You know, we talk about engineering and capturing everything. Maybe that's not necessarily our goal. Our goal is to accept that nature is going to do what it wants to do once in a while, we accept it, and so in some places, we have nature-based solutions.

Plus, if we already know that extreme rainfall events are more frequent than ever before, what's the point of pretending that the Authority doesn't own some responsibility for how severely so many people were affected? And how might this be different, if we prioritized public institutions taking accountability for people's well-being instead of doing everything possible to shirk responsibility for finding ways to manage our relationship with water differently? What we know to be true now is that climate change is making extreme rainfall events more and more frequent, and we don't have the resources to fight nature, prevent flooding entirely, or to go back in time and unmoor the city from its foundation on top of ghost waterways. Here's Carol Miller in conversation with Ari Shapiro, again:

There's tons of money that look like it's going to be heading in that direction. So it should, I'd say it all depends on the people that are making those decisions.

The infrastructure package includes billions of dollars specifically to address flooding. There's $3.5 billion for FEMA's flood mitigation assistance program over five years. Another billion for a FEMA program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. Half a billion for flood mapping. The list goes on.

It is better than what it was, but it's not enough.

Water engineer Palencia Mobley says this is a good start, but she could use all of the flood money that this bill sets aside for the entire country, just fixing Detroit's issues alone. As we take in the neighborhood in the midday heat, I ask her whether people around here associate these record storms with climate change.

They may this summer, this summer might might have made it happen. I think now people contextually understand, yes, something has happened. The 100 year storm now kind of looks like the ten year storm because the recurrence interval has changed.

She says she's trying to imagine infrastructure for a future that's uncertain.

We don't even know what to design for now. This stuff is so far off the curve that you don't even know, like what's the right level of service to try to provide?

You're saying if a 100 year storm is now a ten year storm, how bad is a 100 year storm going to be in a decade or 2 or 5 years?

Your system is not designed to respond to something like that.

These days, when rain starts to fall, her friends text each other: I'm praying for you.

So what is the point of all this? I'm definitely not saying that prayer is all we've got. I'm also not arguing Pollyannishly that we should all just return to nature by burning down the city and pulling up all the concrete. We're here. The concrete is here. The water is here. This is where we find ourselves: amid conditions shaped by the ways that we've treated nature throughout time. What I am saying is: let's figure out how to navigate this shifting landscape in a way that doesn't rely on control and coercion. And when flooding events do occur, because water is going to continue to remember, we don't have to add insult to injury by failing to care for people in the midst of crisis.

I think one of the things that I'd like to, you know, put out there for dialog with a number of the different concepts and ideas and solutions and imaginations that people in different, you know, abolition based communities have offered is this idea of protocol and what does it mean when we develop relationships‚—kinship bonds, as I put it‚—that are so strong that it almost creates that sense that people just automatically are able to fall in line together with each other when a crisis occurs as opposed to being in the, you know, a situation where the most immediate crisis may not be the worst thing about it. Right? Like with regard to injustice, you know, there may be like—even, even though I, I challenge this term—but there might be a "climate-induced crisis" like flooding, but then the worst part of it is not the flooding. It's the injustice that occurs when you attempt to to deal with the flooding.

That's the voice of Kyle Whyte, who you may recall from Part 1. He's an environmental justice scholar and faculty at the University of Michigan. He's also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. When the worst part of a major flood isn't the destructive force of nature, but the dehumanizing response from folks and institutions who are tasked with caring for residents' well-being, something's got to change. And we have to change not just our responses to these kinds of crises, but also how we interpret how our actions influence the conditions that shaped flooding in the first place and the ways we conceive of our relationships and responsibilities to the environment.

Fundamentally Unstable Footing

One thing I can't stop thinking about is how both literally and metaphorically, ghost streams leave Detroit on fundamentally unstable footing, in geological terms because of the city's construction on top of waterways that will never forget where they once ran. But this unstable, water-bound foundation isn't unique to Detroit.

I lived in Mexico City for a while in 2018. When I think about Detroit's water and colonial history. I'm reminded that Mexico City also sits atop the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city besieged by colonial war and disease brought by settlers. As a consequence, the foundation of Mexico City is quite literally sinking. The physical infrastructure of the entire city today is precarious because of how it came to be. After a massacre, the Spaniards destroyed what remained of Tenochtitlan's infrastructure. They drained the lake on which the island city once sat and got to work constructing their empire. Today, as the soil and clay that one sat beneath the city compacts, Mexico City drops another foot and a half per year. The physical infrastructure of the city we know today is compromised, at least in part because of how it came to be, how it was founded and who was erased to bring it to life. Major earthquakes have rocked the city throughout time: the earthquake in 1985 and the one that hit the same day 32 years later, both unmoored the city's perilous physical foundation and the destruction was amplified by the disaster of colonialism that preceded it.

I can't help but see a parallel precarity here in Detroit. We share with Mexico City, no doubt a pattern of colonial genocidal destruction and a vast network of ghost waterways that enabled the foundation of this city.

You know, I think we're living on an open wound right now, you know...

And to borrow from adrienne maree brown here, it's as if Detroit and Mexico City were constructed atop open wounds both geologically and relationally speaking. And yet we wonder why they won't hold, why they keep fracturing, flooding and remembering.

I'm critical of the United States because we were founded through a genocidal colonial act and we never actually repaired it. And then we kept building on top of it with more harm. I'm here because of harmful acts, and we kept building and building on top of it and we never repaired. And so without that repair, now, it's normal to live in an extremely violent, extremely unjust world because that's what we created. That's what was founded. Right. So I think we need deep repair. And then I can believe, "Oh, this place actually cares about my existence." And then care is built into our society: health care, educational care, my care for how people live and die, care for how people feel. I'm like, I don't want to feel like you're just manipulating me with acts of care. I want to feel like you really see me from birth to death as something that belongs to you and you belong to me. And if things go awry, I will repair them. And I can care for you. And you can believe me. Because I show you in my actions, not just in my speeches every four years, but in every day actions. You see my care.

You’re practicing care.

You’re practicing care. And I'm a facilitator, so to me, it's like facilitation is the way you care for a group. I would rather...

These foundational sins of corralling water and genocidal violence are also analogous to more recent cycles of erasure in Detroit. The construction of the new Detroit atop the Detroit that's been here in ruin for the better part of a century. What's notable for the sake of what we're exploring in this series of audio essays is that the social, political and spatial relations in Detroit and Mexico City are presently being shaped and reshaped by the same kinds of capitalist speculation, overpolicing and pervasive surveillance.

The thing that irks me about this new Detroit discourse is that nearly any time I mention that I live in Detroit to folks from outside Detroit, the first reaction is something like, "Oh, cool, I hear the city's 'coming back,' especially downtown!" And I cringe every time because where do they think the city went and where exactly do they think it's going? And what about the people who've been here all along?

Listen. Everybody likes nice things and Detroiters want their city to look and feel like it's thriving and cared for and invested in just as much as the next person. But it's undeniable that the capital-fueled remaking of downtown Detroit, of Midtown and other neighborhoods that are marked by a recognizable resurgence is not for many of the people who already called Detroit home. It's a tactic meant to attract new capital and the people who have it.

I've spent time in Elmwood Cemetery  that has one of our last open air creeks, which most folks will tell you is called Bloody Run Creek or Parents Creek. But all those names, I mean, you look at that and you're just like, "That's not what your name is. That's not... That's what that's what some‚— that's what someone who like, who's been indoctrinated in this world that like that like we get to name something Bloody Run Creek." I mean it's it's too beautiful to be called Bloody Run Creek. And and it's just it's struck me that like all there's there's literally a whole other reality happening underneath the reality that that in some ways you know to this idea that we know too much it's almost like we know too much about only one reality.

Part of what Nate's offering here is a reminder that whatever is erased or subsumed under colonial conquest of people and land cannot and should not be forgotten. What was Bloody Run Creek before it ran red with French and British soldiers blood? And how does the fact of that violence inform what surrounds the creek now? He's also pulling apart the precarity of the fictions that construct our colonized reality, in a place like Detroit.

These reflections can also serve as a reminder that the erasures we witness and the so-called renaissance some would use to describe Detroit of today, are not the first. Bloody Run Creek is named to commemorate a battle between two colonial powers that attempted, in the larger arc of their efforts, to erase Indigenous claims to the land that surrounds it.

This idea that we know too much about only one reality is also a provocation to question that one reality‚—or imaginary‚—in the various places where it shows up.

Time and Space

In a sense, we have refashioned time itself, making it a function of our spatial infrastructure practices. If we cannot literally play the role of time, we try to trick time altering environmental rhythms and cycles, choreographing material flows. But the trick is on us. The world is filled with protagonists known and unknown, who are not subject to design intent.

Anytime we intervene in the environment, when we, quote, "reorganize space for human needs or transform the landscape into a desired state, whether intentionally or not, we're engaged in a kind of temporal sorcery," according to landscape architecture professor Brett Milligan. This happens when we pave a road, burn a bunch of fossil fuels, attempt to contain water or plow a field. Doing so constitutes a kind of acceleration or deceleration of our landscapes. Slowing and diverting water through damming, for example, bends time or say, building entire cities on top of ghost rivers and then building giant inflatable dams to slow down flooding a couple hundred years later. This is to say, that our attempts to control nature, water especially, constitute attempts to manipulate time in addition to space. In our episodes on Safety and Interdependence, we examine how the systems we design to care for human needs too often attempt to isolate our needs from one another. Similarly, our technological attempts at controlling weather events and water are predicated on decontextualizing or fragmenting those events from their complex contexts, abstracting them from time and space. To be clear, in Milligan's writing, he's not arguing that we shouldn't be involved in accelerating or decelerating landscapes. Rather with reference to other scholars like Laura Bear and Barbara Adam, he does argue that we need to approach the ways we act on time more skillfully, with better knowledge and more ethically. He asks, for example, "why and how should a landscape's evolutionary path be shaped? For whom and by whom? Are the knowledges and techniques derived from and applied within this landscape equitable, representative and participatory?"

So far, all the language that I've used to describe the climate transformation surrounding these floods is couched in linear or clock time. I've mentioned the increased frequency with which these flooding events are happening. The 500-year flood that became the 50-year or five-year flood, their severity has heightened compared to years past, right? But, building on the work of Barbara Adam, who proposes that we see the world through timescapes Milligan points out that linear or clock time is actually inadequate for capturing the complexity of the embodied, spatial ways in which time is experienced when grounded in place, and the rhythms and tempos of a specific, ever-changing landscape.

Narrating Climate Change

In a similar vein, Indigenous knowledge has a lot to teach us about:

Consent and responsibility as a way to understand time.

You're listening to Kyle Whyte again. He posits that narrating climate change in linear units of time leads us to shortsighted, irresponsible attempts to mitigate climate change. He writes that "when people relate to climate change through linear time, that is, as a ticking clock, they feel peril and seek ways to stop the worst impacts of climate change immediately. But swift action obscures their responsibilities to others who risk being harmed by the solutions." Instead, Whyte offers a framework for narrating climate change and, more broadly, for understanding change over time in terms of relationality rather than clock time: it's called "kinship time." Unlike linear time, kinship time challenges us to conceive of time in terms of how it shifts relations between different members of our natural ecology rather than in chronological terms, as we typically interpret time in the U.S. and other Western contexts. We usually hear about climate change as described in terms of statistical changes in weather based on quantities of temperature, precipitation and wind averaged over 30-year periods. Basically, like I did when describing the heightened frequency of flooding earlier. To illustrate the difference between linear and kinship time, Kyle Whyte shares an anecdote from Melissa Nelson, an indigenous ecologist, writer, editor, media maker, scholar-activist and professor at Arizona State University, who describes climate transformations based on Anishinaabe intellectual and scientific traditions:

For Anishinaabeg, Mishipizhu, the underwater panther, has always been a guardian of the waters and keeper of balance between the water spirits, land creatures and sky beings. What is his role today, given these human-induced changes in long-term climatic cycles? As the climate shifts and weather patterns are disrupted, there will be stronger thunder beings in some areas and less of them in others. They will come at different times of the year and disrupt seasonal cycles. This is already happening and wild rice gatherers are finding that their lakes are flooded and the rice is stunted in some areas. Their lakes are dry with no rice in others. Hunters are finding that moose, bear and other animals are migrating farther and farther north because of the heat in the South. Other animals and birds, traditionally unknown to the Ojibwe, are migrating up from the hotter South. Increased temperatures also mean increased insects and diseases for some game animals like deer and moose. The temperature of the sky is heating up and changing the behavior, habitat and health of land and water creatures. Mishipizhu has traditionally controlled the well-being of natural resources, especially fish and those others living in and around the waters. In Ojibwe hydromythology, Mishipizhu has always been an enemy of the thunder beings. Today they are being aggravated and multiplied by what we call climate change.

In this story, Nelson refers to relationships between plants, waterways, beings and humans. If we even just take a narrow view to ask ourselves how relations between air, water and people have influenced each other, it's hard to ignore that what humans have done to nature has had disproportionately harmful consequences on nature and on us.

Contaminated air shortens our lifespans and increases Earth's temperature. Rising temperatures change rainfall and water remembers and returns. But the list goes on. Settler colonialism and Western expansion were violent not only toward Ondigenous peoples, but also toward the land, animals and waterways across the Great Lakes region. We made the landscape suit our needs. We covered up rivers, took down trees and built our infrastructure wherever we pleased. Industrialization and Michigan's prized auto industry have both polluted air and water quality locally and shaped the culture and dominance of car dependency worldwide. Downriver, oil refineries like Marathon have a long history of air quality violations and have earned the 48217 zip code, the sometimes-debated title of "Michigan's most polluted zip code." Contemporary consumerism contributes to the global pattern of climate change, too. And Detroit sits on the border with Canada at the busiest international border crossing in North America in terms of trade volume.

These are all pretty undeniable facts that shape how this city and others globally will experience higher temperatures and severe rainfall events, to name just a couple of ways that nature responds and relationships shift. As Kyle writes in "Time as Kinship," "Nelson's description covers why interdependence through mutual responsibility matters when there are various ecological tensions such as that between Mishipizhu and the thunderers. Humans' Interventions into the climate system are disrupting the interaction between the responsibilities and tensions."

Whyte goes on to say that the word kinship in "kinship time," "refers to a sense of responsibility to bonds of mutual caretaking and guardianship." Orienting ourselves to time as a set of relational responsibilities can change how we think about our role in mitigating climate change. Instead of understanding time as a ticking clock, for example, it asks us to see our responsibility to other members of the natural world and recognize our interdependence, another concept we explored in great depth in another episode of this series. This is the difference, I think, between the ways we've talked about attempting to control across nature, covering up waterways with concrete, forcing water to do what we want, for example, and managing our existence alongside water in a way that acknowledges that water is just going to move. Water will remember its old pathways. And water will make rivers of our freeways.

To step back a bit, how we remember and tell the story of climate change is important too, because it shapes how we respond to it.

One of the key themes in the class that I work with the students on is that memory is probably the most important concept to sustainability. And what I think is really important is that, you know, everybody, no matter who you are, is depending on their their memory. But, I think that Indigenous people, Black people and others are are actually the ones that are pointing that out and being explicit about it, right. Actually, you are using your memory and how you use your memory matters and how skilled you are as a activator of your memory means a lot to what types of of solutions, what types of actions, what types of mobilizations you advocate for and you favor.

History too often frames the narrative of climate change in terms of the technological feats that enabled environmental extraction and degradation in the first place. Here's Kyle again.

So, for example, when white or other privileged scientists describe something like the origins of human caused climate change, is one of the things they might tell is the history of when the U.S. and other countries were able to create these technologies, especially extractive technologies that were able to put so much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. You know, one of the main causes of of climate change. And so that's how we describe it. They'll say, well, there was somebody that discovered this relationship, and then there were other people discovered how you would, you know, create the technologies to do it. And there was these other people that had the political or economic, you know, brilliance or genius to mobilize at a mass scale. And before they knew it, they were polluting so much that it was was too late.

This version of events places more weight and value on the technological accomplishments that produce climate change than the relative environmental degradation and harm they leave in their wake. But it's not the only way to remember how we got here.

For Indigenous people, for example, but also for for Black people and for others that also share in that history. That's not exactly what we remember. We remember actually, it's not anybody's brilliance that was responsible for bringing about these technologies. Actually, we remember people who, because they didn't care for our consent, because they didn't care for our land tenure, because they didn't care for the labor conditions that we would have to endure because they didn't care about a number of things, they just built all of these technologies quickly because they could displace us or they could not pay us or they could not take extra measures to address health or other issues, or they didn't have to include us in decision making. We didn't have a veto right to any of these things, and so we were wiped off of our own land and had to suffer health and other issues that historically we didn't have to suffer in that way prior to industrialization and colonialism. And so what we remember is that the climate crisis was actually caused by a mass violation of people's consent, a mass lack of responsibility, a complete. Yeah, depending how one wants to say it, either a breakdown of relationality or just the never having established any relationality whatsoever, any kinship whatsoever. And that's why we're in a climate crisis. That's why it moved so quickly.

Kyle invites us to question: How does remembering what brings us to climate change in this way change how we respond? Maybe it shifts our focus. If our framing for understanding climate change is couched in this belief that technological innovation and human accomplishment are worth the cost of climate degradation, then we might be led to think that technological innovation and human accomplishment are viable ways out of this crisis that we've created. Basically to save the planet and ourselves, we just have to innovate harder. And this is precisely what happens now. But if instead we enter the question from a frame of reference that foregrounds the problem as a violation of consent or a breakdown of relationality, as Kyle says, might we consider how we respond to the fallout of climate change in a way that seeks enthusiastic consent or in a way that moves forward from a place of grounded relationality? Instead of thinking about how quickly we ended up in this mess and how quickly we can get out of it, what if we contemplated slowing down in such a way that cultivates responsibility and relationality?

Throughout this episode, we've discussed nature's power, human vulnerability to that power and nature's vulnerability to human manipulation. Thinking of land and water as something that has the capacity to remember really shifts the traditional dynamic a bit. It gives them more agency than we typically afford.

You know, I've been thinking about Anishinaabe tradition, right, like water is is a being and water is an animate thing. It's a it's not a thing! It's a being, right, so in English only, only things that get to be beings are literally like mostly like mammals. Really like people.

Or, corporations.

Yeah. Right. They have rights.

But in other languages and other spaces, you know, nature is a being, and in some ways, I'm like, yo, like what is the water trying to teach us here? What is it trying to tell us—

We acting up!

Not just like, the literal, like, "Oh, we need to go." But, like, I. I'm like, almost like, if we can spend time with it, is it may be telling us how we could also learn how in some ways like, like allow, how do we allow like some of that, some of the healing that needs to happen is literally in in the earth that we inhabit that we have been gifted, that it's it's the healing not only of our of our functional systems like schools and prisons and food, but also like our physical bodies and then like the physical land that we are on. Like if we are able if we're really trying to get some abolition going, it probably means we're also going to have to like, free the land. If we honor the land as a living being and if that land also has rights, just as we have rights, then‚— and then that water has rights, just as we have rights. And that it is a gift that no one can pay for. No one can own. Right? Like, then then that's a real opportunity to actually‚— for things to be different. Yeah, but it's it's like if we know‚— if we can start to know of this place as that place, and not the colony and not the space that is just a part of America, then there's possibility. Right? Because in that place, this world can be‚— and we live it, right? It literally can be whatever we dream it to be. And right now, we have dreamed, dreamed it to be this Detroit.

But if we can imagine, know that this that Detroit is just one. It's is one outfit, right? That's just one outfit that, like some people that we have‚— that has happened here. But like this place can be so many things.

Here, Nate points out nature's capacity to hold memory for far longer than our feeble human minds can contend with, much in the same way that we talked about ghost streams and flooding as a resurgence of water's remembering. The place we know as Detroit hasn't always been Detroit. And this place, regardless of what we call it, carries with it a series of very specific colonial legacies and the Indigenous legacies that preceded them and continue here. Part of what Nate's invitation challenges us to do here is to question what is the land around me asking me to remember? What are those carceral fictions asking me to forget? And how might remembering a different set of histories expand my own capacity to imagine otherwise toward an abolitionist future?

Nate's also saying that if we're all resigned to the so-called fact that the place where we're situated is called Detroit within a state called Michigan within the United States, it limits our thinking. Because what if the state, too, needs to be reimagined or altogether abolished? How do we make space for that possibility in our imaginations? So when he says:

This place can be so many things.

Part of what he's speaking to is the space that exists beyond these myths we often internalize about neoliberalism and, to extend it to the purview of this series, carcerality and punishment as prominent features of neoliberalism. It would follow that these systems are permanent, inevitable even with a life of their own that human beings can't possibly transform, as we discussed in Part 1. So, if they can't be transformed, why even try, right? Just fall in line. Luckily for us, we know the reality is that neoliberalism isn't natural. And just like the rivers that run beneath Detroit, it's not fixed. Neither are our imaginations and neither is time.

Closing

All right. So to sum things up, as clear and present as climate change now feels, isn't this the time to remember how to work with nature rather than against it? And what would it look like and what might we gain from narrating our experience of those transformations through kinship time instead of clock time? Until next time, remember what's real: we can't control nature as completely as we'd like to believe; nature acts on us just as forcefully as we act on our landscapes, if not more; and we have to reckon with the relational harm we've caused to the environment and to each other, otherwise, we'll keep piling on top of deeply unstable footing. While we may not be able to control nature, we can control how we respond to the fallout of climate crises. And we can do so in ways that don't exacerbate existing social and economic disparity. And last but not least, this place can be, has been and will be, so many things.

Thank you for listening and thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago in this episode that includes Myrtle Thompson-Curtis and Nate Mullen. Thank you especially to PG for helping me facilitate these conversations. And thank you to Kyle White for participating in an interview this fall. You'll hear more from him on other episodes, too. And I have to give a shout out to my friend Amelia Yang, who collected sounds from the streets of Mexico City for this episode. This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend and Ayinde Jean-Baptiste. And the audio was engineered by Connor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by the voice actor Joy Vandervoordt-Cobb. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.