(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper examines the evocative ruins of the community called Druid Heights, located deep in the redwood forest of California, north of the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in the 1950s by Elsa Gidlow, an openly lesbian poet, anarchist, and organic gardener; Roger Somers, jazz musician and woodworker who developed a particular aesthetic of rustic vernacular; Ed Stiles, woodworker, hot tub builder, and only survivor who still inhabits the land; and in the final days, Alan Watts, Beat Generation scholar of Eastern philosophies. The community shared an ethos of spiritual environmentalism which was materialized in their handmade aesthetics. While being critical of industrial capitalism and consumerism, they explored interesting directions for cohabitation with the landscape and with each other that continue to be relevant today. In 1973, as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the forest, the National Park Service invoked eminent domain and purchased the land, giving the three owners life-time leases. Currently, most of the buildings are unoccupied and have fallen into disrepair. Slowly composting back into the land, the ruination process resurfaces some of the community’s original values, opening critical questions: should the buildings be preserved to match how they existed in a prior time? How can we “restore” the crucial context the buildings originally responded to? If left as ruins and allowed to disintegrate, could a different kind of ecological knowledge be unearthed, allowing the stewarding of the buildings and its ruination with empathy, much as we need to do in the world at large? This kind of queer ecological composting can dismantle Western epistemological dichotomies such as nature/culture, challenging mainstream environmental solutionism and techno-fixes that only exacerbate ecological destruction. Speculating on ruins as anarchic “unbuilding” recognizes affective “transnatural connectivities,” opening alternative nonbinary worlds where “naturecultural” entanglements leave no space for extractive relationalities.