The Living City As Ecological Renaissance Rather than As Apocalypse

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Jet Con-Trail Over Lightning-Struck Oak, 2011

IN THE SEPARABLE city, attention to sustainability is increasing.  We “taste” ecology in the bitter form of degrading environmental quality, and yet there is a sense that ecology does not include us.  Nature is envisioned as on the “outside” of human life and moving further away from human life, and reacting negatively to human life.  And we sense that improving environmental quality requires some forfeiture of future human development:  redirecting resources “other nonhuman nations” to which we are linked by a need for material resources and absorption of our waste.  Our language and our subsequent actions describe our longstanding vision of a separation from nature, either as a result of intentionally aspiring to leave it behind or by being excluded from it by literacy and abusive technological development. 

With the living city, our self-perception is radically different:  We perceive ourselves to have always remained inside nature, and now measure being more deeply lost inside it.  “Tasting” our bitter imbalance with the larger Earth ecosystem, we also taste something sweet in that which has seemed to be only a wasteland of our own making.  We begin to aspire to move from a deconstructive pioneering strategy to a constructive post-industrial strategy of residency.

• We find our cities to be living, ecological adaptations that are already self-designing in response to the conditions of existence. 
• We begin to sense that urbanization itself is an ecological adaptation.  Rather than the illusion of the end of a separable nature, we now begin to realize the end of our illusion of separation from nature. 
• We find that we are not post-natural but rather “post-separable,” and that we cannot be healthy and optimize without integrating in the larger Earth community that we have now “peopled.” Rather than trying to enhance a separate nature, we begin to shift from a sense of “intrusion” in nature to try to optimize our inherent “inclusion” in nature.
• We begin to try to overcome the way we have limited both human and nonhuman life by our misunderstanding of nature. 
• We begin to imagine that global urbanization is not an apocalypse, but rather a renaissance that is just beginning and that is dramatically altering our understanding of human nature, just as the Italian Renaissance did in bridging the Medieval and the modern.

The Radical Green Return and The Sustainable Eco-vill

(See previous posts: “The Sustainable Society Is Not The Same As The Living City,” “The Livable City Is Not The Same As The Living City” and “A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch”)

AS ONE INCREASINGLY MOVES toward the ecologically integrative end of the continuum—toward the sustainable eco-vill to the “radical green return” where urbanism and environmentalism finally become mutually exclusive.  The remote cabin and the organic farm and the eco-vill as a community development offer explorations in alternative technology that are applicable to cities, such as John Todd’s “living machine” that recycles wastewater[i] or off-the-grid developments using passive solar and solar and wind generators and alternatives to lawns such as fruit and/or rain gardens.  These models of human habitation are also important to the city, not only as a local food source, but as both an optimal ecological habitat in their own right and as an innovation lab for “seed ideas.”  They are to be strongly encouraged. 

The eco-vill offers much to the long-term future of the “living city,” but it inaccurately presumes that post-industrial urbanization is ecologically unnatural.  While this presumption seems obvious to most, it contributes to reinforcement of a strategy of separation from the larger Earth ecosystem and keeps the relationship adversarial.  Plus, as a model, it does little to resolve the immediate and near future impact of a global population of billions that urbanization is addressing on a large scale through ecologically adaptive features.  Across the long run, if global population levels and even reduces, sustainable society’s emphasis upon urban townships and eco-vills will become increasingly important.

Characteristics of an eco-vill might include a development/community of perhaps

• 20 houses ranging in size from 900 to 3600 square feet [five bedrooms and four baths, using 100 kilowatt hours per month as compared with a non-green home using 1000 kw/month, using wind and solar power with an annual power bill of three-hundred dollars for propane] with each house having a maximum budget of 250 kw/mo,

• smaller yards foregoing grass turf for grapevines, kiwi, gooseberry, plum or other

plants fitted to the climate,

• passive solar design, power-sipping appliances, earth tubes extending six feet underground for low tech geothermal cooling, thick walls and insulation, solar panels for hot water, water collection, and
• a community area, community wind turbine, orchard, greenhouse, ponds, 4000 square foot community garden that sells produce,  and sewage using worms and carbon material that then leaches into a constructed wetland.

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[i] John and NancyTodd, From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1994.

The Sustainable Society Is Not The Same As The Living City

(See previous posts: "The Livable City Is Not The Same As The Living City" and "A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch")

A DESIRE FOR CITIES to be more livable in the face of increasing impact of degrading environmental quality have provoked a shift in urban design toward “sustainability” or activities that improve livability by prioritizing attention to environmental quality.  While sustainability can appear to be an obvious direction and is generally accepted as a rational direction, it is often challenged as lessening human quality by having to give up comforts to appease environmental demands.  Sustainability efforts, such as pollution control, are broadly resisted as an overreaction by environmentally oriented special interests.  Therefore, “sustainability” describes a variety of models that range from a limited separatist accommodation to ecologically-integrative models.  Interestingly, whether separatist or integrative, current models are in agreement that the city-form as separate and unnatural.  And this underlying perception of the city as a machine can misdirect efforts to achieve sustainability. 

The sustainable society is an environmental movement strategy that aspires to address environmental concerns by breaking up the city into smaller living and working units.  This is like new urbanism, but it is an outgrowth of an emphasis upon “sustainability” rather than upon a more human-scale comfortable livability.   It aspires to modify urbanism to produce interconnected villages.  The overall landscape would take on a natural appearance with green space.  The emphasis is more upon local and small and organic, recycling, simpler (less consumptive) lifestyles, green space, and expansion of outlying uninhabited landscapes.  The sustainable society is ecologically oriented and aspires to be less intrusive upon the non-human landscape.  There is an overall aspiration to be organic and to accomplish a large-scale change, with a strong emphasis on the region, and particularly on the bioregion, and not just the city.

While environmentally sensitive, the sustainable society is not broadly shared.  Its directive has come from the environmental movement and is on the fringe of urban planning.  Unless one defines “comfort” from an Earth-centric environmental value-set rather than from material consumption, the sustainable society seems restrictive.  The sustainable society models tend to be dualistic and inflexible, envisioning contemporary society as either under the control of private (corporate) interests or a chaotic sprawl. 

In The Great Turning, David Korten describes a battle between the “empire” and an Earth community[i] as an either-or choice. Essentially, Korten argues for a complete overturning of contemporary post-industrial society because he envisions it as is fundamentally destructive at its core.  For Korten, the most needed changes involve overturning economic structures such as an end to private interest corporations and a redistribution of wealth, along with more environmentally-specific changes stressed by other sustainable society models such as increased public transportation, reduced consumption, compact communities, and environmental rejuvenation.  For Korten, it would be naïve to presume that the post-industrial economic strategy would intentionally shift from an exploitive environmental strategy to an integrative strategy.  And even a more compromising environmentalism envisions a dualistic struggle between post-industrial culture and nature.  However, it might be naïve to presume that in a now peopled Earth, there is a new option that finds crucial economic profit in integrative environmental technologies and services, and that this process might drive a blend of personal interest that employs and supports large populations that increasingly might serve a public interest in optimizing both settled and uninhabited landscapes.

Even for the most separable, exploitive model of human habitation, the more environmentally specific components of sustainable society models offer valuable design elements that can be directly incorporated or modified to practically address environmental dilemmas.  Chip Ward[ii] describes features that might be emphasized in a sustainable society: Unbroken green with grids of roads and fences fading away, sustainable farming, wind farms, solar farms, retreats, spas, green belts, regenerated wetlands, river valleys as corridors between huge habitat reserves across the continent that also provide respite from city while continuing to conserve biodiversity, maximizing public transportation, lawns as rare and replaced by native plants, strong regulation of urban sprawl, and cities become more attractive with parks and activities.

Richard Register[iii] emphasizes the value of features of sustainable society models but also looks somewhat more positively at the city, identifying a functional quality to the emergence and ongoing development of the city rather than the city as something to be eradicated.  For Register, a blend of sustainable society features with urbanism might include:

            urban life fitted to location and climate,

            radically de-emphasizing the auto,

            "necklaces" of separate towns,

more people work in same area as they live,

rivers removed from underground with arcades along watercourses,

parks, orchard, playgrounds, gardens, rooftop gardens, greenhouses,

buildings with terraces, mixed use, roof top cafes.

foot and bicycle paths.

downtown living with work places for non-commuters,

transit shelters: bus, trolley, street car travel,

no car parking downtown,

solar collection and windmills,

streets for human activity, auto street made narrower,

south facing buildings with greenhouses/ backyard gardens,

lawns refigured,

recycling approaches 100%,

more food produced locally,

less TV, more neighborhood socialization, and

tree planting and harvesting of crop-producing trees.

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[i] David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, San Francisco: Berret-Koehler, 2006.

[ii] Chip Ward, “Rewilding America: The Froggy Love-Tunnel Vision Quest” [www.commondreams.org/views04/0514-13.htm].

[iii] Features of eco city are adapted from Richard Register, “EcoCities, Making cities sustainable is a crucial challenge,” in Living With The Land, Winter, 1984, p. 31, and from In Context, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, 1985, [www.context.org/ICLIB/IC08/Register.htm]. See also, “Building ecocities: An interview with Richard Register, January 2000, a three-part series in Ecotexture, The Online Journal of Ecological Design, www.ecotexture.com/library_eco/interviews/register1a.html   

The Livable City Is Not The Living City

(See previous post: "A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch")

THE LIVABLE CITY is the predominant public post-industrial alternative model, while the “separable” city is the actual model.  There has been long-standing design interest in “livable” cities, and more recent public interest and support for livable cities.  The livable city is primarily a large-scale professional redesign of urban and regional space to make it energy efficient and enhance the quality or “livability” of the city.  The primary emphasis is upon “decongesting” traffic, improving air and watershed, and expanding recreational green space. The livable city is environmentally sensitive, but not ecologically oriented.  While there is interest in “green” technology for its efficiency, there is less interest in a “green” values-set, because there is less commitment to an ecological perspective that includes human life.  Human life is still separate.  The focus remains primarily upon being more “humane” than ecological.

The quality of urban life is the primary focus, and urbanization is perceived to be a cultural process rather than a natural process.  Environmental progress is slow because the focus is on costly, large-scale changes in the built infrastructure that require municipal and regional cooperation.  Design is predominantly large-scale redesign that is directed by planning and architectural expertise.  Transformations affect large physical areas such as central city and industrial parks and processes such as modes of transportation and watershed. 

“New urbanism” reflects an effort to improve personal and family life by creating townships where most everyday activities such as work and home and education and civic activity and recreation are all in close proximity.  Proximity is seen as positively decreasing the congestion and pollution caused by urban transportation.  However, the primary focus is on enhancing human scale interface in urban areas where life can seem impersonal and alienated.  There are efforts to be eco-sensitive as an aspect of improving the quality of residential life.  And there is an important focus on urban residency rather than mobility and transitory relationships.  While aspiring to be a return to human-scale, this “local” effort is really a large-scale effort because it essentially builds a new community.  And while new urbanism has created actual communities, it is not widespread, due perhaps to the cost of such change and lower public interest.  And perhaps more importantly in the face of rapidly expanding global urbanization, it acknowledges the inability to planning to control the city, but sees this as a limit rather than sees the post-industrial global process as have functional aspects that are active on both immanent and large scales.

The general model of new urbanism[i] is important for its attention to human-scale and involves

a neighborhood with a community center,

a five minute walk to resources,

a variety of dwelling types’

shops on the edge,

close by playgrounds and school,

parking in alley, and a formal neighborhood association.

Looking at a larger livable city, The American Institute of Architects list ten principles for livable communities:[ii]

1.   Design on a human scale,

2.   provide choices in housing, shopping, recreation, transportation and

      employment,

3.   encourage mixed-use development to create vibrant, pedestrian-friendly

      and diverse communities,

4.   preserve urban centers to help curb sprawl,

5.   vary transportation options including walking, biking and public transit,

6.   build vibrant and welcoming public spaces,

7.   create neighborhood identity to enhance a sense of place,

8.   protect environmental resources by balancing nature and development,

9.   conserve landscapes such as open space, farms and wildlife habitat, and

10. design excellence as the foundation of successful and healthy communities.

Similarly, the Congresses International Architectura Modern [CIAM] list ten Principles of Intelligent Urbanism[iii] which describe livability of cities:

1.     a balance with nature

2.     a balance with tradition

3.     appropriate technology

4.     conviviality

4.1  a place for the individual

4.2  a place for friendship

4.3  a place for householders

4.4  a place for the neighborhood

4.5  a place for communities

4.6  a place for the city domain

5.     efficiency

6.     human scale

7.     opportunity matrix

8.     regional integration

9.     balanced movement

10.  institutional integrity.

The livable city is the primary current working model, and it derived from urban planning rather than from the environmental movement.  “Suatanability” is a very recent push, but still oriented on green technology and recycling for “livability” far more than for ecological integration.  Certain aspects such as modifications of mass transportation and regional planning for water and air quality are the predominant accomplishments that have occurred to a minimal degree globally, but that are present as useful demonstration projects.  Importantly and yet limiting, the focus is on people rather than environment with the objective of increasing the quality of human life or “livability.”  Green space is valued both for park-like human recreation and buffering open space and to a lesser yet increasing degree as a chemical recycling process. 

The variety of “livability “principles sketched are representative of an approach to cities that is definitely increasing globally.   The overall appearance of the city does not necessarily change.  Core environmental features are primarily technological and include:

alternative fuels for mass transportation,

redesigned mass transportation to reduce emissions and personal transport,

passive solar and efficient heating and cooling and insulation, and

recycling.

By far the most popular world example of the livable city is Curitiba, Brazil.  Rather than move toward smaller communities, Curitiba has grown from 150,000 people in the 1950s to 500,000 people in 1965 to 1.6 million in 1994.  Young architects in the 1960s, thinking about the environment and people’s needs, approached the mayor and made a case for better planning.  The mayor sponsored a contest for a master plan, debated responses with the citizens and turned over comments to the architects.  The focus that was different was upon rehabilitating built-up areas rather than spreading the city outward.  There was resistance from shopkeepers with proposals to turn the shopping district into a pedestrian zone.  After a thirty-day trial, other shopkeepers asked to be included. 

Public transportation was modified so that now 70 percent of commuters use it.  Plexiglass tube stations allow shelter, very low fares, private ownership that keeps part of the fare and gives the city part for roads/terminals, faster loading and unloading and noticeably cleaner air, access to buses though all of the city, and express bus lanes that move at fast as subway cars on radial routes.   There is 25% less congestion in Curitiba than in similar-sized cities.  As much as two-thirds of daily garbage is recycled by dividing waste into organic and inorganic only.  Trash can be exchanged for bus tickets and local food, and the trash goes to plants where it is sorted and sold and provides employment.  Builders get tax breaks for including green areas.  Open space has drastically increased from 5 square feet in 1970 to 559 square feet with 16 new parks and 1000 plazas throughout the city.  There are 341 industries involving Fiat, Pepsi, and Volvo and environmental laws do not slow industrial development. Adult education has been enhanced through mobile training centers.[iv]

The values that are operant in Curitba are important to consider.  Various general design elements that contribute to the success of the city and the local state include:

people first/ “humane urbanism,”

non-partisan,

public-spirited and eco-efficient,

integrated urban planning component: IPPUC laboratory,

visions/design/creative innovation,

cheap solutions,

efficiency of transportation [encourage public transportation],

land-use planning,

minimize downtown traffic,

encourage social interaction by providing more leisure areas and pedestrian zones in the center of the city, and

environmental health.

Comments by Jamie Learner offer an important vision in looking at the role of the environment in urbanized human life:[v]

*

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree. i

*

The dream of a better city is always in the heads of its residents.  Our city isn’t a paradise.  It has most of the problems of other cities.  But when we provide good buses and schools and health clinics, everybody feels respected.  The strategic vision...leads us to put first the priorities on the child and the environment.  For there is no deeper feeling of solidarity than that of the dealing with the citizen of tomorrow, the child, and the environment in which that child is going to live. I

*

There is no endeavor more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream.  When a city accepts as its mandate its quality of life; when it respects the people who live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for future generations, the people share responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective dream. ii

*

The city of all of us ii

*

...cities need to be rediscovered as instruments of change. iii

*

The city [Curitiba] has become more intelligent and more humane. iii

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[i] Selected aspects for a new urbanism neighborhood [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_urbanism]

[ii] The American Institute of Architects [www.aia.org/liv_principles].

[iii] Congresses International Architecturea Modern (CIAM) ten Principles of Intelligent Urbanism [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Intelligent_Urbanism].

[iv] Donella Meadows, “The best city in the world? Making a solid case for better urban planning,” Good Medicine, Fall, 1994 and [www.context.org/ICLIB/IC39/Meadows.htm]. See also, “Orienting urban planning to sustainability in Curitiba, Brazil,” [www3.iclei.org/localstrategies/summary/curtibia2.html] and Sustainable Communities Network Case Studies, “Brazil, Curitiba’s “voluntary sustainability,” [www.sustainable.org/casestudies/international/INTL_af_curitiba.html].

[v] Jamie Lerner quotes are from: i.  Donella Meadows, “The best city in the world?, Making a solid case for better urban planning,” Good Medicine, Fall, 1994 and [www.context.org/ICLIB/IC39/Meadows.htm], ii.  “Orienting urban planning to sustainability in Curitiba, Brazil,” [www3.iclei.org/localstrategies/summary/curtibia2.html], iii.  Sustainable Communities Network Case Studies, “Brazil, Curitiba’s “voluntary sustainability” [ www.sustainable.org/casestudies/international/INTL_af_curitiba.html].

A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch

When we look at environmentalism, we have a broad array of approaches that appear to cluster on a continuum that ranges from Earth-centric emphases on one end  to anthropocentric emphases on the other.  In future pieces, we will look at the components of each of the models to see what they offer to an evolving living city model, as well as get a sense of the way in which each reflects a unique philosophical orientation that can then be compared to the components and philosophy of the “living city.”

FACING VERY REAL environmental dilemmas, a variety of responses have emerged in modern life.  They range from an intimate, low technological integration into remote and rural landscapes to be as non-intrusive as possible to a separation of human habitation from non-human landscapes with little regard to the impact of human activity because of a sense that human destiny no longer has much to do with nature.  When applied to the city, these responses form a diverse continuum.  They can range from a desire to completely dissolve the city, break up the city into smaller and more “humanized” settlements, make the existing city more efficient and less consumptive, or have the city become a place where culture is separate from nature.

Beginning on one end of a continuum with an Earth-centric model and going to an anthropocentric model on the far end, these responses might be generally categorized as follows:

a feral “radical green” immersion that involves living off the land, accepting discomfort as essential for intimacy, avoiding modern technology and honoring hand-built craft, foraging and hunting and/or gathering, being nomadic, and aspiring to be politically anarchist; 

a sustainable eco-vill—off the grid, recycling everything possible, emphasizing local action, alternative technology, oriented toward a social co-op network and being food/energy-oriented;

a sustainable society—potentially urban townships, community action, cessation of specific practices such as animal agriculture and pets and feeding wildlife and industrial plant agriculture, a value for simplicity, enhanced human freedom/expression, a bioregional vision, activism to rewild landforms—emphasizing unsettled “corridors” that connect unsettled landscape and the expansion of unbuilt landscape, and hi-tech alternative engineering;

a livable city—attending to comprehensive management of resources, conservation to enhance airshed and watershed and food quality, expansion of quality green space and reduction both of brownshed (abandoned or undeveloped property) and greyshed (industrial properties), specific emphasis on “greening” both home and commercial architecture and industry to dramatically increase energy efficiency, efforts to “decongest” transportation by improving mass transit and a closer approximation between work and home through community developments such as “new urbanism,” an overriding goal of enhancing the quality of life;

and

a separable city—wherein uninhabited landscape is a backdrop that is considered inactive wasteland without use and existing for human use and recreation, with human destiny envisioned as now technologically-evolved beyond nature and/or even beyond Earth or spiritist, anthropocentric in the sense of all priorities being human-centered with no standing to the non-human, emphasis upon urbanization as the built environment rather than on inhabitants, resolving dilemmas through technological solutions, environmental concern as hysteria or delusional, Romantic nostalgia, with development being synonymous with comfort and culture.

A Sketch Of Cities As Wild

TO ESCAPE FORWARD environmentally, the most needed technology to enhance global health will be a “philosophy of care,” an emotional technology, that underlies and determines/guides our actions and our material technology.  We have a plethora of material, physical resolutions.  This “emotional technology” in relation to global urbanization is different.  It involves revisioning the city as an expression of nature. 

As our eco-literacy expands, the important difference between landscapes begins to reveal crucial similarities that are far more important than differences.  The forest and the city share a core strategy.  In Finite And Infinite Games, James Carse describes infinite games as effusive and having no explicit end, no clear boundaries, no clear beginning point, with the intent of the game that of addressing threats to continue.  When viewed as a machine, the city wears the appearance of being a “finite game”—an “end game,” but the city-form is open ended, yes, like a forest or river or desert.

Our longstanding emotional technology approaches cities as over-old to the point of being detached and apart from nature [i.e., “built,” implying artificial, an end-product of civilization], and ecologically dysfunctional.  We tend to view events from an everyday time scale that may look back in time or forward a little more than two generations if that far.  From an everyday perspective, this view appears sensible.  However, seeing things from a perspective of geo-time, our extreme youthfulness in the history of the Earth becomes apparent.  By any measure, urbanization is a fresh event on Earth rather that over old, and immature.  Cities are immature rather than advanced.  While seeing events in geo-time seem impractical and/or philosophical, If we can see that cities are immature and just beginning, we might open a practical, immediate opportunity where before we only seemed to be approaching an endpoint.

 

As natural events, cities are unpredictable, and this unpredictability is amplified by their immaturity that makes them somewhat incomparable with established “mature” ecosystems such as climax forests and deserts.  For example, we know what an eagle or bear needs for survival, but what the city-form needs is more “naturally” vague.  And this amplified unpredictability is a central element in future urban design because it suggests that design must primarily observe rather than know.  Encountering the “ immaturity” of the city that we had described as being over-old implores us to “dive into” the activities of the city rather than design the city as if we know what is required.  In this sense, we discover a “fresh ecosystem” that we may have overlooked.

It is now broadly accepted that any city is incomprehensible and unpredictable in terms of fully controlling its development.  Go to the “starchitects” or “city planners” that are asked to resolve urban “problems,” and they implore us to first listen before we act.  And because the city is incomprehensible, it has been erroneous to approach the city-form as a machine.  As a result, the fundamental ecological nature of urbanization has been poorly described.  Seeing the city as alive rather than as a machine will point us in directions that we have never allowed ourselves to imagine.  Seeing the city as “alive” can begin suspect that there are elements in urbanization that are “natural” as well as erroneous, so that there may be processes at work that may enhance ecological adaptability or function.  

Finding a “natural process” in urbanization would offer design directives if it truly existed.  Cities have appeared to be so inventive as to be “beyond nature.”  But our best measures suggest that cities have always been very fragile (which is apparent in the archaeological record), and continue to be fragile.  In The World Without Us,[i] a speculation of what would happen if human being became abruptly extinct, Alan Weisman describes the rapid deterioration and impermanence of the “concrete,” seemingly impermeable, built environment.

The terms, “artificial” and “domestic” and “wild” and “culture” and “nature” and “human” and “nonhuman” are terms that describe real distinctions at work in the world.  Modern consumption appears to be artificial in terms of over-serving base needs, with, for example, perhaps 350,000 gallons of water needed to manufacture one ton of rayon, or 15,000 gallons of water being consumed daily by each American both directly and indirectly.  But these terms are, finally, not that desperate.  The terms are not helpful for innovative urban planning when arranged into dialectics of opposites.  Rather than discard them or choose one set over another, there is a value in revisioning these concepts, primarily by expanding them.   For example, there is a very real way in which the artificial expresses the wild.  The “eco-literate reality” is that these terms are on continuums, and are facets of the other rather than mutually exclusive, and interrelated and inseparable.  Appearing to be primarily a “built” environment, human settlements seem to be “hard” and artificial.  But “hard architecture”—built stock—is fluid and overturns at a rate that is similar to the replacement rate of trees in forest succession.  And the real essence of the wild living city is, finally, not hard architecture, but rather, the action of human life itself that continuously “softens” the hard grid.

Continued emphasis upon difference more than similarity impedes human integration with the larger Earth community.   Our definition of the term “wildness” has referenced qualities of remoteness and the archaic.  Described in this way, wildness can have little to do with modern human life.  However, this sense of opposites is misleading.  Our most rational scientific measures suggest that wildness is the central dynamic—the functional essence—of a cosmos in which we are deeply immersed.  As Geoffrey West argues, “Cities are just like creatures.  They obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism.”[ii] 

Wildness is how the Earth and cosmos work.  To suggest that modern human life is subject to some other process suggests our immaturity and limits and biases far more than reality and maturity.  We live inside the comprehensive wilderness of the biosphere, that is, in turn, a minute facet of stellar evolution.  This challenges our sense of wildness being restricted to being a descriptor for a complex unsettled ecosystem that has clearly been reduced to a remnant.  It opens the possibility of an enduring inherent wildness in everything.   It implies that wildness is a dynamic to meet the needs of any species—the “needs” of being alive—including  Homo sapiens.  Outr very bodies will change, and leave our immanent bodies behind, and this is because we are both subject to and express the large Earth ecosystem across the long run of events.

By opening the concept of “wildness,” we can find it already operant in urbanization that appears to be the antithesis of wildness.  As an expanded expression of a naturalist, as an “urbanologist” who begins to approach the city as natural, the core wild task of a species is that of alertness and adaptation to the ever-changing conditions of existence can be seen as inherent in the city and as essential for long-term sustainability.  Inclusion of all human activity is the deep, intuitive heart of Henry David Thoreau’s admonition in his essay “Walking” that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” and “Life consists with wildness.”[iii] 

In some very real ways, cities may even fit the heart of our traditional understanding of wildness.  As unpredictable infinite games, cities are like “wild” non-human events.  And cities can be both dangerous to live in and dangerous to the surrounding landscape. 

We might approach cities as unfitted because they are a relatively new event on Earth, rather than because they have evolved beyond a fit with nature.  In geo-time, cities are far too young to have evolved beyond nature.  In fact, cities can be viewed as still-crude, spontaneous efforts to adapt a global human population of billions to the Earth ecosystem that other models of human habitation, while important to continue, would not efficiently support.  

Cities might be unbalanced because they are new adaptations.  Perhaps cities are even biologically neotenic—retaining “juvenile” characteristics—perhaps because plentiful resources have not challenged development to fully mature until now.  It is not the city-form itself that is the ecological problem.  The city is wild and unpredictable.  But the city-from is an attitude container.  And its predominant attitude is a longstanding strategy based on separation and homocentrism—still one of pioneering rather than residency.  But now, the global human population is spontaneously migrating toward the city as a residence as a strategy of survival, and no longer outward from an exploitive center.  Wild, intuitive actions are overcoming nearly intractable beliefs of separation and the centrality of human life in the universe as farcical.   Finally, cities might be understood to not describe exclusive human enclaves.  Seemingly artificial and built and hard, the largest quantitative populations of urban areas are non-human.  And the intensive energy of cities can enhance these nonhuman populations.

In The Landscape Papers, Edgar Anderson writes,

If more naturalists would accept homo sapiens they would turn their attention more and more to the plants and animals with which he spends so much of his life: trees of heaven, squirrels, sunflowers, dogs, dandelions, cats, crab grass, English sparrows, gingkoes, weeds of all sorts.  We would take the time to learn the dynamics of waste lots in the city, of dump heaps, and of city parks.  We would know what is and is not practical in bringing country values into city landscapes.  More importantly, we could acquire a fellow feeling for these organisms with which we live.  We would accept cities instead of trying to run away from them, and in accepting them, mold them into the kind of communities in which a gregarious animal like man can be increasingly effective.[iv]

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i Alan Weisman, The World Without Us. New York: Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

ii Geoffrey West, “The living city,” CEOS for Cities, Conversations, CEO blog, 7.17.07, www.ceoforcities.org/conversations/blog/2007/07, the_living_city.

iii Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Nature/Ralph Waldo Emerson Walking/Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Beacon, 1981, pp. 95 and 97 respectively.

iv Edgar Anderson, The Landscape Papers. Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1976, pp. 83-84.

Cosmic Wildness: A View From The Abyss

THE ACTIVITIES OF modern, post-industrial, cybernetic life seem to have left wildness far behind—to be outside wildness and intrusive in the Earth ecosystem rather than remaining an expression of it.  And yet, it is remarkable that we continue to imagine that we have left wildness far behind. 

Perhaps since literacy emerged in human development, we have described human life has having irrevocably left a wild state.  In the 19^th Century, wildness was dangerous, in need of control and as a wasteland needing our use to activate it.   With a growing ecological perspective, wildness was revisioned in the 20^th Century as complex and dynamic.   Now, we look nostalgically “back” at landscapes and biota, and reference wildness primarily as “wilderness” that our 19^th Century perspective has reduced down to remote zones.

Now in the beginning of the 21^st Century, however, we have been challenged by our most objective measures that place us deeply lost in a cosmic wilderness still in creation.  In this vast cosmic terrain, we have barely appeared in its time-scale, and the Earth itself has been reduced to far less than a dust speck.  Now, we look at and measure the whole Earth as an ecosystem.  And we find the Earth ecosystem to be the expression of the evolution of one obscure star, and the Milky Way galaxy in a local galactic cluster that is interrelated with myriad other clusters.    The biotic Earth is not something in it own right, but rather, a niche where macromolecules can exist in the outer reaches of a star that is still in its own evolution.  The capacity to step out of this context or rise above it becomes farcical.

Still, our measures have not caught up with our much slower-paced perspective that continues to describe post-modern life as separate from wildness.  In our most “real,” rational scientific reality, human life occurs in the deep abyss of a cosmos that essentially operates on a strategy of wildness.  Now, when looking at “wildness,” we find ourselves deep inside a landscape of stars within galaxies that are inseparable from the dynamics of other galaxies, and all of those galaxies, perhaps within a tapestry of many universes—a “multiverse”—that are all based on a strategy of wildness—alertness to changing conditions of existence in a vast, ongoing process of creation.

So, when we look at a city-form, with its hard architecture and high consumption (“massive eco-footprint”), it can appear to us (with a 19^th Century or 20^th Century perspective) to be irrevocably lost from “wildness” as nearly the antithesis of wildness, and to many, of nature in general--artificial.  But, when we begin to look from a cosmic perspective, we begin to see both the impossibility of being separate from wildness and the reality that the city, cybernetics, astro-physics, and even plastic, are the expressions of the Earth ecosystem.  And we also begin to discover that they are not fundamentally “intrusions” upon wildness, as much as they are features of wildness—some maladaptive and some ecologically adaptive.

Everything around us and within us is a living miracle, down to every atom and wave.  The nucleus of each atom spins at perhaps 150,000 mph, and was born in generations of nuclear fission within exploding stars.  We sit in a “skyscraper” that seems remote from rainforests, but on a dust speck moving at many speeds through space:  the rotation of the Earth, the rotation of the sun around the galactic center, and the movement of the Milky Way galaxy through space at well over a million miles-per-hour.  Once presuming the center of the universe to be inside our skulls, we can’t even begin to make ourselves visible in the universe or to really describe the parameters of the cosmos.

Since literacy, our description of wildness itself has fluctuated wildly.  We have gone from referencing dangerous forces that we have had to overcome to complex resources that we now damage and abuse.  But since literacy, wildness has consistently remained either nostalgically or rationally on the outside of human life—now cultural rather than creatural.   This view is destructive and drives inappropriate design.  It is an attitude more than a reality.

Post-industrial, cybernetic culture continues to express the creatural; is totemic, talismanic.  The rich diversity of opinions—even in their irrationality in the face of information, or in either their narrowness or holistic reach, or in their scientific precision—and the rich diversity of interests and skills are wild responses.  The spontaneous, unthinking action of global urbanization is a spontaneous expression of wildness.  For all of the nasty eco-footprint that the city provokes, it is also accomplishing adaptive features such as a reduction of the rate of global population and decreased consumption of resources [primarily driven by population density] as compared to other forms of human habitation that every bit of nature writing, environmental advocacy, and legislation has failed to achieve.

Our astonishing technologies still crude and built from Earth elements and energies.  And all of our customs still archetypal, far more than personal—still mythic—and still fundamentally serving creatural functions of nutrition, shelter, territoriality, reproduction for continuance.  All of our eco-costly shopping and consumption is still gathering and hunting.  They are not that different from the magical thinking of First World societies that are extremely culturally structured—“domestic”—that tends to produce far higher homicide rates than post-modern societies.  Our bodies are still evolving in response to fundamental conditions of existence that are themselves still in creation.  Far more than leaving wildness behind, we are perhaps still neotenic—still immature and imbalanced—but richly wild. 

No matter of how much we aspire to degenerate modern life as eco-destructive (and we should as a eco-healthy measure of alertness), we are lost deeply in a cosmic Oceanus that operates on a strategy of wildness.  Were we to begin to really understand everything we do as an expression of the larger Earth ecosystem, we would begin to encounter adaptive features in that which we believe to be the antithesis of “wildness” that we might optimize. 

Being fond of unsettled landscapes such as rivers and forests and wild grasses and deserts, to begin to approach components of modern life such as urbanization as wild was a direction that I did not want to go.  But pressed to understand “wildness,” modern human life as wild, the context of Hubble’s “red shift,” and DNA, and quantum physics, and even exquisite flora/fauna orientations such as “the Wallace Line” or the implications of Darwin’s “Galapagos,” was unavoidable.  Unsettled landscapes and “post-modern,” “post-industrial,” “cybernetic” built environments are profoundly different.  But in the cosmic landscape where wildness is the core dynamic, differences markedly diminish.  And similarities between settled and unsettled landscapes can be found, especially ecologically adaptive features as well as similarity in such things as overturning of forest trees and housing stock. 

It is remarkable that we can imagine human life as having somehow leapt out of the process of the Earth, the sun, the Milky Way, the universe, and perhaps a multiverse of universes.  Not leaving wildness behind, we are likely gradually developing our eco-literacy that is still in its infancy.  We still do not know well how to say just who it is that we are, or where we are from, or where we are going.  Still, our eco-literacy is expanding. Intellectually, we read deeply in geo-time and have expanded our environment from a planet under a ceiling of stars to a universe of galaxies, and have even begun to knock on the possibility of a gateway to a multiverse.   And practically, having peopled the Earth with no vast remaining physical frontiers from which we can feel separated, we are more on the inside of the Earth ecosystem.  Now, human migration is primarily toward urbanization rather than outward, and environmental feedback nearly immediate. 

We find ourselves in a new, infinite context of nature where wildness is abyssal rather than relegated to dwindling remnants.   We begin to acknowledge that the ongoing conditions of existence continue to involve living in a wild state of alertness and adaptation.  With our widening view, we begin to find an inherent wildness in all our actions no matter how civil or domestic or even artificial that they may have appeared to us to be.  Finding this, we can begin to optimize those actions—those ecologically adaptive features of modern life—rather than aspire to remove ourselves from wildness, as if we could. 

We begin to understand that there is no way out of nature.  We begin to understand that this offers an opportunity, that the way forward is within, and that this way forward is renascent, not retro, and our destiny.  It offers a way to listen deeply and respond—to express whom we are, from where we come, and where we are going. 

It will appear apologist and dangerous to reference modern human life as wild, and to not reference “wildness” as nonhuman.  However, our stance of separation from wildness is no longer accurate, and such a stance is threatening to the fundamental health of the Earth ecosystem and human life to continue to design for modern life as if we are separate.