AC Interview | Rynn Kerkhove
Rynn Kerkhove (image courtesy of the artist)
Recently, we sat down with musician, artist, and city planner Rynn Kerkhove to talk about some of the connections between ecologically reproductive labor, environmental planning, and building reciprocal relationships with local ecosystems. Listen below or visit Amplify’s Anchor page to listen on your favorite podcasting service.
Transcription
Interviewer: Peter Fankhauser
Interviewee: Rynn Kerkhove
Date of Interview: November 6th, 2020
List of Acronyms: RK = Rynn Kerkhove; PF = Peter Fankhauser
[PF] Hi, everybody. My name is Peter Fankhauser and I'm the Program Director at Amplify Arts. Today we're talking to musician, artist, and environmental planner Rynn Kerkhove about some of the connections between ecologically reproductive labor, environmental planning, and building reciprocal relationships with local ecosystems. Rynn, we're really happy to have you here and thank you for making time to share your thoughts and perspectives and experiences with. Would you mind telling folks a little bit more about yourself?
[RK] Thank you so much for having me. I use she/her, they/them pronouns and I work in the long-range planning section of the City of Omaha Planning Department. I focus primarily on environmental planning, but when I'm not there, I make music. I go by the name Bowling by Myself. I also create urban geography YouTube videos on my channel City Chat. I just had my first video go up. It’s a profile of the Brunswick, Georgia metro area. I'm also a member of the 2020 Alternate Currents Working Group.
[PF] That's fantastic. Thank you. This year we've been talking a lot about ecological justice and environmental justice. In fact, we've dedicated the entire year to those discussions and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about ecologically reproductive care work. What does that term encompass? How does it manifest in your work and what role of any does it play in municipal environmental planning?
[RK] I understand ecologically reproductive care work as labor that, by and large, only exists after a different human intervention has occurred. It's labor that seemingly only occurs in environments that humans, or if we want to be more specific about our economy and how it functions, capital has identified as having value. Nobody's really trying to do care work on the ocean floor I guess, because there doesn't seem to be any extractive value there, at least not one that people have deemed worthy of investing in. As far as care work goes in city planning, I don't know that there's a lot of it that I do day-to-day because when I think of care work, I think of work happening more after the fact of human intervention, whereas a lot of what I do, and a lot of what happens in planning, is more the enforcement of regulations that preemptively mitigate the harm development might cause to undeveloped land.
The term “undeveloped land” [might not be the] best term to use, but I say that rather than “natural land” because most of the new land that gets developed is agricultural land rather than untouched forests or prairie. As an example, there are regulations that we have in place that require the planting of new trees if a significant enough amount of canopy of existing tree canopy is removed. That's sort of an attempt of recreating the ecosystem services that are lost as a result of development. In general, the kind of municipal environmental work you'll see depends on where you are, but when I was in undergrad, we talked a lot about how the overarching approach to the environment by governments is one of management more than anything else. I think that's a mentality or a framework that doesn't jive well with the concept of care work. Governments tend to be a lot more interested in trying to control the environment in order to protect public and private assets, as well as people, from natural disasters. I'm not making this comment as a critique, but just an example of the framework that gets used.
Look at the most recent Omaha Capital Improvement Program. A Capital Improvement Program is a city's plan that outlines how that city is going to allocate funds towards capital projects over the next x number of years. In Omaha's case, we do a new one every year, but it looks out five years in advance. A clear plurality, if not a majority of funds, are earmarked for environmental projects. But if you look at what that means, you'll see that most of those funds are going towards programs related to sewer system repair and maintenance, water quality facilities, flood control measures, things like that. There are programs in there as well that we could understand as care work like stream restoration, but most of the funding is going towards ensuring there's infrastructure in place to protect the built environment and people from natural hazards, or make use of the ecosystem services like drinking water that the environment provides. It's understandable why this framework exists in local government. I don't want to come across in this interview as harsh, but in my outlook, it's the framework that exists.
That said, I personally believe that care work can, and should, play a larger role in the work that government does. The issue is that when we talk about that sort of work, it naturally begets a conversation about externalized costs and the labor exploitation that's inherent to capitalism. Any way you slice it, most cities don't fully grapple with the true environmental cost of development. When a new large lot subdivision or suburban neighborhood is built, there's no calculation of the expected emissions increase associated with it, or an expectation that the developer or the city will offset those emissions. Outside of a couple of environmental zoning districts in Omaha and the northeast part of the city, there's nothing that really prompts anybody in the development process to seriously consider things like wildlife corridors which might be obstructed by development. Hydrology is another big thing and in development is considered, but the bottom line is that if you're developing land, you're expected to keep your storm water on site. Something that I wonder about a lot is how has the watershed changed through development, not just locally but even downstream. What are the impacts of the extent to which we've changed the flow of water just within our own little area here? These are issues that I've talked about with people who work in government around the country, but having those conversations and deciding what to do about these issues again begets a conversation about who bears the cost of development. I don't know that capital wants to have that conversation unless it's entirely on their terms which is how we wind up with more performative care work that serves to legitimize the action of capital without seriously grappling with the harm being done.
I guess to circle back to this question of care work after that long, meandering answer, I think care work can serve multiple functions depending on who's doing it and who wants it to be done. It can be anything from performative work, sort of PR work almost that you could argue isn’t even care work to begin with. There’s a veneer of it, but not much of a deeper consideration for the needs of an ecosystem on its own terms. I think there's absolutely room for [genuine care] work in planning and government work in general.
[PF] I feel like that's a good segue into talking about Elizabeth Meyer, who's a landscape architect, and some of her evaluation and consideration around culture and man-made hierarchies. I'm going to read a quote. She says, “the continuation of the culture-nature and man-nature hierarchies by designers when they describe the theoretical and formal attributes of their work perpetuates a separation of human life from other forms of life, vegetal and animal. This separation places people outside the ecosystems of which they are a part and reinforces a land ethic of either control or ownership instead of partnership and inter-relationship.” Can you talk about some planning and design strategies that use a similar feminist critique of contemporary sustainability discourse to realign our relationship with ecosystems as one of reciprocity rather than domination, like an ecosystem services approach to planning for example?
[RK] I definitely agree with Meyer’s thoughts about traditional zoning and planning logic. Zoning in general, at its core, is an attempt to define and spatially organize everything that happens in the community and in specific contexts. That framework is changing and we're starting to view urban areas as continuums more. For example, in more communities mixed-use zoning and form-based zoning codes are being adopted. Those sorts of zoning codes do view the built environment as a sort of continuum. They look at the use of the site and allow a lot more leeway in what uses can occur there, so we're not segregating uses as often or as much. You have commercial retail on the ground floor of the building and then apartments on top of it. That's the most common example of mixed-use development that we think of. Form-based codes are interesting and not used nearly as often I don't think. They look more at the form of the building almost, rather than the use. Again, that allows for a lot more leeway in terms of what's happening.
That said, when it comes to viewing ourselves and the communities that we live in as continuous with the broader ecosystem, I think we have a lot of work to do; a long way to go within the planning field. I think there is a growing recognition of ecosystem services in planning but you can have that conversation in a few different ways. I think right now, we're still having it in the sense that these are services we can take advantage of, rather than services that we should be reciprocating for. What can we give back to a stream for giving us clean drinking water? We're just focusing on the service that can be provided to us at this point. A really good example of that is the US Forest Service’s slate of tools where you can calculate the monetary value of ecosystem services provided by trees and tree canopy. If your goal is to communicate within a capitalist, patriarchal framework that values domination of land and control rather than reciprocity, then this can be really useful because you can say we are getting X million of dollars of value out of our tree canopy and that's how we justify saving it. The monetary value of trees, the way it's calculated, [includes] everything from decreased medical bills from lower air pollution, to carbon sequestration. These are all really valuable services, but it's done in the context of thinking about trees as infrastructure and thinking about the ecosystem as infrastructure or as something that is a tool for us. You can accept a service but still not reciprocate.
So I don't have a specific vision for what urban planning might look like if we were to view humans as interconnected with non-human environments, but I do think feminist and queer planning scholars definitely offer really excellent recommendations and thoughts. Combined with that, I think a more democratized planning process would work against the existing framework--this patriarchal notion that we have of domination and control and privatization. Something that I think about fairly often is that it's concerning how little say we often have over the details of what happens right next to us, right next door. I'm not saying that planning as practiced in the United States is anti-democratic, and I see a lot of planners making an earnest effort to engage communities and seek feedback, but at a certain point, you still run into the issue of private ownership and whoever owns a specific piece of property having an outsized amount of influence. I tend to view everybody as a planner. I went to school for it. That's my job title, but if you are interacting with your community in any way, if you're making decisions about what kind of tree you want to plant in your front yard, that is a planning decision. We all play a role in the overall fabric of our community and we all contribute to it in ways that are both passive and active. I think there's a lot more room to recognize the role that we, as people, play in creating value in our communities. That in turn makes us all more entitled to having more influence in planning and development processes.
That outlook on planning and development might butt up against the idea of private property [ownership] because all of a sudden you're saying the person who has the title to a piece of land doesn't get nearly as much control in that sort of system. But I think if we want to reckon with the reality of the value that every single individual brings to a community, and what that entitles them to as a member of that community, I don’t think a strict private property, domination of land mentality allows for that. Then that becomes a very human-centric way of thinking about democratization. I think democracy in the context of including the broader ecosystem, as well is something we're capable of doing and it’s necessary if we want to recognize the services that the ecosystem offers to us.
[PF] I think that's a really important point to pick up on. It makes me think a little bit about Julia Watson, who's a lecturer in Urban Design at Harvard and Columbia Universities, and the way she frames the idea of a human-nature complex, versus a human-nature divide as symbiosis. She uses that term a lot in her writing and has suggested replacing “survival of the fittest” with “survival of the most symbiotic.” I'm wondering if you can talk about what symbiosis looks like in municipal environmental planning and maybe some examples of how symbiosis or ecological reciprocity could be foregrounded in policy?
[RK] One thing that's just starting to take hold in some places is the idea of community benefits agreements. I think this is a really interesting policy that can be a gateway toward a more holistic, symbiotic form of planning. The idea of community benefits agreement is self-explanatory. It’s the idea that a community ought to benefit from the things that occur within it. If you're a developer coming into a neighborhood and building a new commercial structure, a community benefit agreement might say, “you need to employ X percentage of people from the neighborhood.” They look at what the community recognizes as needs that it needs met, or harms that it wants to be avoided as a result of development. A community benefits agreement is the opportunity to actually give that some legal room so it goes beyond making a comment at the city council meeting. It's a formal agreement and they're starting to get used. I think initially, the context for them was as a hedge against gentrification, which is really important, but if you have advocates for the environment or the ecosystem at the table, then there's an opportunity to advance this idea of a reciprocal relationship between development and the environment. I think with community benefits agreements, if you have enough of those then you can develop a new framework out of that, starting small and then expanding out from there. If we have enough of those good examples, then we could perhaps alter overall policy based on those examples, while circling back to the idea of [creating] a more democratized planning process.
I think about interspecies communication as an environmental planner. We know that animals and plants communicate, just like we do, but our channels of communication aren't really designed to hear them. A shrub can't come into a city council meeting and make a comment. That doesn't mean it doesn't have something to say. The ecosystem does say things all the time, it's just a matter of making an effort to listen. As an example, if you look at the surface of a pond and it's completely covered in blue-green algae blooms, we can interpret that as the pond saying, “your agricultural and urban runoff is loading me up with too much phosphorus; please do something about that.” Maybe it sounds a little juvenile to think about the environment in this way but I see it as giving the environment its due. The alternative is either managing it or ignoring it, and even if you don't necessarily buy the idea that those are morally wrong, they haven't really borne out the best results even in a utilitarian sense. We need to start thinking about the environment differently and I find the idea of communicating with the environment and listening to ecosystems really compelling as a way to reconnect ourselves with ecosystems.
[PF] It seems like we've cut ourselves off from those signals in ways that favor discussions or conversations around technocratic solutions to environmental and ecological crises that continue to be exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. From a planning standpoint, how do you feel about the idea of “smart cities” or strategies like geoengineering, climate engineering, etc? Do you see potential pitfalls or hazards or negative feedback loops emerging from those strategies?
[RK] In general, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole smart cities concept. I'm going to go on a rant about self-driving cars here for a bit, just as an example. The core of my feeling about smart cities, or geoengineering, or climate engineering is that we're misdiagnosing the problems that we're facing as technical problems when they are sociopolitical problems. A sociopolitical problem requires a sociopolitical solution and can't be solved, at least in any meaningful sense, by a technical solution. So self-driving cars as an example concerned me because the last time cities in the US went all in on a new transportation technology, the automobile--the non-self-driving automobile, it had effects that were either unforeseen or ignored that still resonate to this day. I don't really think it's farfetched to imagine roadways or sections of communities that are made inaccessible to pedestrians, or people not using self-driving cars, in order to accommodate new technology. This has already happened in our communities to a greater extent than I think many people realize just as general considerations or concerns that bear that exclusive type of development out. We don't know the full extent of what new infrastructure will need to be implemented, or whether different manufacturers will have their own proprietary infrastructure, such that even more infrastructure will need to be built and duplicated or local anomalies will form. Maybe this is paranoia, but what if Omaha becomes a Tesla city because we only have Tesla infrastructure for Tesla self-driving cars? And then Google is in Phoenix, or something. It’s not out of the realm of possibility. When cars first came onto the market, if an automobile driver hit a pedestrian, the driver was almost always considered at fault, but lobbying from the automobile industry changed things and suddenly jaywalking--a term they came up with--is now commonplace and a crime. That kept non-drivers out of public roads and this seems normal now, but it was a huge shift in American cities at the time. We don't have a strong tradition of public plazas and squares like you imagine in a lot of European cities. The street was the primary shared public space in American cities going into the 20th century up until the automobile came on the scene. All of a sudden, if you have cars dominating that space and taking priority over everybody else, you’ve fundamentally altered the main public space in American cities. You can go back and look at cities in photos and paintings of US streets or cities where even early in the time of cars, you had pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages and people were selling things and talking and moving about freely in the street. There was a general flow of traffic, but it was much less rigid and that's because streets were not just understood as ways to go from point A to point B, but also as shared places for us to gather.
We've already had this massive transformation of a public space, not even getting into the transformation of the built environment that occurred and a lot of the frankly terrible things that happened specifically in communities of color that were bulldozed to make room for the interstate highway system and the suburban sprawl that has occurred. Something else I don't think we grapple with very much is the automobile, for people who can afford one, gives you the freedom to go anywhere you want in the city. If you don't have a car, and there's not a bus route that takes you where you need to go, like the suburbs, then you’re out of luck. It's really difficult to get out there and navigate. Technically, you're not prohibited from going to a suburb, but if you don't have a car, you are functionally closed off from that. I really don't think it is too much of a stretch to look at something like a self-driving car and be skeptical and concerned that this new technology could alter our communities in unforeseen ways. That's my general attitude towards smart cities. Before we go about introducing all these new technologies that gather a ton of data about the way our communities function, or change the way we interact with each other and the built environment, there really needs to be due diligence done. I'm going to remain a skeptic because history has a lot to teach about the issue.
Getting back to the idea of technical solutions versus sociopolitical solutions, obviously a problem can have both of those dimensions present, but if we're talking about climate engineering, the thing that people think about when they hear the term “climate engineering” is a machine that sucks carbon out of the air or something. Well, we have trees that do that. Vegetation does that. I've noticed that there's a hope that if we just plant enough trees, then climate change all of a sudden is not an issue. Never mind the fact that climate change is already in motion. We can't just plant trees and then do nothing else. At its core, this hope that we can just plant our way out of climate change to suck all the carbon out of the air is a technical solution. It's using trees but basically saying we just need more of this one input and we'll get the desired outcome. Reforestation, revegetation, and hedging against desertification, to the extent that it's possible, is crucial. Yes, that's really important and I love trees; I want more trees; I want more prairies; I want more vegetarian, ecologically appropriate re-vegetation. But climate change is the result of our economic system and just like everything else in our sociopolitical, socioeconomic system, it's really tied into every single facet of human life and existence. Of course the culpability for it is not evenly distributed and nor are the harms. Right there, you can't have a technical solution to an issue that results from global power imbalances and also manifests itself along the lines of global power. Industrialized or developed countries are by and large responsible for climate change but are going to be harmed less as a result of it. There's not a gadget that can fix that inequality. Also, we have to recognize that there are people and institutions with an interest in keeping the system running as it is, even if it's leading us towards irreversible disaster. You overcome those inequalities and those institutions that want things to stay the same through politics and through sociopolitical means, organizing and things like that. Planting more trees or self-driving cars are not going to change the fact that Chevron and BP don't really want things to change and haven't wanted things to change for decades as we know. I'm not anti-technology. I'm not a luddite, but I really do worry that we are missing the point when we talk about smart cities and new technology as a way to deal with the problems that our cities are facing.
[PF] What do you think about nature-based technologies? Can you think of some examples in environmental planning of nature-based technologies that have helped to successfully realign people's relationships with ecosystems to be based in reciprocity rather than domination? Are there examples of that happening here in Omaha?
[RK] Something that comes to mind is the articles you shared. I forget just the author--I think it was mentioned in The Guardian piece you included that identified a lot of those things. I think it would be awesome to share that, if you haven't already.
I can only speak locally in my experience, but I think we do have some examples. Earlier on, I was talking about stormwater management and something that the public works department in the city has tried to encourage more in development are things like bioswales or rain gardens to manage storm water instead of grey infrastructure solutions. Gray infrastructure is a very descriptive term that just refers to the color of drainage basins and concrete, basically. The reason these types of ecosystems are being created is still to accommodate changes that result from human development but I think they're a step in the right direction.
Getting back to the idea of reciprocity, I don't know that creating a rain garden is necessarily a reciprocal act in the ecosystem locally. I think it's certainly better than just digging a storm water detention basin and piping that water into the sewer system, but it's certainly not the end all be all. We have like these individual instances of nature-based solutions and I think the next step toward having some sort of reciprocal relationship with the ecosystem would be to identify connections between them and start planning around those connections. The provincial government of Ontario has been encouraging communities there in Canada to develop what they call natural heritage maps by identifying nodes where the natural ecosystem is strong like parks, preserves, or undeveloped land. The way you plan in that community is then altered by the existence of those nodes as you recognize a need to connect them and then begin identifying ways to do that. The maps that are created are kind of cool because they look like transit maps, so you've got the nodes that are the stations, and then the corridors between them that are the routes. I should hope that’s not the end when we talk about reciprocal relationships with local ecosystems. I think those natural heritage maps are a way to get our foot in the door and begin to shift a general understanding of how the built environment relates to local ecosystems and a way for us to think about and see ourselves, and the built environment, as continuous with the local ecosystem.
[PF] That sounds like a great beginning. I wanted to ask one more question before we wrap up and this question has to do with your own self-generated work. You mentioned earlier that you make music as Bowling by Myself and you've recently released a track called “Small.” Riffing on that title, can you talk about how the idea of care influences your work and what it means to care for, or about, the small things?
[RK] I started recording it last summer. I guess all my music comes from a really personal place and it's more a catharsis for me. I tend to write lyrics when I'm feeling a particular emotion very strongly and then just sort of channel that into writing. So that song, I don't think I ever actually say the word “small” in it, but I wrote it because the underlying thought was I didn't necessarily feel like I was ready or worthy of relationships. I didn't fully understand myself and I still don't. You have your whole life to figure out who you are and then probably never do. I guess it comes from a place of thinking I didn't have much to offer. In that sense, I felt small in a bad way. I'm small in the sense that I'm unworthy. I suppose in the intervening time, I personally have tried to take care of myself and recognize those emotions and I certainly don't feel quite as small today as I did when i wrote that song. On a personal level, if we think about caring for small things, sometimes if we are feeling small, it’s important to take care of ourselves and that, in turn, can help you take care of other small things more effectively.
In general, and in my music, I tend to focus on small things and things that I don't know if we focus on very often. I have another song that’s almost like a list poem where the opening lyric is, “I'm the water vapor in a chemtrail, the last stale slice of bread, and the loaf you've been meaning to pitch.” For the record, I'm not into the whole chemtrail conspiracy theory. I was just wondering if the chemtrail conspiracy theorists think about the water vapor in it. They're very focused on whatever chemicals are in chemtrails that are controlling their minds, but there's probably water vapor there. Do they think about that? I'm fascinated with little things that we might think about as mundane or unworthy of our attention. I think when we pay attention to those things, we find a lot to explore and discover. That process of exploring small things leads to a care for small things. If you take the time to notice them, then you want to take care of them. I don't really care about taking care of the chemtrail conspiracy theory community, but I will speculate about the minutiae of what they might talk about.
[PF] I think that's a great place to end it. Thank you again for spending time with us, Rynn.
[RK] Thank you for having me.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Rynn Kerkhove is an urban environmental planner with backgrounds in food systems, affordable housing, and community engagement. While getting her degrees in Global Resource Systems and Urban Planning at Iowa State, she was fortunate to have many opportunities to explore the complexities of urban environments. In 2016, she was the Gerhardt intern at 1000 Friends of Oregon, writing a report on Oregon’s food system. 2018 was a busy year: Rynn interned at Iowa State Extension’s Community Visioning Program to work with small Iowa communities to plan transportation improvements; spent time during the summer working in the Cuenca, Ecuador Planning Department to gain a different perspective on planning abroad; and co-founded the Ames Tenants Union to give renters and houseless people an organized voice in my college town. Rynn currently works in the City of Omaha Planning Department.