IMAGE: Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC, from March 10 – April 17, 2010. In this shot, left to right: Thermal Scanner and Body Temperature Alert System, Daniel Perlin, Field Notes from Quarantine, Katie Holten, MAP 002 Quarantine, David Garcia Studio, Quick, Richard Mosse, and Cordon Sanitaire, Kevin Slavin.

For me, one of the most exciting aspects of the Landscapes of Quarantine studio that Geoff Manaugh and I ran last autumn was its multidisciplinarity. On any given Tuesday evening, we’d see a game designer giving feedback to a set designer, a comic book illustrator comparing storylines with a fiction writer, and architects brainstorming with artists. Meanwhile, the resulting works – on display now at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City – were realised in materials as diverse as bentonite clay, Aerochrome film, medical-grade Tyvek, and tear-off pads.

IMAGE: From the Landscapes of Quarantine group exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture, photo by Emiliano Granado. In this shot, a short story published on tear-off pads: Did We Build The Frontier To Keep It Closed? by Scott Geiger.

And I’m excited to announce that soon – but for two nights only! – the exhibition will also include a medium very close to this blog’s heart: food.

On Saturday, April 10, and Sunday, April 11, the Brooklyn-based a razor, a shiny knife team will explore the culinary implications of quarantine, preparing and serving a quarantine-themed dinner inside the exhibition itself. Tickets are not cheap but then this will not be just dinner: for a razor, a shiny knife founder and leader, Michael J. Cirino, deliciousness is just the baseline from which he pushes his collaborators to explore the outside limits of the science of cooking, as well as the theatrical, social, and experiential possibilities of a meal.

IMAGE: Michael J. Cirino of a razor, a shiny knife, testing recipes at home.

So what does quarantine taste like?

To find out, of course, you will need to attend the dinner itself! But to get a sneak preview, I went along to Michael Cirino’s house a couple of weeks ago to eavesdrop on one of his regular menu brainstorming sessions with collaborators Andrew Rosenberg and Danny Zlobinsky.

On arrival, I was handed half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc (no glass), a roll of masking tape, and a felt-tip pen, and put to work labeling plastic containers filled with remnants of the afternoon’s experiments while the rest of the team filtered duck fat, washed dishes, and discussed what went wrong with the onion soup sandwich cookies (definitely not their split pea cream filling, which I sampled, and which tasted much better than it sounds).

IMAGE: A plated presentation at a previous a razor, a shiny knife dinner.

Cirino was a charming host, inviting me to sample honey-roasted peanuts dipped in avocado puree (delicious, but perhaps not more so in combination than separately) and a canister full of still-warm blue cheese shaving cream (incredible).

“Want bubbles in that?” he said, hooking my wine bottle up to a scuba-diving tank full of carbon dioxide. “Hungry?” he asked, passing me three fresh tacos, one filled with pork, another with duck, and the third (“just a throw-in”) with wild mushrooms. “Did you see the best word in here?” he asked as I poked around in a box labeled “Science,” filled with white powders (sodium hexametaphosphate, a sequestering agent).

IMAGE: Photos from earlier a razor, a shiny knife edible experiments.

With clean-up done, Cirino, Rosenberg, and Zlobinsky went through their quarantine menu notes (which included ideas from fellow a razor, a shiny knife regulars Michael Lee and Demian Repucci). The first course, they decided, would serve as the exposure – guests should encounter the infection for which they would be quarantined.

“It needs to look dangerous,” announced Michael, scrolling through stock photos of petri dishes for inspiration. “But also beautiful. What flavours do we want to serve with trout roe? Can we get it to look like this?” he asked, pointing to a photo labeled “Andrew’s Favourite,” which resembled delicate swine flu virus cells dusted with gold.

After adding “experiment with injecting flavour into agar gel” to their to-do list for next weekend, Michael, seemingly at random, picked up a mason jar, filled it with smoke from a black plastic gun, and sat it upside down on a plate. The second course was supposed to be something to do with spherification or prison trays, according to the notes, but inspired by Michael’s pyrotechnics, Andrew suggested serving cold-smoked fish:

How long does the smoke hold?
We need something to burn.
Grab the oregano. No, the Italian seasoning. I still have ten things of Italian seasoning from that meatball thing.
Throw some of the peanuts in there.
Has anyone got a timer on their phone?
OK, that works. That’s pretty intense.
What’s the fish? Salmon?
No, I hate salmon. It would work, but I’m not doing it.
There’s plenty of fish that gets cold smoked. We can figure that out. What goes in there with it, that won’t get messed up from the smoke?
Nothing.
Nothing?
Yeah. We just have garnishes sitting on the edge of the plate. Maybe mâche with a light vinaigrette.
Totally quarantined! OK, done.

And so the narrative arc developed: if the dinner guests are passengers on a journey through quarantine, then the first course plays with the idea of exposure to disease, and the second course mimics the first step taken on arrival at the lazaretto – disinfection. In our initial conversations, I had told Michael that during outbreaks of the Black Death in fifteenth-century Europe, port officials would “disinfect” suspect cargo and mail by dousing it in vinegar and/or subjecting it to cedar or sandalwood smoke: from that seed of an idea, combined with culinary technology, a new edible experience emerged.

IMAGE: Instruments used for disinfecting mail by smoking.

From this beginning, it was clear that the subsequent courses had to be entirely quarantined. Cirino, Rosenberg, and Zlobinsky quickly thrashed out a sous-vide pasta course to follow, with the vacuum-sealed plastic bags serving as both practical solution in a kitchen-less space and an ingenious way to serve the dish’s components separately, forcing guests to break the hygienic barrier and cut open the clear pouches themselves.

IMAGE: Sous-vide food preparation, via.

After that, a razor, a shiny knife plan to serve dry-aged beef, which is currently being kept in a carefully monitored, climate-controlled twenty-one-day quarantine at the Master Purveyors meat locker in the Bronx. The transformative, revelatory power of time that lies at the heart of quarantine will also act on the meat, concentrating its beefy essence. With that element of the dish in place, the team briefly considered various accompaniments – bacon dust? blue cheese shaving cream? – in order to achieve maximum deliciousness.

IMAGE: Dry-aged beef at Master Purveyors, Inc.

By now, it was late, the cheese course was set already (“we just need to practice”), and it was time to consider dessert. The notes simply said: “Dessert?”

“Dessert is always a bitch,” said Andrew, glumly.

“Can we send people home with some kind of mark?” I asked. “Like the symptoms of a disease that is revealed during quarantine, or like the residual stigma of the quarantined?”

Michael’s eyes lit up, again:

I like that idea! OK, you know what we haven’t done in any of the dishes? We haven’t done an encapsulation in any of the dishes. So for the last thing, why don’t we just encapsulate a sauce, and in the sauce is a surprise. So they crack it open in their mouth and bingo! We can figure out how to make something like that work, right?

And with that, the brainstorming session was over. Of course, weeks of testing have followed, so who knows quite how these initial ideas have evolved since…?

Each dinner will include live butchery, wine pairing, and a mime in a leotard, promises Cirino, who also welcomes questions about the evening’s menu and schedule. Ticketed guests are invited and encouraged to come at 4:00 p.m. on April 10th and 11th for cooking demonstrations, with dinner to be served at 7:00 p.m. More details and tickets are available online here. I can’t wait – and I hope to see some of you there too!

IMAGE: Contraband Room, United States Customs and Border Protection, JFK International Airport, Queens, New York. Part of an amazing series by photographer Taryn Simon, this photo shows all the food confiscated from passengers arriving at JFK over a 48 hour period. Among the seized items is a South Asian lime infected with citrus canker. The United States is currently under citrus canker quarantine, with all “interstate movement of citrus plants and plant parts other than fruit” prohibited.

I’m delighted to announce that Landscapes of Quarantine, an exhibition I co-curated with Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, will be opening at New York City’s Storefront for Art and Architecture at 7 p.m. on March 10. Unfortunately, that means that we’re spending this week painting, installing, and picking up beer for the opening – apologies for the lack of posts in the meantime.

IMAGE: Landscapes of Quarantine (exhibition design by Glen Cummings of MTWTF), featuring the emerald ash borer (top left). Currently Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin and Minnesota are all under federal quarantine against the “green menace.”

As some of you may remember, Geoff and I ran a design studio on this topic last year, from October through December. The resulting work forms the core of the exhibition, and includes an illuminated quarantine fable, an investigation of urban spatial segregation, a tongue-in-check public health campaign (complete with flu-symptom bingo), and a short film inspired by photographer Richard Mosse‘s quixotic journey into the Congo on the trail of the Ebola virus.

IMAGE: Detail from Front Studio‘s Q-City: An Investigation.

IMAGE: Detail from Joe Alterio’s Pages 179 – 187.

Today, though, I’m taking a quick break from painting gallery walls to post a sneak preview of some of the ideas and work in the “Invasion Biology” section of the exhibition.

Although quarantine is usually thought of in terms of human or animal diseases, it is also a form of landscape preservation. A plant pandemic can cause major economic damage (phylloxera wiped out thirty percent of French vineyards in the 1870s) as well as millions of deaths: after Phytophthora infestans devastated the potato harvest in the 1840s, Ireland lost almost twenty-five percent of its population.

IMAGE: A selective history of plant pandemics, as illustrated in Wired magazine’s excellent article about Ug99, the rust fungus threatening the world’s wheat supply. More on that topic another day…

Monocultural farming intensifies the risk that an entire food group could be wiped out by disease. The Cavendish banana is the poster child for disease vulnerability: every single one of the roughly 100 billion bananas consumed annually is a genetic clone. Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fruit That Changed The World, warns that we have only five to ten years before our banana supply is cut off by a variant Panama fungus.

A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest.

Koeppel explains that by the 1960s, the disease had spread around the globe. Just in time, a new, resistant banana cultivar – the Cavendish – was developed. Growers spent “billions of dollars” to adjust their production and supply chain to suit the Cavendish’s different growing and ripening requirements.

IMAGE: Panama disease, or Fusarium oxysporum, courtesy Keith Weller, USDA.

Now, fifty years later, the fungus has mutated and the Cavendish is under threat. Strict banana quarantines are deployed in uninfected areas, to buy time before the disease inevitably strikes.

IMAGE: Banana quarantine sign in Northern Queensland, courtesy Brian J. McMorrow.

Though plants are generally stationary, pollen and spores can travel for miles on the wind. Many countries enforce strict isolation distances around fields of genetically modified crops, while suspect plants are confiscated at the border and kept behind glass until proven safe (or simply destroyed).

However, as the Australian banana quarantine sign above implies, the most dangerous plant disease vector is human trade and travel. For example, the emerald ash borer, which kills infested trees within five years, arrived in the United States hidden in the wood packaging used to ship auto parts, while the poisonous Oak Processionary Moth has recently been discovered in the U.K., brought in on trees imported from Dutch and Belgian nurseries. Human-induced climate change is also encouraging several plant pests to extend their range.

IMAGE: U.S. Quarantine Zones for citrus greening (a bacterial disease) and Asian citrus psyllid.

Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG explored the topic of plant quarantine at length in this interview with Sara Redstone, Plant Health and Quarantine Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, published back in November. For the exhibition, we’re also mapping current quarantine zones across the United States. The centrepiece of the “Invasion Biology” section of Landscapes of Quarantine, however, will be an amazing wall-sized infographic by architect and cartographer Thomas Pollman, a GIS expert at the New York City Office of Emergency Management.

IMAGE: Detail from Thomas Pollman’s Precious Isolation.

Pollman compares the climate-controlled environments of Plant Rescue Centers, in which illegally imported orchids confiscated at the U.S. border are kept alive in hermetically-sealed greenhouses, to the mobile infrastructure of perimeter defense and personal protection that accompanies the U.S. president on his overseas travels. His research breaks down the costs and labor involved in creating these protective bubbles, in order to defend both endangered orchids and U.S Presidents against the environmental hazards that threaten their survival.

Is the President in quarantine?

• • •

Landscapes of Quarantine will be on display until Saturday, April 17, and there will be a series of quarantine-themed dinners in early April (more details and ticket sales for these will be announced in a few weeks).

Our opening reception kicks off at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9; it is free and open to the public (and there will be free beer, generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery). I hope to see some of you there!

IMAGE: The Green Barrier at Hassi Bahbah, Algeria, via.

Algeria is not a small country – according to Wikipedia, it is one hundred three-and-a-half times the size of Texas – but eighty-five percent of its territory consists of the Sahara desert. In fact, only a thin strip of land along the northern coastal edge of the country is cultivable.

IMAGE: Relief and satellite maps of Algeria, via Wikipedia.

In the 1970s, determined not to let the Sahara encroach further onto its thin sliver of agriculturally useful land, Algeria embarked on a sort of steampunk geoengineering project: planting a wall of trees up to 16 miles wide and 746 miles long along the entire length of the Sahara’s northern edge, from the Moroccan to the Tunisian border. Three hundred and ninety-five thousand acres of the Green Barrier, or barrage vert, were planted between 1974 and 1981, mostly by young men as part of their military service.

IMAGE: The Green Barrier as seen from ground level, via.

After this initial burst of activity, the Green Barrier ran into various economic, sociological, and ecological issues. The Barrier was a monoculture, entirely planted with the hardy, heat- and drought-tolerant Aleppo pine, which was a fine idea until the pine processionary moth moved in. Meanwhile, the funding ran out, and the local population, who hadn’t been included in the project’s planning or planting phases, saw the trees as a handy source of building materials and firewood. By 2007, the Sahara had migrated to within 125 miles of the Mediterranean, while the remains of the Barrier were described as “a depressing sight [...] more grey than green.”

Nonetheless, during this month’s equally depressing Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Senegalese officials told National Geographic that 326 miles of a second Great Green Wall had already been planted. The idea was proposed in 2005 by the former Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, and formally adopted by the African Union in 2007.

If it is completed as planned, this vast agro-ecological defensive landscape will ultimately be 9.3 miles wide and 4350 miles long, crossing through eleven countries from Dakar to Djibouti.

IMAGE: The route of the proposed Great Green Wall.

Although this second green wall is also being built by soldiers (on loan from France), the team behind it do seem to be considering a wider range of vegetation, as well as ways to integrate the Great Green Wall into the lives and economy of local population. By including the native Acacia senegal in the plantings, for example, scientists hope that farmers will eventually be able to profit by harvesting the sap, which is better known as gum arabic, a key ingredient in soft drink syrups, confectionary, and cosmetics.

Meanwhile, the jury is still out as to whether ribbons of forest can actually hold back the encroaching sand. For example, the results of China’s own Green Wall project, which began in 1978 and is expected to reach the end of its fourth phase in 2010, have been pretty varied.

Most scientists agree that Africa’s Great Green Wall is not enough on its own, and that developing less-pasture intensive breeds of livestock, researching and implementing dry agriculture techniques, educating local farmers, improving water conservation and soil management, and reducing firewood-dependence among rural populations are equally – if not more – effective strategies against desertification.

IMAGE: Sunrise during the 2009 Great Sydney Dust Storm. Photo by Tim Wimborne/Reuters, via The Guardian.

Nonetheless, with desertification on the rise and the resulting dust storms being blamed for atmospheric pollution, glacial melt, harvest failures, and even the spread of infectious diseases, quarantining the deserts of the world behind ringed walls of carbon-absorbing artificial forests might not be such a bad idea.

NOTE: For a more ingenious Saharan wall proposal, which involves turning sand into sandstone by injecting it with bacillus pasteurii, check out Magnus Larsson’s Dune on BLDGBLOG, or watch his recent TED talk.

IMAGE: Released from Quarantine… Post-meeting debris at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, including a couple of interesting books – Medical London by Mike Jay and Richard Barnett and Herzog & de Meuron’s Metrobasel – as well as Matt Leacock’s board game, Pandemic.

As some of you may know, this autumn, BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography have been co-hosting a New York City-based design studio dedicated to exploring the landscapes of quarantine. Each Tuesday evening for the past eight weeks, our group of sixteen participants has gathered to discuss the physical, geographical, human, biological, geological, ethical, architectural, ecological, infrastructural, social, political, religious, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine – and then come up with individual projects that expand and reflect on one or more of those themes.

The night before last was our final meeting, so now that the empty bottles have been taken down to the recycling bin, here are some quick thoughts and photos from our quarantine adventure.

IMAGE: Landscapes of Quarantine, Week 6. From left to right, Amanda Spielman, Joe Alterio, Katie Holten, visiting guests Luis Callejas and some of his colleagues at Paisajes Emergentes, Scott Geiger, and Yen Ha.

IMAGE: Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG in front of one of Brian Slocum‘s models for a quarantine façade, Week 7.

At its most basic, quarantine is the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, for the purpose of protecting one from exposure to the other. It is a spatial strategy of separation and containment, invoked in response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty.

Typically, quarantine is thought of in the context of disease control, where it used to isolate people who have been exposed to a contagious virus or bacteria, and as a result may – or may not – be carrying the infection themselves. According to historian David Barnes, quarantine was simply “an unpleasant fact of life” in most port cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and in some cases, earlier: in 1377, Dubrovnik became the first city state to hold ships for a thirty day quarantine, on an island outside its harbour).

IMAGES: Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, addressing the studio during Week 5.

By the twentieth-century, this kind of routine application of quarantine was becoming less and less common. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s own “History of Quarantine“:

In the 1970s, infectious diseases were thought to be a thing of the past. At that time, CDC reduced the number of quarantine stations from 55 to 8. However, two major events—the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the SARS outbreak in 2003—caused concerns about bioterrorism and the worldwide spread of disease. As a result, during 2004–2007, CDC increased the number of U.S. Quarantine Stations from 8 to 20.

This year’s swine flu pandemic has prompted an even greater awareness and enforcement of quarantine  – although opinions are divided as to whether it has been effective in slowing the spread of disease at all. The use of quarantine to restrict individual liberties in the name of public health raises a host of legal and ethical questions that proved a fruitful ground for incredibly interesting discussions of the “dark math” of triage and “acceptable losses.” Game designer Kevin Slavin and comics artist Joe Alterio are both now producing projects that investigate the challenge of shared responsibility and individual decision-making in the face of a deadly disease.

IMAGE:  Landscapes of Quarantine studio, Week 6.

IMAGE: Guest speaker Jake Barton talking with Kevin Slavin, Week 3.

IMAGE: Me, Richard Mosse, Katie Holten, Yen Ha, and Michi Yanagishita discussing their projects, Week 3

On the other hand, several participants identified an undercurrent of absurdity inherent to quarantine, gravitating towards images of bored tourists confined to their Chinese hotel rooms and receiving takeout from biohazard-suited attendants, or the returning Apollo astronauts, denied their tickertape parade and waved at by President Nixon through the window of a modified airstream trailer (which was itself later found, mysteriously, on a fish farm in Alabama). Set designer Mimi Lien and graphic designer Amanda Spielman (in collaboration with her brother, Jordan) are both creating projects that play on these more surreal aspects, with (respectively) evocative, depopulated dioramas of unexpected quarantine locations, and a tongue-in-cheek public health campaign filled with helpful tips on, for example, making the most of your time in quarantine, and relationship maintenance for couples divided by quarantine.

IMAGE: (left to right) Guest critic Bjarke Ingels, Jamie Kruse, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Yen Ha, Amanda Spielman, Thomas Pollman, and Joe Alterio, at Studio-X for our “Concept Crit.” back in October.

IMAGE: Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, speaks to the group about the possibilities of the space, Week 5.

Of course, quarantine does not only apply to people and animals. Its boundaries can be set up for as long as needed, creating spatial separation between clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, healthy and sick, foreign and native – however those labels are currently applied. Many of our readings and discussions focused on the technical and extraordinary engineering challenges of designing to prevent the forward contamination of Mars, for example, or the spread of plant pests in an era of climate change. Artists Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of Smudge Studio are focusing their attention on what they have termed the “limit-case” of quarantine: plans for the million-year containment of nuclear waste in geological repositories around the world.

IMAGES: Richard Mosse, Ed Keller, and Thomas Pollman, Landscapes of Quarantine studio, Week 2.

IMAGE: Jamie Kruse presenting at the Landscapes of Quarantine studio.

IMAGE: (left to right) Brian Slocum, Jamie Kruse, Thomas Pollman, Mimi Lien, Amanda Spielman, guest speaker Laura Kurgan, Glen Cummings, Katie Holten, Yen Ha, and Michi Yanagishita, Landscapes of Quarantine studio, Week 7.

As a project of spatial control, the implications of quarantine ripple outward to affect the layouts of buildings, the shapes of cities, the borders of nations, and sometimes even the clothes we wear. Our discussions have ranged from the fictional potential of quarantine (currently under investigation by writer Scott Geiger) to the infrastructural requirements of quarantine as it applies to both orchids and the President of the United States (architect Thomas Pollman, of the NYC Office of Emergency Management).

IMAGES: Giant Post-Its filled with notes about quarantine (4 of about 60).

Meanwhile, architects Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita of Front Studio are addressing the implications of inserting quarantine spaces into the fabric of the city, while architect Brian Slocum has been examining the way quarantine spaces blur the border, sometimes moving it into a bubble inside a country or home, and sometimes externalizing it back to the country or place of origin. On other evenings, our conversations have revolved around the dystopian overlap between border controls and health screening (the focus of sound artist Daniel Perlin‘s research), as well as what quarantine might look like from the point of view of the vector, bacteria, or virus that it is set up to control (a twist that stems from architect and filmmaker Ed Keller‘s thoughts on networks and political science fiction).

IMAGE: Kevin Slavin pointing something out to Katie Holten on the Staten Island Ferry, while Geoff tweets.

IMAGE: The ceremonial re-interment of the quarantined dead, St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Staten Island.

Scott, Kevin, and artist Katie Holten were brave enough to rise early on a cold October morning to witness the ceremonial re-interment of the quarantined dead on Staten Island. Later in the studio, Katie visited North Brother Island, the final home of Typhoid Mary, while photographer Richard Mosse flew to Malaysia as part of his meandering exploration of vampires, family history, and the Nipah virus.

IMAGES: Abandoned buildings on North Brother Island, which was used in late nineteenth and early twentieth century for the quarantine and isolation of typhus, tuberculosis, and smallpox cases. It is now overrun with kudzu, an invasive species. Photographs by Katie Holten.Her trip to the island was made possible by Michael Feller of the Parks Department, Tim Wenskus of the Natural Resources Group, and Todd Croteau, who drove the boat!

Over the course of the studio, we’ve been lucky enough to welcome some fantastic guest speakers, who generously donated their time to help us think through the potential of our topic and ways to organise our forthcoming exhibition (coming to the Storefront for Art and Architecture this spring), as well as offering valuable feedback on independent projects. Thank you, Jake Barton (founder and principal of Local Projects), Bjarke Ingels (architect and principal of BIG), Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA), Joseph Grima (Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture), Laura Kurgan (Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University), and Glen Cummings (founder of graphic design studio, MTWTF).

Some of them are even brave enough to return for our private beta-testing session this weekend, where they will be joined by several others, including Vito Acconci, Andrew Blum, Julie Lasky, Cassim Shepard, and Alice Twemlow, who have volunteered to spend their Saturday afternoon in Quarantine!

IMAGE: Katie Holten, Glen Cummings, and guest speaker Laura Kurgan talking at Quarantine, Week 7, hosted by Front Studio/Harvest.

IMAGE: MoMA‘s Paola Antonelli visited the Landscapes of Quarantine studio during Week 5.

IMAGE: Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, talking with Daniel Perlin during Week 5.

IMAGE: Bjarke Ingels watches Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita present at Studio-X. To their right are Kevin Slavin, Amanda Spielman, Thomas Pollman, and Joe Alterio.

Landscapes of Quarantine, as an independent, unaffiliated design studio, has been lucky to find several generous hosts: we’ve held our meetings at Storefront for Art & Architecture, Studio-X, Front Studio/Harvest‘s HQ, and architect Toshiko Mori‘s studio, and we are extremely grateful to each of you.

And although we’ve had our last meeting, Landscapes of Quarantine is not over! Watch for our forthcoming exhibition (showcasing the projects developed by studio participants) opening at Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC, in March 2010, and the accompanying Storefront Books publication (which is being designed by Glen Cummings of MTWTF, and thus will be beautiful, as well as interesting). BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography will also continue to post occasional quarantine interviews: make sure to check out our previous conversations with Sara Redstone, Krista Maglen, Abraham Van Luik, Dr. Georges Benjamin, Jonathan Richmond, David Barnes, Alison Bashford, and Thomas Mullen.

And finally, a huge thanks to our studio participants for making every Tuesday evening this autumn something to look forward to – and to everyone else who has read this far! More edibly relevant posts will follow shortly…

IMAGE: Benjamen Walker from WNYC setting up to record our discussions, Landscapes of Quarantine, Week 8.

IMAGE: (left to right) Jordan Spielman, me, Joe Alterio, Josh Cummings, Katie Holten, Daniel Perlin, Yen Ha, Michi Yanagishita, and Scott Geiger chatting at the end of our final meeting, Week 8.

The story starts with researchers at the University of Haifa, who partnered with Jordanian colleagues to study “a variety of reptile, mammal, beetle, spider and ant lion species on either side of the border in the Arava region.” According to the university’s press release, the team “set out to reveal whether the border – unknown to the species – could affect differences between them and their numbers on either side of the frontier, even though they share identical climate conditions.”

The question, in other words, is whether a border that exists only as a line drawn on a map, rather than an impassable physical boundary, can somehow become instantiated as biological fact?

IMAGE: Satellite image of the Israel–Jordan border in the Arava desert, via Google Maps.

The research team, led by Dr. Uri Shanas, found substantive differences in the numbers, diversity, and even behaviours of animals on either side of the border:

The first study inspected the reptile population and revealed that the number of reptiles is similar on both sides, but the variety of species in the sandy areas of Jordan is significantly higher than the variety found in the sands of Israel. A second study revealed that Israeli gerbils are more cautious than their Jordanian friends, while a third study showed that the funnel-digging antlion population in Israel is unmistakably larger than in Jordan.

These differences were then analysed to find evidence of a hypothetical “border effect.” Dr. Shanas concluded that although the yard-high strand of barbed wire tracing the political demarcation “is not capable of keeping these species from crossing the border between Israel and Jordan,” it nonetheless “does stop humans from crossing it and thereby contains their different impact on nature.”

IMAGE: (left to right, top to bottom) Dorcas Gazelle via Wikimedia, Antlion via Trevor Jinks, Red Fox via Wikimedia, Gerbil via Wikimedia.

For example, the antlion surplus in Israel can be traced back to the fact that the Dorcas gazelle is a protected species there, while across the border in Jordan, it can legally be hunted. Jordanian antlions are thus disadvantaged, with fewer gazelles available to serve “as ‘environmental engineers’ of a sort” and to “break the earth’s dry surface,” enabling antlions to dig their funnels.

Meanwhile, the more industrial form of agriculture practised on the Israeli side has encouraged the growth of a red fox population, which makes local gerbils nervous; across the border, Jordan’s nomadic shepherding and traditional farming techniques mean that the red fox is far less common, “so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree.”

I’m fascinated by the fact that differing land-use practices, environmental legislation, and agricultural technology on either side of the political border have shaped two distinct and separate ecosystems of out what would otherwise be a shared desert environment.

Human activity has imprinted a virtual division onto the biological landscape, creating an immaterial, yet effective, behavioural border.

IMAGE: Fifty-five of Europe’s most common plant pests. Wall poster via Scandinavian Fishing Year Book, who – as their name indicates – were founded in 1955 to produce an annual directory of Scandinavian fish companies. They have since diversified.

Later in the conversation, we discussed what plant quarantine at Kew actually looks like, in terms of the functional and technical challenges involved in designing a new Quarantine House. Along the way, we touched on plant smuggling, invasive species, and the potential to create a Sudden Oak Death superstrain.

•••

BLDGBLOG: What do plant quarantine measures encompass – invasive species, plant diseases, or even genetically modified organisms? And who is in charge of enforcing plant quarantine in the UK?

Sara Redstone: Plant quarantine at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is concerned with controlling plant pests and diseases, to protect our living collections and the wider environment. In the UK, a number of different structures govern plant import restrictions, monitor invasives, and issue licences for quarantine and for genetically-modified organism (GMO) research. The rules for working with GMOs are laid out and policed by the Health and Safety Executive, but issues that relate to plant health, quarantine, and potential pests and diseases of plants are actually monitored and controlled by an organization called FERA (the Food and Environment Research Agency), which is a new agency within DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).

IMAGE: Diseased pear, from the USDA Pomological Watercolour Collection.

It can get quite complicated! Different organisations deal with plant health issues depending on where the plants grow and what they are. Unfortunately, the type of information you can get online relating to plant health and quarantine is not always very user-friendly. For example, inquiries about plant health, imports, and restrictions in Scotland go to the Scottish Office, but in England they either go to FERA or the Forestry Commission, depending on the type of organism. Licences to operate quarantine facilities depend on what type of material you are quarantining (plant or animal), the purpose of raising such material (to grow the plant itself or to grow potential pests or diseases), and various other factors. Meanwhile, GMOs fall under the Health and Safety Executive, as I said – but inquiries about GMO regulations go to DEFRA.

Ordinary members of the public quite understandably find this very confusing.

Edible Geography: What are some of the most worrying issues facing you in terms of plant pest control?

Sara Redstone: One particularly nasty tree pest, which is also a potential human health hazard, is the Oak Processionary Moth. RBG Kew is just one of many locations in South West London that has experienced this pest. Like the Browntail and other moths, during various stages of their life-cycle the caterpillars are covered in really brittle hairs that have a toxin in them. It can give you a nasty rash and may cause breathing difficulties or affect your eyes on contact. The moth came into the UK as eggs on imported trees from Holland – and the challenge we face is that we don’t typically quarantine trees from northern Europe. There is no legal requirement to quarantine material from within the EU, but the pest is widespread in the Benelux countries and Germany and is increasing its range on the mainland.

IMAGE: The Oak Processionary Moth. (Left) As pictured in a 2007 Daily Mail article titled: “Gardeners are mercilessly hunting down moths with hairspray and flame-throwers.” (Right) Tree infested with Oak Processionary Moth caterpillars. Photo taken by Ferenc Lakatos, University of West-Hungary, and found via the Centre for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health’s Bugwood Network.

What happens is that many Dutch, Belgian, and German nurseries raise trees and shrubs in areas in southern Europe, such as Italy, where the Oak Processionary Moth is already established. The climate and local conditions promote better growth than can be achieved in northern areas, so you get bigger plants faster. They then move the plants back north to grow them on the nursery for a period of time, to get the right shape, etc. This kind of movement of plants has resulted in a lot of pests increasing their range and moving northwards.

Once a pest is established in a those northern mainland European states, there’s no way to prevent it from spreading to the others, because there are no real boundaries. There are no geographic features that are going to prevent them from moving, and there are no trade barriers that are going to stop them, either.

Although Britain is an island, everything is very much geared towards free trade. Unfortunately, quarantine is usually secondary to trade. Most people involved in pest and disease control and quarantine will tell you that we like to employ what we call “the precautionary principle” but for political and economic reasons, governments don’t always choose to operate that way.

One of my concerns is that we know about these tree movements on the European mainland, and we know that the Citrus Long-horned Beetle, for instance, is now fairly well established in the Lombardy district in Italy – which is not that far from some of the major tree-growing areas in Tuscany. What’s going to prevent those Long-horneds from spreading to northern Europe, given the movement of plants, and then coming over to the UK?

IMAGE: Citrus Long-horned Beetle identification guide, via the Indiana Cooperative Agricultural Pest Survey’s list of Indiana’s Most Unwanted Invasive Plant Pests.

We’ve already had an instance where infested Acers were grown in China, shipped over to mainland Europe, and then sold in the UK. The beetle has a long larval phase – two to three years when it is undetectable by normal means, though I understand stethoscopes are now being used by some plant inspectors in an effort to try and detect larvae feeding. Usually the only way to detect them is finding the emergence hole in the tree base – or finding the adult beetle, after the fact. Were all the infested trees found? Were all the beetles present in the consignment destroyed? We don’t even know where all those plants have gone. It’s really bad news.

BLDGBLOG: What sort of measures are in place to deal with these threats?

Sara Redstone: Material that comes in from the European Union is generally uncontrolled. There are Plant Passport regulations that apply to certain types of plant, but there’s no record of exactly what plant material is moving and where it’s from. For instance, even if it says it is from, say, Holland, it doesn’t mean that that material originated in Holland. It may have arrived via Holland in a container ship from China.

IMAGE: Sample Plant Passport from DEFRA’s Plant Health Guide to Plant Passporting.

Different countries have different standards for quarantine and plant health. You can understand that in some countries where it’s really a struggle to make a living, different rules apply. There is an organisation called the International Plant Protection Committee (IPPC), which makes recommendations – but there is a real lack of shared standards for plant quarantine.

One thing that would be really useful now would be a series of suggested blueprints for quarantine buildings. For example, quarantine houses in places like the tropics can be relatively simple: mesh-screen, poly-tunnel-type structures with restricted access are fine. You don’t always have to use chemicals to sterilise things – in the tropics, you can use heat. Even in the UK, we can quite often use solar gain in our glasshouses to sterilise an area, provided we know what we’re trying to kill. The same methods have been used for years in agriculture; farmers will put polythene over an area of land, and then rely on the sun to sterilise the soil.

IMAGE: Healthy and diseased plants in a side-by-side comparison, via the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

Edible Geography: Here at Kew, what is it that you are quarantining? Why does Kew need a quarantine house?

Sara Redstone: We use plant quarantine (isolating, screening and treating plants) for incoming and outgoing plants where we’ve determined they may be a risk associated with their movement. For example, if we want to repatriate material to a country as part of a conservation project, the last thing we would want to do is inadvertently introduce a new pest or disease, so we isolate and treat plants before moving them, to reduce that risk to an absolute minimum.

At present we’re in the process of planning a new quarantine facility. Our intention with the new building is that all plant material that is sent to RBG Kew and our sister garden, Wakehurst Place in Sussex, will come to this one point – our new “plant reception” – regardless of its origin. This means we can improve our data capture, we can make sure that all incoming material is compliant with the necessary legislation, we can do an initial inspection, and, if we think there’s a risk, we can also do the isolation and screening.

England is not like the United States, where the USDA maintains the plant quarantine service. If, say, the New York Botanical Garden requests plant material from us, they will send us an import permit and shipping labels, and the labels will direct those materials to the USDA quarantine service, who then send the material on.

We operate quite a different system in the UK and European Union. What happens here at RBG Kew is that we have a licenced quarantine facility, which is approved by FERA and licenced by DEFRA. This gives us the ability to quarantine plant imports that come to the gardens from outside the European Union.

IMAGE: UK Phytosanitary Certificate, via the Plant Health (England) Order, 2005.

These usually fall into two main types. One is the type of material that comes in with a phytosanitary certificate. If, for example, somebody went to Costa Rica and they wanted to bring back material from a botanic garden there, they would arrange for all the necessary permissions, but they would also arrange for an inspection by a representative of the national plant protection organization there. If the plant material was free of pests and diseases, it would be issued with a phytosanitary certificate. Normally, that’s only valid for two weeks – so there’s quite a short window of time in which the plant can travel. Once material reaches RBG Kew, it then has to have another inspection, because at the time it was inspected in Costa Rica, there may have been no visible signs of pests or diseases, but, in the time it takes to reach the UK, something might have developed. So that’s one kind of material that is received into quarantine.

The other type of material we receive into quarantine is what we call “natural source,” or “wild-collected,” material. We operate under a Letter of Authority to import wild-collected material whose movement would normally be prohibited or controlled. An example of that kind of material would be vines from Kyrgyzstan. Their movement is strictly controlled because, in the European Union, vines are a really important crop. You’ll find the same thing in most countries – a lot of cereal crops are controlled, for example, because they can have such a dramatic impact on the horticulture and agriculture of a country.

BLDGBLOG: Do you ever quarantine controlled or banned plants, such as kudzu or marijuana, to prevent them from entering the country?

Sara Redstone: We wouldn’t normally consider that quarantine. It’s more a case of restricting access of non-authorised people to the plants, or restricting the release of non-native species into the environment. When we quarantine plants, it’s not to do with excluding a particular plant type so much as excluding the diseases or pests that those plants might be harbouring.

Invasive plants like kudzu (Pueraria montana) aren’t banned, although we have a few species like Japanese Knotweed (Fallopia japonica) and Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) which are illegal to intentionally allow to spread to natural areas. I’m not sure whether UK authorities would prevent specific plants being imported. Marijuana (Cannabis sativa), whether in THC-containing forms or hemp, requires a Home Office licence to produce and process.

IMAGE: Kudzu-infested forest. Photo courtesy John D. Byrd, Mississippi State University.

We do provide a service for UK customs authorities. If they make a CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) seizure, we have a department here that will go out to help to identify the plant and tell them whether it’s been wild-collected and if it’s of conservation value.

Edible Geography: Can you give any examples of outbreaks that have happened while you’ve been here?

Sara Redstone: We haven’t had any outbreaks here due to failure of quarantine. The impact of an outbreak on our collection could be very serious, particularly if it involves a known quarantine organism where the only sensible treatment is to destroy the plant material. That could cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds to eradicate. It could also threaten rare species, restrict people’s access to the collections, and prevent us from supplying material for research to our own labs and to other botanic gardens.

We have had a couple of recent pest outbreaks in the UK. I’ve already referred to our ongoing Oak Processionary Moth problem. The interesting thing is that when that outbreak happened, the moth wasn’t even recognized as a quarantine organism and it wasn’t clear which government department was going to manage it.

IMAGE: West Virginia Department of Agriculture’s pest collection, via the Massachusetts Introduced Pests Outreach blog.

The problem with all of these things is that it’s so much easier to prevent an outbreak than it is to deal with one that’s already in progress. Unlike in the U.S., where you seem to be more geared up to a rapid response once something has been identified, it takes us a long time in the UK and we need more resources in place to do the monitoring and undertake control.

One issue, for example, is making sure we have the right chemicals in place. It’s not enough to do a risk assessment; we also need a list of specific, recommended control measures. And if the recommendation is, for example, “Use this particular chemical,” then we need to make sure that somebody in the UK is able to supply it.

BLDGBLOG: What’s involved in thinking through the design of a new quarantine facility?

Sara Redstone: One of the design challenges is to make sure that we not only meet current legislation, but that we also anticipate some of the changes that might need to happen. Global trade and climate change are having an impact already.

Even trying to decide the scale of our building is a challenge: we want to build-in flexibility, and we don’t want to hamstring the organization in the future. At the same time, we have to be able to afford to run the facility! What we know from the experience of others is that there have been lots of examples of institutions where they’ve spent vast sums of money – tens of millions of pounds – on creating fabulous infrastructure, but it has then been so expensive to run that they haven’t been able to operate it. We can’t afford that. That’s not what we’re about at RBG Kew.

IMAGE: Bay leaves showing symptoms of infection by Phytophthora ramorum, the “causal agent” of Sudden Oak Death. Photo courtesy D. Schmidt, Garbelotto Forest Pathology Lab, UC Berkeley, via the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute.

On the other hand, to contain pests and diseases, we need to assess the risks associated with every single plant movement. As a result, over the past few years we’ve routinely quarantined material that there’s no legal need to quarantine. However, we’ve felt that there was a practical need and a moral obligation to quarantine seed material that comes from, for example, California, or from other states where we know there’s a really severe problem with Sudden Oak Death. Particularly with the understorey material, we’ve germinated it all in quarantine and grown it on so that we can screen it. The last thing we want to do is introduce Sudden Oak Death – particularly the American form, because there’s an American and a European strain, and the concern is that the two will meet and produce a super-strain.

The other factor is the human resource. It’s not enough just to have a building: you need to have people who are trained and who understand how to operate it.

Edible Geography: Quarantine is always a question of time. How do you decide how long to grow these understorey plants, for example, before you can determine whether they are healthy or sick?

Sara Redstone: That’s all part of the risk assessment process. I work with our local inspector and an excellent scientific support team at FERA to make those kinds of decisions. For example, the inspector might look at a batch of seedlings and say: “That group hasn’t grown very well – but this group is fine, and they’ve reached three months and we can see that they’re still healthy.” What he might then say is, “The healthy ones can move on” – and he’ll do me a release certificate – “but those other ones ought to stay for a little bit longer.” Or he might say: “I don’t like the look of that first group: destroy them.”

This is always decided on a case-by-case basis – which is very different from GMOs, where there are fixed containment levels. What we’ve done with our new building is use the containment levels for GMOs as a guideline when talking to potential suppliers. For example, in terms of treating our water waste, we’re saying to them that we need an equivalent for containment level 3. That means we’re looking at steam-sterilising all our liquid waste. We’ll take off the solid fraction, and that will be dried and incinerated – or it will be sent through the autoclave – but the liquid will all be steam-sterilised.

The other thing is that all the technology we use needs to be proven and validated. For example, I know of some places where they use an ultraviolet system for treating water, but there are potential problems with that, because if you have high levels of organic matter in the water, things can, in fact, survive. We just can’t take that risk, because it might result in us not getting a licence. And if you put an awful lot of effort and millions of pounds, into doing something, it would be an awful shame to fail just for the sake of wanting to try something new and cool.

IMAGE: Proposed façade for the new Quarantine House at RBG Kew, courtesy Wilkinson Eyre architects.

Edible Geography: Where does the innovation and experimentation in quarantine design take place, if not in designing a new facility?

Sara Redstone: That’s the problem – it doesn’t. It’s the kind of thing that somebody somewhere should do so that we can test new systems. The trouble is that resources are usually limited in this area and facilities tend to be expensive both to build and operate well. Usually you can’t afford to experiment.

We do test our systems once they’re in place, of course. With the steam-sterilisation system that we’re planning to install, we’ll be regularly inoculating it with particular organisms and then testing the processed material to make sure it works. It’s simple, but it’s effective.

I’ll show you the plans as they stand now [unfolds plans]. In the scheme as it stands, we have a reception area which will receive all plant material that comes into RBG Kew: seeds, bulbs, shrubs, trees, everything – whether it’s from the EU or not.

IMAGES: Site plan for the new Quarantine House at RBG Kew, showing the proposed site (marked with the red outline, above) and the proposed floor plan of the new structure (below). Courtesy Wilkinson Eyre.

Edible Geography: What sort of volume is that?

Sara Redstone: RBG Kew receives, on average, between three to five and half thousand accessions a year, and an accession can be quite a large group of plants – it needn’t necessarily be a single plant, if they’re all genetically identical.

The material will then be processed via the inspection area and then either go into the licenced facility (medium and high containment pods) or into the unlicenced large specimen store. The large specimen store’s primary function is to enable us to hold, monitor and, if necessary, treat or destroy trees, shrubs and other plants originating from within the UK and EU.

The large specimen store is basically what we call a high hat. It has a solid roof, which can be shaded, and insect-proof sides. The insect-proofing is aphid proof, so it’s not particularly small – it’s around the 1mm² mark.

Adjoining the store will be the licenced quarantine facility, which will be split in two: high containment and medium containment. Both spaces will be governed by the licence issued by DEFRA. Both units have air cooling – though they each use a different cooling method – and they’re going to be kept at negative air pressure.

IMAGE: Gradations of Containment in the proposed floor plan for the new Quarantine House at RBG Kew, courtesy Wilkinson Eyre.

We also have to build in systems to allow for a failure in the power supply. As we’re on the edge of a flood risk zone, the building itself will sit on top of a concrete raft and the plants will be on benches. That will give us quite a lot of leeway as far as any risk from flooding goes. As added protection we also intend to have slots at the doorways. We can then put in barriers and reinforce them with sandbags, in the case of a serious flood. I also want to have an operating procedure that says, if we get advanced warning that there’s going to be a really catastrophic flood event, we’ll load everything in the incinerator and destroy it. Frankly, if that happens, most of London is going to be completely stuffed, so there’ll be bigger problems to deal with!

At the entrance to the licenced area, we’re putting in a cold lobby. It will be kept at 0ºC and it will have a freezer in it for lab coats. People will put on lab coats before they go into the medium and high containment areas and put them back in the freezer when they come out, where the coats will be sterilised. There will also be an air-circulation fan so that, if anything like seeds or pollen has got stuck to people, it will be blown off into the cold.

Edible Geography: Will there be chemical showers as well?

Sara Redstone: No, that would be considered excessive, to be honest. It’s all about assessing and managing risk proportionately. We’re not a research facility raising pests or diseases for experimentation, so the risks are somewhat less. We have an emergency shower in case somebody’s been contaminated, during pesticide spraying, for example, but our working procedures and precautions like the cold lobby and freezing of lab coats should provide the appropriate level of bio-security.

At every stage, we’re assessing and trying to minimise risk. If we received particularly precious seeds that I thought might harbour a problem, what I would look to do is send them to the seed bank so that they can X-ray them and we can weed out the bad guys straight away, to be destroyed. We also use external treatments – for example, peroxide or other chemicals. Apart from anything else, peroxide is great because it can help trigger germination and is biodegradable.

IMAGE: Design proposal for the new Quarantine House at RBG Kew, courtesy Wilkinson Eyre.

With everything, you have to give it a bit of thought first. Which is why we say to staff, for goodness sake, please don’t turn up on the doorstep with plant material. We need advance notice so we can risk assess the material.

Other parts of the facility include the loading bay, where there’ll be some storage, the incinerator area, and the inspection bay.

BLDGBLOG: What do you do with the output from the incinerator?

Sara Redstone: The ashes are usually incorporated into the soil heap. It doesn’t go into the compost because it blows around; instead, we usually dig it into the soil piles, so it doesn’t go to waste and it is recycled.

The facility also includes a potting area, which contains a small chemical store and a water-treatment area. And there are going to be insectocutors everywhere!

One important design feature is that the plant room is entirely separate, so that the only way people can enter is through that external door. This means that anyone coming to do maintenance on the electrics or whatever doesn’t have to go through any of the quarantine procedures, because they don’t have access to any other part of the building. It’s human nature to prop open the door if you’re feeling warm – but that sort of thing just can’t be allowed to happen inside the licenced areas.

Edible Geography: How will the temperature-control system work?

Sara Redstone: For the individual zones within the greenhouse, each “pod” will have its own small unit climate control panel on the outside of the house, which will control air circulation, fans, and fogging. We’re going to use fogging not just to control relative humidity, but also, in part, to control temperature gain. It’s quite an effective way of modifying the temperature without huge energy input. And we’re going to use external shading – rollers in tracks – because that’s more efficient than internal shading. Although this is the UK, you may be shocked to hear that heat is the biggest problem we have in maintaining the right kind of environment for our glasshouses.

There’s going to be limited lighting because we’ll be either propagating material or maintaining material – we’re not trying to promote lush growth. There will also be a central computer that controls all the zones, and my intention with the new one is to have direct access from my mobile phone and home computer.

One of the intentions with the new building is to minimise energy costs as much as possible. The building also needs to be capable of being operated by only a few staff – it mustn’t be labour or energy intensive!

For plants that have really critical temperature requirements that are at the lower end of the spectrum – for example, we had some orchids in from Patagonia – it’s hard to provide those kind of environmental requirements reliably through a glasshouse system. So what we’re going to use is a couple of growth cabinets with lighting, because we feel that’s the most cost-effective solution to that particular headache. We’re also hoping to use rainwater harvesting for part of our irrigation system, and we’re trying to use the most energy-efficient materials.

IMAGE: Curved polycarbonate sheets for glasshouse construction, courtesy Unigro.

One of the vendors we’re considering makes quarantine houses using curved polycarbonate sheets. You get a lot of lengthways expansion with polycarbonate sheets, and the curve helps accommodate the expansion and contraction, while maintaining a really good seal. The other thing I like is that we can pump air through a cold water spray and then actually circulate it up and over the curve of the structure, which can give a much more even temperature regime across the bays.

BLDGBLOG: I see the facility has been designed by Wilkinson Eyre. How is working with them going?

Sara Redstone: Well, the design isn’t finished yet. The final version will be designed and built within the restrictions we’ve incorporated – we are really getting into this now, I think. It’s quite different from anything else they’ve done and the combination of very specific needs, but a lack of specific technical guidelines, makes it a challenging and interesting exercise. We want the building to look attractive, but containment and functionality are its key priorities.

IMAGE: Proposed north west elevation of the new Quarantine House at RBG Kew, courtesy Wilkinson Eyre.

The other interesting design feature is that there’s a five-metre exclusion zone around the building – a completely solid surface with no plant material. We arrived at that measurement through discussion with the Plant Health and Safety Inspectorate, and it’s important to have a clearly marked exclusion zone. Although the old quarantine building began its life being relatively isolated, pressure to use every available square metre of behind-the-scenes space for support activities at RBG Kew means this is no longer the case. We’ve located the new building so we can make use of some of the existing roadway as exclusion. That way we’re not wasting space, and we’re closer to some of the services.

This particular layout also enables us to add on another block, if we need to in the future.

Edible Geography: How many plant pest & disease quarantine facilities are there in the UK?

Sara Redstone: A lot of universities have small quarantine facilities, often used for GMO work or raising pests and diseases rather than specifically quarantining plants. Rothamsted have a really excellent facility for experimental work. Central Science Labs at the FERA headquarters in York also have quarantine facilities.

Edible Geography: Does the Royal Horticultural Society have one?

Sara Redstone: No, not that I’m aware of. The National Trust doesn’t have specific quarantine facilities either – although, having said that, they have been working very hard on bio-security issues, triggered, as they will tell you, by outbreaks of Sudden Oak Death in their collections in the West Country. They have taken stock of the situation and realised they, like many organisations across the UK, needed to improve current practises. I think it says a lot for the organisation that they have been so open and self-critical.

The head of this programme for the National Trust is Ian Wright, a head gardener from a Trust property in Cornwall. He realised that through lack of resources, budget challenges, and other difficulties, we’ve moved away from basic good practises: cleaning your materials, cleaning your boots, sterilising your blades, all those kind of things. For example, if you bring in new plants, then you should keep them isolated for a period of time, just to make sure they’re clean – but we seem to have lost a lot of those good habits.

So Ian has worked with David Slawson from FERA to produce a lot of information, as well as posters like this [unfolds poster] to go up inside potting sheds, to remind people that quarantine doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be something as simple as a poly-tunnel, or an area behind a shed, where you keep things separate. Containment can be as simple as remembering to wash your boots and wash your hands – basic good hygiene.

IMAGE: The National Trust’s “Clean Leaf” plant quarantine poster.

In fact, one of the things that we’ve been encouraged to think about by DEFRA is providing a limited commercial service, because there are so few plant quarantine facilities in the UK. This new quarantine facility at RBG Kew will be quite a major one, relative to what’s available in the UK. The thing I’m really excited about is the fact that we’ll have the capacity to control more tightly the stuff that comes in from the European Union and around the UK. That’s increasingly important.

Edible Geography: Did you have any qualms about the decision to locate such a major quarantine facility in the middle of one of the world’s greatest collections of rare and valuable plants?

Sara Redstone: We are in a vulnerable location, in a number of ways. We’ve done a major environmental impact assessment, and even looked at the option of having it off-site, but that in itself created major problems. One of the real issues is that it’s not enough just to have the building; you have to have the human resource.

It also makes sense to have a quarantine facility where the movement occurs. We’re not just accessioning new plant material – we’re also doing quite a bit of repatriation. I think it’s really important that we should be able to return safe material to its country of origin, especially if it’s seriously endangered or on the verge of extinction. We have to be able to hold our hand on our heart and say, “It’s clean, there are no problems, and your only challenge will be making sure it grows and that something doesn’t eat it or squash it.” It’s not just for stuff coming in – it’s for stuff we’re sending out that quarantine is crucial, too.

BLDGBLOG: How do you interact with the Millennium Seed Bank? Do you quarantine seeds for them?

Sara Redstone: No, they have a quarantine area in their own lab for seed material. However, if they want to grow any controlled or prohibited seeds – for verification by herbarium staff, for example – then that has to be done within our facility. So they can examine seeds, but if they want to germinate them and grow them on, then they have to come here.

IMAGE: Incredibly beautiful electron micrograph images of seeds (above, a Lamourouxia viscosa seed, below, a seed from Franklin’s sandwort) conserved at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank. Photographs by Rob Kesseler and Madeline Harley, via The Guardian.

Edible Geography: You’ve mentioned that, in the UK, there isn’t a system where the government gives you the approved quarantine facility plans and you follow them to the letter. How can you be sure your design will qualify for the appropriate licence?

Sara Redstone: Well, that’s the case for plant quarantine – the system for GMOs is very different, and I don’t know how animal quarantine operates. In our case, I have constant contact with my colleagues in FERA who will be involved in evaluating the new build plans. If they have an issue with a particular system, they’ll let me know. For example, I had an inspector on site yesterday who asked, “Have you thought about the door seals? I know that these are really good doors but, to get a good seal, what you want is a little up-stand at the bottom of the door for the seal to butt up against.” It’s all sorts of small details like that.

IMAGE: Proposed entryways at the new Quarantine House at RBG Kew, courtesy Wilkinson Eyre.

The difficulty with the project from my point of view has been to make sure it gets enough time and attention now, because I know that if I’m still here when it gets built, my ongoing sanity is going to rely on having made the right choices so that we can physically manage the building. I think that, for projects that are very specialised, like this one, the people who are going to use the buildings often don’t get enough time to actually sit and evaluate what the building needs to do.

Edible Geography: Just writing the brief for it must have been quite a challenge!

Sara Redstone: To say the least. Version 10 got issued about three weeks ago. My biggest worry is that I’ve missed something. There’s just no wriggle room.

Edible Geography: Did you take any of your ideas for your plan from other facilities that you’ve seen?

Sara Redstone: Yes. I actually persuaded them to employ a colleague from Rothamsted, Julian Franklin, as a consultant. He is a major quarantine nerd – not only is he really knowledgeable about the plant side of things, but he’s obsessed by technology, so he can tell you that so-and-so needs to be at this many atmospheres, or amps, or whatever. He’s been a real find. In fact, one of the risks of a project like this is that there are very few experts around – and, especially in the current climate, there are lots of companies who are desperate for work who may claim expertise they don’t really have.

BLDGBLOG: I know you said you want to avoid innovation at all costs, but is there any aspect of the new facility that will be genuinely new or unprecedented?

Sara Redstone: Nobody’s built a screening house quite like ours, I don’t think, but it’s really just an adaptation of things that we’ve seen done elsewhere. Ultimately, it will all be technology that’s been used elsewhere, but perhaps not in quite the same way. Other facilities have air showers, for example, but most of those haven’t also had a cold lobby. We are combining things – but we’re also trying to play safe.

IMAGE: Air Shower diagram, via the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).

Edible Geography: What is the old quarantine facility like – and what will happen to it once the new building is completed?

Sara Redstone: It’s  a modified commercial glasshouse, about twenty-five years old. It wasn’t specifically designed as a quarantine house: it has no automatic shading and controlling the internal climates reliably can be a challenge. The water here is very hard, as well, so the building has had a lot of issues with equipment.

The new facility should be operational by late autumn 2010. This time next year, we’ll be thinking about doing the smoke tests and the pressure tests and so on. And once stuff has been screened in the new facility, it will go into the old house and be held there for short periods of time until it goes onward to the display houses.

BLDGBLOG: I’m also curious about what happens off-site – for instance, if there is an outbreak somewhere in the Midlands or up in Yorkshire, do you have a field quarantine unit of some sort who can rush out and seal the place off in situ?

Sara Redstone: Not yet, that I know of. You’d need to talk to DEFRA and the Non-Native Species Secretariat who monitor and deal with IAS (invasive alien species). There is a working group working on developing a protocol for a rapid response against NNS (non-native species), but I’m not sure if they have agreed the way forward.  If the outbreak relates to plants then you’d have to notify – depending on what the host and pest or disease is – either FERA or the Forestry Commission. If the organism isn’t quarantine-listed then a pest risk analysis (PRA) and other detailed work may be required and this can take some time to do thoroughly. Depending on where the outbreak is and what it is, there’s then also the need to identify who will attempt to eradicate it and how – and where the resources will come from.

What we really need to do is make everybody aware of the dangers of moving plants – it doesn’t matter if you’re a business or an individual. I had a person tell me recently that they deliberately altered their suitcase so that they could bring back cuttings from their holidays overseas without being detected. People get very confessional –  when they hear what my job is, they have this urge to tell me about all of the plant material they’ve brought through customs without declaring, or all of the farms they visited overseas and didn’t mention on their immigration forms. It’s my worst nightmare.

IMAGE: A fairly standard list of materials that must be declared at the border and potentially quarantined to prevent the import of pests and diseases. This particular brochure is Canadian.

There have been outbreaks of quite serious pest problems in botanic gardens and plant collections. These have probably, according to the experts at FERA, been the result of things like exotic flower arrangements or of bringing in fruits from around the world to explain to children about plants. Those routes need to be cut off, as well.

Individuals can sometimes be ignorant of the impact they could have by smuggling – sometimes they don’t even realise that they are smuggling – plant material into and out of the country. We’ve got a bit of money as part of the project to actually do some interpretation on site. I’m hoping that we can do quite a lot to explain to people the risks of moving plant material, and the impact of plant pests and diseases, by having signage in the display houses and in public areas on site.

IMAGE: The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service’s “Big Bugs!” advertising campaign, designed to educate tourists about the risks of bringing in restricted materials.

For example, did you realise that there’s a risk, when you’re moving plants that have soil around the roots, of introducing a pest called the small hive beetle, which can eradicate honeybees? Bees are getting a lot of press at the moment – for very good reason – and so one of the things I’m hoping we can do is use that sort of example to show that the consequences when you smuggle that plant back from your holiday, or when you bring back a jar of local honey, or wax candles, or a wooden sculpture, may be more far reaching than you realise.

If you put things in context, most people are responsible enough not to flout the rules – I hope. We’re all in this together – we all share the same planet.

•••

This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a course pack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.

For other interviews in our quarantine series, check out Until Proven Safe: An Interview with Krista Maglen, One Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham Van Luik, Isolation or Quarantine: An Interview with Dr. Georges Benjamin, Extraordinary Engineering Controls: An Interview with Jonathan Richmond, On the Other Side of Arrival: An Interview with David Barnes, The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen, and Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford.

More interviews are forthcoming.

Alison Bashford is Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, as well as Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Her work has examined the political, cultural, and spatial implications of quarantine at a variety of different scales, from immigration law and geopolitics to the design of nineteenth-century hospitals.

She is the author of Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, and co-editor of both Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies and Medicine At The Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present.

We spoke to Bashford about the ways in which quarantine can both define and blur borders, the use of vaccination scars as health passports, and quarantine’s role in enforcing social hierarchy and racial prejudice.

•••

Edible Geography: To start with, how did you become interested in quarantine?

Alison Bashford: I got to quarantine through my early work on the concepts of purity and pollution. My first book, Purity and Pollution, was about how ideas about clean and dirty spaces and clean and dirty bodies, and the separation between them, came into being in the nineteenth century in the context of hospitals, and the discovery of germs, and so forth. After that first book, I started studying infectious disease management on a larger scale. I fairly quickly moved into looking at maps of early quarantine stations and the division of pure and polluted spaces there, as well as the various diseases that were managed that way.

My work is not always focused on Australia, but I quickly realised there was quite a particular Australian history to be sorted through here. Many diseases that have been endemic and epidemic in other parts of the world, such as cholera, never even arrived in Australia. In Australia, the quarantining of the entire continent came to be actually important in terms of keeping diseases out, but also symbolically incredibly important, as part of the project of producing White Australia. I gradually realised what a rich history there was in terms of thinking about the racialising of the new nation in 1901 as, essentially, a public health project.

After that, I became very interested in island spaces as well – places where people with various diseases were quarantined in a much more permanent way. Amusingly, I live right next to the quarantine station in Manly. I’d written about quarantine for a long time – long before I lived there – and it’s just been terrific, living on the place that I was writing about for so many years.

IMAGE: The North Head Quarantine Station, Manly, Australia. Photo by Edible Geography.

IMAGE: Spa treatment at Q-Station , Manly, Australia, via.

Edible Geography: It’s interesting what they’ve done to the quarantine station at Manly, in terms of turning it into a luxury hotel. The afterlife of quarantine stations is a fascinating topic in and of itself.

Bashford: Yes, absolutely. The developer gave me a good tour around it just before it opened. It was extraordinary listening to him talk about the concept of putting a day spa on the site of the old hospital buildings, which is were the most infected were kept.

BLDGBLOG: A great deal of your work examines the political nature of quarantine and the relationship between quarantine and the border. I was particularly struck by the fact that, in some cases, the biological border has preceded the national border, as in the case of the line between Egypt and Sudan.

Bashford: A lot of historians have written about borders, but I think what’s sometimes overlooked is that this temporary line, marked by quarantine practices that maintain a disease on one side of the border and not the other, is often the earliest sign of what later becomes a national, territorial border.

IMAGE: As Egypt and Sudan gained their independence from Britain, the border between the two countries was determined by drawing a straight line from the sea through Wadi Halfa, a quarantine station on the Nile (which is now an underwater archaeological site due to flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan Dam).

This is also the case with regional borders. The boundary between the nineteenth-century Orient (as the Near East used to be called) and Europe was the place where cholera was controlled. Various quarantine practices were set up every year in and around the Mecca pilgrimage, because there was constant European anxiety that this mass movement – in a place that is just adjacent to Europe – would introduce cholera into Europe itself. So that boundary, which was not an actual territorial border but, rather, an important part of how Europe defined itself in relation to its most adjacent neighbour, the Orient, was made meaningful through very specific, very grounded, practices of inspecting people, putting them in quarantine camps, and monitoring or restricting their movement.

IMAGE: Routes to Mecca, and pilgrims on the Hajj (via here and here).

Edible Geography: You’ve also examined the way these kind of disease borders can define cities as well.

Bashford: Yes – in Imperial Hygiene, I really explored this idea of boundaries at different scales. I structured that whole book spatially. I started with a chapter about smallpox, vaccination, and the border of the body and skin, and I looked at the way that a vaccine introduces disease into the body, in order to create immunity.

Then I moved outwards to the scale of the city. I took Sydney as a place that had certain diseased zones that were quite disordered, and analysed the way in which the establishment of the quarantine station on North Head – in Manly – was an attempt to create clean and dirty spaces within an urban environment.

Then I moved outwards again to think about the entire Australian continent – and outwards again to consider international hygiene and quarantine measures, and the way that the entire globe, due to immigration restriction acts over the twentieth century, became criss-crossed by all kinds of lines of quarantine.

Edible Geography: In that context, I was particularly interested in your paper tracing the origins of the World Health Organisation and public health as a globally regulated phenomenon back to the International Sanitary Conferences, which were themselves convened to implement quarantine.

Bashford: The question of how to manage infectious disease is foundational for the League of Nations Health Organisation, and then the World Health Organisation. In fact, even the large philanthropic organisations, like the Rockefeller’s International Health Board, were attempts to prevent infectious disease, both by quarantine and also by hygiene education. In nineteenth-century Europe, the International Sanitary Conventions and Conferences were, in the first instance, about cholera, and the concern about the annual pilgrimage.

What’s intrigued me for many years are the way immigration restriction lines dovetail as quarantine lines. In spatial terms, I’m fascinated by the way this division of pure and polluted spaces can be architectural at a very small and local level, but can also come to structure the globe as a whole.

Edible Geography: Can you give an example of an encounter with one of these quarantine lines today?

Bashford: Airports are places where the demarcations of  quarantine lines are very clear, and biological or biomedical terms like “Sterile Zone” still cling to the various clean and polluted zones. “Sterile Zone” doesn’t actually mean sterile zone – it indicates a zone into which only authorized people can go.

IMAGE: Thermal scanners in the airport arrivals hall, Bali, via.

Airports still make the link between quarantine and the regulation of movement very clear. Historically, quarantine laws were the main way in which people’s movement over national borders was regulated. Almost all of the immigration acts that proliferated around the globe in the nineteenth century (which we still live with, every time we hand over our passport) were about quarantine regulations. Every immigration restriction act across the world, even now, always has a “loathsome disease” clause in it.

Edible Geography: Can you talk a little more about the relationship between health passports, or pratique, and quarantine?

Bashford: What’s interesting is that all of these identity documents – passports, visas, health vaccine certificates, and so forth – only become attached to an individual relatively late in time. Through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and into the twentieth century, in some cases – these documents would refer to the vessel on which you arrived into a zone, rather than to you as an individual.

IMAGE: Italian Health Passport, via the Disinfected Mail Study Circle.

For a ship arriving in Sydney Harbour, for example, there would be a certificate of freedom from disease that pertained to the entire ship, and that would be determined by the route on which the ship had come. If the ship had come to Sydney from London via what was then Ceylon, and if there was known to be an epidemic of cholera or smallpox in Ceylon, then that entire ship would be understood to be diseased and it would be put in quarantine for a certain period of time. I’m very interested in the way that, in the maritime world, the passengers and ship became one body, which could then be categorised as infected or clean, irrespective of the health or otherwise of the individuals on board.

One thing that I’ve always wanted to do more work on is the actual bodily inspection of people to determine whether they’ve got a vaccine scar, from the smallpox vaccine. It’s something that I know was practiced, particularly during an epidemic. Historically, before you had a passport or even a piece of paper that authorized your movement from one zone into another, people were not infrequently checked for a vaccination scar. You could only move from what was understood to be an infected zone into a healthy zone if you had a vaccination scar. It became a kind of bodily passport.

IMAGE: Smallpox vaccination scar, via.

The other fascinating thing about quarantine is that it dreams of being non-porous, but in fact, quarantine lines are always leaky. Quarantine, like today’s passports and visas, is much more about letting some people through and keeping other people out, than enforcing a total border.

BLDGBLOG: I’m also interested in the phenomenon of proto-states testing the limits of their power through bio-political practices – that is, experimenting with how they can control and regulate individual people, and doing so in the arena of medicine. Medical power becomes a kind of stepping stone toward national sovereignty.

Bashford: Certainly, the display of a line around a country – and hence territorial sovereignty – can be put into practice very clearly through quarantine practices. That’s where we started our conversation. Immigration restrictions and quarantine practices go hand-in-hand as the two intertwined practices that determine a border as a border for modern kinds of territory. This takes place at an imaginary level.

But there is a flip side to all of this: the apparent imperative to maintain hygiene and keep out disease sets up the territorial boundaries of a nation, but it also gives that nation an almost humanitarian license to step over its own border and into the territory of another state. Patrick Zylberman and Alexandra Minna Stern wrote about this in my book, Medicine at the Border.

Alexandra Minna Stern, in particular, writing about U.S. quarantine and yellow fever, discussed the way that quarantine at Ellis Island was about inspecting migrants and excluding some people, and thus setting up a sovereignty for the United States. She then went on to show us how the very concern about yellow fever was also a way in which the United States government could offer assistance to, intervene in, and set up hygienic measures in all of the nations adjacent to the south, as a kind of a first way in. Unsurprisingly, this was followed pretty quickly, either by territorial acquisition of those places or by transnational agreements and other extensions of influence. After the Spanish-American War, in a whole lot of places like Cuba, and eventually Panama, Puerto Rico, and even Guam, the first U.S. inroads were around quarantine and infectious disease measures.

So while quarantine and infectious diseases function to set up territorial borders and national sovereignties, for powerful nations and nations with pretty good internal health structures the management of infectious disease in a place over the border is quite a common way to extend sovereignty into that territory.

Edible Geography: So quarantine contributes to both a spatial out-sourcing or in-sourcing of the border? Quarantine is also inherently a zone of transition, and a “neither-one-thing-nor-the-other” space between healthy and diseased, inside and out. Ultimately, it seems to both mark and disturb the clarity of the border.

Bashford: Exactly. One article that I wrote about quarantine and tuberculosis is called “Where is the border?” It came out of work I was doing with colleagues in the UK about the difference between the Australian history of quarantine and the British tradition.

In Australia, quarantine took place from the physical borders of the nation outwards – the border was pushed way back to the point of origin of any intending migrant. Most people came to Australia from England, and your certificates of health had to be secured before you even got on the ship. This is completely different to the British tradition, because the UK was not, until after World War II, a country of immigration. In fact, the UK had very, very weak, and sometimes completely absent, quarantine laws.

My UK colleagues told me that today, if you have tuberculosis and you arrive at Heathrow airport, you’re not asked to get back on the plane or to get back on the ship as you would be in Australia. Instead, your name and address is taken and you’re asked to see a doctor in your local area. You’re entirely brought within the borders of the country, and then quarantined or monitored.

IMAGE: Tuberculosis detected by X-ray, via.

These island nations have very different histories of where the border is located. Recent British governments have tried to bring in what they call the Australian model – a system where people get their health checks done at the point of departure. It seems to be much more problematic in the UK than it is for nations that have a long history of rigid quarantine rules.

BLDGBLOG: Finally, what examples come to mind in terms of places of quarantine that are particularly striking for spatial reasons?

Bashford: Molokai, Hawaii – that’s one of the original leper colonies dating back to 1865. It’s currently managed by the National Park Service, but there’s a community of people with Hansen’s Disease still living there. It’s a fascinating place. It’s an island within a very remote archipelago, and it’s also on a peninsula. It juts out sensationally underneath the world’s tallest sea cliff. The cliff separated the lepers from everybody else, even on the island, and the island itself was clearly chosen to be separate from the other islands in Hawaii. Natural geographies are being put to use here as a way to create a place of quarantine and isolation.

IMAGES: Molokai, via Atlas Obscura, and.

In addition, nineteenth-century maps of quarantine stations are fascinating for the way that they demarcate zones even within spaces of quarantine. Usually they are divided by race and class – in the nineteenth century, there is typically a specific building within the quarantine station for Chinese passengers, for example. To me, these intricate divisions of space within quarantine stations capture social divisions instantly, and almost too obviously.

IMAGE: Map of Lawlor Island Quarantine Station, showing 1st and 2nd Class accommodation, via.

For our studio participants, we have been assembling a course pack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can still follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.

Thomas Mullen is the author of The Last Town on Earth, a novel set in a voluntarily quarantined village in the remote forests of the Pacific Northwest during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. From the book’s description:

The year is 1918. America is fighting a war on foreign soil that has divided the nation. Meanwhile, rumours of the spread of the deadliest epidemic ever are causing panic on the home front. The uninfected town of Commonwealth, Washington, votes to quarantine itself, and two young friends are asked to guard the town entrance and keep strangers out.

One day, a starving, cold—and seemingly ill—soldier comes out of the woods begging for sanctuary, and the two guards are confronted with an agonising moral dilemma.

The Last Town on Earth was named the Best Debut Novel of 2006 by U.S.A. Today – who describe it as “an absorbing depiction of a utopian town that attempts to keep the 1918 flu epidemic at bay” – and it won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Excellence in Historical Fiction.

We spoke to Mullen about his novel: the historical research that informed it, the moral implications of mass quarantine, and the inevitable impact of human fallibility on both political and medical utopianism.

• • •

Edible Geography: What sort of research went into writing the novel?

Thomas Mullen: The impetus for the book was an article that I read many years ago about an AIDS virologist who had studied the 1918 flu earlier in his career. It also mentioned, parenthetically, that there had been healthy towns in the Rocky Mountain states and in the Pacific Northwest that were so terrified by stories about how contagious the flu was, and how fatal it was, that they decided their best recourse for staying healthy was to block off all the roads leading into town and to post armed guards to prevent anyone from coming in. That just blew me away—it was amazing to read that this had happened—and I thought it would be a very dramatic first scene.

I was hooked by the moral dilemma of quarantine: what happens if, one day, you and your buddy are standing guard over your town and you’re presented with a lost traveler? He’s freezing, and he’s starving, and he’s begging for your aid. He needs food and shelter, or he might die. What do you do? Do you bring this person in? Do you try to be charitable, even if you know he might be carrying this awful virus that you don’t really understand? Again, it was 1918 and their understanding of the virus was certainly worse than ours is today. Or do you tell you the person: “Hey, I’m sorry, but I need to think of my friends and family and my town. I don’t know what you might be carrying, and you’re just going to have to die in the woods.”

That’s what made me want to write the book. I sat down and I read a few books about the 1918 flu—although I couldn’t find many. It had become this overshadowed chapter in history. That’s starting to change now; with the new concern about avian flu and H1N1, there’s been much more discussion of the 1918 epidemic. But, back when I started my research, it was hard to find much information.

I tried to find out about these towns that had done this—these sort of reverse-quarantines. That’s just a phrase that I invented; I don’t know if there’s a real phrase for it. Normally, quarantine is when something or someone is ill and they’re quarantined off so that they don’t spread their germs to the rest of us. But in this situation, the town that closes itself off is healthy. I called that reverse-quarantine.

I couldn’t really find anything out about these towns. In fact, when I was about three-quarters done with the rough draft, a historian named John Barry wrote what is now the definitive history of the 1918 flu, called The Great Influenza. I got that book and I read it—and it’s about 600 pages long, but he only gives about half a page to this phenomenon of Western towns that had closed themselves off. He says that it worked for some and it didn’t work for others—and that’s it.

IMAGE: Historical quarantine signage.

Edible Geography: Was reverse-quarantine a common phenomenon and just under-reported, or was it actually fairly rare?

Mullen: It doesn’t sound like it was very common. After all, if it only got about half-a-page in a 600-page book… It’s just something I could not find reference to very often.

They were probably small towns that were already fairly isolated, and therefore might not have left such a good paper trail for historians to write about. It must have been fairly unusual in the first place, because the flu spread very, very quickly, so usually it was too late. By the time you were thinking that maybe you should close the borders, people were already getting sick in your town—so you missed the opportunity.

Meanwhile, because our nation was at war, there was censorship of the press. Newspapers didn’t want to report bad news. People didn’t often know what was happening until it was too late. Instead, newspapers would have a little pick-me-up story about how some soldiers in a nearby army base had a bad case of the flu… but they’re feeling much better now. Meanwhile, people are looking out their windows and seeing hearses! If there had been a free press, and if the government had not been distracted by a war and had shared information about it sooner, it’s possible that more towns would have tried quarantine. But for most people, by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late.

I think the reason why the towns that did this were in the Rocky Mountains and in the Pacific Northwest was that they were inland and fairly isolated. The flu had started, most epidemiologists believe at this point, in army bases, and then it had traveled along the rail lines, from army base to army base; and from port to port—meaning cities like Philadelphia and Boston and New Orleans and San Francisco—and it gradually trickled inland. Some of the mountain states were the last to get infected – and they were the ones where, finally, the story was out. They were the ones who knew what was happening, so some of them were able to make this decision.

Ultimately, though, because I’m a novelist—I write fiction, and I can make things up—I decided, okay, maybe it’s better that I don’t know exactly what happened in these towns. Maybe that frees me up a bit. I did as much research as I could into how the epidemic worked, how the disease itself worked, and what the political environment was like at that time in America—what these characters were doing and what they were thinking about. But, as for what had actually befallen towns that tried this, I was sort of unconstrained by historical fact—which, I think, was a good thing.

BLDGBLOG: That raises the question of your own interest, as a novelist, in the idea of quarantine. What are the narrative possibilities of quarantine that drew you to it, as a plot device?

Mullen: As a novelist, you need there to be some stress, because that creates the tension between the characters. It leads them to act – sometimes in inappropriate or regrettable ways.

One of the things that I was really interested in doing with this book was studying the way in which people act differently from the way they would like to think they act, under stress. We have this idea of ourselves as good people, and we have these moral guidelines that we like to believe we follow, but when we feel threatened and we feel that our family is in danger, we tend to bend some of these rules. Whether that means shooting a stranger who’s trying to come into your town, or whether that means shutting out your neighbor because you think they might have a cold – things like that.

I was interested in looking at the stresses that these people would be under. First of all, externally, they feel they’re safe in their little town—but the world around them is dangerous, with everyone being ill. Also, in those political times, there were things happening that the utopians in my little mill town didn’t agree with; they’re very anti-war and anti-capitalist. They feel at odds with the world, and they’re closing themselves off from a world that they disagree with in many ways. But, then, when the disease does get into the town, then they’re at odds with each other: some are sick, some are healthy. Then there are new stresses that are introduced; they start running out of food, and out of things that they need to maintain their quarantine.

IMAGES: The town of Jerome, Arizona, during the 1918 flu outbreak; note the face masks. Courtesy of the Jerome Historical Society, via the Sharlot Hall Museum.

Edible Geography: Much of your book is focused on the moral dilemmas associated with implementing and enforcing quarantine. What drew you to that?

Mullen: That was something that I didn’t seek out to do, but, as I was writing the story, it came naturally. You have these utopian idealists and political activists who are anti-war and pro-union, and they’re early suffragists. Some of them support the quarantine because they want to stay healthy; they want to protect their families. But some of them, because their political beliefs are so strong, realize that, hey, I have these beliefs because I want to make the world a better place. I don’t want to just make my town a better place. And what are the moral implications of turning our back on a world that is suffering? Isn’t it our obligation to do something that would improve the world? Some people feel that the best way to make a better world is to focus on yourself, and on your own community, and to hope the world will emulate it. Others—more activist—think they need to get out there. I’m interested in that conflict.

And, of course, that line is itself blurred—because they all support the quarantine initially. Even those who opposed it refused to leave. So, theoretically, everyone in the town in chapter one is cool with the idea. But, as time goes on, some people are thinking, god, I’m bored, I want to get out of here; or we learn that they’ve been secretly sneaking out to visit women or buy booze. So even the people who had initially agreed with it came to feel that it had been imposed on them. They change their minds—but it’s too late.

BLDGBLOG: In a way, you illustrate the fundamental impossibility of a total quarantine: there’s always something getting in or getting out, usually due to human weakness or error.

Mullen: I can’t remember if that’s something that I always intended—that I was going to have these people sneaking out—or if that was something that came up halfway. But it just seemed right to me. The whole dilemma of utopian politics, in general, is: can we really make the world a perfect place? I think there is enough human frailty and vice out there that something will always sabotage it.

Medically speaking, I know that quarantine can work, but, with something on the scale of a whole town, I can’t help but wonder: would it really work? It didn’t in the book because it was this slapdash affair; you’ve got randomly chosen people standing guard. But I think if it were to happen now, with a city or a state, you’d have National Guard or police or army officers standing guard, and I don’t think they would bend quite the way my characters would bend. But then you have the other problem—where it becomes a police state—and people aren’t allowed to come and go. It might work to keep the disease out, and people might thank them for that, but they might also feel like their rights were being violated. It gets really complicated.

IMAGE: A sick ward for those infected with the 1918 Spanish flu.

Edible Geography: Why do you think there has been such a historical silence about the epidemic?

Mullen: My partly cynical answer is that we Americans just don’t know our history very well!

I did a panel once with two other writers who both had novels set during World War I, and they were both British. They talked about how World War I is a big deal in the UK: how everybody knows about it; you see plaques everywhere listing the dead; and there were some towns where, in one night, the entire population of young men died, because they had this idea that men in the same town could enlist together and fight in the same regiment. This meant that you got to enlist with your friends, and you got to fight with your friends, which was great for morale—but what it also meant it that you died with your friends. There were literally towns where all the young men died on the same day, in one of those major battles.

It was a profound experience for so much of Europe, where they fought the war for years on their home soil. For America, on the other hand, we were only involved militarily for about year. We declared war earlier on, but it took a while just to get an army together, because we didn’t even have a standing army. And, of course, it wasn’t fought on our own soil. So the flu took place during the war, and the war itself is just not very well-taught or well-understood here.

But, also, in terms of why do people know about the war and not the flu, can it be that history textbooks can only handle one big subject at once? They’re writing about the war and they just didn’t think they needed to mention the flu? A disease doesn’t have the geopolitical themes that you get to play with when you’re teaching about a war or a politician or a movement; it was this horrible thing that just happened.

Also, I wonder how much of it was simply the fact that the people who lived through it just wanted to build a wall around those memories; they didn’t have our mindset, where we need to come to terms with our past and expose our scars in order to find closure. I think the survivors, to some degree, probably felt that it’s over – and it was horrible – but the last thing to do was to talk about it.

At this point, it’s enough generations away that there’s very little memory of it left – people only remember being told about it. Another horrible thing about the flu was that it killed so many adults and it left so many orphans. A lot of the survivors were very young children, who really don’t remember it for themselves.

But it was interesting to me that so many of the great literary lions in the early 20th century were people who lived through this when they were teenagers or young adults—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Steinbeck—and none of them wrote about it. It now seems like of course you would write about this.

Somewhat disappointingly, this turned out to be a publicity stunt on the part of Friends of the Earth, complete with protesters wearing corn costumes and waving banners. Nonetheless, the story behind the stunt is fascinating.

IMAGE: Friends of the Earth protesting on behalf of non-GM corn (AFP/Dominique Faget).

The only GM crop currently authorised for commercial cultivation in the EU is Bt maize, which has been engineered to resist the corn borer pest.  According to this report issued by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the EU member country with the largest amount of Bt maize under cultivation is Spain:

In 1998, the first planting of Bt corn (transgenic event Bt-176 by Syngenta, Basel) in Spain reached 20,000 hectares. The cultivated area remained fairly stable up to 2003, when the EU approved another Bt corn (transgenic event MON-810 by Monsanto, St. Louis). By 2006, over 53,000 hectares of Bt corn were grown in Spain—15% of the country’s total corn hectarage.

IMAGE: Non GM corn and the corn borer pest (Wikimedia).

However, France (and several other EU countries, including Germany) have banned the cultivation of Bt corn MON-810, citing concerns “related to the long-distance dissemination of pollen, the disposition of the Bt toxin in the environment and its long-term effects on non-target organisms.” David Carpio Sanchez, “spokesperson” for the non-GMO corn, claimed that,

GM corn is grown in Spain without any precaution against contamination…. Faced with this threat to its survival, the corn is forced to flee the country. Better to become French than genetically modified!

Plants cannot (yet) legally claim asylum, but the idea that corn might seek to change its citizenship for fear of inter-species persecution is a perfect illustration of the logical absurdity built into the (very necessary) project of plant health management. The problem is that while national governments possess the legislative authority to regulate plant movement, plants and their pollinators tend to observe biological borders, rather than state sovereignty.

So, on the one hand, you have plant movement controlled through many of the same legal mechanisms that apply to humans: plant passports, plant repatriation, and plant quarantine. (In the UK, much of this legislation is managed by the fantastically named Natural England.)

Meanwhile, the plants themselves are merrily cross-pollinating, and extending or shifting their “natural” range across national borders in response to climatic or environmental conditions, frequently in direct contravention of the laws governing their movement by humans.

The use of legal devices to enforce biological barriers is, of course, at the heart of quarantine regulations. Perhaps one outcome of this autumn’s “Landscapes of Quarantine” design studio could be draft legislation to establish a protocol for international agricultural asylum?

For a more practical exploration of the challenges involved in enforcing plant quarantine, look out for a forthcoming interview (to be posted here and on BLDGBLOG) with the Plant Health Protection Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

IMAGE: Quarantine facility and hospital ward on Swinburne Island, in the NYC archipelago.

It’s been an extremely eventful month since Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG teamed up to announce “Landscapes of Quarantine,” an eight-week, intensive, independent design studio to be hosted this autumn in New York City; its brief is to create original and thought-provoking design projects that explore the spatial implications of quarantine. The results of the studio will then be the subject of an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in spring 2010. The practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest containment strategies to touch on urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. In the early twentieth century, for example, “quarantine lines in Africa offered a clear and politically useful demarcation for new ‘international’ borders between Sudan and Egypt,” as historian Alison Bashford points out in her book Medicine at the Border. From Boccaccio’s Decameron and disinfected mail protocols to bio-secure airlocks, plant smuggling, and Matt Leacock’s Pandemic board game, quarantine is a fertile territory for architects and designers to explore. You can read more about the studio here.

IMAGE: From the “Federal and State Isolation and Quarantine Authority” of the United States, updated January 18, 2005.

Over the past few weeks, we have been blown away by the quality (and even quantity) of applicants interested in the studio. Indeed, narrowing the pool down to a manageable group of participants has been a very tricky process. We have been concerned with achieving a usefully diverse mix of backgrounds, media, and individual strategies of approach, while holding numbers low enough that the studio can still function as a weekly discussion group. In the end, we are excited to announce a truly amazing list of participants:

Joe Alterio — Illustrator, Animator, and Comic Book Artist (joealterio.com)

Joe Alterio is an illustrator, animator, comic creator, and artist, interested in narrative structure, collective creativity, and the physical manifestations of story-telling. Joe has been at the forefront of using new technology to push forward the graphic narrative medium, from his early 2004 mobile comic The Basic Virus to his most recent work with Robots and Monsters. Alterio’s work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Boing Boing, Drawn!, The BLDGBLOG Book, and many other publications.

IMAGE: RobotsAndMonsters.org illustration, Joe Alterio

Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse – Artists, smudge studio (smudgestudio.blogspot.com)

Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse are co-directors of smudge studio, a collaborative, non-profit media arts studio based in Brooklyn. Ellsworth is Associate Provost of Curriculum and Learning and Professor of Media Studies at The New School. Her recent book, Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, is about the aesthetics of mediated learning environments. Kruse is an artist, independent scholar, and freelance graphic designer.

Scott Geiger — Writer, Architecture Research Office (aro.net)

Scott Geiger is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for fiction. A contributor to magazines such as The Believer and Conjunctions, Geiger also writes for Architecture Research Office, a 2009 Finalist for the National Design Award for Architecture. As a Cleveland native, schemes to rescue America’s postindustrial cities stalk his work.

Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita — Architects, Front Studio (frontstudio.com) and “ladies who lunch” (lunchstudio.blogspot.com)

Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita are principals of Front Studio Architects, named one of the “world’s 50 hottest young architectural practices” by Wallpaper magazine. Their work has been featured internationally in Icon, AD: Cities of Dispersal, and the New York Times, and it was recently included in the London Yields exhibition at the Building Centre in London. “The Invisible Gate,” their competition entry in the 2005 Gdansk International Outdoor Art Gallery, is currently under construction.

IMAGE: Farmadelphia, Front Studio.

Katie Holten — Artist (katieholten.com)

Katie Holten has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and, in 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She currently has a solo exhibition at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and a public artwork installed in the Bronx, called the Tree Museum. Holten was born in Dublin, Ireland, and is now based in New York City.

Jeffrey Inaba — Architect, INABA Projects (inabaprojects.com), Director, C-LAB (c-lab.columbia.edu), and Editor, Volume Magazine (volumeproject.org)

Jeffrey Inaba is the Director of C-Lab, an architecture, policy and communications think tank at Columbia University‘s GSAPP, as well as Features Editor of Volume Magazine. With Rem Koolhaas, Inaba co-directed the Harvard Project on the City, a research program investigating contemporary urbanism and planning worldwide. Before starting INABA, he was a principal of AMO, the research consultancy founded by Koolhaas. Inaba has also taught at UCLA, Harvard, and SCI-Arc, and he lectures worldwide.

Ed Keller — Architect and Filmmaker, AUM Studio (aumstudio.org)

Ed Keller is a designer, professor, writer, “media architect,” and former professional rock climber. He is co-founder with Carla Leitao of AUM Studio, an architecture and new media firm based in New York and Lisbon. Keller is an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design, and he has taught at Columbia’s GSAPP, SCI-Arc’s MediaSCAPES, Pratt, the University of Pennsylvania, and many more. Keller’s work has been featured in ANY, AD, Wired, Metropolis, and Assemblage, among others.

Mimi Lien — Set Designer (mimilien.com)

Mimi Lien is a designer of sets and environments for theater, dance, and opera. After studying architecture at Yale University, she began making paintings, installations, objects, and designs for performance. Her work has been seen at The Joyce and The Kitchen, and she is a recipient of a 2007-2009 NEA/TCG Career Development Program award.

IMAGES: Top: Mimi Lien’s set design for Beckett’s Endgame. Bottom: Ruined swimming pool at Uday’s Palace, Jebel Makhoul, Iraq (2009); photo by Richard Mosse

Richard Mosse — Photographer (richardmosse.com)

Richard Mosse is an Irish photographer based in New York. He travels extensively with the assistance of a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts. Recent forays have taken him to Gaza, the Yukon Territories, and Iraq. Mosse has a forthcoming solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery, opening on November 19th, and new video work will be exhibited at Barcelona’s Ca L’Arenas, in a year-long exhibition cycle, investigating war and its representations.

Daniel Perlin — Sound Designer, Perlin Studios (danielperlin.net)

Daniel Perlin is a New York-based artist and sound designer. Perlin operates across media, creating video, objects, installations and performances. His work has been heard at Chelsea Art Museum, the Whitney Biennial 2006, D’Amelio Terras, TN Probe Tokyo, Temporary Contemporary Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, and BCA (Beijing), as well as in such films as Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Errol Morris’s Fog Of War, and Phil Morrison’s Junebug.

Thomas Pollman — Architect, New York City Office of Emergency Management (nyc.gov/oem and thomaspollman.com)

Thomas Pollman is an architect and amateur cartographer based in New York City. He currently works in the Geographic Information Systems Division at the NYC Office of Emergency Management, where he works to enhance situational awareness for first responders through the deployment of geospatial technologies. Pollman is a registered architect in the State of New York.

Kevin Slavin — Urban Games Designer, Area/Code (areacodeinc.com)

Kevin Slavin is managing director and co-founder of Area/Code. Working with media companies, museums, brands, and foundations around the world, Area/Code focuses on games with computers in them. Their work frequently extends game systems into the real world—and the other way around. Prior to founding Area/Code, Slavin was an artist and advertising executive.

Brian Slocum — Architect, Polshek Partnership Architects (polshek.com)

Brian Slocum is the recipient of a 2008 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for ad hoc infrastructures, a design research project focusing on the deployment of scaffolding and alternatives for its spatial exploitation. Slocum was a contributor to Pamphlet Architecture #23 and is currently an Associate at Polshek Partnership Architects.

IMAGE: Tourist guide to New Ephemera by Amanda Spielman.

Amanda Spielman — Graphic Designer, Graphomanic (graphomanic.net) and SpotCo (spotnyc.com)

Amanda Spielman is a graphic designer at SpotCo, a New York-based design studio and ad agency that specializes in creating artwork for Broadway theater. Previously, she spent seven years in editorial design. Her work has appeared in The Design Entrepreneur, Fingerprint, Graphis, STEP, SPD, and metropolismag.com. Spielman graduated from the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts, and holds a BA from Vassar College.

Lebbeus Woods — Architect, Author, and Educator (lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com and lebbeuswoods.net)

Lebbeus Woods is an architect and educator. He is co-founder of RIEA.ch, an institute devoted to the advancement of experimental architectural thought and practice, and author of Pamphlet Architecture #6 and #15, among many other articles and books. His works are in private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, MAK (Vienna). He has received the Progressive Architecture Award for Design Research, the American Institute of Architects Award for Design, and the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. He is currently Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City.

IMAGE: Lebbeus Woods, Lower Manhattan, 1999

It’s hard to overstate how honoured we are to work with practitioners of this calibre; we look forward to eight solid weeks of inspiring conversations and even more interesting work. Expect frequent updates throughout the autumn – in particular, during the week of October 5th, when we will begin to publish (on both BLDGBLOG and on Edible Geography) a series of original interviews with quarantine historians, public health policy experts, biosafety consultants, and more, placing quarantine into its unpredictably extensive context. By making the studio discussions and our own research material public, we hope that anyone who has been inspired by the studio brief – and by the subject matter of quarantine – will be inspired to pursue their own projects, outside the necessarily limited walls of the studio.