Tales From the Sustainable Underground. Stephen Hren

with over tens of thousand of generations. This disconnection can be regarded as a massive ongoing trauma that has disrupted and almost destroyed our sense of safety and well-being on the Earth. We then react to this trauma with compulsive and addictive behavior that further disassociates us from ourselves, and leads to destructive actions that further traumatize ourselves and our descendents. Books like this have led to a field called eco-psychology that examines our disconnection from the natural world and tries to help us create a deeper understanding of our loss and the resulting compulsive behaviors, like non-stop technological addictions and trying to replace the hole in our hearts with more material goods, that seem to provide short-term fixes but exacerbate our original trauma of disconnection.

      Although persuasive as all get out, arguments like these are ultimately frustrating in the vague solutions they offer and their pining away for a lost world it is no longer possible to recreate. Somehow we have to figure out a way to apply those primal connections to our current existence to restore the damage done to our individual and collective psyches and to the Earth itself. There has to be a way to cultivate an enduring compromise between our domesticated and wild selves, and to show that this is a more fulfilling life that others caught up in destructive behavior will want to emulate.

      So as Dabl continued his explanation, I kept thinking to myself, what are we going to do about it? If artistic expression originally had the purpose of keeping alive the history of a culture and integrating a given people with their surrounding ecology, but has now been lost or co-opted to keep us isolated and anxiety-ridden, are we simply doomed to be blown in the wind like a decaying plastic bag? We can’t go back to being pastoralists on the plains of Africa.

      Seeming to understand my frustration on this issue, Dabl got up from his perch behind the counters full of ancient beads and took me on a tour of the property. His magnum opus lay sprawled out in the field behind the shop, the paint cans and chairs and stones sitting in chairs. The piece is titled Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust. It involved about a dozen different staging areas and was assembled with discarded urban detritus and painted with vivid reds, yellows and greens. Dabl is working to create living artwork that transfers a cultural story of meaning and history to its viewers. This story centers around the interwoven existence of iron, stone and wood, the foundations for humanity’s physical culture, and is based on his interpretation of a synthesis of African tradition. Dabl spun a long tale, not all of which I followed, to be honest, even though I’ve watched my video of him explaining it many times since. It involves a long saga of iron being freed from stone, iron engaging in a civil war, and stones escaping during the tumult. Other parts were more immediately comprehensible. A piece involving four timbers set out in a cross with stones on each point and in the middle represented the four stages of life. A big part of Dabl’s complaint about what he considered “outside” religions (he was referring to non-animist religions like Islam and Christianity introduced into Africa) is the concept of having to be judged once you die. He argued persuasively that belief in religions that judge you when you die not only goes a long way towards creating a fear of death, but also impedes the processing and passing on of cultural knowledge during the final quarter of life. Rather than creating an expectation of becoming an ancestor who advises their progeny after death, making the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom in later life attractive, Western religions create a horrendous stress in the elderly by pushing them up against a time when they might burn in hell forever. Regardless, knowledge is obliterated when the living can no longer turn to their ancestors for advice.

      Part of Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust. To the left of the car, chunks of concrete sit in chairs to learn from the tangle of metal wire before them.

      Part of Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust was a large iconic figure, which Dabl referred to as an mkissi, an iconic figure that is empowered with the help of iron. The mkissi played a central role in achieving two things. First, it kept vandals away. And secondly, it made all of the public artwork, including the heavily painted two-story abandoned building next door, invisible to the city officials. This is very important, because that building did not belong to Dabl or the African Bead Museum, and its decoration could potentially bring about two unwanted consequences. Either it could hasten the building’s demolition because of its “unsightliness.” Or the city could try to force the Bead Museum to take possession of the building because they are “using” it and thus charge them property tax.

      Prior to its decoration and protection by the mkissi, the building was simply abandoned and had become a haven for prostitution and drug use. Dabl had continued his physical storytelling onto this abandoned home. The most conspicuous decorations were three giant blue, red and white chevron beads painted across the front on the first story. This style of glass bead was commonly made in Venice in the Middle Ages and exported to West Africa, where it became incorporated into the existing bead culture and traditional storytelling. There were also many jagged pieces of mirror worked into the design. Mirrors are important, according to Dabl, as a means of communicating with ancestors. They also reflect the sun, and the fact that it is possible to catch the fire of the sun by using correctly placed mirrors makes them an extension of the sun. There was one additional benefit of mirrors. They have the power to make potential wrongdoers become self-aware. Destructive behavior like crack cocaine use and vandalism are things people like to do in the dark where they keep their wrongdoing shielded from their own consciousness. But mirrors break through these shadows and bring consciousness to the surface. This is who you are and this is what you are doing, they say. There is no hiding. In the almost fifteen years since Dabl started the project, there has been no vandalism, squatting or interference from public officials. So the decorating, the storytelling and the guarding by the mkissi have been effective in preserving this building until someone can be found who wants to occupy it usefully. Rather than be a deteriorating eyesore ripe for arsonists or demolition by the city, the building relates some of Africa’s history to the surrounding African-American community.

      Dabl telling it like it is in front of the abandoned building he helped decorate with painted chevrons and applied mirrors to assist in its preservation.

      Maybe one of the most interesting things about Dabl’s work was that he refused to be the only person helping to save buildings in this manner. When I asked him whether he would continue decorating any other nearby structures with the hopes of saving them, he said he wouldn’t. He couldn’t handle more than one. If members of the community became inspired and wanted to decorate abandoned buildings on their own, he would more than encourage it, and help to procure paint and mirrors as necessary. But he couldn’t be a one-man community. Others had to get involved.

      I moved on from some of the questions Dabl was raising to the first reason that Detroit had piqued my interest — its urban farming movement. It is currently illegal for gardening to be the primary use for any parcel of land in the city limits of Detroit. The city has a nationwide reputation as a innovator in using abandoned land for farming and gardening, and with 40 square miles (25,600 acres) of vacant land, you would think city leaders would be all about having more of it used for productive good rather than sitting idle. But the law hasn’t changed. The good news is that, like most of the laws in Detroit, most folks just don’t give a damn what it is. Usually it’s too complicated to know, and whatever it is, the city’s law enforcement have bigger fish to fry.

      How do laws that prohibit growing your own food arise? How did we stray so far from personal independence and local reliance that a government official could tell you you can’t grow food on your own land? I had some insights into these questions over the last few years back in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. In some ways Durham is like a mini-Detroit. We thrived on the tobacco industry in the early decades of the 1900s, growing prosperous and attracting a lot of immigrants, many of them African-American, from the surrounding countryside. A thriving middle class developed with the success of this notorious product (I won’t go into the debate of whether the automobile or the cigarette is more evil — that would be too long a digression). Some of the largest African-American-owned businesses in the country eventually became based in Durham,