Memoir Project:

Over the past five decades—as I moved from practice to scholarship to activism—I identified a pattern already lived by my ancestors. It informs my current book project:

FACTS MIGRATE: A Memoir of Maine Infrastructure

In this work I propose the conditions of living on Earth are not fixed—they migrate, if only a little. If the voters, activists and decision-makers (for whom this book is written) long for a return from Trumpian uncertainty to orthodox Modern, or Sublimely Fixed Facts, they should be cautious of what they wish. More important, readers will see that action, at any scale, matters. We are all migrants building a common future. The stories I have to tell are all personal—they track interdependent organisms seeking a home--people, animals, forests, technologies and algorithms.  Their stories are told in five parts:

Section one is a memoir of my own family’s tortured migration from Northern Ireland to the United States in the Mid-19th C. Over six generations, the Moore family migrated from Belfast to New Orleans, Cincinnati, Indiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and to Maine. As my ancestors built artifacts of metal, they also forged questions about the technological facts used to assemble the infrastructure of the new nation.

The three center sections of the book reconstruct uniquely Maine stories about contemporary infrastructure systems of food (seaweed), waste (community composting) and housing (single-family homes digitally printed from sawdust). In these chapters I narrate how relationships between human, nonhuman and technological migrants develop into systems-of-systems, or what we now call infrastructures. These contested relationships are sometimes life-enhancing, sometimes fatal, but never final. Finding home is, for everyone, an interminable project. Sections One through Four make this tension palpable through the use of abundant images, some with extended captions, which provide readers with a second mode of interpretation.

In the fifth section, I consider how the trajectory of each story might be deflected by action—my own, and that of the rich personalities I engage in transit. As a whole, the book is a very human and accessible interpretation of a very complex problem: how infrastructures initially reflect our competing social values; then, direct our inconsistent choices for the future; and finally, materialize relationships between humans, nature and technology—whether we intend them or not.