Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene

"There’s love and death here, fear, fascination, hope, and the breaking of the world. Dee has written an absolute triumph.”―Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk

Over the past hundred years, gulls have been brought ashore by modernity. They now live not only on the coasts but in our slipstream following trawlers, barges, and garbage trucks. They are more our contemporaries than most birds, living their wild lives among us in towns and cities. In many ways they live as we do, walking the built-up world and grabbing a bite where they can. Yet this disturbs us. We’ve started fearing gulls for getting good at being among us. We see them as scavengers, not entrepreneurs; ocean-going aliens, not refugees. They are too big for the world they have entered. Their story is our story too.

Landfill is the original and compelling story of how in the Anthropocene we have learned about the natural world, named and catalogued it, and then colonized it, planted it, or filled it with our junk. While most other birds have gone in the opposite direction, hiding away from us, some vanishing forever, gulls continue to tell us how the wild can share our world. For these reasons Landfill is the nature book for our times, groundbreaking and genre-bending. Without nostalgia or eulogy, it kicks beneath the littered surface of the things to discover stranger truths.

"In his delightful jaunt through gull taxonomy, behavior, and lore, Tim Dee casts his feathered protagonists as indomitable heroes of the Anthropocene―thriving in our cities, colonizing our culture, and repurposing our trash as treasure. Next time a gull snatches your fries, you’ll find yourself not cursing a petty thief, but admiring one of our planet’s grittiest, savviest survivors.”―Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager and Crossings

Tim Dee is a radio producer, television broadcaster, acclaimed author of Four Fields and The Running Sky, and editor of the anthology Ground Work.