A Contemporary Ecological Renaissance

CONTEMPORARY LIFE has yet to catch up with its own new view of the universe, one that no other culture throughout human emergence and development has ever had.  It is a renascent view that challenges and transforms our understanding of human nature.

It is a view that literally sees Earth as a small dot that is lost within infinites of smallness and largeness.  And it is a view that revisions wildness and civility from mutually exclusive events to complementary events that are facets of a whole.

Human success has resulted in the “peopling of the Earth.”  And that success is also transforming our actions in a renascent way.  The peopling of the Earth has shifted human migration toward cities rather than outward from the cities, with urbanization now the predominant human habitat.   Post-industrial cities are rapidly becoming residencies rather than global resource extraction management centers.  This is provoking a radical shift from a longstanding, natural strategy of exploitive pioneering that has been successful in an Earth ecosystem with vast stored resources to one of integrative residency in an Earth ecosystem with no vast physical frontiers. 

Our most rational measures suggest that global urbanization continues to diminish the health of both uninhabited and settled landscapes.  However, increasing global urbanization is driving the emergence of human actions that are adaptive and move toward integration with the larger Earth ecosystem.  Most of these adaptive actions to date are secondary intuitive responses rather than primary intentional ones.  But they are important responses such as, for example, reducing the rate of population growth that our intentional efforts have been unable to accomplish. 

In these intuitive adaptations, there is a renascent leap in our understanding of cities and human nature that is beginning to occur.  From both our most rational scientific measures and our actions, there is a new sense of post-modern cities and human life as continuing to be natural, even in its domesticity, and even more startling, a sense of human life as not only natural but also as wild.  And this is not an esoteric discovery, but rather a practical, deeply economic one in a now-peopled Earth.

Ecology is still a very new word, and eco-literacy, still in its genesis.  And it has really not included human life.  The peopling of the Earth, global urbanization and scientific inquiry have created a threshold where we cross over to a less superstitious perception of deep inclusion in vast wildness and a sense of being young in the life of the Earth.

Departure

THE LIVING CITY is an idea and direction that I didn’t intend to go as a nature writer with a passion for unbuilt, unsettled landscapes.  I published River Eternal [Viking, 1989] and other literary naturalist essays exploring a variety of unsettled ecosystems, and continue to be dedicated to such landscapes.  I have meandered mountains and prairie remnants, seacoasts and Northern forests, and even explored the astonishing micro-ecological landscapes of fish scales and moths’ ears.  These landscapes seemed to express a wisdom still green from which human development had largely strayed and even lost.

Some years past, I was challenged to think about “human wildness” and simultaneously redirected by reading Thomas Berry’s The Great Work: Our Way Into The Future.  Berry is remarkable in viewing the Earth perspective of the universe.  Rather than looking outward to nature as exiles, Thomas Berry looks from inside the belly of an abyss.  From this perspective, the Earth is immerse as a dust speck in an oceanus of cosmos.  It then becomes remarkable that we continue to image human life as capable of being a separable intrusion. 

A change in our sense of contemporary human life as inside nature and even wild has begin to emerge from looking closely at the landscape of the modern city and the dramatic increase in global urbanization.  Unexpectedly, our measures begin to find powerful adaptive ecological features in global urbanization.

THE LIVING CITY explores:

• Global urbanization as ecological, not artificial,
• Post-industrial modern life as continuing to be wild, AND
• Design elements to optimize natural adaptive features to integrate into the larger Earth ecosystem. 

Global urbanization is explored as ecologically adaptive, not as an intrusion in the Earth ecosystem.  This distinction is explored as crucial in designing “eco-cities”—cities that optimize integration into the larger Earth ecosystem. 

To explore such a radical departure in how we envision cities is not just a philosophical exercise.  We become our words.  Our words measure what we believe that we see and, perhaps more important, guide how we act.  If our words describe us as apart from nature—as artificial or domestic, as the antithesis of nature and as an intrusion—then this is what we design. While the ecological destructiveness of urbanization needs to be acknowledged, not perceiving and overlooking the adaptive features dangerously postpones seizing opportunities that are also already strongly present. 

Yes, the eco-footprint of post-industrial life is extensive enough to be destructive on a global scale.  But rather than the city-form, the successful yet rapid global population of billions is the eco-problem.   In fact, adaptive ecological features of urbanization challenge the rapid growth of the global human population.  Urbanization is a process that is already accomplishing environmental goals, such as reducing the rate of global population growth, that or most ardent environmental advocacy has failed to achieve.

A sense of the city as having ecologically adaptive features is a radical departure from a popular view of cities as both the antithesis of nature and a process of separation from nature.  There is a new sense that cities come into existence as an effort to ecologically adapt to the conditions of existence.  We once imagined complex ecosystems such as deserts and mountains and remote unsettled landscapes as wastelands needing out use to activate them.   Our eco-literacy radically flipped this popular view, but our eco-literacy is still in its infancy.  Our popular sense of urbanization as an ecological wasteland is beginning to be re-visioned as adaptive features begin to appear in our measures.  Similarly, all human life is beginning to be explored as an ongoing expression of the Earth ecosystem, and wild, and still very young in the history of the Earth. 

Our overall image of the city is that of a hard grid, but the heart of the city dynamic is the inhabitants’ continual softening of the grid.  They do this, not consciously to “save the Earth,” but intuitively to save themselves as a process of adapting to the global conditions of existence.  Now more than half of the global human population is urban and this rate of urbanization continues to rapidly increase.  Superficially, it seems as if human life is leaving the Earth behind, but it is the exact opposite.

  

A sense of post-industrial urbanized life as far beyond wildness can appear to be obvious.  To challenge this sensibility by describing modern domesticity as wild seems to be irrational.  Modern wildness is not a process of retreat to a Romantic pastoral.  It will be different, evolving.  Our most rational scientific measures challenge our view of having somehow stepped out of the ongoing wild, creative Earth process as anthropocentric illusion.   Rather than having risen above nature, we find ourselves deeply lost in space and time, and very young in Earth’s history.  In fact, it is remarkable and irrational to continue to imagine that we are not an ongoing wild expression of Earth and cosmos.  It is a measure of our limits that we have not reached a point in our eco-literacy that recognizes how our activities intuitively aspire to fit to integrate into the larger Earth ecosystem  

THE LIVING CITY explores modern human life as a natural wild state and alludes to ecological and geo-time perspectives on the city.  However, the primary goal of THE LIVING CITY involves highlighting design strategies to build upon practical, inherent adaptive features of urban ecology to optimize rather than impede the integration of cities into the larger Earth ecosystem.

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.