By JOHN NORTH

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SWANNANOA — His aspiration is to “live off the grid and outside the box” in harmony and balance, radical ecologist and graphic artist-author Aaron Birk said during a wide-ranging Feb. 6  talk at Warren Wilson College’s Canon Lounge.

Despite his distress with what he sees as the ravages of industrialization, Birk said, “the nature without us ... always expresses itself ... You can always look within, when you feel crowded out by modernity.” 

For Birk, “the superhero (in comic books) is someone who finds their strength within, and not so much (from) an outside power.”

Taking a conciliatory tack, the ecologist asserted, “Rather than viewing the police or government as a blocking element, they can be regarded as yet another force” that should be befriended rather than treated with hostilty, for the long-term good of the effort to protect the environment.

He added, “We need multiple approaches” — from individuals chaining themselves in key locations to delay fracking ... to more cooperative efforts.

Birk, who addressed “The Anarchist’s Apiary: Guerilla Gardening, Urban Architecture and Restoration Ecology,” later fielded some questions from the audience and finished with a book-signing of his recently published graphic novel, “The Pollinator’s Corridor.” The program drew about 70 people.

His book is set “in the aftermath of the 1970s landlord fires in the Bronx. It tells of three friends in their attempt to connect watersheds, city parks and forest fragments via corridors of flowering plants, restoring biodiversity to the streets and awakening communities to the soil beneath their feet.”

Birk began his talk by reviewing how he got to where he is now. After graduating from Oberlin College, he worked in gardening and eventually became a park ranger at Central Park in the Bronx area. 

He said he is sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts and is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio’s “Radio Lab” program.

Prior to his talk, Birk had spent a couple days as a guest lecturer at WWC, addressing a number of classes.

Birk then pointed out that “Warren Wilson College, by far, is one of the most spectacular campuses I’ve seen ... You’re way of life and working pretty much embodies the ethos” of environmental consciousness.

Regarding his “Pollinator’s Corridor” book, he said, “This project began in 2003. I graduated from Oberlin (College). I worked my way up to Central Park — a 70-acre tract in New York City. It was gritty, sometimes we found bullets — even animal carcases had to be picked up...

“In 2005, I quit my job, packed my bags and bummed around Europe....

“People were basically torching their buildings — the Bronx was almost taken off the map ... With drugs and crime, people were torching” their buildings to collect on the insurance value.

“The sky’s on fire — the world is wrecked,” Birk said of his assessment at the time.

“The real question is, where do we go from here? How does a meadow cross the road?”

The late mythologist Joseph Campbell “wrote this amazing book, ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces,’” Birk said. Campbell’s book inspired Steven Spielberg to produce the “Star Wars” series of movies, he noted.

In his interpretation of Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” Birk said Campbell found that mythology can be defined by a certain thread, where a basic pattern is found in many narratives from around the world. These narratives “keep repeating themeslves.”

Continuing, Birk said, “Every single accomplishment begins with an idea.”

After showing a map of the Bronx, he said, “I don’t want to say ‘wasteland’ — I’ll say, ‘industrial landscape” because it is the home to many people.

“The honeybee, I believe, can fly a mile from  the hive — maybe farther,” he said. (Other sources say honeybees fly up to two or three miles from their hives to forage. Birk noted that he is not a beekeeper.)

He then spoke of the corridors that are used to cross cities by birds, bees and other creatures, saying they “are like capillaries... Hopefully, someday, these can be the flowering highways of biodiversity.”

Turning to his artistic interests, he said, “I really love comic books... You promote the fear ...  Discharging of the boundaries in the inside and outside ... Adventurour epic story versus a lesson plan that teaches need to unpack.

“Incorporating the urban and the agricultural. The anarchy is the important part... We can no longer depend on an overarching systems to keep us alive. .. It depends on your taking this into your own hands.”

Birk added, “Where I come from, we’re all in it together... With all these forces crammed together, somehow ... we can find some harmony.”

“The promise of the bright future of our parents and grandparents ... that’s gone now” with the changes wrought by the recent severe recession, he said.

“I was really happy flying into Asheville from Charlotte, seeing the landscape soften,” Birk said.

Nonetheless, he noted, “We live in a very stark era... Just over the border in West Virginia, about 500 mountaintops have been blasted off....”

“In real life, I don’t think guerilla gardening is the best way.... (“Guerrilla gardening is gardening on land that the gardeners do not have legal right to use, often an abandoned site or area not cared for by anyone,” according to Wikipedia.)

An April 14, 2011 story in The Washington Post described “guerilla gardening” as “civil disobedience with a twist: Vegetable patches and sunflower gardens planted on decrepit medians and in derelict lots in an effort to beautify inner-city eyesores or grow healthful food in neighborhoods with limited access to fresh food.”

Birk noted, “I don’t have anything against seed-tossing,” he said.  (Also known as “seed bombs,” golf-ball-size lumps of mud are packed with wildflower seeds, clay and a little bit of compost and water.)

However, he said, “I think working in collaboration, cooperatively is the best way to restore things to their natural .... health.”

To that end, Birk asserted, “If the coast of New Jersey had had normal coastal grasses, the inpact of Hurricane Sandy would have been much reduced.”

Turning to adaptability, he said Bradford pear trees are considered an invasive tree, with pears that “aren’t very good,” but “you could cut it down to its roots and graft a normal pear” and it “grows well” and produces tasty pears. “There are always ways to adapt,” he said.

Changing subjects, he asked, “What are people supposed to eat?” The answer, he said, revolves around the honeybee.

He said the honeybee is a key pollinator of many plants, resulting in the foods that Americans depend on for their sustenance.

“But it’s also an immigrant,” as there were no native honeybees in America before the arrival of the Europeans. “It (the honeybee) exists in domestication. You have to work” with them, to some degree, to keep them alive.

While there are about 5,000 species of native bees and butterflies, they “have been largely knocked out,” Birk said.

He then told of a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, where, “instead of a ribbon, crime-scene tape” was snipped to officially open a guerilla garden, and “instead of the mayor, they just had kids in the neighborhood cut the ribbon.”

With an obvious sense of wonder, Birk then spoke of the importance of chlorophyll, which, he noted, is vital for photosynthesis, allowing plants to obtain energy from light.

Further, he asserted, “At this point in time, I don’t like the term ‘ecology,’” feeling that it carries too much negative baggage with it.

Upon leaving his ranger job in the Bronx, Birk said he realize there was much potential for calamaties. “The power could go out, the dollar could crash — where do you go? Your turn within yourself.”

To that end, he said, “Warren Wilson College is so amazing ... You guys are well on your way to becoming a self-sufficient campus.”

He lamented that many of the environmental policies created in the 1970s were later dumped or relaxed.

Next, he slammed the practice of fracking, or hydraulic fracturing — the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside.

Besides using huge amounts of water, he said the process uses “many very toxic chemicals.” Further, Birk said, “They release untold amounts of greenhouse gases.”

Speaking of the Asheville area, he said, “I understand the mountains here become a conduit for air pollution from the north.”

Changing topics, he said. “The Buddha said life is (physical and psychological) pain and suffering” because it is impermanant and ever-changing. And that suffering exists because of individuals’ desires and attachments.

Despite the suffering, Birk said, the Buddha said individuals “have a responsibility to keep a certain amount of heart and radiance ... You can’t let it get you down.”

He spoke of visiting the honey-hunters of Nepal. “They live in the forest and hunt the wild Himilayan honeybee — a very aggressive form of honeybee.

“They start by honoring” all of nature. “Their view of agriculture and food is so different from ours... There’s something we can learn from them.

“These people are living almost completely off-the-grid.”

“I think there’s something to be gained by the marriage of (the ideas of the) east and west. Each have qualities worth preserving.”

Nonetheless, he was critical of aspects of Western culture. “If you look closely, you can see underpinnings of our Colonial culture,” Birk said. “The crime of our settlement on this continent is not to be overlooked.”

“Bees are not the center of the whole universe,” he said., noting their are other winged pollinators. For instance, “a bat from the Sierra Madre mountain range in Mexico” pollinates agave plants, which produce sweet syrup and tequila.

During a brief question-and-answer period, someone asked about his book, “When did he see the bridge of importance of nature and tie-in” with the industrial world?

“This book was really hard because I don’t have an affinity for the place (the Bronx),” Birk replied. “I still don’t like going there.”

He was asked whether he preferred today’s urban decay situation better than that of the 1970s.

“I many ways, I like the New York from the past, with cars up on blocks” along the streets, Birk answered. “The New York of today is more monolythic.”

On another question, Birk said, “Simply put, the survival of the honeybee seems to be most successful in small, urban applications.”

He added that he has “a sense of deep reverence and respect” for the WWC bee-student crew. (WWC’s apiary incudes about seven hives. An eighth colony did not survive the winter.)

He also said the honeybee has become an unwitting co-conspirator in feeding the world.”

In an interview afterward, Birk told the Daily Planet, “Without the honeybee, food as we know it would be too expensive to afford. We’d have (only) potatoes and corn.”

When pressed, Birk said that, despite the current decline of honeybee populations in the U.S., he is optimistic about them springing back.

However, he said, “It might require” a collapse of American society.

Does he compare the honeybees’ demise to the canary in the coal mine, in the same way indicating wider dangers to everyone else?

“The honeybees’ demise would be the mine caving in,” he said.

Birk also said he likes a quote of author-beekeeper Michael Bush that “it’s better to have 60,000 beekeepers with one hive rather than one beekeepers with 60,000 hives.”