Lance Kinseth, Self as Landscape, 48”x60, 2015
IN THE GREAT WORK, theologian Thomas Berry suggests that the task for
the 21st century involves the integration of human life into the
larger Earth ecosystem. However, contemporary
human life seems to be moving further away from nature. Since 2000, the majority of people
inhabit cities and this is anticipated to increase to 70% by 2050. Berry suggests that this task will
require the intensity of a renaissance because of the way that it will alter
our fundamental understanding of human nature.
Berry’s task
begins to seem possible because urbanization
is driving ecologically adaptive features. Remarkably, for example, global urbanization is
unintentionally reducing the rate of global population growth to a degree which
decades of intentional environmental activism have not been able to
accomplish. Because of the rate of
reduction, there is even the guarded possibility that the global population
might be lower at the end of the century than it was in 2001 (W. Lutz et al,
The end of world population growth. Nature, Vol. 412, No. 6846, 543-545).
Global
urbanization continues to diminish the health of both uninhabited and settled
landscapes. While we may desire to
focus environmental efforts on improving unsettled landscapes, successes will
be Pyrrhic victories at best if we fail to address urbanization as the primary
locus for intervention for the integration of human life into the Earth
ecosystem. And the good news is
that urbanization contains a naturalness that we did not expect. There is a “living city” operant in the
ecologically destructive separable city.
In Finite And
Infinite Games, James Carse would approach
the city as a natural “infinite” system rather than as a “finite” machine,
because a city is effusive and has no end. The eco-barrier to be overcome is the design strategy rather
than the city-form—a finite “hard
grid” machine model that envisions separation from nature and continues to
extract resources for consumption.
The reality is more one of an infinite soft, creative process that is so participatory as
to be almost beyond design and capable of creating resources rather than only
consuming resources.
If the city is
viewed as the antithesis of nature, intentional urban planning and design
corrects mal-adapted “artificial” modern life. If the city is viewed as natural and “living,” design
identifies outstanding adaptive ecological features and optimizes them. What is especially noteworthy here for
design is that the ecological adaptability of the post-modern city has already
begun and does not have to be invented.
Design for an ecological “living city” would be quite different from
either a now-popular strategy of a “livable city” or a “sustainable city” which
have been the first steps in changing the “separable city.” Rather than invention, the design task
becomes one of listening and then optimizing existing ecologically adaptive
features.
When we begin to
look differently, perhaps searching for a crazy oxymoron such as “human
wildness,” astonishingly, ecological adaptive features of urbanization begin to
be seen. These include actions and
large design elements, such as an astonishing reduction in the rate of global
population growth, freeing up landscape by increasing people-friendly
population density, shift to residency with its inherent interest in
sustainability, resource efficiency due to density and public health even in
urban poverty, enhanced intra-urban nonhuman habitat, eco-centered resource
production rather than only consumption, primary support for environmental
research, and specialization/innovation.
Thomas Berry’s ecological renaissance
begins with our eco-literacy still in its infancy. Say “nature,” and we glance out the window to find it rather
than imagine oneself within nature.
A renaissance occurs broadly rather than as a specific social
movement. A “renaissance,” such as
the Italian Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution is easily a century long
process, and it tends to begin quite obscurely—as was visually demonstrated in
the Italian Renaissance, beginning vaguely with artists such as Cimabue and
becoming explicit with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
In this renascent
view, human migration toward cities is a spontaneous intuitive effort to
sustain in a peopled Earth. In an
infinite Earth system, cities must be complementary infinite systems to sustain
across the long run. And the long
run outcome can be a surprising one—that we can create an oasis of human and non-human
diversity and fittedness out of what we have presumed to be separate from wild
nature and artificial and domestic.
Our
environmentalism can transform to be a positive health model rather than
adversarial, and be people-friendly.
The task before us is large, but we are beginning to look more as
residents than as migrants—from a posture of inclusion rather than intrusion
and exclusion. In the city itself,
there is an opportunity improve human health and optimize other species through
fresh strategies such as reconciliation ecology and a litany of approaches such
as “vertical gardens,” participatory architecture, green space, green
technology. An online search of
eco-strategies will produce a near-unending list of creative endeavors.
Startling, “domestication”
that integrates “self-as-landscape”—this sense that humanness is more than
human beings—may be the core expression of a constructive “human
wildness.” And this sense of
contemporary human wildness is not esoteric or an ethereal return to a Pastoral
state. It is perhaps most wild in
its quest for concrete alertness and adaptation—key dynamics of wild
processes. It is a practical,
optimally healthful and deeply economic strategy, that, in a now-peopled Earth,
can re-imagine Thoreau’s admonition, …in Wildness is the preservation of the
world.
