Pest, Purity, and Control
Our favorite nature is the denatured kind
First, if you don’t read Virginia Sole-Smith’s newsletter Burnt Toast, I highly recommend it. One of the questions she asks a lot is “is this diet culture?” For things from capsule wardrobes to people working out with their spouses. And she shows that, yes, there are a lot of things that are diet culture influenced, influenced by our neverending cultural obsession with being thin, “pure,” in control, “healthy,” and clean.
I’ve been thinking about this obsession we have with control and purity and cleanliness when it comes to the animals near us. I was glancing through one of the sources I used extensively in my book, Colin Jerolmack’s “The Global Pigeon”. He points out that our disdain for pigeons, and for animals in urban environments in general, can be traced in part of our obsession with control.
Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, pointing to the popularity of ornamental gardens and pets, observes that we most enjoy having nature in our midst when we can exercise out “impulse to reduce—and thereby, order and control it” Jerolmack, pg 15.
Pigeons, rats, gulls. Animals that come around whether we want them or not. They have two flaws: They are too common to care about, and they are not pure enough to respect.
We, especially we in the Global North, are obsessed with purity. Indoor human spaces are spaces where we are in control, where we have created purity, spaces where dirt is not allowed, where animals are not allowed unless they are carefully controlled and invited. Uninvited things in our houses, living or non, are, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes, “matter out of place.”
And now, we’ve expanded that idea to our cities as well.
What people classify as “pests” or “nuisance animals” are in fact those species of “wildlife’ that trespass on sidewalks and colonize human dwellings in spite of efforts to designate these spaces as human-only places. Jerolmack, 226
Cities are human, they’re clean of other animals. Animals that live among us? We assume there must be something WRONG with them, if they want to be associated with us. We assume that animals that want to be around us are impure. Unhealthy for us and them.
They’ve violated our sense of control, and that must mean they are bad. The thrive and are numerous, and that must mean they aren’t precious. Truly precious things, after all, are rare.
Jerolmack quotes Robert Sullivan (who himself wrote a fabulous book called Rats), who recognized that animals in urban environments aren’t noticed as nature, “because it is not the kind we are looking for—it is less precious, less ‘pure.’”
Meanwhile, we love the “pure” animals that don’t want to be near us. The fragile, delicate species that require specific circumstances to thrive, circumstances completely at odds with how we live. Jerolmack calls it “a fetishism of ‘pure’ asocial nature.”
REAL nature, we seem to think, is pure. REAL nature doesn’t want to be near people. REAL nature is delicate, it needs saving. REAL nature is out there, away from us. Where it belongs.
But of course, none of this is true! Pigeons and rats are “real” animals, just as kangaroos and pandas are. They’ve merely figured out how to thrive associated with us. And because they associated with us, they lose value in our eyes.
Pigeons, as I note in my book, were animals we used to value so highly. We used them as messengers, as sources of fertilizer, as food. We made them common, we took them around the globe and took pride in their abilities in our service. We created the pigeon fancy with species purebred (of course, “pure”) breeds. And then, when they were no longer useful, we let them go. Maybe people who let pigeons go assumed they would go back to nature. Back to the wild. That they would begone and trouble us no more.
To a pigeon, the city streets ARE their nature, this IS their jungle. The same as ours. But because we no longer control them, we’re no longer happy to see them. They’re no longer pure, but a sign of disorder, a sign of an eviction gone wrong. Now, we blame them for our problems and associate them with other things we won’t take responsibility for: Unhoused people, unclean streets.
No ecosystem on Earth has missed the tread of our boots. What if we realized there was no such thing as “pure” nature? What if we realized that “clean” is a judgement, and “control” is an illusion?
What if we saw the animals living in our environments with the same wonder we reserved for bison, pandas, or lions? What if we understood that just because something is common doesn’t mean it loses value? What if we saw animals on their own terms, instead of on ours?
Where have you been?
Is it reading this amazing piece about which kind of paper is most likely to cause papercuts? I love physicists. They don’t get a papercut and go “oh my I am a clumsy physicist” no they say “hm I bet I could make a paper knife!”
Maybe it’s reading about how RFK Jr claims he dumped a dead bear in Central Park. Can’t make this stuff up.
Maybe you know about how the great sycamore tree in the gap at Hadrian’s Wall got chopped down (vandalized), but it’s sprouting forth! Can’t keep a good tree down.
Or maybe it’s reading about hellbenders! Giant salamanders of the Appalachians, and how removing some of the thousands of defunct dams in the mountains could help these slimy puppies survive.
Maybe it’s reading about how trees can honestly hold their breaths when wildfire smoke is happening! Unfortunately, they can only do it for so long, and it’s a stressor. Growth rate decreases.
Perhaps it’s this study that shows that yes, doctors take women’s pain less seriously than men’s. They rate it as lower. They treat it less often. Hopefully this study will help lead to change! Speaking of, people are FINALLY listening to people who have been yelling about IUD insertion pain! There are guidelines to manage the pain now.
Definitely recommend this piece by Artologica about how hard it is to be a professional artist. Much like being a writer. Everyone wants to look. No one wants to pay.
Where have I been?
My latest column is live at Scientific American! I recently had a cold, and I asked, as everyone does, HOW much mucus we really produce. It was not as much as I thought, and I have questions.
I’ve been helping my friend Chelsea Henderson launch her book! She’s written: Glacial: The Inside Story of Climate Politics, basically the story of how and why it took us SO DANG LONG to do anything about climate. It is not only a thorough history of climate policy, it’s a lesson in how the Federal government works. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past few years, it’s that very few people know anything about how legislation happens.
Anti-Discourse Actions
I donated some classroom supplies for teachers this year! IMO, I want teachers and finance bros to switch salaries, the bros can make a base of $30K and make it up with being good at finance. Teachers? Give them $400K and a pension because they hold the future in their hardworking hands. I’ve never met a teacher who wasn’t wholly and deeply dedicated to their work. Glad to help these wonderful humans make their classrooms great places for their students (and also give the students nice shiny new supplies. If you are like me, there is no joy like the joy of a perfect new notebook).
I contacted my government critters about KOPSA, an online safety act that is truly anything but.
I am of course letter writing! And I voted in a recent special election.
And finally: The power of local government action, I contacted people about an unsafe intersection, where the greenery meant pedestrians couldn’t see cars coming (cars that frequently blow through the red light, a different issue I am also yelling about). One week later? They trimmed the plants! You can see now!
I think the point you are making about how we perceive and value/devalue certain kinds of animals in certain environments is a good and important one but I want to gently pushback on calling it "diet culture".
I've written about this in response to Virginia Sole Smith's work (https://wendyrobinson.substack.com/p/everything-isnt-diet-culture) and the problematic idea that EVERYTHING can be seen through a diet culture lens. I think there is a conflating of our culture of perfectionism (which diet culture is connected to) and the idea of diet culture as a social/cultural/economic system that is SPECIFICALLY harmful to people in larger bodies.
The problem with conflating personal or cultural impulses toward perfectionism with diet culture is that, at some point, it starts to remove weight stigma (and the subsequent individual and systemic harms caused by that stigma) as one of the defining features of diet culture.
Using the diet culture label for things like how we feel about "pests" or nature feels problematic to me and doesn’t actually do anything to address the fundamental and essential concerns of the anti-diet culture movement. It doesn’t force all of us to consider and address our own biases about larger bodies. It doesn’t lead to advocating for anti-discrimination laws or for companies to be more consistently size and body diversity inclusive. It doesn’t, ultimately, make things better for the people who are most harmed by diet culture.