The case for green water

What it really means to be Team Algae

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I spent the last week on a sailboat in the Chesapeake Bay, during which I spent many long hours riding the wind and pondering the blueness and greenness of waters. By now, the president’s failure to summon blue water into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been roundly mocked and rigorously mined for metaphorical meaning. He came in to drain the swamp and instead he created one! critics said. He can’t even win a war against algae! others proclaimed. It’s not fair that the pool’s algal bloom is getting all the attention while the algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico are not! environmentalists complained. While the president blamed “criminally made algae” and arrested Olympians, the real culprit is his own administration’s cosmetically driven instruction to turn off the bubblers, the New York Times scooped; or to give no-bid contracts to the companies that did the doomed repairs, including one literally named “Greenwater Services.”

But none of this commentary explored a more fundamental question.

Why does the water have to be blue in the first place?

More on that, below.

Cerulean Water Is Dead Water

There is a kind of Uber-water worshipped in beach novels and soap operas and swimming pools. It’s water that is crystal clear and appears cerulean blue.

But by revering this water as “pure” and “pristine,” in a way we are implicitly positioning life itself as a form of pollution, a contaminant that must be repelled by impervious barriers, chemically sterilized and deported. Clear, blue water is water that is low in nutrients and chlorophyll, the green pigment made by living things that photosynthesize, magically turning sunlight into energy and providing the basis for all life on earth. It’s dead water.

Trump’s efforts to make the reflecting pool blue is not just a superficial cosmetic fix. It’s part of his larger project, which is to enact a certain order of nature. In this vision, nature consists of pure types with intrinsic properties that irresistibly arrange them in a particular order in relation to each other and to geography.

The underlying basis for this order is spiritual, which is why it is revealed through aesthetics and power. The blue water is naturally more beautiful and pure than the green or brown water. Men are naturally more powerful than women. The people with white skin are naturally the masters and those with brown and black their servants and slaves. The people whose ancestors were born in the country naturally “belong” in it and people who are newly arrived do not. Crossovers, hybrids, and migrants are intolerable. This is not because they harm anyone or because they require scarce resources, which they don’t. Pointing that out has almost zero political effect because that’s not what the objection is about. Hybrids and migrants are intolerable because they violate the purity of types and their natural order. The threat they pose is not instrumental; it is existential.

For Trump, newcomers to America are “poisoning the blood” of the country; for Stephen Miller, Haitians who’ve spent decades building families and businesses in the US can be summarily and forcibly relocated to an island wrecked by violence and centuries of punitive colonial extraction because “Haitians live in Haiti.” “I mean, it would be crazy for us to say that Haitians couldn’t live in Haiti. It’s their country,” Miller said. They belong there just as bats belong in caves and beavers in dams. It’s only natural to banish them!

This is not policymaking: its “purification” and “cleansing,” to restore a clean, orderly nature, by turning unwanted living beings into things that can be destroyed or repelled without moral qualm. Stalin did it when he described unwanted people as vermin and pollutants who had to be “subjected to ongoing purification”: the Stasi, the secret police in East Germany, when they described their attacks on people who lived near the border with West Germany as “Operation Vermin.” Pol Pot murdered hundreds of thousands and called it a “cleansing” that would render Cambodia “purified.”

The confounding messiness of nature’s continuum

There was a moment in the 18th century when Western publics might have embraced a different vision of nature. At the time, European naturalists searched for a system of classification that would allow them to understand the wealth of biodiversity they’d discovered in their journeys of conquest. Two taxonomic systems competed for primacy. The French naturalist and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens and Menagerie in Paris George-Louis Leclerc (aka the Comte de Buffon) detailed his taxonomy in a 36-volume encyclopedia, Histoire Naturelle. For him, all of nature consisted of an unbroken continuum, separated only by “imperceptible nuances” and “unknown gradations,” Buffon wrote. The solidity of rock, the contours of waterways, and the habits of living creatures did not express some fundamentally unchanging material nature. They were just momentary expressions of processes in flux, with no fixed substance. Permanence was an illusion. What was real was change.

But while Buffon looked at the mess of biodiversity—the frogs and the toads and the capybaras and koalas and the light-skinned Polynesians and dark-skinned Asians—and focused on the underlying similarities between them, his rival, Carl Linnaeus, looked at the same confusion of biodiversity and sought out the distinctions. Charles Darwin called their competing approaches that of “lumpers” and “splitters,” a choice encountered in any discipline that attempts to create order from a confusion of data. Either you lump things together based on unifying commonalities or you split them into as many categories as possible based on their subtle distinctions. Buffon was a lumper.

Linnaeus was a splitter. For Linnaeus, nature consisted of living things with intrinsic properties that affixed them to precise locations on the planet and separated them into rigid categories with clearly drawn borders. Red Americans belonged in America; White Europeans in Europe; Black Africans in Africa, and so on. Drawing on medieval ideas about the Great Chain of Being, each type rested on its own particular rung of the moral ladder, with white European men at the very top, just below the angels. (I tell this story in more detail in my book, The Next Great Migration.)

Being more suitable for the purposes of commerce and European empire-building, the Linnaean system won the day. Later, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection appeared to complete the picture of nature Linnaeus drew, explaining how from a common ancestor all the various Linnaean types emerged.

The perpetual dilemma for this rigid view of nature is that while messy dynamism can be ignored, it can never be fully erased. What to do? The Nazis blamed cosmopolitanism and civilization for the result. Germanic and Nordic people had evolved ineluctably through Darwinian processes of survival of the fittest, they thought, rendering them spiritually and physically superior and “rooted in the soil,” but civilization had unlocked natural borders and blurred categories, allowing nomadic Jews and Roma and migrants—vermin and pests—to seep in and hybridize with pure, wild types, degenerating them.

Like Trump’s, Nazi efforts to restore their imagined order in nature extended to the non-human landscape. Nazi gardens had to be full of “native” plants, with “foreign” plants allowed only when they helped “express the laws of life” as one Nazi-era landscape architect put it, or when they could be hidden from passersby. Domesticated, captive animals were another example of degeneration from superior, pure, wild types. Biologists such as the ethologist Konrad Lorenz compared their supposed stupidity and ugliness to that of their naturally superior and more beautiful wild counterparts. At the Berlin Zoo, Lorenz’s associates embarked on their own Nazi purge, attempting to breed domesticated cows to be more like their superior and more beautiful wild ancestors, the aurochs.

The irony is that if the superiority of pure Germanic people, or pure wild animals, or pure blue water actually were the result of some law of nature, there would be no need to work so hard to actualize these properties. Nobody needs to pull the rain out of the clouds for it to fall from the skies to the ground. The law of gravity does it all by itself. The fact that the pool’s water must intentionally be made blue--like the fact that the government must deprive trans people of their rights for them to go underground and round up and expel migrants for them to disappear—is because in fact nature is blurry and mixed and hybrid.

Team Algae

Fittingly, Trump’s ill-fated war on hybrid “dirty” water began when a friend from Germany visited and complained to him about the reflecting pool. “It’s filthy-dirty. The water is disgusting looking. It’s not representative of the country,” the friend said, the Washington Post reports.

Trump apparently thought turning the reflecting pool a pure, clean, and properly American blue would be easy. Coat the concrete basin with epoxy and fill it with chemically treated municipal waters—human-manufactured materials that have already been sanitized of messy nature. These are “artificial” materials! But the chaotic hybridity of nature is omnipresent, even when rearranged by monkeys like us. There’s no sealed barrier between categories, which continuously seep through shifting, porous borders. The chemically treated water has bioavailable phosphate in it. The air all around it teems with microscopic algal spores, dormant creatures from the dawn of life on earth. They came and nourished themselves and reproduced according to their own self-directed logic, regardless of what the monkey had planned. For a moment, the water was rich, green, and alive.

Three cheers for Team Algae. Count me in.