hell’s handmaiden

I’m not sure that this is the future, but I kinda hope that it is.

We are animals, but our environments are species poor.

Part of this hope, I admit, comes from a childhood fascination that I refuse to relinquish.

There is a real connection between the two, though. There is a connection between that building and that colony in space that runs deeper than my aesthetics and my love for Babylon 5. That connection involves our use of space.

We are animals– fabulously adaptable animals, fabulously clever animals. We are animals, but we share space poorly. No other animal so completely pushes other critters out of its sphere. No other animal so completely whitewashes its environment. We even whine and cry about the animals that do find ways to flourish in ‘our’ space. Think about the pariah species– pigeons, rats, etc. God-damned pests! Hmm… just animals finding a niche in which to live.

And I think we do damage to ourselves and to everything else because of it. We fight and fight to make ourselves not-nature but we fundamentally are nature. We always have been. We always will be. If we colonize Mars we’ll take nature with us because we have to have it. And it will still be nature. Groomed. Managed. Effected by humans. Still nature. Still nature because we are still nature. A beaver’s alteration of its landscape doesn’t make that landscape not-natural, nor does our alteration make that landscape not-natural. An carpenter ant’s cutting of leaves and farming of mold deep underground doesn’t make the ant or the mold not-natural, nor does our farming, our managing, make either us or our farmed, our managed, not-natural.

The fantasy that we are not nature has led us to create very poor, very sterile environments for ourselves, and everything suffers. I am hoping that this fantasy is dissolving. Some factions within environmental ethics recognize this. Some old-timers do not and still argue a nature/culture distinction. But those old-timers are being left behind by the green building movement, by environmental design, by environmental psychology, by ecopsychology, by urban design, and I hope that the end result will be cities something like what can be glimpsed in Antilia. Never-mind that Antilia is single family residence. It is the design I care about.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.