The Green Futures of Aaron Birk

How one mild-mannered artist/urban warrior is drawing up a brighter urban landscape.

by Carolyn Huckabay

Randa Jarra FORCE OF NATURE: Birk spent 19 days this summer at the Norton Island Residency program in Maine, working on his graphic novel (above).

In Aaron Birk's dream, he is swimming in a dark sea beneath an ink-black sky. A tidal wave approaches, and instead of fleeing, he dives headfirst into the swell, letting it pass over him like a shadow.

"When I woke up I saw in my hand The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying," he says. "In the dream I remember thinking to myself, 'I guess the book will get wet.'"

On an icy November morning inside a West Philly studio so minimal it would make Moby blush over his own extravagance, Birk describes this dream as a metaphor for being ready to die.

"How many times have I had sushi?" he asks himself out loud. "How many times have I been on a roller coaster? How many glasses of wine have I had? How many times have I ridden a bicycle? It's all the same. You just want to do those things again and again, that's why you don't want to die."

It's all pretty existential stuff for 10 o'clock in the morning, but the circle of life — death, karma, regeneration — maintains a tight orbit around Birk's worldview. And for the Maryland-native artist whose hands are rough from working with the earth, the end always justifies the means. "If you can just say thank you and be grateful," he says in a radio-ready voice stifled slightly by the city's sudden frost, "your whole world opens up. How am I going to use my day? How am I going to use that minute?"

Birk, who seems equal parts Buddhist, ecologist and unrelenting optimist, has plans for his minute.

Motivated by the ideal of a world where cities and nature live harmoniously, and armed with nothing more than dissolved sumi ink, rice paper and a behemoth aloe plant for inspiration, Birk has been working with quiet diligence on a graphic novel, The Pollinator's Corridor. The in-progress project, roughly 60 percent completed, has been selected for inclusion in a March 2009 exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

It's a coup for Birk, introducing his work to art-world forces that could potentially make or break him. But he seems less concerned with building a reputation and more focused on solving the questions he posits in the book: How do you get a meadow to cross a highway? How do you convince bees to pollinate throughout the inner city? Simply, how can urban ecosystems survive — and thrive — despite their obstacles?

According to the Center for Urban Restoration Ecology, "For the first time [in our history], more people will live in cities than in rural areas of the Earth." The obstacle, in other words, is us.

At the center of The Pollinator's Corridor is Sam Barker, who embarks upon a quest to save the world from ecological destruction. But there are no super powers or maniacal villains or cartoony thought bubbles here: just an elegantly drawn boy whose vision launches a sort of guerrilla-gardening revolution. And more than talk about himself, Birk wants to share that vision.

"There's soil, there's water, there's Mongolian Buddhist superheroes," he says with a laugh, eager to get into the specifics of the story he's serializing for City Paper. Set in the Bronx, where Birk lived when he started the work, The Pollinator's Corridor could really be about any urban space. And Sam Barker could be any kid who realizes his own potential.

Compelling and gorgeous, much of the book centers on taking a thought and acting on it. In one sequence, Sam's classmate Natasha is dismayed by the mountain of discarded trash she discovers beneath a subway platform. Not content to walk away from the blight, she throws a glass bottle toward two cops idling at the scene, and lets them chase her through the rubbish. Standing dumbfounded amid the mess, the men realize the neglect that surrounds them, and call for reinforcements to clean it up.

"Our heroes come by night with bike trailers loaded with potted trees," Birk says of the scene, "and in a few hours have created a shaded wetland garden, with stone-lined pathways and herbaceous ground cover."

These are pie-in-the-sky expectations, perhaps, but they reflect Birk's earnestness and the community-oriented model he advocates. If everyone gets involved, he says, the possibilities for change are infinite.

To tell Sam Barker's story is really to tell Birk's, since one was born from the other. After graduating from Oberlin College in 2001 without any formal horticultural education, Birk toured organic farms from California to New Jersey before landing in Central Park as a forester. "I spent 15 months alone in the woods, in Harlem," he says. "All I would do all day is wrench out baby trees. Believe it or not, the trees were the problem — there were too many of the same species growing for anything to flourish." He easily recites the Latin species — Acer platanoides — but has trouble conjuring its common name, frustrated by his own forgetting. This is Birk at his most charming, completely wrapped up in the science of things.

Birk, now 30, calls his time as a forester an "urban warrior experience": He embraced the philosophy of manipulating the ground in order to change it. From a pile of well-worn books he pulls out Leslie Sauer's The Once and Future Forest, in which urban restoration ecologists develop technologies — from native plant propagation to studying and working with indigenous peoples' ecological practices — to turn ugly, useless tracts of land into self-sustaining ecosystems that can survive despite being densely populated by humans.

Restoration ecology is, per Wikipedia, simply, "the study of renewing a degraded, damaged or destroyed ecosystem through active human intervention."

It's very American, this manipulation of the earth, Birk says. And while he considers Sauer a hero and a pioneer of a field that has existed for only a decade, he says that, while on duty in Central Park, he often became frustrated by the earth's stubbornness. "You realize that you're fighting an endless war. The weeds will grow back, and that's the way the world is."

Since leaving New York for Philadelphia three years ago, Birk has been a horticultural intern at Bartram's Garden, exhibit curator, puppeteer, Philly Fringe presenter (his Clandestine Cinema: Lost Animation of the Twentieth Century premièred this summer) and, most recently, unpaid volunteer coordinator for the Save the Free Library movement. He rarely goes grocery shopping, living off what he calls the "bulk-foods section" in his kitchen — full of grains, nuts and homegrown produce. He spends much of his time meditating, cooking, gardening and reading inspirational fare like scientist-turned-organic-farmer Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution.

"His philosophy was, don't do any work," Birk explains. "Don't do anything. Let it all grow. That's how he was able to restore deserts and prairies. He brought wastelands back to life."

It's this philosophy of letting, rather than manipulating, that deeply influences Birk's point of view — and that of his graphic-novel hero. "Sam Barker's first approach — which was mine in New York and which killed me — was to get in there, rip out the weeds, kill the invasives, rebuild the ecosystem, plant natives, plant indigenous things, get communities and children involved." Once Sam takes a step back and recognizes the beauty that surrounds him, he is far more successful in his journey to restore his surroundings.

so what's the solution? For Sam Barker, it's running with the idea of bringing together fragmented ecosystems via "pollinating corridors" of native plants — which sounds more complicated than it is. "You have these fragmented forests and parks," Birk says, pointing to a map of New York City. "Here's the Bronx, here's Central Park. These green spaces are just little patches, and in those patches, there are vital things. There are birds laying eggs, there are salamanders under the leaves. And then all around it you have hip-hop, jeans and sneakers, airports and commerce. What we want to do is connect them."

City Paper's cover this week reflects that connectivity. In what he calls a "retrofitted urban block," Birk depicts bicycles trumping cars, windmills replacing satellites, and home upon home with solar panels, rooftop gardens, bee hives and aviaries. It's hard to imagine goats and butterflies thriving in Philadelphia's concrete tangle, but Birk insists that transformative urban ecology is possible.

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"What we're really talking about is a total paradigm shift, which is happening everywhere," he says without a touch of cynicism. "And all that means is a change in consciousness from thinking about yourself to thinking about the greater good."

How, then, do we follow his lofty example of living simply and giving back to the Earth? How do our stubborn neighbors — our South Philly block mayors who neither recycle nor know the meaning of the word "compost," our gas-guzzling friends and family members — change their ways?

"For everybody it's going to be a different answer," Birk says, lighting up when he talks about collecting rainwater and capturing renewable energy. "How do you connect with the natural world? Whether it's going to the farmers market or composting or even recycling, or just thinking about it or wishing well for the world, that wish will send a vibration out and it will affect others.

"Thoughts are tangible, like stones, like bones," Birk says. "Thoughts change the world. Everything in this room — this lamp, this typewriter — was first just a thought."

He points to his aloe plant, which he bought three years ago from a Bronx homeless organization called New Leaf. Without much more than sunlight and gentle watering, it has burst to life and is practically taking over his studio in its medicinal brilliance. Like The Pollinator's Corridor, it, too, was once just a seed, an idea, conjured up and brought to life. Birk hopes his graphic novel has the same tenacity.

(carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net)

To learn more about greener urban spaces, visit the Society for Ecological Restoration at ser.org.