May we all be so lucky to find our muses in our own neighborhoods.

For now, these old survivors sheltered here—as did I—in a space formerly dedicated to the demands of war. I wasn’t expecting to encounter it today, but this may be the best illustration of what manifest dismantling has to offer to those who are willing to receive it. When we pry open the cracks in the concrete, we stand to encounter life

Some of these birds you might find at Elkhorn Slough—but this was an active shipping port, not (officially) a wildlife refuge. In other words, the beach wasn’t so much a holdover from the past as a hopeful artifice, an invitation to the birds to return. And return they did.

To tear up the concrete or take down the freeway is to start to piece a community back together, though it may not (ever) look the same again.

In every moment of history, something was trying to happen, like two ends of something striving to meet each other.

we might ask what goal manifest dismantling has to offer in place of the North Star of productivity. Beyond the vague cyclicality of what Purdy calls “going on living,” can there be teleology without a telos?

IF YOU LOOK for instances of manifest dismantling, I promise you will find them. Peter Berg, the founder of modern bioregionalism, did a little bit of manifest dismantling in front of his San Francisco house in the 1980s. Like Fukuoka, he was inspired by weeds—in this case, the ones growing in the cracks of the sidewalk pavement. Berg got the

In this tradition and in modern ecology, there is potential to realize that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation. Seeing nature’s work in this light would align environmental politics with the key feminist insight that much socially

It was only through this humility that Fukuoka was able to arrive at a new kind of ingenuity. Do-nothing farming recognized that there was a natural intelligence at work in the land, and therefore the most intelligent thing for the farmer to do was to interfere as little as possible. Of course, that didn’t mean not interfering at all. Fukuoka