Behold the suburban lawn—that curious monument to our forgetting. Every Saturday morning, ten million Americans perform the same ritual: the flattening of non-native grass into European fantasies of order. We have created ordinances to enforce this aesthetic tyranny, threatening fines for those who let plants grow as nature intended. The prairie that lived here for millennia has been replaced by something that cannot survive without constant human intervention—and we call this beauty.
This is how forgetting works—through the accumulation of small surrenders, daily capitulations to systems that promise control over what cannot be controlled.
The Diagnosis
We are temporary arrangements of water, protein, and mineral—briefly organized configurations of earth that will return to constituent elements when our moment ends. This is not poetry but biology. Yet we have spent centuries constructing elaborate systems to forget this fundamental fact.
Desert Vitalism traces the genealogy of this forgetting: how we learned to see ourselves as separate from nature, how we developed technologies of optimization that distance us from immediate experience, how we created economic systems that externalize their true costs onto invisible others. Every form of alienation—from our bodies, our labor, our relationships, our landscapes—stems from the same root: the refusal to recognize what we actually are.
The Desert
We live in a time of abundance and believe that abundance will beget abundance. But this abundance depends on resources accumulated in geological time, that we consume in human time. The comfortable suburban existence, the global supply chains, the digital interfaces that mediate our every interaction—all of this depends on extraction rates that cannot be sustained. The desert is not coming; we are living in it now, temporarily shielded from recognizing our condition by systems that cannot last.
All ecological harm is self-harm. When we poison the water, we poison ourselves. When we treat workers as resources, we degrade the very social fabric we depend on. The hidden costs of our convenience—the factory workers, the strip-mined landscapes, the exhausted soils—these are not external to our wellbeing but integral to it.
The abundance that allows us to remain ignorant of these connections is ending. Desert Vitalism prepares us for what comes next: not collapse but revelation. When the systems that hide our material condition stop working, we discover what we have always been—earth temporarily conscious of itself.
The Method
I practice genealogy in the service of remembering. Each essay excavates some ordinary phenomenon—lawn enforcement, heart rate tracking, prairie restoration—to reveal the mechanisms of forgetting at work. But this is not academic exercise. I confess my own complicity, my own capture by the systems I critique. I check my heart rate obsessively even as I write about quantified self alienation. I find satisfaction in my perfectly mowed lawn despite recognizing its absurdity.
This honesty is methodological, not confessional. We cannot critique these systems from outside because there is no outside. We are fish asking about water, temporary arrangements examining the forces that shaped our temporary arrangement. The recognition of complicity is the beginning of wisdom.
The Vision
Desert Vitalism offers neither false optimism nor fashionable despair. It begins with radical acceptance: we are what we are, embedded in systems larger than ourselves, responsible to the earth that temporarily assembled us into consciousness. From this acceptance comes the possibility of genuine response.
Not the response of optimization—more efficient solar panels, better carbon accounting, smarter cities. These remain trapped in the mindset that created our predicament. The response required is ontological: remembering what we are and acting from that remembering.
The desert teaches attention to what sustains life. It teaches the difference between need and want, between flourishing and accumulation. It teaches patience with processes that unfold over geological rather than human time scales. Most importantly, it teaches that we have never been separate from what we are trying to save.
This blog serves as workshop and practice ground for developing these insights. Each post is a small genealogy, a diagnostic excavation of how forgetting operates in the texture of daily life. Through sustained attention to lived experience, I am learning to recognize the water I swim in—and preparing for the day when recognizing our material condition becomes not philosophical luxury but survival necessity.