CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

"When the Cities Lie at the Monster's Feet..." Do We Need to Destroy Society to Save the Earth?

In my previous post, I cited the work of Derrick Jensen, who, in his massive two-volume book Endgame  holds that civilizations cannot, in fact, be sustainable -- or, indeed, redeemed. Every aspect of what we refer to as civilization is in his view merely a form of violence and domination. His work is based on twenty premises, two of which are:

"Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time...The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after."

Therefore, according to Jensen, civilization must be “brought down” by whatever means necessary before it destroys the global biosphere and with it, humanity.

In the summer 2009 issue of EnlightenNext, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging muses on just this prospect. Citing the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, (as quoted in the title to this post) Steffen wonders if there's any point to letting civilization go on. He describes how, parking along the Colorado River one night, he imagines letting civilization crash, and, in his words, "watch it burn and build[ing] something newer, stronger, cleaner in the ashes."

This is precisely what Jensen argues for in his books: resistance to and the destruction of the material and political structures of our civilization. However tempting this vision may be to some ecologists, though, Steffen argues that such an accomplishment would have horrific consequences:

"Real apocalypses are sordid, banal, insane. If things do come unraveled, this presents not a golden opportunity for lone wolves and well-armed geeks, but a reality of babies with diarrhea, of bugs and weird weather and just everywhere, of never enough to eat, of famine and starving, hollow-eyed people, of drunken soldiers full of boredom and self-hate, of random murder and rape and wars that accomplish nothing, of many fine things lost for no reason and nothing of any value gained. And survivalists, if they actually manage to avoid becoming the prey of larger groups, sitting bitter and cold and hungry and paranoid, watching their supplies run low and wishing they had a clean bed and some friends. Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the biggest: that there is any world worth living in that involves the breakdown of society."

Not all extreme ecologists seek this breakdown. As Murray Bookchin has pointed out in his writings, there are some "eco-brutalist" Deep Ecologists who, instead of advocating tearing down existing structures of power to save the Earth, believe even more draconian structures will be necessary to force humanity to dial down its attack on the ecosphere, primarily through extreme forms of population control. Deep ecologists, Bookchin argues, have adopted a highly misanthropic outlook that includes, (in addition to government-led population control) the pointlessness of foreign aid to famine-stricken nations and the need for stricter anti-immigration policies.

However, a healthy and socially just human society is integral to resolving the ecological crisis. As such, Bookchin also argues against an ecologically-inspired crusade against human society, for it, too, is a part of nature:

"Human society, in fact, constitutes a 'second nature,' a cultural artifact, out of 'first nature,' or primeval nonhuman nature. There is nothing wrong, unnatural, or ecologically alien about this fact ...This second nature is uniquely different from first nature in that it can act thinkingly, purposefully, willfully, and depending up on the society we examine, creatively in the best ecological sense or destructively in the worst ecological sense...Taken together, all of these human traits---intellectual, communicative, and social---have not only emerged from natural evolution and are inherently human; they can also be placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new and ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents or the harsh effects of mere change."

In other words (and contrary to the propositions of Derrick Jensen) it is in our nature to have the capacity to save nature -- willingly, and within the constructs of our societies. Like Bookchin, ecotheologian Thomas Berry also believes we are genetically coded as such (akin to Edward O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis), and have the potential to undertake what he refers to as "The Great Work". In the words of Stephanie Kaza,

"{Berry argues for] a reinventing of the human—with critical reflection, rethinking, readapting, and reevaluating our role in the universe. The challenge is enormous, impossible in its scale. Berry urges us to confront the 'profound cultural disorientation' of the deep entrancement with industrial civilization. Rethinking ethics is a place to begin, but ultimately a deep cultural therapy is required, one which will overthrow the governing dream of the twentieth century. For Berry, the most powerful recipe for liberation is awakening to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process. This awakening is 'our human participation in the dream of the Earth, the dream that is carried in its integrity not in any of Earth's cultural expressions but in the depths of our genetic coding.' (The Great Work, p. 165).

(Myself? I wouldn't be in the business of city planning if I thought civilization had a terminal disease requiring euthanasia. Like most environmentalists,  I just hope I can contribute to the "cultural therapy"...)

Michael Dudley

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A Sustainable Civilization?

In his book Macro History, Lee Daniel Snyder describes civilization as a

 Culture-System…in a continuous process of 1) preserving…the integrity of its shared behavior patterns, against internal disintegration…and 2) adapting its structures to changing historical circumstances (p. 50).

The crisis of climate change is a result of historical and contemporary global civilizational arrangements that enable some broadly-shared behaviour patterns (e.g., a culture of industrialized mass consumption) that are quite incapable of being sustained indefinitely. Our “culture-system” cannot both preserve such behaviours and survive; nor can it “adapt its structures” to the “changing historical circumstances” of climate change without meaningfully disrupting these “shared behaviour patterns.”

How, then, can our “Culture-System” be made more sustainable? Will the transition to a post-carbon society be achieved through more sustainable city-building, or will it need to involve a reappraisal of the nature of our civilization?

I suggest that if our efforts to “colonize the future” are to be viable, they must, following Guy & Marvin (1999) be much more modest in their claims for the sustainable city (p. 272). While the prescriptions for the sustainable city are indeed important and essential components of a sustainable future, they do not, in and of themselves, comprise the ingredients of a sustainable civilization.

In his forward to the book Natural Advantage of Nations Alan Atkisson sets out his principles for a sustainable civilization, including the complete redevelopment of our energy systems, building technologies and agriculture as well as the preservation of the world's remaining species and ecosystems in the context of long-lasting international peace. Yet we can see that these principles, while admirable, are not in themselves the ingredients for a successful civilization. Indeed, given the revolutionary nature of these prescriptions, an already successful civilization – one with sufficiently sustainable social, political and economic structures – would be a prerequisite for carrying them out.

Derrick Jensen, in his massive two-volume book Endgame (2006) holds that civilizations cannot, in fact, be sustainable -- or, indeed, redeemed. Every aspect of what we refer to as civilization is in his view merely a form of violence and domination and therefore must be “brought down” by whatever means necessary before it destroys the global biosphere and with it, humanity.

In his classic 1961 book The City in History, Lewis Mumford acknowledged these violent “unbuilding” tendencies inherent in metropolitan civilization, but stressed that the will to dominate, control and exterminate that originally came with the institution of kingship and forms of political hierarchy have always coexisted with life-affirming reciprocal relationships, spiritual aspirations, arts and learning. These contradictions are expressed in the web of our social, religious, economic, cultural, political and, yes, spatial arrangements.

Therefore, any vision for a sustainable civilization must address this contradiction directly, and not be confined solely to spatial planning and technological considerations. For, while spatial patterns can impose constraints on these arrangements, they are not synonymous with them.

As I pointed out in a previous post, too often the prescriptions for sustainable cities are overly technical and instrumental, and essentially divorce the city from the currents of civilization, thus making impossible the articulation of alternate political arrangements. If we are to have truly sustainable cities and a habitable future, these currents and arrangements must be more vigorously contemplated, articulated and pursued. 

In Snyder’s (1999) definition of civilization we may discover a useful model: that of a resilient civilization “adapt[ing] its structures to changing historical circumstances” (p. 50) – provided that such structures are not comprised merely of mortar and stone. 

Michael Dudley

(This posting is adapted from a paper given at the 39th conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, Kalamazoo Michigan, June 4th 2009).

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Problematizing the "Sustainable City"

There is a growing consensus that climate change represents one of the greatest challenges to the project of civilization we have ever faced. Not only would abrupt climate change be ecologically devastating, it threatens to be a significant new source of war and conflict. In order that some of the causes and consequences of this threat may be partially addressed, the urban planning literature has in recent years promoted various schemes for "sustainable cities." Frequently cited elements of the sustainable city include increasing urban density, building mass transit, improving cycling infrastructure, building "green" structures and investing in renewable energy. The form of the city is seen as a vital means of reducing energy consumption and the production of greenhouse gases. Sustainability has become one of our era's most deeply embedded meta-narratives.

Yet these and other conceptions of the sustainable city and sustainable development in general have come under some criticism, not so much in terms of their practical merits but for the ideological deficiencies and unwarranted assumptions common to the literature in which they are espoused. For example, architect Jeffrey Inaba criticizes so-called “sustainable” architecture for inspiring minimal scrutiny and resulting in “regressive urban environments”. On socio-political grounds, Guy & Marvin (1999) note that the literature's emphasis on technological solutions brings with it a concomitantly narrow conception of contemporary social relations, while Adrian Atkinson in his Cities Afer Oil series finds that, owing to the profound distributive issues at stake "there are philosophical/moral issues to be considered...before it is possible to think of physical (planning) solutions" (p. 203).

Peter Marcuse framed this problem succinctly when he observed (1997) "sustainability is not enough", and indeed is, strictly speaking not even desirable, as the conditions of the poor both “cannot be sustained [and] should not be sustained” (p. 106). An especially common fault with this discourse, according to Guy & Marvin (1999) is its "singular" vision of what a sustainable city would look like, and reducing it to a list of so-called "best practices," the realization of which requires a prescribed set of technological advances which are regarded with "determinist and celebratory" praise (p.270).

Sustainable city discourse is also criticized for its sheer inadequacy in the face of the actual threats facing humanity. Adrian Atkinson warns in his aforementioned Cities After Oil series that we are facing nothing short of societal collapse when globalization breaks down as energy supplies dwindle, forcing a dramatic reduction in scale of all human activities. Yet, he argues, all attempts to articulate a "sustainable city" have failed to meet the challenges he describes. Atkinson shows how sustainable city discourse has emerged from an Occidental world view of progress that mediates against the adherence to natural limits. All current trends, he believes, point to an exhaustion of fossil-based energy sources and an inexorable collapse of modern society. A few generations following such a collapse might render unrecognizable any vestige of our civilization as we know it, a fate for which the sustainability discourse has done little to prepare us.

The threat that dramatic climate change poses to our global civilization is such that we need to consider whatever ameliorative measures we can. However, because spatial planning intimately connects to multiple levels of social and power relations it is essential that changes to the city undertaken under the exigencies of crisis are done so in such a way that we avoid to the extent possible injustice and other unanticipated negative consequences.

Michael Dudley

(This posting is adapted from a paper given at the 39th conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, Kalamazoo Michigan, June 4th 2009).

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