Doing nothing can take the constructive form of alternative world-building

Evidence

The political quality of “doing nothing”—of not building at the West Berkeley site—is obvious here. But besides refusing development, what the Ohlone members have proposed is more than nothing. In 2017, Ohlone matriarchs Ruth Orta and Corrina Gould worked with a Berkeley landscape architect to create a different vision for the site: a forty-foot-high mound, echoing the shape of the original shellmound, covered in California poppies. The plan would also restore other native vegetation, create a dance arbor for Ohlone ceremonial use, and daylight a section of Strawberry Creek, which runs underground through the site. While this living monument would be of obvious importance to indigenous folks, I consider it also an incredibly generous gesture to other East Bay residents, who stand to inhabit this place more consciously. Gould herself described the potential site as an opportunity for all of us simply to remember “our compassion, conscience and civility, to learn to be human again, together.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 661

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the concrete heart of ‘manifest dismantling’ as the reader needs it defined — not passive refusal but an affirmative, imaginative counterproposal.
• SEED: Could build an essay on refusal-turned-proposal as a political form, contrasting NIMBY ‘not building’ with the shellmound plan’s affirmative vision.
• XREF: connects to: Business-derived self-assessment rituals reproduce the sense that no alternative exists. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2105; Not doing nothing differs from wholly escaping the world or other people — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 36