When I was a kid, this place was a dump.

1/
I mean… it was literally a dump.

Back before we realized we were poisoning the absolute shit out of the ecosystem, any place unsuitable for easy development was treated as worthless.

This was a pristine wetland.

They turned it into a garbage dump. A landfill.

2/
Every Sunday, my father would drive me home from New York City to suburban New Jersey.

We’d travel down the Turnpike off in the distance to the left.

Where I stood taking these pictures was a massive, sprawling dump. An endless line of garbage trucks rolling in to unload.

3/
The water you see all around is a tidal marsh.

Whatever seeps into the water flows both upstream and down.

Pollution travels in both directions.

The damage to the estuary is irreparable. The mud is an up to 60-foot thick toxic marshmallow.

It will never again be clean.

4/
But the landfills themselves have long been closed, capped, and remediated.

Were you to merely walk around in these high grasslands, you’d never know these were once a vulgar blight of human consumption and waste and disregard for earth and nature.

5/
Most of these remediated former landfills are closed to the public.

They are uninhabited rolling plains sweeping out over low wetlands leading out to the sea.

They are home to deer, coyote, fox, and muskrats.

They are hunting grounds for eagles, hawks, owls and falcons.

6/
I kinda love them.

They are metaphors.

They are our failures - permanent and irreparable - offset against the forgiveness of time.

I do a fair amount of trespassing to spend time in these quiet little plains.

I probably shouldn’t admit that.

7/
They are oddly serene.

In late fall/early winter, it is just me in the high grass, bundled up against the whistling of a bracing wind, alone in a place disrespected and now overlooked.

8/
And down below me is the estuary which fills and empties with the rhythm of the tides.

At high tide, it is a bayou of connected lagoons with everything from white perch to 25-pound striped bass.

9/
At low tide, it is a vast and sweeping mudflat suddenly crowded with gulls and wading birds.

It is a body scarred but not dead. Injured but not broken.

And in an irony of destruction and survival, it is home to bald eagles.

10/
Only five miles up that tidal watershed, Diamond Alkali had a riverside factory.

In it, they manufactured Agent Orange.

They literally manufactured an agent designed to destroy nature on the banks of the most vital tidal waterway in the country’s densest state.

11/
Diamond Alkali pumped all manner of toxic runoff directly into the waterway.

The pollutants aggregated upwards in the food pyramid until they reached apex predators like bald eagles.

12/
Between food chain pollution and, specifically, the impact of DDT, we nearly extinguished bald eagles from earth.

And yet, now, even here in the very center of our reckless and negligent blast radius, eagles have returned and are thriving.

13/
These places are metaphors. They really are.

They are our sins and excesses. And they are our redemption - partial and incomplete, slow in coming though it is.

14/
Within a ten-mile radius of where I took these pictures, there are five million human beings.

Hidden in plain sight is this imperfect little suburban treasure.

I love this place.

When I was a kid, it was a dump.

//

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More from @TheRealHoarse

20 Nov
Everything kind of sucks so I’m just going to post a few bird pics that made me happy this week.

This is a northern harrier. A “gray ghost”. A male.

Striking, beautiful birds.

I’ve seen a gray ghost only once before.

1/?
I literally filled up my computer with pictures this past year.

Was up til 3 am archiving and deleting to make room.

It was a chore but I found a bunch of pics I meant to go back and clean up but hadn’t.

Like this early morning red-tailed hawk.

I think he noticed me.
Serious bird photogs don’t bother going out on shitty light days.

A white sky is the worst. You can’t get good birds in flight pics against a white sky.

I don’t care. I go out anyway. It’s about the activity not the output for me.

That’s a peregrine falcon. Amazing birds.
Read 7 tweets
18 Nov
Let’s start with just one of these: the “$25 million for doulas”.

1) The US is the only advanced country in the world where maternal mortality rates are actually getting worse.

2) We rank near last in infant mortality rate.

3) The $25 million equals .001% of the budget.

1/2
To put .001% in perspective:

It is the equiv. of spending one penny out of one hundred dollars.

And other advanced countries already pay for doula care.

The funding in the bill is literally a *pilot program* to test WHAT ALREADY WORKS IN PLACES WITH LESS SHITTY HEALTHCARE.

2/
Our infant and maternal mortality rates are a sin. A national embarrassment.

But the New York Times is so committed to dishonestly undermining Biden and Dems, they’re criticizing spending ONE CENT per $100 to try to reduce our horrible infant and maternal mortality rates.

3/
Read 5 tweets
18 Nov
Do you want to know why I am harping on this Chris Christie thing?

Because if we can’t even process that we are being played for clicks, retweets and ratings when the most liberal network books an utterly hated Republican, we are entirely fucked.

We *need* to be better.

1/
We absolutely have to cease rewarding networks for manipulating our primitive responses to heroes and villains.

We have to stop rewarding the meaningless bullshit where [hero] totally obliterated [villain]!!

That is what Fox News does.

Are you smarter than that?

2/
We cannot… cannot… CANNOT… allow the media to continue bombarding us with endless performative bullshit where the “bad guy” gets us all mad and then the “good guy” really wins! and then we retweet the shit out of it!

…because we aren’t bright enough to get the game.

3/
Read 5 tweets
13 Nov
I just can’t even begin to express how badly it will go if you try to condescend to me.

That will go badly. How is that not known.

I can list on one hand the times I was so embarrassingly wrong, people condescending to me were entirely right.

They left a mark.

1/
One time, I spouted what I now know to be completely wrong bullshit about whether grinding up Adderall had a real effect.

Actual doctors smacked me around. I found it embarrassing. I deserved it.

2/
Another time, I got way out over my skis in an argument about intelligence warrants and one of the final executive orders Obama signed before leaving office.

@MalcolmNance unfollowed me over it. I deserved it. I was out of my lane and should have shut the fuck up.

3/
Read 5 tweets
12 Nov
My last little snarkogram of the morning:

When people tell you that they are deeply afraid of where things are heading, that actually isn’t fun for them.

People don’t actually enjoy having founded, rational anxiety about real things they can easily list and explain.

1/
Responding to someone anxiously yelling “Fire!” by accusing them of just enjoying yelling “Fire!” is asinine.

It is fucking asinine.

That person entered the room thinking you probably just hadn’t smelled the smoke yet.

They thought you just hadn’t gotten a whiff of it.

2/
When there is a fire, you don’t wait for everyone to independently smell the smoke and unanimously agree that it is indeed smoke rather than just bacon maybe.

The people who smell it first go and warn other people.

That’s kind of the whole idea of yelling “Fire!”

3/
Read 9 tweets
12 Nov
This is my favorite Twitter personality type.

Timeline contains only retweets of other people’s content.

Makes no attempt to offer anything at all of substance.

Thinks I am supposed to care deeply about his “criticism”.

I have some bad news, Kevin.
90+% of the content on Twitter is posted by <10% of the accounts.

There is nothing wrong with that.

There is nothing wrong with being a content consumer.

Reading someone else’s content doesn’t obligate them to indulge your criticism though.
A lot of people on here truly believe by following someone they’ve given that person something of value that the person is now indebted to earn or repay.

When you follow someone, you are the one receiving something you have decided is of value: their content.
Read 6 tweets

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