CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

Deep Time and Spectacle Collide at Niagara Falls

The words, “carved” into faux rock, shout out “Niagara's Fury”. And as you get closer to the edge, the unfathamable power of the water becomes ever more palpable – roaring in your ears, reverberating in your body. Once you are at the railing and see the massive surge flowing past you and over the edge, a delicious touch of panic arises. It become hard to imagine what it must have been like to have been the first to install these railings and stone walls, so close are they to so lethal a force of nature.

Yet in contemplating the three magnificent falls and their millenia-old purpose of wearing away the cliffs to dust on their way to the Atlantic, I sense no fury. There is no anger, no malice, no revenge in Niagara's heart. Anthropomorphizing nature is always a mistake, for the Earth is incapable of such small-mindedness. There is only the timeless quest for equilibrium -- as here at Niagara Falls the waters find their lowest point as part of the global, eternal hydrologic cycle.

Where one does see fury, however, is in the assault upon the senses that is the modern city of Niagara Falls. To say that it is filled with tourist traps would be trite in the extreme. It is worse than that: much of it resembles no “city” I've ever seen, so thoroughly has its core been denuded of any functions that might be of use to its own residents.

One can, however, see traces of what the city once was, and indeed might have been if we lived in a more moderate culture. Several of the main tourist streets are narrow, with most buildings adjacent to the sidewalks, rather than behind parking lots. And quite a few of those buildings appear to be original, hundred-year old houses and former dry goods stores and offices.  There is still, almost beyond telling, the echo of the charm and grace that horse-drawn Niagara residents must have once known.

However, these structures are now festooned with an appalling array of junk screaming to passersby about whatever low-rent “attractions” await within. And if this abuse of the cornea wasn't sufficient, almost every business also has inane recorded voices shouting at pedestrians as well.

The upper “downtown” is admittedly less garish, but is almost more depressing. The location of a number of Vegas-inspired hotels and a casino, the district is spectacularly soulless and lacks any visible function not tied to the tourism industry. There is little in the way of services or conventional stores, to say nothing of residences.

Meanwhile, the actual historic downtown on Queen street, many blocks away from the falls and hence the centre of tourism gravity, is undergoing an exciting arts-led renaissance after decades of abandonment. It is a wonderfully charming street filled with galleries and gift shops, and their owners were warm and bravely determined in their commitment to the street. Yet many desolate and empty storefronts remain.

This is because the action of course is the falls, and every business does its best to associate themselves with the massive torrent regardless of their actual proximity to them. Indeed, a number of businesses shamelessly photoshop themselves into absurd adjacency to the falls in their advertising. The pace of development is now appropriately, ”furious”, including a convention Centre and 5 more hotels.

Why this type of city building – which is by turns glitzy, tawdry, tacky and ghastly – should be desired at all here is a bit of a mystery to me.

I may be a grumpy middle-aged man with no sense of fun, but I don't get why, when one of the wonders of the world is at your feet, would anyone wish to go see a wax museum, a museum of criminals, or a haunted house (of which there appear to be at least three)? Unsatisfied or disinclined to appropriately respect what we're seeing, why do we crave more spectacle still?

If, as I say, ours were a more moderate culture, the city of Niagara Falls could have been a very different place. Were the Falls in Denmark or Sweden for example, can you imagine either country turning their nearby cities into cheap theme parks to draw attention to them? Livingston, Zambia overlooks Victoria Falls, and still retains its colonial-era charm.

The reason for this rotten urbanism – which is by all accounts even more excessive on the American side -- may lie at the heart of our culture, and its response to something that is, in turn, at the heart of Niagara Falls, something that is a bit difficult to comprehend, let alone face.

The “deep time” on display is profound. Scientists believe that the Niagara has been wearing away these cliffs for at least 10,000 years, or about as long as human beings have engaged in settlement-building. So on a geologic timescale, they're pretty recent, and, catastrophic climate change notwithstanding, they should continue to do so for thousands of years more, until they have eroded the cliffs to the shores of Lake Erie. That nature operates on such time scales, with no regard whatever for our little lives is – or at least should be – humbling. A modest people wholly comfortable with their own mortality and insignificance within the context of geologic time would draw wisdom from such a spectacle.

But not us. As we snap pictures and buy crappy souvenirs we are probably dimly aware that the powers on display are completely beyond us. We know we are doomed to exist for but an infinitesimal microsecond of the falls' existence, but the cognitive dissonance such knowledge instills in us causes us to turn away and seek something to distract us from that knowledge.

I wonder if this is what lies behind this city, with some of the most furious anti-urbanism I've ever seen. It was a relief to leave this place. The charm of Queen Street and the lovely people I met there notwithstanding, no city has left me feeling more depressed.

The memory of the falls, on the other hand, I will gladly return to for the rest of my brief life.

 

By Michael Dudley (including photos)

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Can Civilization Survive? And if so...What Would That Mean?

The 2009 State of the Future Report -- a Millenium Project co-production of UNESCO, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation -- has been released, and it contains a grim warning: that "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilization will collapse". According to the Independent,

"Although the future has been looking better for most of the world over the past 20 years, the global recession has lowered the State of the Future Index for the next 10 years. Half the world could face violence and unrest due to severe unemployment combined with scarce water, food and energy supplies and the cumulative effects of climate change.And the authors of the report...set out a number of emerging environmental security issues. 'The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change – ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states – has unprecedented implications for political and social stability.'"

The Millenium Project is not alone. James Lovelock writes in his new book The Vanishing Face of Gaia that it's too late to do anything about climate change, that cap-and-trade schemes are a scam and that humanity will be "culled" by billions of souls in this century. He does believe, however, that some form of urban civilization will survive:

"Those who survive will be responsible for maintaining a high-tech, low-impact, low-energy society advanced enough to keep the flame of progress alive but small and smart enough to carefully husband what arable land remains. Lovelock guesses the rump human race will cluster around a few temperate islands in the far northern hemisphere, including his native U.K. He believes that if emergency preparations are made in time—he compares the present moment to 1939—and if the worst-case scenarios of geopolitical conflict are avoided—namely resource scrambles leading to global thermonuclear war—then something resembling a modern and even urban lifestyle could await the survivors."

If the Millenium Project and Lovelock are correct -- that "much" of civilization will collapse, but that some form of civilization will survive -- then it would seem pretty essential that we start thinking now about what that would mean. What would such a civilization look like? How would it be structured? How would it function? Most importantly, how would it avoid the sheer unsustainability of the one that preceded it?

Roger Osborne, in his 2006 book, Civilization: A New History of the Western World, argues early on that we err when we equate the term civilization only with the "positive" aspects of human societies, such as our arts and cultural productions. Any discussion of civilization must also include in his view the less savoury aspects, such as the will to power and militarism. In this he echoes Lewis Mumford, who, in his 1961 book The City in History, acknowledged these violent “unbuilding” tendencies inherent in metropolitan civilization. However, Mumford stressed that the will to dominate 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, political and spatial arrangements.

As such, a "post-apocalyptic" civilization will need to be a self-conscious one. It will need to re-evaluate what civilization is going to mean when all those values and accomplishments we cherish as life-affirming face unimaginable pressure under the exigencies of crisis. For, under such conditions of crisis, it will be all-too easy to lose our tenuous grasp on those things that will be most needed to save us -- and make our societies worth preserving.

For a glimpse of what I'm talking about, one could do worse than consider the new book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. It's a postmodern "mash-up" of Jane Austen's classic novel and a zombie apocalypse. While it is on the surface a patently ridiculous proposition, Grahame-Smith noted in a recent interview that

"Many of Austen’s characters are rather like zombies...They carry on single-mindedly in their bubbles of immense wealth and privilege, no matter what’s going on around them. They pride themselves on discipline and politeness and repression and subservience. These people simply carry on with their gossip and romances and manners and balls, despite the fact that people are being gored and eaten alive. You get the sense that they would act the same way even if the rest of England was falling apart around them. In this version, it just so happens that England IS falling apart around them."

As a result of these conditions, Austen's characters recede from recognition. Despite their impeccable manners, fine speeches and good breeding, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are brutal and skilled killers, inured to death and mayhem. At one point Liza even thinks to herself that the occasional slaughter of innocents is of no concern, as long as zombies are being dispatched.

As a thought-experiment, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies illustrates the tension between the veneer of civilization and the threat of calamity. Against such threats, a civilization must respond, but to do so in such a way that it does not become coarsened, cruel and lose sight of those very things that make it worth preserving.

No "rump" of civilization (as Lovelock puts it) will long endure if all it seeks to preserve are the material productions of civilization. An entirely new set of civilizational processes -- including non-exploitative social and environmental relations -- will be required. 

By Michael Dudley

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On the Idea of a Private Park as an Integral Component of a High Rise Residential Apartment Complex

In previous posts I have set out our inherent need for contact with nature and the deficient arrangements with which the forces of urban development have attempted to meet this need in high-density urban areas.  I would like now to propose one means of creating a closer tie between humanity and factors in our spiritual bond with the natural environment whose presence, whether near at hand or at a remote distance is felt by human beings only by their impact on our sense of sight, sound, taste, or smell.  Accordingly I draw your attention to the architectural drawing below. 

It is the ground floor plan of a high-rise apartment building complex conceived by the architectural firm of Praxis Architecture Inc. of Esquimalt, B.C.  The striking feature of this ground floor plan is that it contains as an integral component of the high-rise residential structure, a built-in private park belonging to the residents in common.

The site of this architectural concept is located in the Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt, a local government authority whose area of jurisdiction lies in a fairly narrow strip along the eastern boundary of the City of Victoria, B.C.  The property on which the design is based is privately owned.  The owner, however, is unaware that it has served as the hypothetical site for this imaginative development concept.  It was selected by the architects for this exercise because they are located in Esquimalt and familiar with its development potential, but are also aware that there are sites in the high-density area of any city which can be developed with a high-rise residential building of which a private park is an integral component.

For our present purposes it is only the ground floor of this hypothetical complex that is relevant.  The architects who produced the ground floor plan also had in mind the residential component of the total project.  They assumed an apartment structure rising some 14 stories above the ground floor with approximately 104 apartments.  But that item like the ground floor design itself is part of the total imaginative concept that need not be dealt with specifically in the present paper since the purpose here is to examine the private park component of the concept.  It is only the ground floor plan with its private park and other contents and the site on which the concept is located which are relevant here.  However it should be noted that the complex would only function successfully if it were in condominium ownership.

The site on which this hypothetical complex is located is itself an interesting item.  It is bounded on its east side by Admirals Road, and on its west side by Constance Avenue, but between these two traffic arteries its rocky contours drop about 12’ from its Admiral’s Road side on the east to Constance Avenue on the west.  

The total area of the site is 12,000 square feet.   Admiral’s Road is a bus route and one of the main arterial roads into and out of Esquimalt.  Automobile access to the building however is only from Constance Avenue.  Entry to the underground garage for vehicle parking is from the semi-circular drive off Constance Avenue.  Access into the building is through two main doors – one on the east side giving entry from Admiral’s Road, the other on the west side giving entry from Constance Avenue.

The door on the Admiral’s Road side opens into a large landscaped garden area or “atrium” which in effect is a private park and is an integral component of the complex – the treatment of its walls, the furniture, the plants and trees etc. would best be left to the management committee (or a subcommittee) of the condo complex.  The maintenance of the atrium is also a matter for the resident-owners of the complex to manage and would probably be arranged with the advice and assistance from professional sources.  

The elevators up to the residential units are located near the centre of the atrium.  If one is a resident of one of the units in the building, but is outside and approaching the building on foot from the Admiral’s Road side then he or she must have a key to that access door to gain entry into the building.   That person must also have a separate key for the door to his or her dwelling, which would not be the same key as the one for the access door into the building.  The key to the building access door from the Constance Avenue side is the same as the one for the building access door on the Admirals Road side.  Clearly then each would have to have two keys – one for access into the building from either side, the other for access into his or her residential unit.  This may seem at first glance to be an elaborate arrangement but it ensures that the atrium is in effect a private garden or park and is an integral part of the residential complex and is not available to the general public at large.

On the Constance Avenue side the 12’ drop in the gradient from its level on the Admiral’s Road side provides the vehicle entrance to the ramp which leads to the parking level.  Pedestrian access to the building proper requires ascending an exterior staircase in order to reach the entry door to the building.  On the way up this staircase one passes by an exterior landscaped roof garden shown shaded on the plan.  The exterior landscaped garden area is directly accessible from the top of the exterior staircase but direct entry from the roof garden is not.  Adjacent to the roof garden is a room in the interior of the building which abuts the roof garden.  Access to the roof garden from inside the building is only one way - through the adjacent room whose door to the exterior only opens one way, outward to the exterior but not inward from the exterior.  From the top of the exterior staircase one can gain entry into the building and proceed along the corridor to the elevators and the atrium.

Underlying the comfort and livability of an apartment dwelling in a tall residential structure are a number of factors.  These include, among others, such items as the layout of the unit, the facilities available, the services and upkeep of both the building and the unit, etc.  Some of the underlying factors are also related to the personality and preferences of the apartment residents.  But generally speaking interpersonal communication among the residents of tall apartment buildings, in dense urban areas, is not as close or as frequent as it is among residents in single family dwellings in smaller rural communities.

The comparative infrequency of interpersonal contact among residents who live in dwellings so closely packed together is a puzzling phenomenon.  Perhaps it is due to the fact that people are drawn together personally by forces other than the occupancy of neighbouring dwellings.  Occasionally the same personal remoteness exists between the next-door-neighbours in single family dwellings.  On the other hand it may be due to the fact that each resident’s concern over property matters ends at the property line but matters of personal interest lie beyond the property line and persons with compatible interests must be found elsewhere. 

It may be that the concept of a ground floor private park – in which the identity of ownership of each individual apartment unit is erased and extended to the mutual ownership of the entire atrium - offers an environment in which the personal concern of the individual resident can find some basis of mutual interest among the co-owners of the atrium garden.  Again, much will depend on the furnishings and the management of the property.  But even if the extension of mutual interests isn’t fully achieved by the large attractive common private garden it would neverthe-less provide a very pleasant place to spend time away from the confines of the apartment in the broader ambience of a landscaped private park, perhaps even to discover mutual concern among some of the other resident - visitors to the park.

The total floor area of the ground floor is approximately 10,000 square feet.  The area of the atrium is approximately 2,800 sq.ft. and that of the exterior roof garden is about 2,600 sq.ft.  Taken together the combined area of the atrium and the roof garden is about 5,400 sq.ft.  which is approximately half of the total ground floor area.  All the dwelling units have exterior privacy areas, i.e. patios or balconies.

In addition to the possibility of finding new friends and better interpersonal relationships the atrium offers a park to the residents all year round and the roof garden offers that amenity during the seasons when weather is appropriate.  The spiritual bond between the residents and the natural environment is thereby strengthened and maintained throughout the entire year and is a constant attribute of that specifically created residential–garden complex environment.

By Dr. Earl A. Levin

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"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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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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Guest Post: Urbanism and Our Bonds with Nature

In the beginning, when human beings first began to walk on the Earth in communal groups, their primary objective was survival. In order to maintain life, food was the fundamental necessity. Fortunately for the species their habitat was the natural environment and in the natural environment there was enough food both in quantity and variety to sustain them. They were hunters and gatherers and the necessary foods for their sustenance, as well as the basic materials for the provision of garments and of shelter were adequately available in the natural environment, which was their habitat. Under adverse weather conditions which must have been part of the normal environmental occurrence they sometimes were able to take shelter in vacant caves. If such shelters were not available, they could put together sufficient cover from tree branches and animal hides to serve the immediate shelter purposes. The natural environment was the fundamental source of all the requirements to sustain life and support its continuity. All of these requirements were of a physical nature – food, garments, shelter etc. They were so basic to the survival of the species that ultimately and inevitably there evolved a firm bond between the species and their natural environmental habitat. It would be appropriate to regard this connection between the early humans and their natural environmental habitat as a physical bond.

There was, however, another type of bond which ultimately evolved between humans and their natural environment. The basis for this other environmental connection was the emotional reaction to phenomena that occurred in the natural environment and which were perceived visually or audibly but had nothing to do with their sustenance requirements. The phenomena of night and day and those events which occurred in the sky above involving the sun, the moon, the stars, sunsets, lightning, the awesome presence of mountains, the landscape elements of lakes and rivers, the foliage of the trees, the recurring colour and scent of the seasonal floral growth, all of them evoked a sense of wonder, of visual pleasure, of breathtaking awe and self-identity. They were moved by these events to the realization that their habitat had other dimensions to it and their own visceral pleasure in experiencing these mysterious phenomena ultimately found its way into the basic sub-stratum of the various religions of the world. The bond with the emotional components of their habitat can be regarded as the spiritual bond while the bond which nourished their physical existence can be regarded as the physical bond. Through the emergence of these two types of bonding the personal relationships between the individual human beings in any group were strong, warm and commanding.

These close individual relationships among group members probably declined as the physical and spiritual bonds were loosed by emerging new lifestyles and population growth and increasing population densities. As technologies advanced and the production of human food moved from the primal source and methods to agriculture and manufacture, the bonding between humans and the natural environment in which they lived also underwent changes. The greatest change was, of course, in the production of food – that is, in the physical bond. With the advances in agricultural production and processing the hunters and gatherers were replaced by the farmers and ranchers who produced the foodstuffs in their grain and cattle farms and ranches.  The acreages involved in these new food technologies were large but it was customary on most farms to reserve some small part of the acreage to grow items that continued the spiritual bond with the natural environment, although in a modified form. Space was usually provided on most farms for shrubs, bushes, ornamental trees, fruit trees and fruits and vegetables. The bond with the natural environment was maintained in its spiritual sense as well as in its physical sense although both in greatly modified form.

Eventually the profound changes which were occurring in virtually every branch of technology produced correspondingly profound changes in the lifestyles of people which resulted in the inevitable movement of population from rural areas to urban areas. At an early stage in this urbanization the new resident population was housed in single-family dwellings. It was typical of these dwellings that they were built on lots with some space left as front yards and back yards. It was also typical that the occupants of the dwellings planted grass and gardens in these yards in a way reminiscent of the plantings which the farmers of a preceding era had put into the spare acreages of their grain or cattle farms.

However, it was not long before the low-density urbanization of our cities became a flood of high-density development with a heavy concentration of rental apartments and condominiums in the central areas. The resulting isolation of people from their former close connections with nature has come at a price. In future posts I will discuss how modern urban developments have sought, with varying degrees of success, to address this problem.

Written by Dr. Earl A. Levin

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The Albertalachia Syndrome: Peak Oil, Ecocide and Injustice

In the classic H.G. Wells sci-fi film Things to Come, one of the 21st century's technocractic elite, seeking to remake the world, says to his comrades,

"We shall excavate the eternal hills. We shall make such use of sky and sea and earth, as man has scarcely dreamt of hitherto. I wish I could see our children's children in this world we shall make for them."

The film's art-deco futuristic pretentions aside, its sentiments still resonate in two megaprojects that are, indeed, making such use of sky and sea and earth as we have indeed not dreamt of before...except perhaps in nightmares.

The Alberta Tar Sands, which is doing so much to distort the entire Canadian economy, is so colossal in scope that it is being dubbed the world's first "gigaproject." With its jaw-dropping clearances of forests and massive artificial toxic slurry lakes, it is also now being called the greatest environmental crime in history:

"The oil rush is scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers -- up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas...It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world's biggest carbon sinks."

Similarly brutal extraction methods are becoming the norm in the Appalachias, where coal companies are turning the landscape inside out to access their coal seams, in a process known as "mountaintop removal" -- a term which only tells half the story, as the resulting debris is then dumped in the valleys. As a result, the once storied Appalachia mountains are being levelled, with horrific consequences for regional ecosystems, water quality and communities.

These two environmental catastrophes, while a continent apart, share so many disturbing characteristics: radically destructive mining practices that transform entire landscapes; vast pools of toxic slurry; and hollow industry promises of landscape remediation (the Alberta government has yet to certify a single "reclamation" effort). Both are supported by a growth consensus on the part of business, government and media, and are so entrenched that citizen opposition groups are making little headway against them. Part of this entrenchment may also be owed to the fact that they are both being developed for their military purposes: the U.S. military gets a significant amount of its energy from Alberta, and is keenly interested in developing liquified coal for military uses.

They share one more particular evil: both are physically removed from large populations centres (and thus relatively invisible) but are causing greatest harm to socially marginalized communities. The Appalachias have long been home to some of America's poorest communities, and northern Alberta's boreal forest is home to the Lubicon people, whose way of life is being systematically ravaged by tar sands development:

"Since the province of Alberta began promoting the exploitation of tar sands in the area, huge operations have sprung up downwind and downstream from the Lubicon community despite Lubicon objections...These massive resource exploitation activities have decimated the Traditional Lubicon hunting and trapping economy and way of life and threaten[ed] the very existence of the Lubicon Lake People as a distinct Indigenous society. With the onset of resource exploitation has come terrible social and health problems which the Lubicon people never had to face before, such as asthma and other respiratory problems, cancers of all kinds, skin diseases and miscarriages."

Mainstream society may feel itself isolated from these growing scars on the planet and those who are suffering most from them, but this is an illusion: Canadians east of Alberta are increasingly being exposed to acid rain emanating from the tar sands, and the watersheds in both regions are being depleted and contaminated -- at a time when scientists are predicting that access to fresh water will be one of the key challenges in the 21st Century.

There is of course nothing new in industrial practices enriching the few while disadvantaging the many; nor in such processes being environmentally harmful. What is new in these two instances -- and makes them so significant as to represent a syndrome of their own -- is the extreme nature of the damage being wrought; the massive scale on which it is occurring; and the eternal consequences both will have. Finally -- and this point may drive the others -- both are occurring at a time when humanity is on the cusp of converging crises -- but also new opportunities.

It seems singular that, even as our culture seems to be increasingly willing to accept "green" energy sources and technologies, the old "paleotechnic" industries are launching what appears to be a ferocious rearguard action. Big oil and coal -- the "unbuilding forces" of a technics gone mad -- are tearing at the planet with renewed and almost inexplicable frenzy. It is as if they want to get to the last of their resource base before the technological and economic transitions to a new economy can be made.

This urgency may well be owed to an institutional and corporate acceptance of Peak Oil. Panic must be setting in at the highest levels that our phenomenal energy-dependence is endangered, and that any and all measures are required to sustain it. That this sacrifice will eternally change the world and poison its people is not part of their calculations.

Unlike H.G. Well's protagonists, I would not want to see our children's children in the world we will make for them, for theirs will be a world in which the oil and coal and any benefits derived from them will be long gone, and all will be left will be a legacy of ravaged landscapes, where mountains and forests are not even memories.

One can hardly imagine they will forgive us.

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"Talk to the Hand" -- About Sustainability

The news concerning the state of the planet's health gets more dire -- almost on a daily basis. Recently, the United Nations Environment Programme issued a report calling for urgent action -- that "fundamental changes in political policy and individual lifestyles" are required or the planet faces "a point of no return."

However, encouraging individual action and having masses of individuals act on those suggestions are quite different things. While certain actions -- such as recycling -- have become quite mainstream, in general most people are happy to go on driving and carrying on as they always have. If it isn't apathy, then perhaps it's resignation or powerlessness that drives this inertia.

Or maybe it's just utter bloody rudeness.

The other night I finished reading Lynn Truss' new book, "Talk to the Hand," her manifesto on the need for a manners renaissance in an age of self-centred obliviousness. As was the case with her earlier work on punctuation ("Eats Shoots and Leaves") she has positioned something seemingly quaint as nothing less than the foundation for the continuation of our civilization.

Yet, where "Shoots" was amusing and instructive, "Talk to the Hand" is a profound social critique that left me quite disturbed. What Truss documents here (in a very British context, mind you) is an utter breakdown in civilized behaviour. While she acknowledges that some of these erosions (such as the loss of stark social divisions based on class) have had their positive outcomes, she makes it plain that nothing has replaced these conventions and as a result we are left as atomized individuals who, when not giving a thought to others are downright hostile towards them.

It occurs to me that the currents and principles she has identified might shed some light on the other breakdown in society -- that of our relationship to the Earth. Our rudeness (she says) falls within six categories that I think are also key to understanding the crisis of ecology:

1.) Was That so Hard to Say?
In the first section she mourns the loss of the simple niceties of please, thank you and I'm sorry. As does Truss, I would say that the loss of these expressions are, at a basic level, indicative of a wider pathology. What could be more self-centred and thoughtless than our civilization's rapaciousness, our heedless consumption of resources without any recognition that these were gifts? Where Aboriginal peoples would give thanks to the animals they killed, or to the land for the sustenance it provided, we have completely forgotten such gestures. They are of course, more than words: to admit that you have received something, and that you are grateful for those things, obliges you towards the giver. You owe something in return -- at the very least, the kindness of not destroying the very source of your bounty. And for any harm we have caused the Earth -- why shouldn't we apologize? It would be an excellent place to start.

2.) Why Am I the One Doing This?
In part two, Truss expresses her frustration at how large, unfeeling corporations have continually downsourced their customer service to the customers themselves -- all under the guise of improving customer service. As it relates to the crisis of ecology, this downsourcing can be seen in how citizens are expected to recycle packaging, but that the manufacturers of the products in question forsake responsibility for the lifecycle of those products as soon as they leave the plant. Corporations have also been given regulatory carte blanch to produce their products in whatever manner is most cost-effective, and leave communities -- and national taxpayers -- to deal with the resulting pollutants or other ecological repercussions. Part of what has made this such an intractable problem is that corporations claim "personhood", yet have assumed none of the obligations that, in a healthy society, a person would owe to other people. What is needed, many argue, are not just programs to extend producer responsibility, but to fundamentally restructure the relationship of the corporation to the wider society -- to remove the corporate person status and to hold corporations to a higher standard than simple profitability.

3.) My Bubble, My Rules
In an iPod era, where it's seen as perfectly acceptable to talk loudly on your cellphone on public transit and to change into your pajamas in the airplane washroom on a long-haul flight -- in other words, to make yourself at home wherever you go -- we have, according to Truss, adopted the assumption that there are no other rules to live by than our own. A powerful source of our contempt for the natural world -- and not incidentally for the majority of humans who are unable to share in our wealth -- is the belief in our ceaseless sovereignty.

4.) The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
This blithe arrogance leads to Truss' next principle, that of the offended -- and often violent -- outrage that greets any effort on the part of others to point out that we have given offence. I can personally vouch for this: for fear of having my head torn off, I having long since given up telling people to put their litter in the garbage, not drop it on the ground. I would also suggest that the reaction against green politics from the likes of the so-called "Wise Use" movement is a form of the Eff-Off response.

5.) Booing the Judges
In Truss' view, we have lost all social rules concerning deference to those who are older, wiser -- and indeed, any natural perspective of respect. Instead, "respect" now seems to be reserved for gun-toting gangstas, or an acknowledgement of how much stuff someone has. However, this is also an essential matter of our loss of connection to the natural world: we no longer feel any respect or deference towards it. As Bill McKibben pointed out in The Age of Missing Information , to get over this notion of our individual supremacy, we need to see ourselves as insignificant compared to the awesome workings of nature. In other words: Respect Your Mother!

6.) Someone Else Will Clean it Up
Finally, the clearest intersection between Truss' arguments and mine: that too often we simply forsake all efforts to solve ecological problems because we feel it's someone else's responsibility. This perspective was parodied brilliantly in the Simpsons episode Trash of the Titans, in which Homer is elected Springfield's Sanitation Commissioner based on the popularity of his slogan, "Can't Someone Else Do It?" Of course, by carrying this slogan into the workplace he creates an ecological crisis of such dimensions that Springfield is inundated with garbage spewing from the ground and the whole town has to be relocated.

These principles, I believe, are more than just useful heuristically: they also suggest a connection between the environmental and social contexts. As Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac, we have failed to extend the sense of community to the Earth itself; yet our society has also failed to nurture a culture of respect and consideration towards our fellow human beings as well. Both are symptoms of the same malady: our general alienation.

Consequently, I believe Lynn Truss is correct: Manners are the basis of civilization. As such, we can probably hold little hope that campaigns to respect the Earth can have much traction until we can learn to hold each other in higher regard.

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Depleted Uranium and the "Unbuilding" of Iraq

(Warning: Some of the links in this article contain disturbing images)

One of the more powerful themes in Lewis Mumford's The City in History is that humanity's remaking of the environment may be seen as the unleashing of atomizing, negative "unbuilding" forces that so often overpower the self-organizing and dynamic forces of nature. These forces of life/lifelessness play out in the context of evolution; and because human beings -- with our advanced consciousness, art, literature and cities -- are the culmination of evolution, Mumford believed it would be a profound cosmic loss if our civilization were to collapse or be incinerated in a nuclear war -- the possibility of which he campaigned against most of his adult life.

As Mumford so eloquently showed, human will may be materialized in the form of the city, as well as etherialized in the form of ideas or myth. While human civilization is capable of great achievements -- as represented by our cities -- so too may the city represent our will to power, to dominate and to destroy.

These tension -- between building and unbuilding, between the visible and the invisible, between life and lifelessness -- may be seen in Iraq, where as a part of its ongoing occupation, the United States is building the largest embassy in the world. When completed, it will feature all the amenities Americans have come to expect: pools, tennis courts and movie theatres. Many critics see the sheer size of this embassy as a sign that it will be a major element of an American "reordering" of the Middle East.

But even without the embassy, this American "reordering" would still be complete and unstoppable, for it is not just political or physical. As Mumford might have put it, the occupation too has become etherialized. The massive use of depleted uranium in American munitions has made this reordering invisible, microscopic and eternal. It will forever be re-constructing the very architecture of human beings and their environments, both in the Middle East and around the world:

"Most American weapons (missiles, smart bombs, dumb bombs, bullets, tank shells, cruise missiles, etc.) contain high amounts of radioactive uranium. Depleted or non-depleted, these types of weapons, on detonation, release a radioactive dust which, when inhaled, goes into the body and stays there. It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Basically, it’s a permanently available contaminant, distributed in the environment, where dust storms or any water nearby can disperse it. Once ingested, it releases subatomic particles that slice through DNA.

At the Uranium Weapons Conference held October 2003 in Hamburg, Germany, independent scientists from around the world testified to a huge increase in birth deformities and cancers wherever NDU and DU had been used. Professor Katsuma Yagasaki, a scientist at the Ryukyus University, Okinawa calculated that the 800 tons of DU used in Afghanistan is the radioactive equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The amount of DU used in Iraq is equivalent to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs."

The results have been devastating and heartbreaking. As Dr. Jawal Al-Ali revealed in his presentation to the 2003 World Uranium Weapons Conference, Iraqis have been suffering from massive tumours and lesions, but also giving birth to horrifically malformed babies -- babies born without heads, or deformed to such an extent that they bear little resemblance to human beings.

The U.S. and Canadian mass media have been reluctant to address this issue, but it is a story that will literally never go away: with a half-life of 4.5 billion years -- much longer than life has lived on planet Earth -- DU will continue to swirl through the atmosphere and destroy the DNA of every living thing it touches, for as long as there is a planet Earth.

Clearly, this is an environmental catastrophe of the first order: there is nothing else save an actual nuclear war that can compare to it.

Yet the American military remains committed to the use of DU in Iraq and Afghanistan, and continues to send its soldiers and contractors in their thousands to work in Iraq despite the shockingly high radiation levels that have been recorded there. Now in the coming year they may be sending a staff of 1,000 to work in an embassy that can be seen from space. If the history of Gulf War syndrome is any indication, we can unfortunately expect that many Americans who serve in Iraq -- and their children -- will be stricken in numbers similar to those seen among Iraqis and Afghanis.

In Iraq, American power is being materialized as a citadel and etherialized as DNA-smashing depleted uranium. Between this massive construction project and the slow destruction of Iraqi genes we are seeing the struggle between life/lifelessness being playing out on a scale never before imagined in the history of warfare.

What we see in the etherialization of war through the atomization of DU is not just the paradoxical and suicidal utilitarian logic of the "sacrifice zone", or the willingness to render certain parts of the planet uninhabitable in order to further the perceived -- and wholly perverted -- self-interest of an elite.

No: the use of DU carries this ideology into another dimension altogether. For now we must also speak of a "sacrifice time." The "unbuilding forces" unleashed through DU contamination are cumulative, eternally corrupting and uncontainable. They have the potential to render every era following our own unlivable. As Mumford himself put it:

"There is surely no evidence of stability in a civilization...that has resurrected the most barbarous forms of compulsion, torture and wholesale extermination, and that now threatens, in future struggles to...'preserve freedom,' to annihilate the population of entire continents and perhaps make the whole planet permanently uninhabitable...To build any hopes for the future on such a structure could occur only to the highly trained but humanly under-dimensioned 'experts' who have contrived it." (The City in History, pp. 525-528).

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Sacrifice

In Neal Stephenson's classic SF novel Snow Crash, the U.S. National Parks Service runs a National Sacrifice Zone program, responsible for public lands, the projected cleanup costs of which have rendered them valueless. While the setting of the novel might be the proverbial "near future", the notion of the "national sacrifice zone" has been with us a long time - and will be forever.

The term originated in the Cold War when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in pursuit of nuclear supremacy, contaminated territories of their own beyond human habitability. But the need for such zones has gone beyond old-style atomic weaponry: Most recently, 200 acres of Jefferson County, Indiana may be declared a National Sacrifice Zone owing to depleted uranium weapons testing. But military uses are no longer the predominate form of sacrifice zones.

The term is now used widely to refer to brutal extraction or industrial regimes that destroy or contaminate the landscape and its people. Northern Alberta, with its lucrative tar sands, has become Canada's de-facto national "sacrifice zone"; while the same imperatives are stripping Colorado, as documented in a new film called National Sacrifice Zone: Colorado and the Cost of Energy Independence. Thousands of acres of New Mexico are also slated for destruction to access coal bed methane.

While I guess it shouldn't surprise us that a concept originating in the "military industrial complex" should have migrated so seamlessly from the military to industrial realm, it should give us pause that there seems to be such a widespread acceptance -- officially at least -- of the notion that whole regions may be devastated without remedy. Such is what results from economic policy when viewed from a narrowly-defined Utilitarian lens: that if we can conceive of actions (such as strip mining) as benefiting the greater good (the economy), then the act is also rendered virtuous. Because of this, the needs of those protesting mining (local environmentalists) may, as a minority view hostile to the utility of the "greater good", be dismissed.

But now there are also global sacrifice zones. The West appears to be reasonably sanguine about China polluting her own rivers to the point where they are poisonous to the touch, as long as our own remain clear and we can buy all our consumer goods at low, low prices.

Which brings me to the point: our culture has adopted a curiously malignant notion of "sacrifice".

Only a few generations after Americans rationed and recycled en masse to contribute to the war effort, we have seemingly forgotten any notion of self-denial. Nothing can put the brakes on our consumption as we continue on a spending spree that fewer of us can actually afford. But as our own debt grows, so too deepens our ecological debt. We are apparently willing to sacrifice the land and those who live near it, so we don't have to sacrifice anything.

Beyond the basic immorality of this choice (even granting that people even think about it this way) there is a catch. And I'm not even talking about the obvious one -- that there are only so many places in which we can hide our sacrifices zones until they're outside our windows.

No, the more immediate problem is that, when the global sacrifice zone is also the global factory, then how long will it be before those consumer goods are themselves toxic? We got a taste of this in recent months when Chinese-made Thomas the Tank Engine toys were contaminated with lead, and thousands of pets died from contaminated pet food. How long will it be before we learn that a host of other products are toxic or radioactive?

Whether in the form of a closing circle of destruction or a legacy of contamination we should know that our unwillingness to practice self-sacrifice now will lead, as Shakespeare put it, to an "even-handed justice [which] commends th'ingredience of our poisoned chalice to our own lips." We may, in fact, be sacrificing ourselves after all.

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