Fort Irwin is a U.S. army base nearly the size of Rhode Island, located in the Mojave Desert about an hour's drive northeast of Barstow, California. There you will find the National Training Center, or NTC, at which all U.S. troops, from all the services, spend a twenty-one day rotation before they deploy overseas.
Sprawling and often infernally hot in the summer months, the base offers free tours, open to the public, twice a month. Venue made the trip, cameras in hand and notebooks at the ready, to learn more about the simulated battlefields in which imaginary conflicts loop, day after day, without end.
Coincidentally, as we explored the Painted Rocks located just outside the gate while waiting for the tour to start, an old acquaintance from Los Angeles—architect and geographer Rick Miller—pulled up in his Prius, also early for the same tour.
We laughed, said hello, and caught up about a class Rick had been teaching at UCLA about the military defense of L.A. from World War II to the present. An artificial battlefield, beyond even the furthest fringes of Los Angeles, Fort Irwin thus seemed like an appropriate place to meet.
We were soon joined by a small group of other visitors—consisting, for the most part, of family members of soldiers deployed on the base, as well as two architecture students from Montréal—before a large white tour bus rolled up across the gravel.
Renita, a former combat videographer who now handles public affairs at Fort Irwin, took our names, IDs, and signatures for reasons of liability (we would be seeing live explosions and simulated gunfire, and there was always the risk that someone might get hurt).
The day began with a glimpse into the economics and culture of how a nation prepares its soldiers for war; an orientation, of sorts, before we headed out to visit one of fifteen artificial cities scattered throughout the base.
In the plush lecture hall used for "After Action Reviews"—and thus, Renita apologized, air-conditioned to a morgue-like chill in order to keep soldiers awake as their adrenalin levels crash—we received a briefing from the base's commander, Brigadier General Terry Ferrell.
With pride, Ferrell noted that Fort Irwin is the only place where the U.S. military can train using all of the systems it will later use in theater. The base's 1,000 square miles of desert is large enough to allow what Ferrell called "great maneuverability"; its airspace is restricted; and its truly remote location ensures an uncluttered electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that troops can practice both collection and jamming. These latter techniques even include interfering with GPS, providing they warn the Federal Aviation Administration in advance.
Oddly, it's worth noting that Fort Irwin also houses the electromagnetically sensitive Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, part of NASA's global Deep Space Network. As science writer Oliver Morton explains in a paper called "Moonshine and Glue: A Thirteen-Unit Guide to the Extreme Edge of Astrophysics" (PDF), "when digitized battalions slug it out with all the tools of modern warfare, radio, radar, and electronic warfare emissions fly as freely around Fort Irwin as bullets in a battle. For people listening to signals from distant spacecraft on pre-arranged frequency bands, this noise is not too much of a problem." However, he adds, for other, far more sensitive experiments, "radio interference from the military next door is its biggest headache."
Unusually for the American West, where mineral rights are often transferred separately, the military also owns the ground beneath Fort Irwin, which means that they have carved out an extensive network of tunnels and caves from which to flush pretend insurgents.
This 120-person strong insurgent troop is drawn from the base's own Blackhorse Regiment, a division of the U.S. Army that exists solely to provide opposition. Whatever the war, the 11th Armored is always the pretend enemy. According to Ferrell, their current role as Afghan rebels is widely envied: they receive specialized training (for example, in building IEDs) and are held to "reduced grooming standards," while their mission is simply to "stay alive and wreak havoc."
If they die during a NTC simulation, they have to shave and go back on detail on the base, Ferrell added, so the incentive to evade their American opponents is strong.
In addition to the in-house enemy regiment, there is an entire 2,200-person logistics corps dedicated to rotating units in and out of Fort Irwin and equipping them for training. Every ordnance the United States military has, with the exception of biological and chemical weapons, is used during NTC simulations, Ferrell told us. What's more, in the interests of realism (and expense be damned), troops train using their own equipment, which means that bringing in, for example, the 10th Mountain Division (on rotation during our visit), also means transporting their tanks and helicopters from their home base at Fort Drum, New York, to California, and back again.
Units are deployed to Fort Irwin for twenty-one days, fourteen of which are spent in what Fort Irwin refers to as "The Box" (as in "sandbox"). This is the vast desert training area that includes fifteen simulated towns and the previously mentioned tunnel and caves, as well as expansive gunnery ranges and tank battle arenas.
Following our briefing, we headed out to the largest mock village in the complex, the Afghan town of Ertebat Shar, originally known, during its Iraqi incarnation, as Medina Wasl. Before we re-boarded the bus, Renita issued a stern warning: "'Afghanistan' is not modernized with plumbing. There are Porta-Johns, but I wanted to let you know the situation before we roll out there."
A twenty-minute drive later, through relatively featureless desert, our visit to "Afghanistan" began with a casual walk down the main street, where we were greeted by actors trying to sell us plastic loaves of bread and piles of fake meat. Fort Irwin employs more than 350 civilian role-players, many of whom are of Middle Eastern origin, although Ferrell explained that they are still trying to recruit more Afghans, in order "to provide the texture of the culture."
The atmosphere is strangely good-natured, which was at least partially amplified by a feeling of mild embarrassment, as the rules of engagement, so to speak, are not immediately clear; you, the visitor, are obviously aware of the fact that these people are paid actors, but it feels distinctly odd to slip into character yourself and pretend that you might want to buy some bread.
In fact, it's impossible not to wonder how peculiar it must be for a refugee, or even a second-generation immigrant, from Iraq or Afghanistan, to pretend to be a baker in a simulated "native" village on a military base in the California desert, only to see tourists in shorts and sunglasses walking through, smiling uncomfortably and taking photos with their phones before strolling away without saying anything.
Even more peculiarly, as we reached the end of the street, the market—and all the actors in it—vanished behind us, dispersing back into the fake city, as if only called into being by our presence.
By now, with the opening act over, we were stopped in front of the town's "Lyndon Marcus International Hotel" to take stock of our surroundings. In his earlier briefing, Ferrell had described the simulated villages' close attention to detail—apparently, the footprint for the village came from actual satellite imagery of Baghdad, in order to accurately recreate street widths, and the step sizes inside buildings are Iraqi, rather than U.S., standard.
Dimensions notwithstanding, however, this is a city of cargo containers, their Orientalized facades slapped up and plastered on like make-up. Seen from above, the wooden frames of the illusion become visible and it becomes more and more clear that you are on a film set, an immersive theater of war.
This kind of test village has a long history in U.S. war planning. As journalist Tom Vanderbilt writes in his book Survival City, "In March 1943, with bombing attacks on cities being intensified by all sides, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction at Dugway [Utah] on a series of 'enemy villages,' detailed reproductions of the typical housing found in the industrial districts of cities in Germany and Japan."
The point of the villages at Dugway, however, was not to train soldiers in urban warfare—with, for instance, simulated street battles or house-to-house clearances —but simply to test the burn capacity of the structures themselves. What sorts of explosives should the U.S. use? How much damage would result? The attention to architectural detail was simply a subset of this larger, more violent inquiry. As Vanderbilt explains, bombs at Dugway "were tested as to their effectiveness against architecture: How well the bombs penetrated the roofs of buildings (without penetrating too far), where they lodged in the building, and the intensity of the resulting fire."
During the Cold War, combat moved away from urban settings, and Fort Irwin's desert sandbox became the stage for massive set-piece tank battles against the "Soviet" Blackhorse Cavalry. But, in 1993, following the embarrassment of the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu, Fort Irwin hosted its first urban warfare, or MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain) exercise. This response was part of a growing realization shared amongst the armed forces, national security experts, and military contractors that future wars would again take the city as their battlefield.
Massed, professional, and essentially symmetrical armies no longer confront one another on the broad forests and plains of central Europe, the new tactical thinking goes; instead, undeclared combatants living beside—sometimes even with—families in stacked apartment blocks or tight-knit courtyards send out the occasional missile, bullet, or improvised explosive device from a logistically confusing tangle of streets, and "war" becomes the spatial process of determining how to respond.
At Fort Irwin, mock villages began to pop up in the desert. They started out as "sheds bought from Shed World," Ferrell told us, before being replaced by shipping containers, which, in turn, have been enhanced with stone siding, mosque domes, awnings, and street signs, and, in some cases, even with internal staircases and furniture, too. Indeed, Ertebat Shar/Medina Wasl began its simulated existence in 2007, with just thirteen buildings, but has since expanded to include more than two hundred structures.
The point of these architectural reproductions is no longer, as in the World War II test villages of Dugway, to find better or more efficient methods of architectural destruction; instead, these ersatz buildings and villages are used to equip troops to better navigate the complexity of urban structures—both physical, and, perhaps most importantly, socio-cultural.
In other words, at the most basic level, soldiers will use Fort Irwin's facsimile villages to practice clearing structures and navigating unmapped, roofed alleyways through cities without clear satellite communications links. However, at least in the training activities accessible to public visitors, the architecture is primarily a stage set for the theater of human relations: a backdrop for meeting and befriending locals (again, paid actors), controlling crowds (actors), rescuing casualties (Fort Irwin's roster of eight amputees are its most highly paid actors, we learned, in recompense for being literally dragged around during simulated combat operations), and, ultimately, locating and eliminating the bad guys (the Blackhorse regiment).
In the series of set-piece training exercises that take place within the village, the action is coordinated from above by a ring of walkie-talkie connected scenographers, including an extensive internal media presence, who film all of the simulations for later replay in combat analysis. The sense of being on an elaborate, extremely detailed film set is here made explicit. In fact, visitors are openly encouraged to participate in this mediation of the events: we were repeatedly urged to take as many photographs as possible and to share the resulting images on Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Appropriately equipped with ear plugs and eye protection, we filed upstairs to a veranda overlooking one of the village's main throughways, where we joined the "Observer Coaches" and film crew, taking our positions for the afternoon's scripted exercise.
Loud explosions, smoke, and fairly grisly combat scenes ensued—and thus, despite their simulated nature, involving Hollywood-style prosthetics and fake blood, please be warned that many of the forthcoming photos could still be quite upsetting for some viewers.
The afternoon's action began quietly enough, with an American soldier on patrol waving off a man trying to sell him a melon. Suddenly, a truck bomb detonated, smoke filled the air, and an injured woman began to wail, while a soldier slumped against a wall, applying a tourniquet to his own severed arm.
In the subsequent chaos, it was hard to tell who was doing what, and why: gun trucks began rolling down the streets, dodging a live goat and letting off round after round as insurgents fired RPGs (mounted on invisible fishing line that blended in with the electrical wires above our heads) from upstairs windows; blood-covered casualties were loaded into an ambulance while soldiers went door-to-door with their weapons drawn; and, in the episode's climax, a suicide bomber blew himself up directly beneath us, showering our tour group with ashes.
Twenty minutes later, it was all over. The smoke died down; the actors reassembled, uninjured, to discuss what just occurred; and the sound of blank rounds being fired off behind the buildings at the end of the exercise echoed through the streets.
Incredibly, blank rounds assigned to a particular exercise must be used during that exercise and cannot be saved for another day; if you are curious as to where your tax dollars might be going, picture paid actors shooting entire magazines full of blank rounds out of machine guns behind simulated Middle Eastern buildings in the Mojave desert. Every single blank must be accounted for, leading to the peculiar sight of a village's worth of insurgents stooped, gathering used blank casings into their prop kettles, bread baskets, and plastic bags.
Finally, we descended back down onto the street, dazed, ears ringing, and a little shocked by all the explosions and gunfire. Stepping carefully around pools of fake blood and chunks of plastic viscera, we made our way back to the lobby of the International Hotel for cups of water and a debrief with soldiers involved in planning and implementing the simulation.
Our hosts there were an interesting mix of earnest young boys who looked like they had successful careers in politics ahead of them, standing beside older men, almost stereotypically hard-faced, who could probably scare an AK-47 into misfiring just by staring at it, and a few female soldiers.
Somewhat subdued at this point, our group sat on sofas that had seen better days and passed around an extraordinary collection of injury cards handed out to fallen soldiers and civilians. These detail the specific rules given for role-playing a suite of symptoms and behavior—a kind of design fiction of military injury.
A few of us tried on the MILES (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System) harnesses that soldiers wear to sense hits from fired blanks, and then an enemy soldier demonstrated an exploding door sill.
While the film crew and Observer Coaches prepared for their "After Action Review," our guides seemed talkative but unwilling to discuss how well or badly the afternoon's session had gone. We asked, instead, about the future of Fort Irwin's villages, as the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan. The vision is to expand the range of urban conditions into what Ferrell termed a "Decisive Action Training Environment," in which U.S. military will continue to encounter "the world's worst actors" [sic]—"guerrillas, criminals, and insurgents"—amidst the furniture of city life.
As he escorted us back down the market street to our bus, one soldier off-handedly remarked that he'd heard the village might be redesigned soon as a Spanish-speaking environment—before hastily and somewhat nervously adding that he didn't know for sure, and, anyway, it probably wasn't true.
The "town" is visible on Google Maps, if you're curious, and it is easy to reach from Barstow. Tours of "The Box" are run twice a month and fill up quickly; learn more at the Fort Irwin website, including safety tips and age restrictions.
Arriving much earlier than expected for our tour of Fort Irwin, detailed in another post, Venue spent a half-hour wandering around the so-called Painted Rocks, where outgoing troops memorialize their time at Fort Irwin by painting unit insignias on an ever-larger swath of desert scrabble.
"We have a tradition at the National Training Center of painting rocks with unit patches and insignias," Command Sgt. Maj. Victor Martinez explains in an article posted at army.mil. They are "symbols of pride and allegiance."
The results are colorful, more self-mockingly macho than threatening, and highly photogenic; skulls, serpents, sharks, and dragons join bombs, arrows, spears, castles, and silhouettes of assault rifles, all of which gradually fade in the desert sun and need to be repainted when the unit responsible circles back to the desert base.
Unexpected cousins of Newspaper Rock, which Venue visited in Utah on a separate trip, the Painted Rocks turn geology into media, not as long-lasting as petroglyphs but still a semi-superstitious message left by humans on a thin layer of the earth's surface.
Screenshot of our own SimCity (called, for reasons that made sense at the time, We Are The Champignons) after three hours of game play.
In the nearly quarter-century since designer Will Wright launched the iconic urban planning computer game, SimCity, not only has the world's population become majoritatively urban for the first time in human history, but interest in cities and their design has gone mainstream.
In March 2013, the first new iteration of SimCity in a decade was launched, amidst a flurry of critical praise mingled with fan disappointment at Electronic Arts' "always-online" digital rights management policy and repeated server failures.
A few weeks before the launch, Venue had the opportunity to play the new SimCity at its Manhattan premiere, during which time we feverishly laid out curving roads and parks, drilled for oil while installing a token wind turbine, and tried to ignore our city's residents'—known as Sims—complaints as their homes burned before we could afford to build a fire station.
We emerged three hours later, blinking and dazed, into the gleaming white and purple lights of Times Square, and were immediately struck by the abstractions required to translate such a complex, dynamic environment into a coherent game structure, and the assumptions and values embedded in that translation.
Fortunately, the game's lead designer, Stone Librande, was happy to talk with us further about his research and decision-making process, as well as some of the ways in which real-world players have already surprised him. We spoke to him both in person and by telephone, and our conversation appears below.
• • •
Nicola Twilley: I thought I’d start by asking what sorts of sources you used to get ideas for SimCity, whether it be reading books, interviewing urban experts, or visiting different cities?
Stone Librande: From working on SimCity games in the past, we already have a library here with a lot of city planning books. Those were really good as a reference, but I found, personally, that the thing I was most attracted to was using Google Earth and Google Street View to go anywhere in the world and look down on real cities. I found it to be an extremely powerful way to understand the differences between cities and small towns in different regions.
Google has a tool in there that you can use to measure out how big things are. When I first started out, I used that a lot to investigate different cities. I’d bring up San Francisco and measure the parks and the streets, and then I’d go to my home town and measure it, to figure out how it differed and so on. My inspiration wasn’t really drawn from urban planning books; it was more from deconstructing the existing world.
Then I also really got into Netflix streaming documentaries. There is just so much good stuff there, and Netflix is good at suggesting things. That opened up a whole series of documentaries that I would watch almost every night after dinner. There were videos on water problems, oil problems, the food industry, manufacturing, sewage systems, and on and on—all sorts of things. Those covered a lot of different territory and were really enlightening to me.
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
Using the zoning tool for the city designed by We Are the Champignons.
Twilley: I’d love to hear more about the design process and how you went about testing different iterations. Did you storyboard narratives for possible cities and urban forms that you might want to include in the game?
Librande: The way the game is set up, it’s kind of infinite. What I mean by that is that you could play it so many different ways that it’s basically impossible to storyboard or have a defined set of narratives for how the player will play it.
Stone Librande's storyboards for "Green City" and "Mining City" at the start of play.
Instead, what I did was that I came up with two extreme cases—around the office we call them “Berkeley” and “Pittsburgh,” or “Green City” and “Dirty City.” We said, if you are the kind of player who wants to make utopia—a city with wind power, solar power, lots of education and culture, and everything’s beautiful and green and low density—then this would be the path you would take in our game.
But then we made a parallel path for a really greedy player who just wants to make as much money as possible, and is just exploiting or even torturing their Sims. In that scenario, you’re not educating them; you’re just using them as slave labor to make money for your city. You put coal power plants in, you put dumps everywhere, and you don’t care about their health.
Stone Librande's storyboard for "Green City" at mid-game.
I made a series of panels, showing those two cities from beginning to late stage, where everything falls apart. Then, later on, when we got to multiplayer, I joined those two diagrams together and said, “If both of these cities start working together, then they can actually solve each other’s problems.”
The idea was to set them up like bookends—these are the extremes of our game. A real player will do a thousand things that fall somewhere in between those extremes and create all sorts of weird combinations. We can’t predict all of that.
Basically, we figured that if we set the bookends, then we would at least understand the boundaries of what kind of art we need to build, and what kind of game play experiences we need to design for.
Stone Librande's storyboard for "Mining City" at mid-game.
Twilley: In going through that process, did you discover things that you needed to change to make game play more gripping for either the dirty city or the clean city?
Librande: It was pretty straightforward to look at Pittsburgh, the dirty city, and understand why it was going to fail, but you have to try to understand why the clean one might fail, as well. If you have one city—one path—that always fails, and one that always succeeds, in a video game, that’s really bad design. Each path has to have its own unique problems.
What happened was that we just started to look at the two diagrams side-by-side, and we knew all the systems we wanted to support in our game—things like power, utilities, wealth levels, population numbers, and all that kind of stuff—and we basically divided them up.
We literally said: “Let’s put all of this on this side over in Pittsburgh and the rest of it over onto Berkeley.” That’s why, at the very end, when they join together, they are able to solve each other’s problems because, between the two of them, they have all the problems but they also have all the answers.
Stone Librande's storyboard for the "Green City" and "Mining City" end-game symbiosis.
Twilley: One thing that struck me, after playing, was that you do incorporate a lot of different and complex systems in the game, both physical ones like water, and more abstract ones, like the economy. But—and this seems particularly surprising, given that one of your bookend cities was nicknamed Berkeley—the food system doesn’t come into the game at all. Why not?
Librande: Food isn’t in the game, but it’s not that we didn’t think about it—it just became a scoping issue. The early design actually did call for agriculture and food systems, but, as part of the natural process of creating a video game, or any situation where you have deadlines and budgets that you have to meet, we had to make the decision that it was going to be one of the things that the Sims take care of on their own, and that the Mayor—that is, the player—has nothing to do with it.
I watched some amazing food system documentaries, though, so it was really kind of sad to not include any of that in the game.
Data layer showing ore deposits.
Data layer showing happiness levels. In SimCity, happiness is increased by wealth, good road connections, and public safety, and decreased by traffic jams and pollution.
Manaugh: Now that the game is out in the world, and because of the central, online hosting of all the games being played right now, I have to imagine that you are building up an incredible archive of all the decisions that different players have made and all the different kind of cities that people have built. I’m curious as to what you might be able to make or do with that kind of information. Are you mining it to see what kinds of mistakes people routinely make, or what sorts of urban forms are most popular? If so, is the audience for that information only in-house, for developing future versions of SimCity, or could you imagine sharing it with urban planners or real-life Mayors to offer an insight into popular urbanism?
Librande: It’s an interesting question. It’s hard to answer easily, though, because there are so many different ways players can play the game. The game was designed to cover as many different play patterns as we could think of, because our goal was to try to entertain as many of the different player demographics as we could.
So, there are what we call “hardcore players.” Primarily, they want to compete, so we give them leader boards and we give them incentives to show they are “better” than somebody else. We might say: “There’s a competition to have the most people in your city.” And they are just going to do whatever it takes to cram as many people into a city as possible, to show that they can win. Or there might be a competition to get the most rich people in your city, which requires a different strategy than just having the most people. It’s hard to keep rich people in a city.
Each of those leader boards, and each of those challenges, will start to skew those hardcore people to play in different ways. We are putting the carrot out there and saying: “Hey, play this way and see how well you can do.” So, in that case, we are kind of tainting the data, because we are giving them a particular direction to go in and a particular goal.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are the “creative players” who are not trying to win—they are trying to tell a story. They are just trying to create something beautiful. For instance, when my wife plays, she wants lots of schools and parks and she’s not at all concerned with trying to make the most money or have the most people. She just wants to build that idealized little town that she thinks would be the perfect place to live.
A regional view of a SimCity game, showing different cities and their painfully small footprints.
So, getting back to your question, because player types cover such a big spectrum, it’s really hard for us to look at the raw data and pull out things like: “This is the kind of place that people want to live in.” That said, we do have a lot of data and we can look at it and see things, like how many people put down a park and how many people put in a tram system. We can measure those things in the aggregate, but I don’t think they would say much about real city planning.
Twilley: Building on that idea of different sorts of players and ways of playing, are there a variety of ways of “winning” at SimCity? Have you personally built cities that you would define as particularly successful within the game, and, if so, what made them “winners”?
Librande: For sure, there is no way to win at SimCity other then what you decide to put into the game. If you come in with a certain goal in mind—perhaps, say, that you want a high approval rating and everyone should be happy all the time— then you would play very differently than if you went in wanting to make a million dollars or have a city with a million people in it.
As far as my personal city planning goes, it has varied. I’ve played the game so much, because early on I just had to play every system at least once to understand it. I tried to build a power city, a casino city, a mining city—I tried to build one of everything.
Now that I’m done with that phase, and I’m just playing for fun at home, I’ve learned that I enjoy mid-density cities much more then high-density cities. To me, high-density cities are just a nightmare to run and operate. I don’t want to be the mayor of New York; I want to be the mayor of a small town. The job is a lot easier!
Basically, I build in such a way as to not make skyscrapers. At the most, I might have just one or two because they look cool—but that’s it.
Screenshot from SimCity 4.
Manaugh: I’m curious how you dealt with previous versions of SimCity, and whether there was any anxiety about following that legacy or changing things. What are the major innovations or changes in this version of the game, and what kinds of things did you think were too iconic to get rid of?
Librande: First of all, when we started the project, and there were just a few people on the team, we all agreed that we didn’t want this game to be called SimCity 5. We just wanted to call it SimCity, because if we had a 5 on the box, everybody would think it had to be SimCity 4 with more stuff thrown in. That had the potential to be quite alienating, because SimCity 4 was already too complicated for a lot of people. That was the feedback we had gotten.
Once we made that title decision, it was very liberating—we felt like, “OK, now we can reimagine what the brand might be and how cities are built, almost from scratch.”
Technically, the big difference is the “GlassBox” engine that we have, in which all the agents promote a bottom-up simulation. All the previous SimCity games were literally built on spreadsheets where you would type a number into a grid cell, and then it propagated out into adjacent grid cells, and the whole city was a formula.
SimCity 4 was literally prototyped in Excel. There were no graphics—it was just a bunch of numbers—but you could type a code that represented a particular type of building and the formulae built into the spreadsheet would then decide how much power it had and how many people would work there. It just statically calculated the city as if it were a bunch of snapshots.
A fire breaks out in the city designed by We Are The Champignons.
Because our SimCity—the new SimCity—is really about getting these agents to move around, it’s much more about flows. Things have to be in motion. I can’t look at anybody’s city as a screenshot and tell you what’s going on; I have to see it live and moving before I can fully understand if your roads are OK, if your power is flowing, if your water is flowing, if your sewage is getting dumped out, if your garbage is getting picked up, and so on. All that stuff depends on trucks actually getting to the garbage cans, for example, and there’s no way to tell that through a snapshot.
Sims queue for the bus at dawn.
Once we made that decision—to go with an agent-driven simulation and make it work from the bottom up—then all the design has to work around that. The largest part of the design work was to say: “Now that we know agents are going to run this, how do schools work with those agents? How do fire and police systems work with these agents? How do time systems work?” All the previous editions of SimCity never had to deal with that question—they could just make a little table of crimes per capita and run those equations.
Manaugh: When you turned things over to the agents, did that have any kind of spatial effect on game play that you weren’t expecting?
Librande: It had an effect, but it was one that we were expecting. Because everything has to be in motion, we had to have good calculations about how distance and time are tied together. We had to do a lot of measurements about how long it would really take for one guy to walk from one side of the city to the other, in real time, and then what that should be in game time—including how fast the cars needed to move in relationship to the people walking in order to make it look right, compared to how fast would they really be moving, both in game time and real time. We had all these issues where the cars would be moving at eighty miles an hour in real time, but they looked really slow in the game, or where the people were walking way, way too fast, but actually they were only walking at two miles an hour.
We knew this would happen, but we just had to tweak the real-life metrics so that the motion and flow look real in the game. We worked with the animators, and followed our intuition, and tried to mimic the motion and flow of crowds.
We Are The Champignons' industrial zone, carefully positioned downwind of the residential areas.
In the end, it’s not one hundred percent based on real-life metrics; it just has to look like real life, and that’s true throughout the game. For example, if we made the airport runways actual size, they would cover up the entire city. Those are the kinds of things where we just had to make a compromise and hope that it looked good.
Twilley: Actually, one of the questions we wanted to ask was about time in the game. I found it quite intriguing that there are different speeds that you can choose to play at, but then there’s also a distinct sense of the phases of building a city and how many days and nights have to pass for certain changes to occur. Did you do any research into how fast cities change and even how the pace of city life is different in different places?
Librande: We found an amazing article about walking speeds in different cities. That was something I found really interesting. In cities like New York, people walk faster, and in medium-sized or small towns, they walk a lot slower. At one point, we had Sims walking faster as the city gets bigger, but we didn’t take it that far in the final version.
I know what you are talking about, though: in the game, bigger cities feel a lot busier and faster moving. But there’s nothing really built into the game to do that; it’s just the cumulative effect of more moving parts, I guess. In kind of a counter-intuitive way, when you start getting big traffic jams, it feels like a bigger, busier city even though nothing is moving—it’s just to do with the way we imagine rush-hour gridlock as being a characteristic of a really big city.
The fact that there’s even a real rush hour shows how important timing is for an agent-based game. We spent a lot of time trying to make the game clock tick, to pull you forward into the experience. In previous SimCities, the day/night cycle was just a graphical effect—you could actually turn it off if you didn’t like it, and it had no effect on the simulation. In our game, there is a rush hour in the morning and one at night, there are school hours, and there are shopping hours. Factories are open twenty-four hours a day, but stores close down at night, so different agents are all working on different schedules.
The result is that you end up getting really interesting cycles—these flows of Sims build up at certain times and then the buses and streets are empty and then they build back up again. There’s something really hypnotic about that when you play the game. I find myself not doing anything but just watching in this mesmerized state—almost hypnotized—where I just want to watch people drive and move around in these flows. At that point, you’re not looking at any one person; you’re looking at the aggregate of them all. It’s like watching waves flow back and forth like on a beach.
For me, that’s one of the most compelling aspects of our game. The timing just pulls you forward. We hear this all the time—people will say, “I sat down to play, and three hours had passed, and I thought, wait, how did that happen?” Part of that is the flow that comes from focusing, but another part of it is the success of our game in pulling you into its time frame and away from the real-world time frame of your desk.
Twilley: Has anything about the way people play or respond to the game surprised you? Is there anything that you already want to change?
Librande: One thing that amazed me is that, even with the issues at the launch, we had the equivalent of nine hundred man-years put into SimCity in less than a week.
Most of the stuff that people are doing, we had hoped or predicted would happen. For example, I anticipated a lot of the story-telling and a lot of the creativity—people making movies in the cities, and so on—and we’re already seeing that. YouTube is already filled with how-to videos and people putting up all these filters, like film noir cities, and it’s just really beautiful.
Screen shot from SimCity player Calvin Chan's film noir montage of his city at night.
The thing I didn’t predict was that, in the first week, two StarCraft players—that’s a very fast-paced space action game, in case you’re not familiar with it, and it’s fairly common for hardcore players to stream their StarCraft battles out to a big audience—decided to have a live-streamed SimCity battle against each other. They were in a race to be the first to a population of 100,000; they live-streamed their game; and there were twenty thousand people in the chat room, cheering them on and typing in advice—things like “No, don’t build there!” and “ What are you doing—why are you putting down street cars?” and “Come on, dude, turn your oil up!” It was like that, nonstop, for three hours. It was like a spectator sport, with twenty thousand people cheering their favorite on, and, basically, backseat city planning. That really took me by surprise.
I’m not sure where we are going to go with that, though, because we’re not really an eSport, but it seems like the game has the ability to pull that out of people. I started to try to analyze what’s going on there, and it seems that if you watch people play StarCraft and you don’t know a lot about it, your response is going to be something like, “I don’t know what I’m looking at; I don’t know if I should be cheering now; and I don’t know if what I just saw was exciting or not.”
But, if you watch someone build a city, you just know. I mean, I don’t have to teach you that putting a garbage dump next to people’s houses is going to piss them off or that you need to dump sewage somewhere. I think the reason that the audience got so into it is that everyone intuitively knows the rules of the game when it comes to cities.
Water Pipe, Running from Central Arizona Project to Pleasant Valley Development, Phoenix, Arizona (2009). Photograph by Peter Arnold, originally published on Design Observer as part of "Drylands: Water and the West," an essay by Peter and Hadley Arnold of the Arid Lands Institute, whose work focuses on the challenge of drylands design.
I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.
However, Americans—or, at least, those in positions of power—were unwilling to forego the nation's "Manifest Destiny," and, over the subsequent century and beyond, through to the present day, the arid regions of the West have been "reclaimed" through a series of dams, diversions, and irrigation projects, while the region's limited water has proved endless only in terms of its ability to generate legal fees.
Powell's own prescription, presented in his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, proposed organizing the government of the region by watershed, rather than state, with citizens of each "drainage district" responsible for administering the resource as a communal property.
John Wesley Powell’s 1890 map of the "Arid Region of the United States, showing Drainage Districts,” published in the Eleventh Annual Report of the U.S. Geological Survey. If Congress had followed Powell's recommendations, the governance units of the West would have followed these hydrological boundaries instead of state lines. Via the Aqueous Advisor's blog, where a larger PDF version is available.
Instead, the application of a structure of individual property ownership and states' rights onto a dynamic hydrological system has led to a complex, and seemingly unsustainable, system of water management.
The white "bathtub ring" visible in this panorama of Lake Mead (taken by Kumar Appaiah) shows its lowered level. According to some estimates, the reservoir could drop below the minimum power pool elevation of 1,050 feet as early as 2017.
Curious to understand what the West's water looks like from a legal perspective, as well as to learn why Reno's Truckee River is the most litigated body of water in America, Venue stopped by the office of attorney Ross de Lipkau, author of The Nevada Law of Water Rights, for a quick chat.
Our conversation sheds light on the origins of Western water law in mining claims, the ebb and flow of the water rights market, and alternative water management systems—a vital context for understanding the region's hydrological history, as well as for re-imagining its future.
• • •
Geoff Manaugh: To begin with, I’m curious how you define the users or the constituency of a body of water—and, along those lines, how a body of water itself is defined.
Ross de Lipkau: Today, the jurisdiction of Nevada water is handled strictly by the Nevada State Engineer. The State Engineer has jurisdiction of all waters in Nevada, with the exception being the Colorado River, which comes through Nevada at the southern tip.
Nevada’s water law was first enacted in 1905. Prior to that time, you did it just like the old miners did. When Nevada was settled, homesteaders were basically trespassers upon federal lands who would simply divert water from a creek to irrigate the land they’d taken. In 1866, Congress came out with probably the most important land law of its time. What that law did was affirm and, in essence, bless the activities that had taken place previously. That meant that the mining claims were fine, and the ditches dug by the farmers across federal lands to their irrigated lands were fine, and, with that blessing, that behavior continued.
In Nevada, you simply diverted water from a creek or source and irrigated your lands, no questions asked.
Hydraulic mining near French Corral, Nevada County (c.1866), Lawrence & Houseworth (publisher), Library of Congress.
There were some cases prior to 1905, but they also affirmed prior appropriation. In 1905, Nevada water law came into effect, and what it says, in part, is that all those rights placed to beneficial use prior to the adoption of the water law are fine, but that after 1905, all water rights have to be filed and approved by the Nevada State Engineer.
The result is that we have what I call a dual system: the permitted water rights from post-1905, and, prior to that, what are called vested water rights.
Nicola Twilley: Are the vested water rights all recorded somewhere?
de Lipkau: They’re recorded in the State Engineer’s Office.
Twilley: So people who had diverted water for their own use prior to 1905 had to visit the Engineer, to make sure it was written down.
de Lipkau: Correct. We frequently go to the State Engineer’s Office in Carson City to check his official records. They’re on the computer, but we’d rather see the hard copies when it’s important.
Twilley: Do people ever come along with a water right that they say is vested but didn’t get written down at the time?
de Lipkau: Yes, that happens all the time. In that case, you file a claim of vested right. Then the State Engineer may have a hearing; it may end up in court. Two or more people arguing over and claiming the same water source is a very frequent problem in Nevada.
Manaugh: We’re interested in talking about some of the landmark cases in water rights law. For example, I’m thinking about the ongoing discussion about diverting water from northern Nevada down to the south to help out with Las Vegas and Lake Mead—is that something you’re involved with?
de Lipkau: I used to be involved. What is happening in Las Vegas is a result of that city’s huge growth spurt. Nevada was originally allocated 300,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River in the United States Supreme Court decision that adjudicated the waters of the Colorado between the different states. In that decision, the Lower Basin states received 7.5 million acre-feet and the Upper Basin received the same, which is fine except that there aren’t 14 million acre-feet flowing in the river. The adjudication was based on 1920 records and those just aren’t accurate to today’s reality.
In any case, Nevada receives 300,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River, plus ground water in the Las Vegas basin, which is in the magnitude of 35,000 acre-feet. The water management team of Las Vegas, which I think a great deal of, said that, because of this growth spurt that took place in the late 80s and early 90s, we need more water. So the water district filed under state law—enacted in 1905, as I mentioned, and substantially amended in 1913—a total of 126 applications to appropriate water in three different counties, and in different groundwater basins. There are 254 groundwater basins in Nevada, and they filed in something like twenty of them. They’ve subsequently dropped some of the applications because they were perhaps leading to an environmental situation, or they involved a federal wildlife preserve, or things like that.
Map showing the South Nevada Water Authority proposed pipeline, pumping water from northern Nevada groundwater basins to supply Las Vegas. The Governor of Utah rejected the proposal in April 2013, casting a yet another question mark over the entire project. Map via KCSG TV.
At this point, the State Engineer has granted a series of applications in White Pine County, which is several hundred miles north of Las Vegas. Las Vegas is now in the process of permitting the right of way to bring the pipeline to the city, to commingle the waters with the Colorado River waters and their groundwater sources. The county won’t get any return flow.
Twilley: So some of this water from a different basin will end up joining the Colorado?
de Lipkau: Yes, a certain percentage of the water delivered by the water district goes back into the river via the sanitary waste system. The state of Nevada gets credit for that. So, for example, if they pump 100,000 acre-feet out in any given year, a certain percent—I think it’s fifty-eight—of that goes back and can be repumped. So the 300,000 acre-feet expands, and is actually 480,000 acre feet.
Twilley: I see: the better you are at returning it, the more you can pump.
de Lipkau: Correct. The less outdoor use, the better. That’s why, if you’ve been to Las Vegas, you’ll know there are brand new and even twenty-year-old subdivisions that have no lawns. They call it native landscaping. Lots of rocks, a few bushes and a couple of trees—and that’s it.
In those cases, virtually all of the water is used in the house, and virtually all of the water that is used in the house returns through the sanitary system.
Xeriscaping on the campus of the University of Las Vegas, Nevada; photo by Andrew Alden.
Manaugh: What’s on the horizon? Are there any larger legislative changes that might affect water rights, or any major new developments in Nevada that might cause water rights conflicts?
de Lipkau: I would say no. What happens, for the most part, for new developments, is that you have to renegotiate existing water rights. In Reno, for example, the State Engineer stopped granting groundwater permits in 1975. In order to get water for development, you have to transfer existing rights to a new use. So, if someone wanted to built a 100-unit condominium on that vacant lot out there, they would have to acquire and buy enough water to serve that size of condo, and then they would have to dedicate and give that volume of water to the water purveyor, which is the local water company. That’s how they do it here.
Twilley: Where would they buy that water from?
de Lipkau: They’d likely have to buy it from a farmer. There’s an open market for water rights.
Twilley: Any farmer?
de Lipkau: It’s got to be in the same valley. It can be a pretty competitive market. During the heyday, in 2004—and this will shock you—an acre-foot would go for upwards of $25,000. It could go as high, in an extreme case, as $50,000.
Twilley: The farmers were sitting on a goldmine.
Irrigated farmland in Nevada; photo via a realtor who specializes in transactions involving ranch water rights.
de Lipkau: Yes, they were. Now, it’s more like $6,000, maybe even $5,000. It’s gone down by eighty-five to ninety percent. There’s no market because there’s no development. There are still some mining companies that have had to buy farms to transfer the water to their mining operations, but the market has gone way down.
Now, to give you some context, one acre-foot would probably serve two houses annually. I have a water meter, so I know that I use about half an acre-foot a year. Actually, during the winter, the water meter reads about one hundred gallons a day with just my wife and I—and I have no idea where that goes. During the summer, when you’re outdoors watering—and I don’t have a big lawn or anything—you use a heck of a lot more.
The basic premise in Nevada water law is when the State Engineer sees an application, he’s required to deny it if one of three things is true. He has to deny it if there’s no un-appropriated water in the proposed source supplying the water. In this watershed—Truckee Meadows—all the groundwater is already taken, so he will deny it on that ground. That’s why new development relies on transfers. The other ground for denial is based on whether the granting of the application will tend to impair the value of the existing rights. What that means is that you can’t give permission for a well too close to another well. “Too close” is an engineering call by the State Engineer based on hydrology and the cone of depression. When a well pumps water, it creates a cone of depression as the water above it drains to the pump. If you have too many wells too close together, these cones of depression will overlap and the water level will go down.
The third ground for denial is whether the granting of the application would tend to be detrimental to the public interest, which is pretty much undefined. That third reason, in itself, is very, very seldom used as the sole grounds to deny an application—I can think of maybe three examples in this state.
A rain chart of the United States showing areas with more than twenty inches of rain per year (the minimum required for non-irrigated agricultre) in varying shades of grey, and those with less than twenty in white. From John Wesley Powell's 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Via the University of Alabama.
Twilley: Are there any changes you would like to see in Nevada’s water law?
de Lipkau: I’d like to undo some statutes. The legislature sometimes attempts to add to the water law without an understanding of what the effect is. These new statutes look pretty innocuous on their face, but they are a huge detriment to the intended water user. For example, there’s one new statute that says when you have a trans-basin diversion, meaning that you are planning to move water from one basin to the other, if the amount being moved is more than 250 acre-feet, you have to prepare—or pay for the State Engineer to prepare—an inventory of the basin from which the water comes.
It’s kind of a make-work deal. One little tiny town in Nevada got caught up in that statute, and they’re dead in the water. The State Engineer doesn’t have the staff to go out and prepare this study. It’s happened to mining companies, but they have the $100,000 or $250,000 to prepare this inventory that nobody looks at. It’s supposed to be a snapshot in time, but if the snapshot in time is from the first week in June, and the springs are flowing, it bears no relation if you do it during the last week in January.
Twilley: What was the motivation behind that legislation?
de Lipkau: It was political. I sarcastically say sometimes that the legislature wants to make water when water is not there, because their constituents or their corporate supporters are complaining that the State Engineer won’t grant any permits. Special legislation is sometimes made in an attempt to make him have to grant permits. Or, if there’s a project that people want stopped, like the Las Vegas Water Importation Program, then it’s a case of throwing up as many legislative roadblocks as we can.
That’s the kind of stuff I’d like to see eliminated. I’d like to get back to what it was thirty years ago. It would be a lot less political, which would streamline the process and make it easier for the applicant.
Then there’s another statute that I personally don’t care for, which is that’s anybody can file a protest to any application. For example, I can personally file a protest against the next application filed in Elko County, which is three hundred miles away, just because.
Twilley: So any Nevadan can protest any application made in the state?
de Lipkau: No, no—anyone can protest. You can file. It doesn’t make any sense. In my mind, the only reason to protest that application in Elko would be if it’s going to hurt my water right. But it doesn’t have to hurt my water right—I can protest it if I just don’t like it. If I don’t like farming or I don’t like mining or I don’t like development, I can protest, and that will bog up everything for six months or a couple years, and then I can appeal it to the district court, too.
Manaugh: So, in your mind, a protest should only be filed by people who actually have water rights in the same basin?
de Lipkau: Correct. A protest should be filed by someone who has a legitimate standing, to put it in legal terminology.
A detail showing Reno from John Wesley Powell’s 1890 map of the "Arid Region of the United States, showing Drainage Districts,” published in the Eleventh Annual Report of the U.S. Geological Survey. Via the Aqueous Advisor's blog, where a larger PDF version is available.
Manaugh: Given the scarcity of water in the American West in general, and thus the potential for future conflict, we’d love to get your thoughts on John Wesley Powell’s proposal for governing the American West according to drainage basins. Do you think that Powell’s proposal has merit?
de Lipkau: I do. Aligning the boundaries of governance units—say, states—with hydrologic units makes a great deal of sense to facilitate coherent management policies. Having a state line go through the middle of an agricultural area that is irrigated from a single drainage basin is a recipe for dispute.
As an example, take the border between California and Nevada, which was finally decreed by the Supreme Court in 1980 after more than a hundred years of conflict, sometimes physical as well as legal. Much of the ongoing contention over the management of Lake Tahoe and the source of the Truckee River could have been avoided if that boundary had followed the Sierra crest line rather than following the 120th meridian right through the middle of Lake Tahoe, as the territory—then State—of Nevada originally proposed.
So I think Powell’s proposal has a great deal of merit—although it might well have resulted in less work for me.
The congressional acts that created the Nevada Territory in 1861, and then the State of Nevada in 1864, provided for a hydrological western boundary at the Sierra Nevada crest line—if the California state legislature would agree to change its existing boundary from 120 degrees longitude. California declined, leading to a variety of interstate water rights issues that persist to this day. Maps via this Tahoe Nuggets article on the California-Nevada border war, originally published in Professional Surveyor, January 2002.
Twilley: Finally, I’m curious about something I was told at Venue’s launch party, which is that Reno’s Truckee River is the most litigated river in America. Is that true? And, if so, why?
de Lipkau: I’d say the answer is yes. An adjudication is the judicial means of determining the relative rights to all the waters of a stream or river system. The Truckee River Adjudication Suit was first filed by the United States in the teens. It was a federal action because the Truckee is an interstate stream, meaning it starts in California, at Lake Tahoe, and it ends in Nevada, at Pyramid Lake.
I’ll give you the short version. In 1926, an injunction was granted and the parties followed the injunction and were bound by the injunction until 1944, when the final decision or decree was issued by the United States Federal District Court. The decree allocated all of the waters of the Truckee River to the farmers in the Truckee Meadows valley, to the Sierra Pacific Power Company, which supplied Reno and Sparks, and to irrigate the Newlands Project.
That was the country’s first reclamation project, and it came out of a piece of legislation authored by Senator Newlands in 1902, which authorized the construction of Derby Dam on the Truckee. The dam split the waters at that point, with a portion going to irrigate the farmland near Fallon, under the control of the Truckee Carson Irrigation District, and the balance going to Pyramid Lake.
Derby Dam, twenty miles east of Reno on the Truckee River, was the first project of the brand new U.S. Reclamation Service (today’s Bureau of Reclamation), organized under the Reclamation Act of 1902, which committed the Federal Government to construct the hydraulic infrastructure necessary to irrigate the West. Photo via UNR.
In the 1944 decree, which is called the Orr Ditch Decree, the Pyramid Lake tribe was given approximately 30,000 acres’ worth of water. The Pyramid Lake Reservation was set aside by the president in 1859. Therefore, they had the highest priority on the system.
What has happened over the years is that the tribe wants more water. They want the waters of Pyramid Lake maintained as a fishery, and there has been constant litigation since about 1968. It eventually went all the way to the United States Supreme Court in U.S.A. vs. Nevada. In 1983, the Supreme Court said that the Indians were out of luck and that their rights were fully determined in the Orr Ditch Decree—the litigation that was final in 1944. Ever since then, the tribe has been bringing various actions to put more water in Pyramid Lake and lessen the diversion of water by others, mostly the Truckee Carson Irrigation District.
I suppose the end result that the tribe wants is that the diversion of the Derby Dam be shut down, and all the waters of the Truckee River that are not used upstream left to flow into Pyramid Lake for a fishery.
Twilley: When the original adjudication was determined, why wasn’t the fishery allocated an adequate supply?
de Lipkau: Because, at that time, the fishery was not important. In 1902, in the era of the Newlands Act, farming and opening up the west to agriculture was the primary concern of Congress. At that point, more than one hundred years ago, converting sagebrush lands to productive farmlands was considered to be in the public interest.
Now, people argue that it’s not—that farming is not so good and that the water is better used for environmental and fishery purposes. Pyramid Lake is the end or terminus of the Truckee River. It’s a dead lake, in other words, and the salinity is rising because there’s no outlet and there’s no way to freshen it up. So, through evaporation, water escapes into the atmosphere, and the solids—the salts—stay in there.
Timothy O’Sullivan, "Rock Formations, Pyramid Lake, Nevada," 1867. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, The Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection.
Mark Klett, "Rephotographic Survey Project, Pyramid Isle, Pyramid Lake, Nevada (Site #79-33)," 1979/1984–85. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, The Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection.
Twilley: When you go through this adjudication process and determine the relative rights of different users to water, is the law written in such a way as to account for the fact that people’s priorities will shift over time?
de Lipkau: As far as changes in uses and their perceived benefits over time, the Truckee River Decree expressly authorizes changes pursuant to law. The language is there to say that the existing law and the existing water right is always subject to change in conformity to future legal determination, and that is true of any legitimate water legislation in Nevada.
Priority, on the other hand, does not shift. The water law follows the mining law. We all know how priority works in mining from our eighth grade civics classes on the California Gold Rush in the 1840s. We learned then, and I relearned much later, that the first person to stake a claim has priority on that mineral resource.
The first water rights case came out of California in 1855. It had to do with miners diverting water out of small creeks to wash the gold out of the rock in sluice boxes. The California Supreme Court said, with no legal authority, that the way to make it fair and to make it work was priority appropriation. That means that the first person who diverted water from the creek had the first priority. The second person who diverted water from the creek had the second priority, and so on. In times of shortage, the last priority cuts off completely, then the next to last, and so on, till the first appropriator—the earliest priority—gets it all. And priority doesn’t change.
Nevada came along in 1866 and affirmed that decision, and so priority of appropriation is also the basis of Nevada’s water law.
Now, a system in which all the users are forced to cut back by a certain percentage is called correlative rights. But that’s not the case here; with the Truckee, it’s strict priority.
Venue took a long afternoon detour south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to hike the surreal geological formations of the all but unknown Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument—a kind of American Cappadocia of weirdly repeating pinnacles shaped like fairy tale magic hats and glowing white in the constant sunlight.
Similar to the visual pyrotechnics on display at sites such as Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, at times it seems as if the rock pillars are stuttering out of the hillsides, repetitive echoes of themselves and each other. You can almost see the formations marching forward out of the earth, one after the other, to be revealed slowly, over eons of time, for thousands, perhaps millions, of generations to come.
In fact, parts of the National Monument often look, in photographs, as if a processing bug has somehow cloned the slender columns and what we're seeing is not natural earthworks at all but a kind of representational error, a planetary glitch, the surface of the earth time-stretched.
However, it's all just differential weathering: the erosion of incredible stone shapes from the earth, like a mineralogical garden as designed by Max Ernst.
Every few seasons, flash floods roar through and reduce the ground level another few feet; tree roots now grow as if in midair and more and more bewildering rock formations are revealed. The slower, or less immediate, action of snow joins the chorus of forces taking the landscape apart each winter. Where the earth being locally dismantled reaches its most otherworldly extremes, we declare our national parks and monuments.
For all of its geologic complexity, however, Kasha-Katuwe—which means "white cliffs"—is neither large nor particularly strenuous from the point of view of hiking. Still, it feels so much like Turkey's Cappadocia region that it's tempting to propose a geological sister-park program, or some other administrative way of combining, and thus drawing connections between, geologically similar regions in very different parts of the world.
Also like Cappadocia, Kasha-Katuwe has a long history of human habitation. The Monument itself includes several archaeological sites, including the cliff cave—or "cavate"—shown below. Curiously, a typo on the BLM's signage within the park labels it a "caveat," instead, suggesting that the human role in helping to shape this landscape is just a minor and relatively temporary exception.
The cavate, part of a whole regional complex of formerly inhabited caves stretching north from Kasha-Katuwe into Bandelier National Monument and beyond, has the effect of making humans seem vaguely sponge-like: reef-dwellers for whom civilization is more like a perforation in the landscape, a cut, hole, or pore excavated from the earth and made habitable as "architecture."
For their part, the Bureau of Land Management describes Kasha-Katuwe as a "remarkable outdoor laboratory, offering an opportunity to observe, study, and experience the geologic processes that shape natural landscapes."
In this case, the BLM explains, what we see now is the after-effect of widespread volcanic eruptions that occurred as long as 7 million years ago, "leaving pumice, ash and tuff deposits over 1,000 feet thick." The tent-rocks formations—also known as hoodoos, fairy chimneys, and even, in French, demoiselles coiffées, or ladies with hairdos—were then sculpted by a process of erosion, described by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources as follows:
Water and, to a lesser extent, wind erosion preferentially attacks the sand and ash grains around the base of large blocks in the gravel-rich beds. Eventually, the gravel clasts rest on pedestals, thus protecting the underlying sand and ash from further erosion. As time passes, the capstones are gradually undermined and the rocks topple, leaving an unprotected cone.
Put another way, as one ancient landscape, violently laminated atop an even older surface now lost somewhere far below it, begins to be erased, parts of it hang on, temporarily protected by the shelter of yet another more recent and resilient surface above. Slicing—or, in architectural terms, cutting sections—through these multiply intertwined surfaces are now slot canyons and trails.
The Monument's geological revenants form oddly stacked and twisting forms, strangely melancholic remnants doomed to disappear as many more millions of years of wind, rain, and snow scrub the ground of these temporary mountain ranges, preparing for future terrains to come.
The whole National Monument brings to mind an image of geological sculpture described by author China Miéville in his novel Iron Council.
There, Miéville describes something called "slow sculpture," a planetary artform in which outsized blocks of sandstone are "carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths."
Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, with its winding canyons and time-echoed rock formations, makes a compelling day trip for anyone interested in hiking the earth's own version of slow sculpture, an ever-changing procession of tented pillars, canyons, caves, and labyrinths, scooped in rippling contours out of the soft, white rock.
On a visit delayed by a long stretch of rain the day before, Venue drove east from downtown Los Angeles to visit the Puente Hills landfill—the nation's largest active municipal dump—near the city of Whittier.
An astonishing and monumental act of landform construction, Puente Hills is scheduled to close in October 2013, to be replaced by the much larger and geographically far more remote Mesquite Regional Landfill, two-hundred miles southeast in the Imperial Valley.
As we approached the site, the scale of the landfill became more clear, and the rhythm of its expansion was also evident in the traffic all around us, as dump trucks bumped and rumbled down the highway off-ramp, all on their way to add mass to the trash mountain looming on the right side of the freeway, blocking the sun.
At the entrance to the dump sits the unassuming two-story headquarters of the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. Basil Hewitt, a public information officer, met us there to escort us up the mountain in his minivan.
Over the next few hours, Hewitt patiently answered our many questions about the site's history, its design, and its impending closure, while good-humoredly tolerating our recurring expressions of awe at just how unearthly a place Puente Hills can be.
The landfill opened in 1957, and was taken over by the Sanitation Districts in 1970. It sits on a 1,365-acre site, half of which is devoted to a buffer zone and wildlife preserve, leaving an area roughly the size of New York City's Central Park to receive one third of Los Angeles County's trash.
Over the past three decades, Hewitt told us, Puente Hills has received nearly 130 million tons of garbage. As Edward Hume writes in his excellent book, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, this is a hard quantity to visualize. He offers the following analogies to convey its truly monumental scale:
Here's one way to picture it: If Puente Hills were an elephant burial ground, its tonnage would represent about 15 million deceased pachyderms—equivalent to every living elephant on earth, times twenty. If it were an automobile burial ground, it could hold every car produced in America for the past fifteen years.
What began as a small municipal dump, filling in a canyon on the edge of the San Gabriel Valley (acting literally as "landfill") has turned, over four decades, into a mountain-building exercise.
Hewitt told us that Puente Hills now rises to the height of a forty-story building, meaning, as Hume notes, that if the landfill was a high-rise, "it would be among the twenty tallest skyscrapers in Los Angeles, beating out the MGM Tower, Fox Plaza, and Los Angeles City Hall."
For quite some time, the garbage mountain of Puente Hills has been rising above its surrounding terrain, resembling nothing more than a huge and eerily modern version of an ancient tell—those giant mounds in the Middle Eastern deserts that mark where once-might cities rose and fell, and that now lie bured and broken beneath the sands.
We headed upward in the minivan, stopping to learn how the weigh station worked. Pulled over, we watched as trucks rolled up, paused on the gigantic scale (Puente Hills currently charges $38 a ton), then coughed and belched their way further up the hillside.
As he started the minivan back up, Hewitt made the fascinating observation that just a few years ago, this line of trucks would have been significantly longer, backed up sometimes all the way to freeway off-ramp. Toward the end of 2007, all of a sudden, Hewitt told us, "Puente Hills was like a ghost town. People who had worked here for forty years had never seen anything like it."
From a peak of 1,900 trucks per day in summer 2007, thirty or forty of which would be loaded with construction debris, Puente Hills' traffic decreased to only 400 trucks a day by the end of the year. "When it first happened, we didn’t know what the heck was going on," Hewitt explained. "We're not economists, but, in retrospect, we figured out something was up in December 2007, and all those banks didn't start to fail until fall 2008."
Had the Puente Hills landfill called it back in 2007, when the U.S. was on the verge of the Great Recession, perhaps we'd all be singing the praises of garbology as economic indicator.
From the weigh station onwards, the road bed sits on trash: "You can tell," Hewitt explained, "because trash is not homogenous, so you'll get differential settling, and the road will give you a little of a roller coaster at Disneyland-type ride."
If the bumpy ride was exciting, things at the active dumping site were more chaotic still. Because of the rain the day before, the working surface had become slippery and operations were confined to a "winter day" footprint—a smaller-than-usual area, given grip with a layer of crushed asphalt.
Hewitt, otherwise an extremely low-key and calm presence, became quite agitated as we tried to maneuver between dump trucks, compacting machines, and piles of shredded green waste. "This is not good!" was his repeated refrain, as heavy equipment backed up toward us without warning.
His alarm was justified: in Garbology, Hume notes that eight landfill workers nationwide died in 2010, and that the risk of "drop-off"—the chance that some of the twenty to thirty feet of uncompacted trash that builds up each day could start to slide, tipping them off the edge of the mountain altogether—is omnipresent.
On a normal day, Hewitt told us, the active dumping site at the top of Puente Hills is usually about an acre in area, and twenty feet deep. It's called a cell—not, as Edward Hume writes, "in the prison-block sense, but more akin to the tiny biological unit, many thousands of which are needed to create a single, whole organism." In other words, the garbage pile that the bulldozers and graders push, compact, and sculpt each day, is a landfill building block—a brick in the pyramid of trash that is Puente Hills.
The resulting "fill plan," designed by the Sanitation Districts's waste engineers and staked out afresh each day, informs the particular topography that the heavy machinery massaging the trash are trying to achieve. Down to its cell slopes and road patterns, the landfill is an entirely managed and manufactured terrain, a shape calculated in advance and then sculpted, incrementally, with every shift of every machine.
Hewitt's description of a mountain-building logic formed of "cells" could not help but remind us of historians Martin Bressani and Robert Jan van Pelt's discussion of 19th-century architect Eugène Viollet le Duc—designer of, among other things, the plinth or artificial hill upon which the Statue of Liberty now stands.
Sketch of Mont Blanc by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc; for more on Viollet-le-Duc's mountain-building analyses, from the perspective of a geologist, see Michael Welland's blog Through the Sandglass.
Viollet Le Duc, as Bressani and Jan van Pelt explain, was inspired by the "structural network" of Mont Blanc to develop an architecture based upon crystal forms, employing "lifelong observations into mountain formation" as his chosen method of research.
His sketches are often extraordinary, analyzing mountain peaks, slopes, and even glaciers for their formal, geometric qualities, looking for what he called "the great crystalline system" underlying it all.
Bressani and Jan van Pelt's description of Viollet Le Duc's opening chapter, which analyzes the geological processes behind the creation of Mont Blanc in architectural terms, is worth quoting at length:
An expanded mass of soft granite (protogine) below the earth’s thick surface erupted through the crystalline crust above, producing a domical rock formation sprouting out of a buttonhole-shape slit. As it slowly cooled and crystallized, this gigantic mass of granite progressively shrank and retreated. According to Viollet-le-Duc, the subtraction process followed a very precise rhombohedral prismatic pattern consistent throughout the whole. Mont Blanc thus acts as one huge crystal formation—every edge, every peak and aiguille follows a geodesic structure. The pattern creates a network of cells, a type of formation that Viollet-le-Duc found also at the micro level in glacial formation. This hexagonal configuration, based upon the equilateral triangle, proved the most fundamental and consistent principle of organization within Viollet-le-Duc’s late writings and architecture.
It would seem that a similarly analytic study of the mountain-building logic behind Puente Hills could be done here in greater Los Angeles, treating this astonishingly massive artificial landform as its Mont Blanc: held in place and given shape by methane pipes, geotextiles, concrete roads, and carefully choreographed "cells" of daily growth, and, in every sense, a work of architecture.
Puente Hills' daily construction cycle ends at 5 p.m.—or whenever the daily intake limit of 13,000 tons has been reached, which, before the recession, would happen as early as 1 p.m.—at which point, its machine operators use laser-guided markers to level the top of the mound, and then cover it with a twelve-inch layer of clean dirt and green waste.
That daily blanket, explains Hewitt, stops "vectors" from scavenging—primary rats, but also flies and coyotes—and is what makes Puente Hills a sanitary landfill.
In addition to the active cell, its traffic jam of heavy machinery and dump trucks, and a pile of green waste and clean dirt for the sanitary layer, Hewitt told us of the twin banes of landfill construction: siloxanes, a chemical found in many hair gels, mousses, and conditioners, which pits the equipment, and, surprisingly, tires:
We collect tires, and we have to shred them before we bury them, because we found out if we bury them without shredding them they kind of float up and burst through our cover and our liners.
We step out of the minivan for a moment, making Hewitt even more uneasy, and are immediately struck by the site's lack of stink. It smells like trash, of course, but it's really only as bad as the early-stage rot of a full domestic garbage bag. "In January," Hewitt tells us, "it actually smells really quite nice, because of all the mulched-up Christmas trees."
Nonetheless, Puente Hills is now a sufficiently large landform to generate its own microclimate and wind patterns—with the effect that several gigantic fans and berms dot the edges of the plateau, to keep wind from blowing over residential areas of Whittier.
Meanwhile, what look like large fishing rods stuck into the ground are actually bird deterrents. "In the old days," says Hewitt, "they would just shoot a sea gull in the morning—this was back in the 1960s or 70s. They’d wing a seagull, leave it out, and it would squawk and warn the other seagulls away. You don’t do that anymore."
Instead, the thin monofilament lines hung from the rods disrupt the birds' landing glide. They are often sufficient control on their own, but, Hewitt explained, "When the weather’s bad out at the ocean, that's when all the gulls come inland looking for food." Plan B starts with noisemakers, and ends with what someone flying a remote control airplane to buzz the birds, which Hewitt described as "the coolest job."
The rats are apparently even less difficult to control: Hewitt told us that the District's solid waste research group had "done a study, way back, which found that when they compact the trash they kill about fifty percent of the rats. Then, by covering it, the other fifty percent die from lack of oxygen. They can't survive the landfill process."
After one too many close calls for Hewitt's comfort, we retreated, retracing our steps before taking a side road round to an overlook in the buffer zone.
Standing next to a water trough (the park half of Puente Hills is criss-crossed with equestrian trails), we looked first west over Rose Hills Cemetery, the landfill's immediate neighbor, to the skyscrapers of downtown LA, and then back east to the brown plateau of the active dumping site, and the lush green of the terraced mountain, its contours defined by a spiderweb of white plastic tubes.
Decomposing garbage oozes toxic "leachate" and releases a steady flow of "landfill gas," which is a mix of methane, carbon dioxide, and other trace gases. As a result, both the interior and exterior of Puente Hills are filigreed with a network of plastic pipes—trash plumbing, to divert the leachate from groundwater and collect the landfill gas to prevent explosions and generate electricity.
Hewitt proudly points out the Puente Hills Energy Recovery from Gas facility, or PERG, which generates more than forty megawatts of electricity per day from more than 30,000 cubic feet per minute of landfill gas.
In Garbology, Hume describes Puente Hill's pioneering role in transforming landfill gas to energy:
Back in the eighties, the Puente Hills engineers decided to break with landfill tradition and stop merely "flaring" the gas—the practice of burning it inside a giant torch to keep the raw methane from entering the atmosphere, where it becomes a potent greenhouse gas—and instead put it to use for power generation. They soon ran into the same problem others had encountered when trying to mine energy from landfill gas: Over time, as the trash in the landfill decomposed and settled under its own weight, the pipes would crack, crush, and break. The ingenious, low-tech solution—adopted first at Puente Hills, now employed all over the world—was to use plastic pipes of varying diameters and fit them together loosely, with plenty of overlap, like arms in a sleeve. As the trash mound settles, the pipe sections can move up and down at different rates and angles without damage, yet stay connected.
This gas will continue to flow for another fifteen to twenty years after the last piece of trash is accepted in October this year, which brought us to our final question for Hewitt: What happens when Puente Hills closes its doors for good?
"There's no closing party or celebration plan," Hewitt told us. "No, we’re just trying to save money. We’re going to be in rough waters, because when this landfill closes, we’re going to lose a huge revenue stream."
Nonetheless, work will continue at the site for the foreseeable future. In addition to the power plant, Puente Hills will become the intermodal transit site for the new "Waste-to-Rail" system that will funnel the County's trash out to the new Mesquite landfill — which has sufficient capacity to accept 20,000 tons of trash per day for one hundred years. Meanwhile, the closed landfill will still need to be monitored for leachate contamination or methane drift—a precaution that will have to continue for at least fifty years, according to Hewitt—and, of course, there is the landscaping work to transition this canyon turned garbage mountain into its next reincarnation, as a county park.
Hewitt grimly predicts that most people in Los Angeles County won't know Puente Hills landfill was ever there until it's gone—when the region's private landfill operators take advantage of the gap between its closure and Mesquite coming online to raise their rates.
And with that, we got back in the minivan, slowly winding our bumpy way down from the heights of terrestrial artificiality, back to the sculpted highways of greater Los Angeles, heading west into the city again.
When European farmers arrived in North America, they claimed it with fences. Fences were the physical manifestation of a belief in private ownership and the proper use of land—enclosed, utilized, defended—that continues to shape the American way of life, its economic aspirations, and even its form of government.
Today, fences are the framework through the national landscape is seen, understood, and managed, forming a vast, distributed, and often unquestioned network of wire that somehow defines the "land of the free" while also restricting movement within it.
In the 1870s, the U.S. faced a fence crisis. As settlers ventured away from the coast and into the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, limited supplies of cheap wood meant that split-rail fencing cost more than the land it enclosed. The timely invention of barbed wire in 1874 allowed homesteaders to settle the prairie, transforming its grassland ecology as dramatically as the industrial quantities of corn and cattle being produced and harvested within its newly enclosed pastures redefined the American diet.
In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Venue met with Dean M. Anderson, a USDA scientist whose research into virtual fencing promises equally radical transformation—this time by removing the mile upon mile of barbed wire stretched across the landscape. As seems to be the case in fencing, a relatively straightforward technological innovation—GPS-equipped free-range cows that can be nudged back within virtual bounds by ear-mounted stimulus-delivery devices—has implications that could profoundly reshape our relationships with domesticated animals, each other, and the landscape.
In fact, after our hour-long conversation, it became clear to Venue that Anderson, a quietly-spoken federal research scientist who admits to taping a paper list of telephone numbers on the back of his decidedly unsmart phone, keeps exciting if unlikely company with the vanguard of the New Aesthetic, writer and artist James Bridle's term for an emerging way of perceiving (and, in this case, apportioning) digital information under the influence of the various media technologies—satellite imagery, RFID tags, algorithmic glitches, and so on—through which we now filter the world.
The Google Maps rainbow plane, an iconic image of the New Aesthetic for the way in which it accidentally captures the hyperspectral oddness of new representational technologies and image-compression algorithms on a product intended for human eyes.
After all, Anderson's directional virtual fencing is nothing less than augmented reality for cattle, a bovine New Aesthetic: the creation of a new layer of perceptual information that can redirect the movement of livestock across remote landscapes in real-time response to lines humans can no longer see. If gathering cows on horseback gave rise to the cowboy narratives of the West, we might ask in this context, what new mythologies might Anderson's satellite-enabled, autonomous gather give rise to?
Our discussion ranged from robotic rats and sheep laterality to the advantages of GPS imprecision and the possibility of high-tech herds bred to suit the topography of particular property. The edited transcript appears below.
• • •
Nicola Twilley: I thought I'd start with a really basic question, which is why you would want to make a virtual fence rather than a physical one. After all, isn’t the role of fencing to make an intangible, human-determined boundary into a tangible one, with real, physical effects?
Dean M. Anderson: Let me put it this way, in really practical terms: When it comes to managing animals, every conventional fence that I have ever built has been in the wrong place the next year.
That said, I always kid people when I give a talk. I say, “Don't go out and sell your U.S. Steel stock—because we are still going to need conventional fencing along airport runways, interstates, railroad right-of-ways, and so on.” The reason why is because, when you talk about virtual fencing, you're talking about modifying animal behavior.
Then I always ask this question of the audience: “Is there anybody who will raise their hand, who is one hundred percent predictable, one hundred percent of the time?”
The thing about animal behavior is that it’s not one hundred percent predictable, one hundred percent of the time. We don’t know all of the integrated factors that go into making you turn left, when you leave the building, rather than right and so on. Once you realize that virtual fencing is capitalizing on modifying animal behavior, then you also realize that if there are any boundaries that, for safety or health reasons, absolutely cannot be breached, then virtual fencing is not the methodology of choice.
I always start with that disclaimer. Now, to get back to your question about why you’d want to make a virtual fence: On a worldwide basis, animal distribution remains a challenge, whether it’s elephants in Africa or Hereford cows in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
You will have seen this, although you may not have recognized exactly what you were looking at. For example, if you fly into Albuquerque or El Paso airports, you will come in quite low over rangeland. If you see a drinking water location, you will see that the area around that watering point looks as brown and devoid of vegetation as the top of this table, whereas, out at the far distance from the drinking water, there may be plants that have never seen a set of teeth, a jaw, or any utilization at all.
So you have the problem of non-uniform utilization of the landscape, with some places that are over utilized and other places that are underutilized. The over utilized locations with exposed soil are then vulnerable to erosion from wind and water, which then lead to all sorts of other challenges for those of us who want to be ecologically correct in our thinking and management actions.
Even as a college student, animal distribution was something that I was taught was challenging and that we didn't have an answer to. In fact, I recently wrote a review article that showed that, just in the last few years, we have used more than sixty-eight different strategies to try to affect distribution. These include putting a fence in, developing drinking water in a new location, putting supplemental feed in different locations, changing the times you put out feed, putting in artificial shade, so that animals would move to that location—there are a host of things that we have tried. And they all work under certain conditions. Some of them work even better when they’re used synergistically. There are a lot of combinations—whatever n factorial is for sixty-eight.
But one thing that all of them basically don’t allow is management in real time. This is a challenge. Think of this landscape—the Chihuahuan desert, which, by the way, is the largest desert in North America. If you’ve been here during our monsoon, when we (sometimes) receive our mean annual nine-inches plus of precipitation, you’ll see that where Nicola is sitting, she can be soaking wet, while Geoff and I, just a few feet away, stay bone dry. Precipitation patterns in this environment can be like a knife cut.
Students learning rangeland analysis at the Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center; photograph by J. Victor Espinoza for NMSU Agricultural Communications.
You can see that, with conventional fencing, you might have your cows way over on the western perimeter of your land, while the rainfall takes place along the other edge. In two weeks, where that rain has fallen, we are going to have a flush of annuals coming up, which would provide high-quality nutrition. But, if you have the animals clear over three pastures away, then you’ve got to monitor the rainfall-related growth, and you’ve got to get labor to help round those animals up and move them over to this new location.
You can see how, many times as a manager, you might actually know what to do to optimize your utilization, but economics and time prevent it from happening. Which means your cows are all in the wrong place. It’s a lose-lose, rather than a win-win.
One of Dean Anderson's colleagues, Derek Bailey, herds cattle the old-fashioned way on NMSU's Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center. One aspect of Bailey's research is testing whether targeted grazing, made possible through Anderson's GPS collar technology, could reduce the incidence of catastrophic western wildfires. Photograph courtesy NMSU.
These annual plants will reach their peak of nutritional quality and decline without being utilized for feed. I’m not saying that seed production is not important, but basically, if part of this landscape’s call is to support animals, then you are not optimizing what you have available.
My concept of virtual fencing was basically to have that perimeter fence around your property be conventional, whether it’s barbed wire, stone, wood, or whatever. But, internally, you don't have fences. You basically program “electronic” polygons, if you will, based upon the current year’s pattern of rainfall, pattern of poisonous weed growth, pattern of endangered species growth, and whatever other variables will affect your current year’s management decisions. Then you can use the virtual polygon to either include or exclude animals from areas on the landscape that you want to manage with scalpel-like precision.
To go back to my first example, you could be driving your property in your air-conditioned truck and you notice a spot that received rain in the recent past and that has a flush of highly nutritious plants that would otherwise be lost. Well, you can get on your laptop, right then and there, and program the polygon that contains your cows to move spatially and temporally over the landscape to this “better location.” Instead of having to build a fence or take the time and manpower to gather your cows, you would simply move the virtual fence.
This video clip shows two cows (the red and green dots) in a virtual paddock that was programmed to move across the landscape at 1.1 m/hr, using Dean Anderson's directional virtual fencing technology.
It’s like those join-the-dots coloring books—you end up with a bunch of coordinates that you connect to build a fence. And you can move the polygon that the animals are in over in that far corner of the pasture. You simply migrate it over, amoeba-like, to fit in this new area.
You basically have real-time management, which is something that is not currently possible in livestock grazing, even with all of the technologies that we have. If you take that concept of being able to manage in real time and you tie it with those sixty-eight other things that have been found useful, you can start to see the benefit that is potentially possible.
Twilley: The other thing that I thought was curious, which I picked up on from your publications, is this idea that perhaps you might not be out on the land in your air-conditioned pickup, and instead you might actually be doing this through remote sensing. Is that possible?
Dean Anderson's NMSU colleague, remote sensing scientist Andrea Laliberte, accompanied by ARS technicians Amy Slaughter and Connie Maxwell, prepare to launch an unmanned aerial vehicle from a catapult at the Jornada Experimental Range. Photograph USDA/ARS.
Anderson: Definitely. Currently we have a very active program here on the Jornada Experimental Range in landscape ecology using unmanned aerial vehicle reconnaissance. I see this research as fitting hand-in-glove with virtual fencing. However—and this is very important—all of these whiz-bang technologies are potentially great, but in the hands of somebody who is basically lazy, which is all human beings, or even in the hands of somebody who just does not understand the plant-animal interface, they could create huge problems.
If you don’t have people out on the landscape who know the difference between overstocking and under-stocking, then I will want to change my last name in the latter years of my life, because I don't want to be associated with the train wreck—I mean a major train wreck—that could happen through using this technology. If you can be sitting in your office in Washington D.C. and you program cows to move on your ranch in Montana, and you don't have anybody out on the ground in Montana monitoring what is taking place …. [shakes head] You could literally destroy rangeland.
We know that electronics are not infallible. We also know that satellite imagery needs to be backed up by somebody on the ground who can say, “Wow, we've got a problem here, because what the electronic data are saying does not match what I’m seeing.”
This is the thing that scares me the most about this methodology. If people decouple the best computer that we have at this point, which is our brain, with sufficient experience, from knowing how to optimize this wonderful tool, then we will have a potential for disaster that will be horrid.
NMSU and USDA ARS scientists prepare to launch their vegetation surveying UAV from a catapult. Photograph USDA/ARS.
Twilley: One of the things I was imagining as I looked at your work was that, as we become an increasingly urban society, maybe farmers could still manage rural land remotely, from their new homes in the city.
Anderson: They can, but only if they also have someone on the ground who has the knowledge and experience to ground-truth the data—to look at it and say, “The data saying that this number of cows should be in this polygon for this many days are accurate”—or not.
You need that flexibility, and you always need to ground-truth. The only way you can get optimum results, in my opinion, is to have someone who is trained in the basics of range science and animal science, to know when the numbers are good and when the numbers are lousy. Electronics simply provide numbers.
Multispectral rangeland vegetation imagery produced by Andrea Laliberte's UAV surveys. Image from "Multispectral Remote Sensing from Unmanned Aircraft," by Andrea S. Laliberte, Mark A. Goforth, Caitriana M. Steele, and Albert Rango, 2011.
Now, you’re right, we are getting smarter at developing technology that can interpret those numbers. I work with colleagues in virtual fencing research who are basically trying to model what an animal does, so that they can actually predict where the animal is going to move before the animal actually moves. In my opinion if they ever figure that out, it’s going to be way past my lifetime.
Still, if you look at range science, it’s an art as well as science. I think it’s great that we have these technologies and I think we should use them. But we shouldn’t put our brain in a box on a table and say, “OK. We no longer need that.” Human judgment and expertise on the ground is still essential to making a methodology like this be a positive, rather than a negative, for landscape ecology.
Drawings from Anderson's patent #7753007 for an "Ear-a-round equipment platform for animals."
Manaugh: I'm curious about the bovine interface. How do you interface with the cow in order to stimulate the behavior that you want?
Anderson: I think that basically my whole career has been focused on trying to adopt innate animal behaviors to accomplish management goals in the most efficient and effective ways possible.
Here’s what I mean by that. I can guarantee that, if a sound that is unknown and unpleasant to the three of us happens over on that side of the room, we’re not going to go toward it. We’re going to get through that door on the other side as quickly as possible.
What I’m doing is taking something that’s innate across the animal world. If you stimulate an animal with something unknown, then, at least initially, it’s going to move away from it. If the event is also accompanied by an unpleasant ending experience and the sequence of events leading up to the unpleasant event are repeatable and predictable, after a few sequential experiences of these events, animals will try and avoid the ending event—if they’re given the opportunity. This is the principle that has allowed the USDA to receive a patent on this methodology.
The thing, first of all, about our technique is that it’s not a one size fits all. In other words, there are animals that you could basically look at cross-eyed and they’ll move, and then there are animals like me, where you’ve got to get a 2x6 and hit them up across the head to get their attention before anything happens.
When these kinds of systems have been built for dog training or dog containment in the past, they simply had a shock, or sometimes a sound first and then a shock. The stimulus wasn’t graded according to proximity or the animal’s personality.
Dean Anderson draws the route of a wandering cow approaching a virtual fence in order to show Venue how his DVF™ system works.
[stands up and draws on whiteboard] Let’s say that this is the polygon that we want the animal to stay in. If we are going to build a conventional fence, we would put a barbed wire fence or some enclosure around that polygon. In our system, we build a virtual belt, which in the diagrams is shaded from blue to red. The blue is a very innocuous sound, almost like a whisper. Moving closer to the edge of the polygon, into the red zone, I ramp that whisper up to the sound of a 747 at full throttle takeoff. I can have the sound all the way from very benign up to pretty irritating. At the top end, it’s as if a fire alarm went off in here—we’re going to get out, because it sounds terrible.
This video clip captures the first-time response of a cow instrumented with Dean Anderson's directional virtual fencing electronics when encountering a static virtual fence, established using GPS technology.
I’ve based the sounds and stimuli that I’ve used on what we know about cow hearing. Cows and humans are similar, but not identical. These cues were developed to fit the animal that we are trying to manage.
Now, if we go back to me as the example, I’m very stubborn. I need a little higher level of irritation to change my behavior. We chose to use electric stimulation.
I used myself as the test subject to develop the scale we’re using on this. My electronics guys were too smart. They wouldn't touch the electrodes. I’m just a dumb biologist, so…
Diagram showing how directional virtual fencing operates. The black-and-white dashed line (8) shows where a conventional fence would be placed. A magnetometer in the device worn on the cow’s head determines the animal’s angle of approach. A GPS system in the device detects when the animal wanders into the 200m-wide virtual boundary band. Algorithms then combine that data to determine which side of the animal's to cue, and at what intensity. From Dean M. Anderson's 2007 paper, "Virtual Fencing: Past, Present, and Future" (PDF).
If I’m the animal and I’m getting closer and closer to the edge of the polygon, then the electrodes that are in the device will send an electrical stimulation. In terms of what those stimulations felt like to me, the first level is about like hitting the crazy bone in your elbow. The next one is like scooting across this floor in your socks and touching a doorknob—that kind of static shock. The final one is like taking and stopping your gas-powered lawnmower by grabbing the spark plug barehanded.
What we did was cannibalize a Hot-Shot that some people buy and use to move animals down chutes. I touched the Hot-Shot output and I could still feel it in my fingertips the next morning, so we cut it right down for our version
As the cow moves toward the virtual fence perimeter, it goes from a very benign to a fairly irritating set of sensory cues, and if they’re all on at their highest intensity , it’s very irritating. It’s the 747s combined with the spark plug. Now, back from your eighth-grade geometry, you know that you have an acute angle and you have an obtuse angle. As the cow approaches a virtual fence boundary, we send the cues on the acute side, to direct her away from the boundary as quickly and with as little amount of irritation as possible. If we tried to move the cow by cuing the obtuse side, she would have had to move deeper into the irritation gradient before being able to exit it.
We don’t want to overstress the animal. So we end up, either in distance or time or both, having a point at which, if this animal decides it really wants what’s over here, it’s not going to be irritated to the point of going nuts. We have built-in, failsafe ways that, if the animal doesn’t respond appropriately, we are not going to do anything that would cause negative animal welfare issues.
Heart rate profile (beats per minute) of an 8-year-old free-ranging cross-bred beef cow before, during, and after an audio plus electric stimulation cue from a directional virtual fencing device. The cue was delivered at 0653 h. The second spike was not due to DVF cues; the cow was observed standing near drinking water during this time. From Dean M. Anderson's 2007 paper, "Virtual Fencing: Past, Present, and Future" (PDF).
The key is, if you can do the job with a tack hammer, don’t get a sledgehammer. This is part of animal welfare, which is absolutely the overarching umbrella under which directional virtual fencing was developed. There’s no need to stimulate an animal beyond what it needs. I can tell you that when I put heart rate monitors on cows wearing my DVF™ devices. I actually found more of a spike in their heart rates when a flock of birds flew over than when I applied the sound.
Now, there are going to be some animals that you either get your rifle and then put the product in your freezer, or you go put the animal back into a four-strand barbed wire fenced pasture. Not every animal on the face of the earth today would be controllable with virtual fencing. You could gradually increase the number of animals that do adapt well to being managed using virtual fencing in your herd through culling.
But the vast majority of animals will react to these irritations, at some level. They can choose at which point they react, all the way from the whisper to the lawnmower.
Diagram showing two cows responding differently to the virtual boundary: Cow 4132 (in green) penetrates the boundary zone more deeply, tolerating a greater degree of irritation before turning around. From Dean M. Anderson's 2007 paper, "Virtual Fencing: Past, Present, and Future" (PDF).
Here is the other thing: We all learn. Whatever we do to animals, we are teaching them something. It’s our choice as to what we want them to learn.
Of course, I don’t have data from a huge population that I can talk about. But, of the animals with whom I have worked—and the literature would support what I’m going to say—cows are, in fact smarter than human beings in a number of ways. If I give you the story of the first virtual fencing device that I built, I think you’ll see why I say that.
What our team did initially was cannibalize a kids’ remote control car to send a signal to the device worn by the animal. I had a Hereford/Angus cross cow, and she was a smart old girl. I started to cue her. I was close to her and she responded to the cues exactly the way I wanted her to. But she figured out, in less than five tries, that, if she kept twenty-five feet between me and her, I could press a button, and nothing would happen. I tried to follow her all over the field. She just kept that distance ahead of me for the rest of the trial—always more than twenty-five feet!
So that’s the reason why we are using GPS satellites to define the perimeter of the polygon. You can’t get away from that line.
A cow being fitted with an early prototype of Dean Anderson's Ear-A-Round DVF device. Photograph via USDA Jornada Experimental Range, AP.
What sets DVF™ apart from other virtual fencing approaches is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all. The cues are ramped, and the irritating cues are bilaterally applied, so we can make it directional, to steer the animals—no pun intended—over the landscape.
What’s interesting is that if you have the capacity to build a polygon, you can encompass a soil type, a vegetation situation, a poisonous plant, or whatever, much better than you can if you have to build a conventional fence. In building conventional fences, you have to have stretch posts every time you change the fence’s direction. That increases both materials and labor costs in construction, which is why you see many more rectangular paddocks than multi-sided polygons. Right now, you can assume that, on flat country, about fifty percent of the cost in a conventional fence is labor, and the other fifty percent is material. Stretching barbed wire around a corner, shown in this engraving from A Treatise Upon Wire: Its Manufacture and Uses, Embracing Comprehensive Descriptions of the Constructions and Applications of Wire Ropes, J. Bucknall Smith, 1891.
Twilley: Which raises another question: Is virtual fencing cost-effective?
Anderson: It depends. I’ll give you an example to show what I mean. The US Forest Service over in Globe, Arizona, is interested in possibly using virtual fencing. Some of the mining companies over there have leases that say that before they extract the ore, and even after, the surface may be leased to people with livestock.
That country over there is pretty much like a bunch of Ws put together. In March 2012, for two-and-a-half miles of four-strand barbed wire, using T posts, they were given a quote of $63,000.
That's why they called me. [laughs]
Now, if that was next to a road, even if it cost $163,000 for those two-and-a half miles of fence, it would be essential, in my opinion, that they not think about virtual fencing—not in this day and time.
In twenty years from now—somewhere in this century, at least—after the ethical and moral issues have been worked out, instead of stimulating animals with external audio sound or electrical stimulation, I think we will actually be stimulating internally at the neuronal level. At that point, virtual fencing may approach one hundred percent effective control.
The DARPA "Robo Rat," whose movements could be directly controlled by three electrodes inserted into its brain; photograph via.
It's been done with rodents. The idea was that these animals could be equipped with a camera or other sensors and sent into earthquake areas or fires or where there were environmental issues that humans really shouldn’t be exposed to. Of course, even if it can be done scientifically, there are still issues in terms of animal welfare. What if there is a radiation leak? Do you send rodents into it? You can see the moral and ethical issues that need to be worked out.
Twilley: If that ever becomes a real-world application, will you sell your shares in U.S. Steel?
Anderson: [laughs] I have a feeling that we never will have a landscape devoid of visible boundaries. If nothing else, I want a barbed wire fence between Ted Turner’s ranch and our experimental ranch up the road here. With a visible boundary, there’s no question—this side is mine and that side is yours.
Fencing photograph via InformedFarmers.com. Incidentally, Ted Turner's Vermejo ranch in New Mexico and southern Colorado is said to be the largest privately-owned, contiguous tract of land in the United States.
Twilley: Aha—so it’s the human animals that will still need a physical fence.
Anderson: I think so. Otherwise you’re looking at the landscape and there’s absolutely nothing out there—whether it be to define ownership or use or even health or safety hazards.
Manaugh: Do you think this kind of virtual fencing would have any impact on real estate practices? For example, I could imagine multiple ranchers marbling their usage of a larger, shared plot of land with this ability to track and contain their herds so precisely. Could virtual fencing thus change the way land is controlled, owned, or leased amongst different groups of people?
Anderson: If you were to go down here to the Boot Heel area of New Mexico you could find exactly that: individual ranchers are pooling areas to form a grass bank for their common use.
Anything that I can do in my profession to encourage flexibility, I figure I’m doing the correct thing. That’s where this all came from. It never made sense to me that we use static tools to manage dynamic resources. You learn from day one in all of your ecology classes and animal science classes that you are dealing with multiple dynamic systems that you are trying to optimize in relationship to each other. It was a mental disconnect for me, as an undergraduate as well as a graduate student, to understand how you could effectively manage dynamic resources with a static fence.
Now, there are some interesting additional things you learn with this system. For example, believe it or not, animals have laterality. You probably didn’t see the article that I published last year on sheep laterality. [laughter]
USDA ARS scientists testing cattle laterality in a T-Maze. Photograph by Scott Bauer for the USDA ARS.
Twilley and Manaugh: No.
Anderson: Our white-faced sheep, which have Rambouillet and Polypay genetics, were basically right-handed. You’ll want to take a look at the data, of course, but, basically, animals are no different than you and I. There are animals that have a preference to turn right and others that have a preference to turn left.
Now, I didn’t do this study to waste government money. Think about it in terms of what I have told you about applying the cues bilaterally. If I know that my tendency is right-handed, then in order to get me to go left, I may need a higher level of stimulation on my right side than I would if you were trying to get me to go right by applying a stimulus on my left side, because it’s against my natural instincts.
With the computer technology we have today, everything we do can be stored in memory, so you can learn about each animal, and modify your stimulus accordingly. There is no reason at all that we cannot design the algorithms and gather data that, over time, will make the whole process optimized for each animal, as well as for the herd and the landscape.
Cow equipped with a collar-mounted GPS device; photography by Dave Ganskoop for the USDA ARS.
Twilley: Going back to something you said earlier about animal memory—and this may be too speculative a question to answer—I’m curious as to how dynamic virtual fencing affects how cows perceive the landscape.
Anderson: The question would be whether, if the virtual fence is on or near a particular rock, or a telephone pole, or a stream, and they have had electrical stimulation there before, do they associate that rock or whatever with a limit boundary? In other words, do they correlate visual landmarks with the virtual fence? Based on some non-published data I have collected, the answer is yes.
In fact, to give some context, there have been studies published showing that for a number of days following removal of an electric fence, cattle would still not cross the line where it had been located.
So this could indeed be an issue with virtual fencing, but—and my research on this topic is still very preliminary—I have not seen a problem yet, and I don’t think I will. Part of the reason is that cows want to eat, so if the polygon that contains the animals is programmed to move toward good forage, the cows will follow. It’s almost like a moving feed bunk, if you will. I'm sure that, in time—I would almost bet money on this—that if you were using the virtual fence to move animals toward better forage, you could almost eliminate the virtual fence line behind the animals, especially if the drinking water was kept near the “moving feed bunk.”
The other thing is that the consumer-level GPS receivers I have used in my DVF™ devices do not have the capability to have the fixes corrected using DGPS, which means that the fix may actually vary from the “true” boundary by as much as the length of a three-quarter ton pick-up. That’s to my benefit, because there is never an exact line where that animal is sure to be cued and hence the animal cannot match a particular stone or other environmental object with the stimulation event even if the virtual boundary is held static. It’s always going to be just in the general area.
Manaugh: So imprecision is actually helpful to you.
Anderson: Yes, I believe so—although I don’t have enough data that I would want to stand on a podium and swear to that. But I think the variability in that GPS signal could be an advantage for virtual paddocks that spatially and temporally move over the landscape.
Twilley: We’ve talked about optimizing utilization and remote management, but are we missing some of the other ways that virtual fencing might transform the way we manage livestock or the land?
Anderson: Ideas that we know are good, but are simply too labor-intensive right now, will become reasonable. The big thing that has been in vogue for some time—and it still is, in certain places—is rotational stocking. The idea is that you take your land and divide it into many small paddocks and move animals through these paddocks, leaving the animals in any one paddock for only a few hours or days. It’s a great idea under certain situations, but think of the labor of building and maintaining all those fences, not to mention moving the animals in and out of different paddocks all the time.
With the virtual paddock you can just program the polygon to move spatially and temporally over the landscape. Even the shape of the virtual paddock can be dynamic in time and space as well. It can be slowed down where there’s abundant forage, and sped up where forage is limited so you have a completely dynamic, flexible system in which to manage free-ranging animals.
Here’s another thing. Like anybody who gathers free-ranging animals, I have a song I use. My song is pretty benign and can be sung among mixed audiences. [sings] “Come on sweetheart, let’s go. Come on. Come on. Come on, girls. Let’s go.”
In this video clip, a cow-calf pair are moved using only voice cues (Dean Anderson's gathering song) delivered from directional virtual fencing (DVF™) electronics carried by the cows on an ear-a-round (EAR™) system.
That’s the way I talk to them, if I want them to move. One day when I was out manually gathering my cows on an ATV I put a voice-activated recorder in my pocket and recorded my song. We later transferred the sounds of my manual gathering into the DVF™ device. Then when we wanted to gather the animals we wirelessly activated the DVF™ electronics and my “song”—“Come on, girls, let’s go”—began to play. Instead of a negative irritation, this was a positive cuing—and it worked.
The cows moved to the corral based on the cue, without me actually being present to manually gather them—it was an autonomous gather.
I think this type of thing also points to a paradigm shift in how we manage livestock. Sure, I can get my animals up in the middle of night to move them, but why do that? Why not try to manage on cow time, rather than our own egotistical needs—“At eight o’clock, I want these cows in so I can brand them,” or whatever. Why not mesh management routines with their innate behaviors instead? For example, my song could maybe be matched to correspond to a general time of day when the animals might start drifting in to drink water, anyway.
Twilley: I see—it’s a feedback loop where you’re cuing behavior with the GPS collars, but you’re also gathering data. You can see where they are already heading and change your management accordingly.
Anderson: Absolutely. You are matching needs and possibilities.
Manaugh: To make this work, does every animal have to be instrumented?
Anderson: This is a very valid question, but my answer varies. All the research needed to answer this question is not in, and the answers depend on the specific situation being addressed. I have a lot of people right now who are calling me and asking for a commercial device that they can put on their animals because they are losing them to theft. With the price of livestock where it is currently, cattle-rustling is not a thing of the nineteenth century. It is going on as we speak.
If that’s your challenge, then you’re going to need some kind of electronic gadgetry on every animal for absolute bookkeeping. For me, the challenge is how do you manage a large, extensive landscape in ways that we can’t do now, and I don’t think we necessarily need to instrument every animal for virtual fencing to be effective.
Instead, if you’ve got a hundred cows, you need to ask: which of those cows should you put instruments on? As a producer, you probably have a pretty good idea which animals should be instrumented and why: you would look for the leaders in the group.
Position of two cows grazing similar pastures in Montana, recorded every ten minutes over a two-week period. The difference in their grazing patterns reveal one cow to be a hill climber and one to be a bottom dweller. Image form a USDA Rangeland Management publication (PDF) co-authored by Derek Bailey, NMSU.
What’s interesting is that there are cows that prefer foraging up on top of hills. There are others that prefer being down in a riparian area. A colleague of mine at New Mexico State University, calls them bottom dwelling and hill climbing cows and this spatial foraging characteristic apparently has heritability. So it’s possible that you could select animals that fit your specific landscape. If, as I mentioned earlier, the ease with which an animal can be controlled by sensory cues also has heritability, it seems logical to assume that you could create hightech designer animals tailored to your piece of land.
Now, when you start adding all of these things together, using these electronic gadgetries and really leveraging innate behaviors, it points to a revolution in animal management—a revolution with really powerful potential to help us become much better stewards of the landscape.
This photograph shows a worm fence, an American invention. It was the most widely built fence type in the US through the 1870s, until Americans ran out of readily accessible forests, triggering a "fence crisis," in which the costs of fencing exceeded the value of the land it enclosed. The "crisis" was averted by the invention of mass-produced woven wire in the late 1800s. Photograph from the USDA History Collection, Special Collections, National Agricultural Library.
Twilley: None of this is commercially available yet, though, right?
Anderson: That’s true—you cannot go out today and buy a commercial DVF™ system, or for that matter any kind of virtual fence unit designed specifically for livestock, to the best of my knowledge. But there is a company that is interested in our patent and they are trying to get something off the ground. I’m trying to feed this company any information that I can, though I am not legally allowed to participate in the development of their product as a federal employee.
Manaugh: What are some of the obstacles to commercial availability?
Anderson: The largest immediate challenge I see is answering the question of how you power electronics on free-ranging animals for extended periods of time. We have tried solar and it has potential. I think one of the most exciting things, though, is kinetic energy. I understand that there are companies working on a technology to be used in cellphones that will charge the cell phone simply by the action of lifting it out of your purse or pocket, and the Army has got several things going on now with backpacks for soldiers that recharge electronic communication equipment as a result of a soldier’s walking movement.
I don’t think the economics warrant animal agriculture developing any of these power technologies independently, but I think we can capitalize on that being developed in other, more lucrative industries and then simply adapt it for our needs. When I developed the concept of DVF™ I designed it to be a plug-and-pray device. As soon as somebody developed a better component, I would throw my thing out and plug theirs in—and pray that it would improve performance. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t!
Anderson: That’s an interesting suggestion that I have not looked into. However, I have though a lot about capturing kinetic energy. If you watch a cow, their ears are always moving, and so are their tails. If we can capture any of that movement….
The other thing we need is demand from the market. In 2007, I was invited to the UK to discuss virtual fencing —the folks in London were more interested in virtual fencing than anybody else I have ever talked to in the world.
The reason was really interesting. England has a historic tradition of common land, which is basically open “green space” that surrounds the city and was originally used for grazing by people who had one or two sheep or cows. Nowadays, it’s mostly used by dog walkers, pony riders—for recreation, basically. The problem is that they need livestock back on these landscapes to actually utilize vegetation properly so certain herbaceous vegetation does not threaten some of the woody species. However, none of the present-day users want conventional fencing because of the gates that would have to be opened and shut to contain the animals. So they were interested in virtual fencing as a way to get the ecology back into line using domestic herbivores, in a landscape that needs to be shared with pony riders and dog walkers who don’t want to shut gates and might not do it reliably, anyway.
But it’s an interesting question. I’ve had some sleepless nights, up at two in the morning wondering, “Why is it not being embraced?” I think that a lot of it comes strictly down to economics.
I don’t know, at this point, what a setup would cost. But, in my opinion, there are ways we could implement this immediately and have it be very viable. You wouldn’t have every animal instrumented. You can have single-hop technology, so information uploads and downloads at certain points the animals come to with reliable periodicity—the drinking water or the mineral supplement, say. That’s not real-time, of course—but it’s near real-time. And it would be a quantum leap compared to how we currently manage livestock.
Barbed wire, patented by Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden in 1874, opened up the American prairie for large-scale farming. Photograph by Tiago Fioreze, Wikipedia.
Twilley: What do the farmers themselves think of this system?
Anderson: What I’ve heard from some ranchers is something along the lines of: “I've already got fences and they work fine. Why do I need this unproven new technology?”
On the other hand, dairy farmers who have automatic milking parlors, which allow animals to come in on their own volition to get milked, think virtual fencing would be very appropriate for their type of operation, for reasons of convenience rather than economics.
Robotic milking parlor; photograph via its manufacturer, DeLaval.
Now, let me tell you what I think might actually work. I think that environmentalists could actually be very beneficial in pushing this forward. Take a situation where you have an endangered bird species that uses the bank of a stream for nesting or reproduction. Under current conditions, the rancher can’t realistically afford to fence out a long corridor along a stream just for that two-week period. That’s a place where virtual fencing is a tool that would allow us to do the best ecological management in the most cost-effective way.
But the larger point is that we cannot afford to manage twenty-first century agriculture using grandpa’s tools, economically, sociologically, and biologically.
Some people have said, “Well, I think you are just ahead of your time with this stuff.” I’m not sure that’s true. In any case, in my personal opinion, if I’m not doing the research that looks twenty years out into future before it’s adopted, then I’m doing the wrong kind of research. In 2005, Gallagher, one of the world’s leading builders of electric fences, invited me to talk about virtual fencing. During that conversation, they told me that they believe that, by the middle of this century, virtual fencing will be the fencing of choice.
But here’s the thing: none of us have gone to the food counter and found it empty. When you have got a full stomach, the things that maybe should be looked at for that twenty-year gap are often not on the radar screen. As long as the barbed wire fences haven’t rusted out completely, the labor costs can be tolerated, and the environmental legislation hasn’t become mandatory, then why spend money? That’s human nature. You only do what you have to do and not much more.
The point is that it’s going to take a number of sociological and economic factors, in my opinion, for this methodology of animal control to be implemented by the market. But speaking technologically, we could go out with an acceptable product in eighteen months, I believe. It wouldn’t have multi-hop technology. It would equal the quality of the first automobile rather than being comparable to a Rolls Royce in terms of “extras”—that would have to await a later date in this century.
And here’s another idea: I think that there ought to be a tax on every virtual fencing device that is sold or every lease agreement that’s signed in the developed world. That tax would go to help developing countries manage their free-ranging livestock using this methodology because that’s where we need to be better stewards of the landscape and where we as a world would all benefit from transforming some of today’s manual labor into cognitive labor.
Herding cattle the old-fashioned way on the Jornada Experimental Range; photograph by Peggy Greb for USDA ARS.
Maybe with this technology, a third-world farmer could put a better thatched roof on his house or send his kids to school, because he doesn’t need their manual labor down on the farm. It’s fun for a while to be out on a horse watching the cows; what made the West and Hollywood famous were the cowboys singing to their cows. I love that; that’s why I’m in this profession. Still, I’m not a sociologist, but it seems as though you could take some of that labor that is currently used managing livestock in developing countries and all of the time it requires and you could transfer it into things that would enhance human well-being and education.
It’s in our own interest, too. If non-optimal livestock management is creating ecological sacrifice areas, where soil is lost when the rains come or the wind blows, that particulate matter doesn’t stop at national boundaries.
I always say that virtual fencing is going to be something that causes a paradigm shift in the way we think, rather than just being a new tool to keep doing things in the same old way. That’s the real opportunity.
After a long drive down toward the Shenandoah Valley, passing southwest across Pennsylvania into the mountains of Virginia, Venue arrived near sunset at Luray Caverns, just in time for their final tour of the day.
The surreally ordinary door through which you access Luray Caverns.
Discovered in 1878, the caves at Luray remain on private property. This means that, unlike their counterparts in the National Park Service, whose educational and recreational programs are constrained by strict ecological and historic preservation guidelines, Luray is a show cave—an artful blend of natural and built subterranean forms, visited by roughly five million people a year.
State laws extend into the subterranean world.
Also a popular destination for school field trips, the caverns are by no means wild or remote; they are well-lit, family-friendly, and not insignificantly altered, with as much as twenty percent of the original cave, our guide explained, removed or expanded to accommodate human passage.
The caverns, which extend throughout an area nearly sixty-four acres in size, are home to an array of formations, from dripping pillars that look as much like lithified swarms of ancient jellyfish as they do columns of rock to semi-translucent rippling curtain forms known as "cave bacon" and an extraordinary reflective lake filled with crystal-clear (although very shallow) water.
This organ, the Luray Cavern's website explains, was "conceived" by a man named Leland W. Sprinkle, "a mathematician and electronics scientist at the Pentagon."
The keyboard of the organ.
The instrument visitors now encounter, extensively wired up to the labyrinth of stalactites hanging down from the ceiling, actually takes its inspiration from an earlier version, as Russell H. Gurnee explains in his informative booklet Discovery of Luray Caverns, Virginia.
"A wall decoration not far from the Saracen's Tent," Gurnee writes, describing the "original natural instrument" from which Sprinkle's invention takes its cue, was not invented, as such, but instead "consisted of fifty-six graduated columns arranged like the pipes of an organ."
These graduated columns could be played: tapped with hammers or a flashlight, and resonant tones would result.
The mallets are remarkably easy to miss.
Sprinkle's organ relies on the same principle—tapping stalactites of different size and resonance, like a xylophone—but at a much more awe-inspiring scale. The organ keys are connected to small rubber mallets strung up to the rocks by way of five miles' worth of wires.
In the words of Luray's administrators, this "stalactite-tapping instrument" apparently took thirty-six years to perfect: "Three years alone were spent searching the vast chambers of the caverns to select and carefully sand stalactites to precisely match the musical scale. Only two stalactites were found to be in tune naturally."
The deliberately theatrical, Willy Wonka-like red keyboard adds to the sense of tourist gimmickry that pervades most show-caves—the addition of manmade wonders ("the largest musical instrument on earth!") sitting uncomfortably alongside the subterranean sublime.
The organ's music is, nonetheless, sonorous, omnidirectional, and highly atmospheric, as well as a virtuoso display of mechanical invention.
Instagrams of mallets and wires cobwebbed across the cave.
Only one man plays the organ, our guide informed us, but in his absence, we instead listened to a preprogrammed sequence, a kind of geological piano player; the song we thus heard was an old hymn by Martin Luther, called "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
It percussed and rang across the cobweb of rubber hammers in speleological surroundsound, indicating through echoes that there were yet more distant parts of the cave we would not have time to explore.
We stood there for three or four minutes in appreciative silence, listening to this electrical contraption that formalized the otherwise random actions of an earlier generation of explorers who merely tapped on the rocks around them. A habit, you might say, became a machine.
Hearing the Earth ping with music written centuries ago, it was hard not to wonder how literally fantastic it would be to have one's own, secret access to some vast subterranean instrument wired together in tangles of valves, mallets, and wires—sitting alone at night in a mansion in the mountains of Virginia, perhaps, as a fog sets in, playing this buried machine that uses the planet itself as a resonation chamber, hollow cavities, from the smallest tunnels to gigantic chasms several counties away, shivering with the induced seismicity of your own music. Sounds hum up through your old wooden floorboards, and glassware in the kitchen begins to vibrate.
Until such a day, it's easy enough just to listen to Luray on CD: indeed, we picked up a copy of a 2001 album offered by the shop upstairs called Midnight in the Caverns by Monte Maxwell. In that recording, the triggering of the mallets is clearly audible as a kind of secondary clicking beneath the music, which gives the songs a slightly robotic feel—an extra layer of strangeness that, like the addition of the organ to the caverns, it didn't need but, in the end, isn't any the worse for. We put the CD on repeat for the next few hours as Venue left Luray behind.
Perky's Bat Tower stands at the end of an unmarked dirt road on Sugarloaf Key as a striking, albeit unsuccessful, monument to both biological pest control and cross-species design.
Before the Florida Keys meant sun, sea, and Jimmy Buffet, they were famous for mosquitoes—dense, black clouds of them that hummed and bit without pause, spread malaria, dengue, and yellow fever, and drove visitors temporarily insane with irritation.
In the late nineteenth century, the Broward Palm Beach New Times reported swarms "so dense in some areas that it was impossible to breathe without inhaling mouthfuls of mosquitoes." A twentieth-century entomologist caught a terrifying—and record-breaking —"365,696 mosquitoes in one trap in one night" on an island just off the tip of the Florida peninsula, according to Michael Grunwald's book, The Swamp.
And, in the 1920s, hordes of mosquitoes were the major obstacle standing between Richter Clyde Perky, a real estate developer from Denver, and the success of his fishing resort on Lower Sugarloaf Key. The construction manager Perky had hired to oversee the project complained that "in the late afternoon, you would just have to rake the bugs off your arm" and that "they'd form a black print on your hand if you put it against a screen and suck all the blood right out of it."
In his search for a solution, Perky came across a book called Bats, Mosquitoes, and Dollars by Dr. Charles Campbell. A doctor and "city bacteriologist" based in San Antonio, Texas, Campbell had been experimenting with attracting bats to artificial roosts since the turn of the century, in the belief that they were the natural predators of mosquitoes. As an article in BATS magazine explains, Campbell initially thought that the design of bat architecture would be a simple matter:
"Can bats like bees be colonized and made to multiply where we want them?" he wondered. "This would be no feat at all!...Don't they just live in any old ramshackle building? They would be only too glad to have a little home such as we provide for our song birds..."
After a handful of expensive failures, followed by several months spent in the caves of West Texas, observing bats in their natural environment, Campbell came up with his pioneering design for a Malaria-Eradicating Guano Producing Bat Roost, "built according to plans furnished by the greatest and only infallible of all architects, Nature," and equipped with "all the conveniences any little bat heart could possibly desire."
His new tower, claimed as the world's first successful intentional artificial bat roost, was built next to Mitchell's Lake, ten miles south of San Antonio, in spring 1911. Malaria cases in the neighborhood decreased, Campbell cleared hundreds of dollars in guano sales, and the Mitchell's Lake tower was soon followed by more than a dozen more built to the same design, one as far afield as Italy.
Perky obtained the roost plans from Campbell in 1929, and constructed his own tower at a cost of $10,000. More than thirty feet tall, and sturdy enough to have weathered dozens of hurricanes over the past eighty years, the tower still features a louvered bat entrance facing the prevailing wind, a central guano removal chute, and a dense, honeycombed walls of cypress wood bat corrugation that function as roosting shelves.
Sadly, despite a lavish application of pheromone-doused guano as bait, not a single bat ever moved into in the palatial accommodations Perky had provided. (In fact, the first scientifically confirmed colony of bats in the Keys was only found in 1996.)
Today, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District regards Perky's Bat Tower as their founding monument, but relies instead on a full-time team of seventy-one employees armed with handheld foggers, spray trucks, four helicopters, and two fixed-wing aircraft from which to dispense regular doses of larvicide granules and pesticide sprays onto the landscape. They are currently contemplating a not uncontroversial return to biological control with the purchase and release of genetically-modified mosquitoes, whose offspring die upon hatching.
Meanwhile, Perky's tower is finally home to a winged animal. Standing in a pool of stagnant, mosquito-friendly water, the weathered pine pyramid is currently topped with an active osprey nest—architecture by animals atop architecture for animals.
According to Jack Chambers, proprietor of the Sonoma Valley Worm Farm and a former Delta Air Lines pilot, when he got in the cockpit of a 747, "the other guys would have second homes and boats and be into golf. But I was the worm guy."
Venue visited Chambers on a sunny September afternoon, and, as he showed us around the farm, he explained that his worm obsession began, straightforwardly enough, as a gardening hobby. A friend told him about a local farmer who had earthworms for sale, and so, twenty years ago, in 1992, Chambers paid a visit to Earl Schmidt, a former mink rancher, enthusiastic angler, and bait worm farmer.
Five days and one 5 gallon bucket of Red Wigglers (Eisenia fetida) later, Chambers' home compost pile was a rich, deep black color with a crumbly texture that he'd never been able to achieve before. He started hanging out with Earl, helping out in return for a chance to learn about worms.
As they picked worms side-by-side over the next three months, Earl told Chambers that he was looking forward to retirement and finally having the time to fish. Chambers, "without really knowing what I was getting into," found himself offering to buy the place.
A crash course in all things worm quickly followed, including a carefully scheduled layover in Vigo, Spain, to attend the World Worm Conference, and conversations with vermiculture pioneer and Ohio State University professor, Clive Edwards. Trial and error also played a role, with Chambers reminiscing about the "worm volcano" he accidentally created by experimenting with cornmeal as a feed — 50,000 disgusted worms all crawled over the sides of the bin at once, in a scene worthy of a horror movie. "Now, if I'm trying something new," explained Chambers, "I only add it to quarter of the bin, to leave room for escape."
Chambers credits his pilot's appreciation for standard operating procedures and checklists for many of the technical improvements he's introduced over the past twenty years. For example, in order to pre-compost the manure source and kill any pathogens or weed seeds before feeding it to the worms, Chambers arrived at his own design for a three-bin forced-air system, complete with a rigorously optimized schedule of turning, blowing, and releasing gases. "If I've done anything with worms," he says, "it's that."
That is certainly not all, though. As we moved under the corrugated steel sheds that house the farm's four million worms, Chambers explained that he realized early on that, in fact, "the vermicompost is the big deal, not the worms." In other words, rather than simply feeding worms in order to harvest them for sale to sport fishermen and gardeners, Chambers focused on marketing their castings, particularly to the region's high-end grape-growers.
To do so, he has built four ninety-foot long continuous flow vermicomposting bins, based on an original blueprint by Clive Edwards, but improved over the years to the point that he now has a patent pending on the design.
"This is high-tech for worms," explained Chambers, as he demonstrated his most recent iteration, the VermiComposter CF40. In sixty days, pre-composted manure will make its way from top to bottom of the four-foot deep bins through a continuous conveyor-belt system of worm digestion.
The raised bins are fed from the top twice per week, and harvested from the bottom once weekly using an automatic breaker bar. A wire mesh tumbler then separates the worms from their excretions; the worms go back in the bins and the remaining black gold is sold for a dollar a pound.
Earthworms are easy to overlook, but among those who do observe their work, they seem to inspire extreme devotion, counting among their historical fans both Aristotle and Charles Darwin. Chambers is equally enthusiastic. As we dug our hands into the warm, soft compost and watched the worms we had disturbed wriggle back into the darkness, he expounded on the mysteries of worm reproduction as well as numerous studies that have shown vermicompost's beneficial impact on germination rates, disease suppression, flavor, and even yield (up to a twenty percent increase for radishes, according to Clive Edwards' colleagues at Ohio State).
Vermicompost is typically used as a potting medium — Chambers' advice is to "put one cup in the hole with your seed or transplant" — or it can be brewed at 73 degrees for 24 hours to make a "compost tea" that can be sprayed onto the soil or plant directly. Although it is between four and fourteen times more expensive than regular compost, Chambers argues that, like a high-end skin product, vermicompost's benefits and economy of use make it well worthwhile:
I tell vineyards to think of it like insurance. After all, a vine costs about $3, and some vineyards lose as many as twenty percent of their new plantings. With our vermicompost, they usually lose less than one percent.
Chambers and his wife even planted four hundred vines of their own, losing only two, and they attribute their ongoing victory over powdery mildew to regular applications of compost tea. They make a very good "Worm Farm Red," that we were lucky enough to sample and that even won a gold medal in the amateur category at the 2008 Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival.
Sonoma Valley Worm Farm already makes more than 200,000 lbs of vermicompost a year, but Chambers took early retirement from Delta last year, and has big plans for the business. The day we visited, he had just finalized the agreements for a new facility that will more than double his capacity, as well as incorporate several new improvements to his existing equipment.
As we examined the architectural plans in Google SketchUp, Chambers described his vision for the next generation VermiComposter CF 40, which will include electronic moisture and temperature monitoring and automated feeding.
While he waits for the new facility to be built, he's already experimenting with feeding the worms an extra inch of compost per week, to see whether he can increase their productivity. Meanwhile, in response to interest from California's berry giant, Driscoll's, he's started working with compost tea-kettle manufacturers on a unit that could brew up to 250,000 gallons at a time. In fact, Chambers' only concern as he scales up, he told us, was what he would do when the worms' demand outstripped the manure supply of the organic dairy farm (Straus Family Creamery) that he currently works with.
Given that, last year, the EPA estimated that thirty percent of annual landfill contents could have been recycled through composting, and that California's dairy cows produce 30 million tons of manure annually, much of which is stored in waste lagoons where it risks contaminating groundwater, it seems as though feeding four or five million new worms is not going to be much of a challenge at all. The fact that those worms will not only remove that waste from the environment, but also transform it into something that scientists are calling "pretty amazing stuff," as well as "the next frontier in biocontrol," is even better.
Chambers told us that he is convinced that "worms are going to be the next big thing in agriculture." If we're smart, it will be.
