Charles Darwin’s first wormstone is an unremarkable boulder, fairly smooth on top, mostly submerged in the earth in the garden of a house owned by a relative. In Darwin’s life, it sat above the ground. He noticed that it became more buried as time passed between his visits, and wondered if this gradual change might be the work of worms. Later, critics would say Darwin gave worms, which were small and stupid, too much credit. Darwin accused these critics of a larger ignorance: the error, in their general appraisal of the world, of undervaluing “small agencies and their accumulated effects.”
Back at Down House, the Darwins’ home in Kent, the scientist, husband, and father of ten scattered chalk and cinders over patches of ground and assembled his own little heaps of stones. He watched them for nearly 30 years, observing the rate at which the stones sank and measuring, 27 years later, the same layer of chalk and cinders now at a depth of 7 inches below the surface. Darwin’s explanation: Worms had come to the surface, suctioned up the chalk and cinders, and dragged them down to their burrows, leaving castings up above as a replacement. The cyclic nature of the worms’ commute – come up in search of organic material to eat and pad their burrows with, tunnel downward, and repeat, digesting and leaving castings along the way – transported the whole surface layer down roughly intact.
At some point, Charles Darwin’s son Horace, co-founder of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, made his father a more official wormstone, a replica of which can be seen at Down House today. This wormstone was a thick cylinder of rock with a hole drilled through the middle of it, laid in the topsoil. Two iron rods protruding through the wormstone’s hole were anchored, immobile, into the bedrock below. The wormstone started at ground level, with the upper surface of the stone flush with the tops of the rods. As worms moved the soil below the stone and deposited it above, the stone slipped down like a bead on a string. By measuring the height of the rod relative to the wormstone, Darwin could calculate its rate of movement: about two millimeters per year.
Darwin’s decades of watching provided the material for his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms. At the time, it sold as well as On the Origin of Species. In retrospect, its contents have been overshadowed by the enormity of the idea of natural selection. But it is an extension of the same curiosity that drove Darwin’s other lifelong work: The desire to understand processes that happen too slowly to be seen in one sitting. Looking around the world and wondering how all this, in its splendid diversity, came to be and continues to come into being.
The opening words of “Chapter 1: Habits of Worms” read like a poem, or a shorthand character sketch for a population from another planet:
Nature of the sites inhabited – Can live long under water – Nocturnal – Wander about at night – Often lie close to the mouths of their burrows, and are thus destroyed in large numbers by birds – Structure – Do not possess eyes, but can distinguish between light and darkness – Retreat rapidly when brightly illuminated, not by a reflex action – Power of attention.
The themes of this issue are worm-inspired: multi-generational processes, burial, breakdown, nocturnal wanderings, life cycles, and some ideas related to the “nature of the sites inhabited.”
PLANNING & STRATEGY.
Attacks on energy substations play into the hands of extremists, who recognize their ubiquity and vulnerability and want the chaos that power outages can cause. Jane C. Hu’s High Country News feature on the trend is full of foreboding signs, but I was most struck by her mention of researchers seeking ways to design physical features of waste sites that clearly communicate, without language, the dangers of toxic waste to anyone who comes upon the sites ten thousand years from now. Menacing earthworks designed to dwarf and disorient anyone who wanders among them, landscapes of thorns, that kind of thing. The linked report from Sandia Labs is the collaborative work of an anthropologist, an astronomer, and archaeologist, an environmental designer, and a materials scientist. The first criterion for the marking system is that the site must be marked: it will be “indelibly imprinted by the human activity associated with waste disposal.” So, the authors wrote, “We must complete the process by explaining what has been done and why.” Unmistakability, consistency, and redundancy are identified as additional criteria for the marking system, along with the requirement that each component be made of materials with little intrinsic value, to prevent them being looted or taken apart. “The destructive (or recycling) nature of people will pose a serious threat to the marking system.” Like earthworms, humans dredge things up and bury others, in a constant churn that is only slow from some perspectives.
Turning to landscapes more hopeful than ominous earth berms and fields of spikes, Josephine Woolington wrote (also for High Country News) about underground seed banks and the possibilities they hold for ecological regeneration. Even in the aftermath of severe disturbance, “unique seed structures, hardy root systems, long-living bulbs and complex dormancy periods” can survive for decades or centuries, allowing plant populations to regrow when the time is right.
MAKING & MANUFACTURING.
Most case studies I’ve read on the reuse of building structures focus on the technical problems solved and logistical barriers overcome. Demi Fang’s account of the relocation of the 93-year-old traditional Japanese house that is now the Chair Laboratory, a museum of chair design and carpentry, includes a number of problems solved and barriers overcome, but it stands out for its focus on craftsmanship. The structure, beautifully photographed by Fang, becomes a labor of love, and a testament to the carpenters’ tenderness toward, respect for, and intimate knowledge of the materials.
MAINTENANCE, REPAIR & OPERATIONS.
Hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy in the world, and one of the older ones. It’s terrible for fish: the sharp, thin edges of turbine blades kill large fractions of the eels and trout that move through them. As hydropower plants age and come due for relicensing (the average plant in the US today is 65 years old), many face difficulties in meeting the environmental and safety requirements that have come into force since they were originally constructed. Operators are exploring technological improvements that might help reduce harm to wildlife and keep hydropower plants online. A new design for fish-safe turbines has blades with thick, curved edges that push water out around them to cushion fish in a “stagnation zone,” preventing fatal contact. This critical point in the life cycle of hydropower infrastructure, when plants are approaching retirement or retrofit en masse, highlights the tension and opportunity in periods of reevaluation and renewal.
DISTRIBUTION & LOGISTICS.
In Los Angeles County’s two largest landfills, scorching temperatures and stormwater intrusion have ignited uncontrolled chemical reactions. In 2023, the state agency that oversees the Chiquita Canyon Landfill described a “heating/smoldering event,” expanding in all directions. At the time of the LA Times investigation, it was an open question whether a vast subsurface fire was raging in a long-dormant area of the landfill. Authorities said it wasn’t. Odors of burning garbage and carbon monoxide levels suggested it was. The high temperatures melted and deformed PVC components of the landfill’s gas collection system, interfering with the facility’s efforts to contain toxic pollutants.
On BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh remarked that it felt “oddly on-brand with modern living that we might not fully understand long-term landfill chemistry, that random solvents, dyes, acids, fuels and detergents sloshing around together in huge, sealed landscapes for decades might break out in unexplained reactions, like inadvertent batteries – that we isolated our waste, thinking it would make us safe, but it is only gaining in chemical power.” But experts say, and the LA Times report noted, that organic waste – mundane and familiar food scraps, lawn clippings, bits of paper, and their conversion to methane – is at the root of the crisis. California has laws calling for significant reductions in the quantity of organic waste sent to landfills. Progress toward achieving these reductions is inhibited by the lack of infrastructure to divert organic waste elsewhere. Organic waste could be turned into compost, but, as an engineer on the L.A. County waste management task force acknowledged, “we do not have the market to turn 11 million tons of waste into compost.”
Written as the landfills smoldered, SOW contributor Kelly Pendergrast’s deeply wormy essay “The World is Toxic. Welcome to the Metabolic Era” reads as prescient.
INSPECTION, TESTING & ANALYSIS.
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 is a staggering catalog of the technologies and social structures that have co-evolved over the last five centuries, making the world as we know it. The large-scale interactive visualization by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler is wildly ambitious in its breadth, complexity, and its choice of starting point. In 1500, global networks of trade, empire, and cultural exchange took new shapes, aided and formed by advances in naval and navigational technologies; transformative communication and information technologies were born; systems of classification, privatization, and enclosure spread to cover land, plants, animals, and space. Calculating Empires harnesses methods of categorization and navigation for its own purposes. It takes four themes – communication, computation, classification, and control – and maps them not only through time, but also through linked clusters of ideas. It makes plain, but does not simplify, the relationships between pathways of technological development and patterns of colonization, imperialism, and concentration of power and wealth. It’s a lot to take in.
SCOPE CREEP.
- I’m reading The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin. In the essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” I first heard of Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia, a gigantic brick of utopian fantasy that describes an alternative world in such realistic granularity that readers get homesick for it. Has anyone read it? Should I?
- The new mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, has promised to build about one hundred utopias over the course of her six year term. She comes to Mexico City from Iztapalapa, where the UTOPÍAS (an acronym which translates to “Units of Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony”) constructed during her tenure serve as free, safe public spaces designed to meet the everyday needs of poor and working class people. They host childcare, elder care, laundromats, sports facilities, craft classes, environmental workshops, and more, grounded in a feminist ethos and celebration of the right to the city. To some critics, they’re a distraction from the ruling party’s larger projects. To other observers, they are “a brilliant example of collective amenity and public infrastructure of care,” “a Green New Deal you can touch and feel.” To me, the discourse around them is a reminder of the difficulty of reading any utopia from the outside.
- The glaciers of the last Ice Age wiped out soil-dwelling worms across a large swath of the North American continent. Most of the earthworms squirming in northern North American forests today are European worms, which arrived with settlers. Ecologists are only recently beginning to understand the impact of invasive worms on the diversity and abundance of native species.
Thanks as always to Scope of Work’s Members and Supporters for making this newsletter possible. Thank you to my father, John Balwit, for visiting Down House with me and giving me a lifetime of ideas.
Love, Natasha
p.s. - We care about inclusivity. Here’s what we’re doing about it.