Chapter 10
Recorded on January 12, 2069, at Riis Beach.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello. My name is O’Brien, and I am interviewing An Zhou about his work around biodiversity and ecological restoration. This is part of a research project focused on the history of the New York Commune. We are at the site of the former Jacob Riis Detention Facility. Hello An. Could you introduce yourself?
An Zhou: Sure. My name is An. I use he or they. I’m originally from Calgary. I am forty-nine years old. I am currently living in an agricultural commune in the town of Hugo, about forty kilometers outside of Minneapolis. Though I’m permanently based out of Vancouver.
O’Brien: Can you tell us about your work?
Zhou: I’m here in New York to help with a restoration project for the tidal marsh zone in the coastal areas of Long Island. This land has mostly been flooded since the thirties and abandoned. It became part of the tidal zone. We have been ripping out old infrastructure in tidal zones and putting in new plant life. Here, it means removing the pavement, planting saltmeadow cordgrass, spike-grass, and other species that will do well with the ocean water. We are making sure the flooded parts of the city are thriving as saltmarshes. It’s a part of broader ecological reconstruction efforts underway around the world. You could say it’s kind of embracing the destruction of the last few decades and trying to make sure we remove any of the human-made hurdles to new or old ecological systems regenerating. I’m just here for a couple of weeks, then I’ll be heading down to the Jackson Fallout Zone for another project.
O’Brien: It sounds like you are working in several places?
Zhou: Yeah, I work on a lot of different climate rehabilitation and adaptation projects. I travel around. I’m based out of Minnesota at the moment, because the Hugo project has been ongoing for a while and it’s where I devote most of my time.
O’Brien: What is the project in Hugo?
Zhou: We have various fancy names for it, but it is basically permaculture. It uses similar principles as the forest restoration I specialize in. The general framework is centered around maximizing ecological niches, biodiversity, and variation through combining self-sustaining processes and deliberate intervention.
O’Brien: Why Hugo though?
Zhou: It’s become the North American hub of collaborations, research, and thinking by First Nations peoples about farming practices. A dozen research farms and an institute, all centered around trying to identify, reclaim, understand, and disseminate Indigenous approaches to growing food. It’s had a major impact on my thinking, and links to all these other kinds of restoration projects I am involved with.
O’Brien: How did you get into restoration work?
Zhou: My dad was a geologist. He emigrated to Canada to work for oil companies. He spent a lot of time outdoors, and when I was growing up got really into backpacking and camping. Mostly around British Columbia. He’d always take me with him, and I developed a real love for the forests of that region. I spent my whole childhood roaming those forests, befriending the trees, foraging mushrooms, observing the animals. This was the twenties, and we still had considerable biodiversity, even though the die-offs had already started. As a teenager, I traveled a lot in the punk, anarchist, and radical environmental scenes. Bouncing from protest to squat. Eventually I decided to go to college in Vancouver. I studied forest ecology. That led to getting involved in forest restoration projects. Eventually, I got into a collective of biologists who worked with First Nations land defenders and restorers. We travel all over North America to work with communities that are responding to or adapting to catastrophe. We integrate Indigenous practices and principles of agriculture with biotech.
O’Brien: Biotech?
Zhou: It was controversial. We were one of the first teams interested in designing and introducing newly created species to increase biodiversity in partially wrecked biomes. We wanted to think through the roles of species that had gone extinct because of climate catastrophe, and try to create species that would replicate those roles or replace them. People said we were playing God. Well, fuck God. God let this happen. None of it is over, you know. We have better practices now to work with refugees, move aid into affected regions, and not build in stupid places, but the scale of the disaster keeps unfolding. Like it or not, our job is to mitigate the consequences of the catastrophe of the old world.
O’Brien: And you mentioned you focus on farming practices?
Zhou: It helped think about the nature/human interface differently, helped shift the framework. With the soil blight in the Midwest, the agricultural collapse, and the insurrection, it was clear we needed to radically rethink some very basic things. First Nations forces played a major role in the revolutionary war, in the [North American] Liberation Front, and were well positioned to set terms after the fighting was over. Particularly in the Great Plains and the Prairie regions, where most of North America’s agriculture had been concentrated. Then, in the sixties, there were some intense struggles in the communes and assemblies over Indigenous sovereignty, and a lot of the kind of work I do grew out of those debates.
O’Brien: Could you talk a little bit about the scope of the ecological crisis in the forties? It has come up a few times in interviews as a cause of the collapse of old state regimes and a motivator for the insurrections.
Zhou: It’s hard to describe the scale of what happened. It also looked different depending on where you were. Let’s take North America in a broad sweep. Deadzones across a lot of California, the Southwest, and Texas as water ran out. Agricultural and soil collapse in the Midwest, being one of the triggering events of the hunger. A lot of people on the move and desperate. The storms in the Gulf Coast wiping out a lot of the coastal cities, and then the nuclear fallout. The forests had massive die-offs all over the continent.
O’Brien: What happened to the forests?
Zhou: Logging wiped out the lowland ancient forests back in the twentieth and early twenty-first. Fires just started ripping across the West Coast and the Rockies annually, on a scale and intensity that even forests well-adapted to periodic fires could not withstand. The hotter temperatures brought out these fungal infections we didn’t expect that decimated the firs and pines. The forests I grew up with are gone. There are just a handful of sickly remnants we are trying to salvage, with hundreds of miles of barren deadzone. Once they were—they were—these cathedrals of such majesty. The canopy overhead and the air so perfect and now it’s all dead and it’s all gone. In less than a decade we saw 80 percent of the forest species go extinct.
During the hunger, my friends ended up living in the woods trying to survive off the land, but the trees and the game and everything was dying. I lived in a forest camp in the Yukon for a summer, and we almost starved to death before we realized the moose we were trying to hunt had gone extinct.
O’Brien: I’m sorry.
Zhou: [Long pause.] I did a sojourn five years ago. I know I’m too old for it, I’m not seventeen. But it spoke to me as a social form. But a few of us just sailed to memorial sites. Miami, the Bahamas, Port-au-Prince, and Antilles. I can’t think of it without crying. We will never get those places back. I know there are dozens of other cities like this around the world, a billion displaced people.
O’Brien: What are those sites like now?
Zhou: There are boat communities, these floating cities. They tie together dozens of old barges and small boats and build walkways between them. They try to get out of the way of the worst storms—break the city apart and keep moving during hurricane season. And newer architecture, the grown buildings that float, made out of algae. And some smaller islands left in what was high ground, though they are drowned every year. People build on these high stilts, and sometimes that works out, but the storms can be deadly. During my sojourn we went diving, scuba diving, down into the old cities. So many people died. [Pause, begins to cry.] I remember when they sealed the Gulf Coast states—Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana—trapping all the refugees there to die.
O’Brien: Would you like to say a little about what happened in the Gulf Coast?
Zhou: The New Afrikaan People’s Party was in power in Mississippi and Alabama, gaining territory and influence throughout the forties. A lot of people fleeing from the Caribbean ended up there and ended up joining the Republic of New Afrika. Then, I guess it was ’49, the US military sealed off the whole area and prevented any refugees from leaving. It wasn’t entirely clear why they did it; probably to squeeze the People’s Party, maybe to mitigate the overwhelm from refugees after water shortages out West. Some say these refugees were too politicized already and would have made a lot of trouble.…
O’Brien: Are you okay?
Zhou: I think about Florida a lot.… I actually liked Florida, the one time I visited it as a kid, before I ended up there during the deaths. Like we went to some theme park, I don’t even remember what it was called. I think the US had already lost its soul a long time before that, but something about what they let happen to Florida, I think just broke it all. So many people had fled there from all over the islands, and to leave them to the storms, to let everyone die, after what they had done in Jackson—I think a lot of people knew something had to change. It all happened so fast—the [US] Army’s nuclear strike on Jackson, LARS hitting for the second year, the terrible storms that drowned the peninsula. In Miami, they were burning mountains of corpses, like literally these piles of bodies as high as apartment buildings.… Just when I think I am starting to connect the different parts of myself, of my mind and of this broken world, I think about all the blood, and all the death and all the horror we’ve unleashed, and it feels so impossible. And it isn’t over.
O’Brien: I’m really sorry.
Zhou: No, I’m definitely not okay. I was there for a project in the middle of all that. In the middle of the mass deaths. I was in Miami, about to travel down into the Everglades when it all went to hell and we were trapped. Did you see it?
O’Brien: A bit. I was in the Mississippi Delta a few years later. I spent time in the Fallout Zone. I tried to be a part of the struggle there … I want to get a fuller picture of your life. Is it hard to travel so much? You mentioned your home base is in Vancouver still, despite working out of Hugo and other places?
Zhou: I have family in Vancouver, so I make it through there every year, but I tend to keep moving.
O’Brien: Family?
Zhou: Before the communes, there was no way I could have had a family. I kept moving, had a hard time establishing lasting relationships, mostly just this ever-shifting network of friends. I had a lot of problems in my head. I think I was trying to outrun them. But the commune allows me to travel, and I know my family is okay and loved and will welcome me back whenever I make it. My husband and I are members of the Gastown Commune in Vancouver. We are parents to two children, with a group of other adults. My mother and father moved in with us, moved into the Commune, when our first kid was born. That was eight years ago. I spend at least a month of each year with the family. It works really well; if we had been in a nuclear family it would have been traumatizing for our kids. I’ve been in Hugo for most of the last year. I’m out here in New York for a few weeks.
O’Brien: Is it hard traveling so much?
Zhou: Yes, it is. I kind of thrive on it, but it makes it hard to maintain my health. I got addicted to sleep aids last year and they had a bad interaction with my psych meds and hormones.…
O’Brien: Anything you want to say about that?
Zhou: Oh, I don’t know.… I’m trying to be less private about my mental health stuff. I have schizophrenia. I need to maintain a stable drug regime to not spin out. I have started trying to talk publicly about mental health stuff occasionally, after a long time of being very private about it.… It has been helpful to be more public about it. At least it helps to have the people in my life know about it. Like it is helpful to have the people I stay with and the people I work with know something about my mental health condition. I am less clear about being this public, in the sense of discussing it in an oral history, but I guess it has its place.… I guess that’s all I want to say about it. It is still hard to talk about.… Can you ask me about something else?
O’Brien: Of course. Could you outline a bit of the broader picture of ecological restoration? It is such a huge part of what’s happening in the world. Honestly, we are a bit out of the loop in New York.
Zhou: Yeah, the scene here is small. That’s part of why we all came in, to help out with this project. In most rural areas of the continent, ecological restoration is the main thing that everyone is talking about and working on. Even in cities like Vancouver or Minneapolis, you see hundreds of thousands of people involved in hub debates and affiliated with various restoration work projects. Biology, ecology, genetic research, all these have come to dominate the education curriculum. The level of thinking and mass engagement with the field completely dwarfs anything I could have imagined twenty years ago when I was completing my degrees. New York has been slow. People fled out of many neighborhoods as the flooding got worse—but doing something about it is just now becoming the mass concern it has long been elsewhere.
O’Brien: I’m thinking about climate mitigation, that you mentioned. It’s a big topic, so want to try to get a handle on some of the specific social changes and the historical trajectory. There has been a lot of discussion lately in the Mid-Atlantic about the growth of international travel. Some of us remember when you would take a plane overnight to Asia or Europe. But most young people are just now getting their chance to do long-distance sojourns. The transcontinental maglev trains, wind clippers, and solar barges on the sea. I gather it is all very low carbon compared to the travel system that I remember through much of my life. Could you say a bit about how this all came about?
Zhou: Going into the insurrection, most of the global economy had collapsed. Auto production and air travel, affordable gas, transcontinental shipping, electronics consumption—all of this disappeared or collapsed over the course of a decade of economic, political, and ecological crisis. A lot of resources went into maintaining the orbitals and enclaves. But most people, in most places, were much more familiar with life in refugee camps than with any sort of individual consumption or transport. Like most of the kids on the frontlines had never been in a functioning car, let alone be overly attached to the old ways of organizing cities. So, when the insurrection started cohering, there was a chance to do something really different. All over the world, we are seeing communes, and assemblies, and councils figuring out what that something different looks like. Now that the profit drive isn’t making all our basic decisions for us, it is possible for people to actually get together and think about the world we want. The kinds of low-carbon, long-distance transit systems you are describing is one of the many examples that have grown out of this process of collective deliberation and rebuilding. We no longer have oil companies forcing us to use fossil fuels when the sun is so much cheaper and more abundant—for example.
My focus on this is around ecological restoration and its connection to agriculture and human use. I could do a deep dive on this, but not sure that’s what you want. The Tunis Accords are the basis of a lot of this. I was there, giving testimony about the North American temperate forest die-offs at the assembly in Tunisia in 2062. That assembly identified three pillars that really guide and shape many of the vast range of local restoration projects. The pillars are ecological restoration, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation. But I have a feeling an oral history isn’t the best place for that kind of detail.
O’Brien: Could you describe one example of a restoration project that gives us a sense of how it works? You usually work with forests?
Zhou: Sure. So, last month I was in the Kitimat Ranges. The Canadian military had a missile range there they set up in the forties, to test drone technology they were using as part of their participation in the war in Iran. The forests were already ravaged, but the RCAF construction and the explosives left the land extremely toxic. I’ve been working with a group of Haisla people on and off for a decade around restoring the forest and setting up a sustainable logging program. When they won sovereignty over the land, in 2050, they started as these sorts of projects have to: cleaning up the toxic mess left behind. They started dismantling the built environment, doing toxic cleanup, then major geological, bacterial, and nanite engineering of the soil. When I joined the project, they had already introduced several successive waves of species, establishing a forest. But it couldn’t look like it had, like you couldn’t restore the forest that was once there, they had to do something new. The climate has changed too much, too many species are extinct. The idea was to establish a forest that maximized species diversity that could thrive in the region, given current and future climate conditions, including frequent fires. So, it is kind of designing a new ecosystem partially from scratch. We’re talking at least hundreds of species. At least a dozen of those species have to be completely redesigned genetically. This project alone engineered three entirely new kinds of soil bacteria. The Haisla did this long, intensive, spiritual reflection process as part of designing the project. They also spent years collaborating with researchers and consultants, both through the First Nations assemblies throughout the Pacific coastal mountains and through temperate forest ecologists globally.
O’Brien: That is fascinating.
Zhou: I know! It’s magnificent. So last month they were ready to do some of the first tree cutting since the restoration program began. They collaborated with this settler logging council. They invited all their remote consultants they had been working with to actually come in person. I had visited the project in person several times, but there were at least twenty-some people there who had never made it to North America before. We prayed, and watched these trees come down, crashing down through the underbrush. Just a few fast growing ones, but it was a huge step.
O’Brien: You mentioned the controversies surrounding the use of biotech and engineered species in restoration. Are there other major controversies?
Zhou: Definitely. It was a major step for the Haisla, for example, to be open to collaborative decision-making around the restoration process. Ecological restoration projects can affect the surrounding region and depend on broader webs of social and ecological systems. There are many competing needs for land. The Haisla, for example, decided to build a biosynthetic server farm through an underground rhizomatic fungi system on the roots of the trees. This was a giant decision, and one that helped expand communications and computational capabilities for the whole continent. How do you balance these human uses with efforts at constructing new diverse ecologies? Who decides? These are giant debates, because they affect huge numbers of people. First Nations, often in the lead around ecological restoration, were not up for just ceding their sovereignty into the new deliberative processes of the assemblies. So, through the sixties there were major debates about how to balance autonomy, accountability, and sovereignty in land use decisions.
O’Brien: That is helpful. I spoke with Connor Stephens last month about the North American Liberation Front, and he alluded to some of those debates. I gather you know him?
Zhou: Yes, I stay with his family when I’m in New York … I have a hard time explaining to people what is core for me in all this: understanding that human life and ecological systems can’t be these entirely separate things. The new institutions of the communes provide a chance to really rethink humans’ relationships with ecological systems on a large scale, and to begin to work through what it would mean to take those relationships with nonhumans very seriously.
O’Brien: Is that interconnection with nonhuman life a spiritual matter for you?
Zhou: Not if I take my meds. [Laughs.] It’s complicated. There is definitely something spiritual about spending time in old-growth forests out West. It touched me deeply. When I developed a psychosis in my twenties, a big part of my craziness was feeling a spiritual connection to the planet, to ecology, and particularly to the forests. I was deeply misanthropic. For a long time after my recovery, I dealt with my psychosis by walling it off, separating it from the rest of my life, trying to keep it contained. I have been in my own healing process of beginning to integrate ways of thinking that have a psychotic character with the rest of my functional adult life, without being taken completely by the psychosis. This process of integration has been very scary for me, and often very hard.…
O’Brien: I hear you drawing a parallel between integrating different parts of your mind, and the integration of human-use and ecological systems.
Zhou: That’s right. Being at this logging site was really beautiful for me. Like when I was twenty-one years old, I was in this tree-sit land defense campaign—not a lot of Chinese kids there, let me tell you—and I wanted to kill all loggers. I got hospitalized towards the end of that year. I changed my gender that year and a lot else. Being at this logging operation last month, helping take down this gene-hacked Sitka spruce, it was very profound for me, like, very healing. It was like, integrating parts of myself together in this moment. I was saying that I feel like I am all broken into all these pieces. I feel like that Sitka is a place to start, but sometimes it just feels so ridiculous, and we have so far to go.
O’Brien: Do you know much about the history of this area, of Riis Beach?
Zhou: A bit. It was a popular beach. I heard a lot of queers hung out here for most of the last century. There was an old sanatorium of some sort. And then sometime in the late forties the military set up a detention camp here and housed political prisoners.
O’Brien: I haven’t been back here since the camp closed.
Zhou: That’s right, I remember hearing you were detained here. One of the project leads mentioned it when she was arranging this interview.
O’Brien: I was, yes.
Zhou: How was that?
O’Brien: Not pleasant.
Zhou: Now I’m curious.
O’Brien: [Pause.] Let’s get back to you.
Zhou: I think we were winding down. You are interviewing a lot of people for this project, right? But you won’t answer any questions yourself? … What was it like?
O’Brien: Okay, sure … I used to come to this area to float in the waves, and for queer hangouts and such, when it was a public beach. Lots of queers all along the beach over that way. [Gestures; pause.]
When the flooding started, they built a seawall over that way, to slow the flooding down. That lasted a decade or so. While it held, military officials had their administrative offices set up in that building there. [Points to the only standing structure, an Art Deco building alongside the beach, currently flooded with hightide.] I think that building must be from the early twentieth century, when this area was constructed as a public beach. They added these modular housing units to the building. Then the detainees lived in these large tents that covered what had been this huge parking lot. At their peak, maybe two thousand of us? Maybe more? And then circled the whole thing with huge piles of razor wire. The Red Cross provided the food. Mostly the Army let the camp run itself.
The detainees were political prisoners, like organizers and union leaders and some of the leadership from street gangs as those got more and more politicized. A lot of people who knew something about—about how to have an efficient deliberation process, I would say. Some of the more amazing people I’ve ever met. I was on the older end of the population. Occasionally the Army would bring in people arrested in looting or street fighting, but once they figured out they weren’t organizers they would transfer them elsewhere.
I helped out with the school, teaching political theory. Adults. There were not many kids, kids ended up elsewhere. I also acted as a therapist. The interrogations were hard on people. I was here for pretty much the whole duration of the camp. In ’52 the military pulled most of its forces out of the city but kept a skeleton crew here. A joint group of militias raided the camp the following year, mostly people from Central Brooklyn and Newark, led by communards from Brownsville.
Zhou: Thanks for sharing a bit about it. I like to know the history of the places where I’m working.
O’Brien: This project is connected to some other intertidal work happening around New York?
Zhou: Salt marsh restorations are moving ahead all along the new intertidal regions of the NYC coastline. Lower Manhattan, the South Bronx, Long Island City, Red Hook—these places belong to the ocean as much as they belong to us. There has been a lot of abandonment of the coastal areas from the decades of storms and flooding. Those who are remaining are beginning to learn to live differently. Restoring the salt marshes is a part of that living differently. And these salt marshes can become a part of the joy and community and life of the city. It’s very easy for me to imagine people a decade from now kayaking through saltmeadow cordgrass exactly where we are standing. It’s not really a beach anymore, but I hear there are some great queer dance parties that happen on the floating dock where the old sanatorium used to be—over there. After the detention camp was burned down, people built a jetty that they use for swimming. I think the urban farms and the coastline restoration can both together contribute to New Yorkers learning to live as a part of the ecological world again.
O’Brien: I feel like New York is a bit behind when it comes to ecological restoration.
Zhou: Definitely. I hope the next few decades see a major shift in New Yorkers learning about ecology on a large scale. Ecological sciences are the single most important field for both basic and advanced curriculums on every continent, but it is like seventeenth or something in education here. New Yorkers, you love your parks, your community gardens. You are growing to love the waterways—I had a beautiful kayaking experience in the Harlem River yesterday—but you haven’t really paid any attention to how this city interfaces with ecological processes. I feel like that is really starting to change, from what little I’ve seen and heard.
O’Brien: Thank you for doing this interview. Is there more you wanted to share?
Zhou: No, nothing else. I appreciated being able to talk about how the mental health stuff connects to forest restoration. I haven’t really shared about that much.
O’Brien: I was quite moved by you describing how healing it was for you being a part of that logging project, and how it connects with integrating your psychosis into your adult life … I think in a parallel way, it is healing for me to come out here, to return to this site after living in the detention camp. This place has a lot of horror in it as well as a lot of joy. I can see how building a marsh is a way of honoring both of those things. There is so much trauma, in this place, everywhere.
Zhou: So much trauma. And so much healing to do.