Neon And Starlight

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Neon And Starlight, 36x36, acrylic on canvas, 2006

“NEON AND STARLIGHT” can appear to be metaphors for two incompatible, mutually exclusive opposites—artificiality and wild nature.  And yet, perhaps this sense of incompatibility is a measure of our limits rather than reality.  We once overlooked deserts and jungles and mountains as dangerous wastelands needing our use to be “activated.”  Now, we understand these landscapes to be complex, dynamic ecosystems.  We envision post-industrial societies as having become separate from such landscapes—as “neon,” if you will, as artificial rather than natural, and incapable of being wild.  And yet, now, even with its destructive eco-footprint, global urbanization may be beginning to present to us as a cutting edge of wild ecological adaptation. 

Our contemporary understanding of “wildness” and “wilderness” that seem to finally be rational and realistic describes something obvious and permanent are still fluid and biased.  Our eco-literacy is newborn rather than mature.  Our visions and our actions, still homocentric.  Rather than being separate from natural Earth processes, global urbanization may be an integral expression of the larger Earth ecosystem.  It is an intuitive response to the rapid rate of population growth, and one that has been more effective in reducing the rate of growth than all of our intentional environmental advocacy efforts.  Appearing to be nearly the antithesis of wildness, the city-form is beginning to be explored as a living, ecologically adaptive ecosystem that can be optimized.  THE LIVING CITY explores this possibility and why it may be the critical locus for the contemporary renascent task—that of optimizing the integration of human life into the larger Earth ecosystem, rather than aspiring to design for separation as if it were possible.