Where are we going, how can we change?

an investigation into the motivations for human action
as applicable to a sustainable future

Environment

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.¹

Henry David Thoreau

A clear mountain stream, the grand canyon, the Las Vegas strip, a suburban cul-de-sac, a grove of oak trees, a grassy field, a garbage dump, a sandy beach, a trailer park, an airport runway, a strip-mine, Manhattan, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Atlantic Ocean, the Sahara desert, a Wal-Mart parking lot, a village of primitive huts: these are all natural environments. Human beings and what they create are purely natural. What humans create begins as a concept in the naturally evolved mind. It is assembled using the natural materials at hand on the Earth. If different materials with different properties were at our disposal, and if our brains were differently evolved, our environment would naturally be different.

Beavers build a dam, ants create a hill, bees build a hive, humans create a civilization. The environment we have built is expansive. It is ever-expanding. Its increasing complication is resultant from the multiplication of learned techniques. Humans are required to manipulate materials in ever more complex forms in order to provide the necessities for an ever-growing population. The desire for an increased quality of life, believed to be achieved principally through a more complex array of possessions, adds to the need to further our manipulation of materials found in their unaltered state.

We, of course, can separate that part of the natural world which humans plan and construct (manmade development), and that which has not been created by human planning. The Hoover Dam, and Lake Mead which it created, are the creations of man and provide water, power, and flood control to the inhabitants of the American Southwest. The changed Colorado River habitat for fish and wildlife is the result of this creation of man. The negative effects for these species were not necessarily appreciated by humans prior to the dam’s construction. The point at which what was planned, and what happened by unanticipated effect, is not always clear or definitively able to be proven. Agreement will not be reached by all, in the case of the Hoover Dam, whether its overall effect has been good or bad, only that the effect on mother-nature was profound. Suffering has been decreased for those people served by it, while the found state of the river habitat has been destroyed. A human generally approaches a question such as this from the viewpoint of what is only best for itself. This is natural. It should not be assumed to be otherwise. However, in making the determination of what is best for man, one must considerer the effect over generations of time, with an understanding of the interconnectedness of life and nature’s relentless drive towards equilibrium. This is too often ignored in hasty decision making.

Humans must exert control over their environment in order to survive. All animals must consume the items of their environment in order to satiate basic desire for sustenance and provide for comforts of life. One life must consume at the expense of another. This is the rule of nature. Equilibrium will be found amongst animal species and will naturally control over-consumption of the environment. Over-consumption reaches a limit for the species when either the food supply begins to dwindle to the point where it can not support the population, or the waste products of consumption, better known as pollution, reach a level of toxicity. The genius of mother-nature’s balance lies in the symbiotic relationship of species, such that one species’ pollution can be another’s livelihood. The plant needs the human’s wasted carbon dioxide, the human needs the plant’s wasted oxygen. However, many forms of pollution are equally poisonous to all living things.

Mother-nature does not allow a species to expand beyond the capacity of their food supply or their tolerance for toxicity. We have seen already, as evidenced by some of the African nations, that nature has forced a control of human population through a crisis of limited food supply and toxicity, by human disease. The effect is widespread suffering. Suffering which could have been controlled by intelligent decision making is a failure of the human society. We know, through witnessing the massive extinction of species, that there is no guarantee for continuous survival. Where toxicity becomes overwhelming, or the food supply is exhausted, the species will die.

The human global economy demands greater toxicity. The most highly valued traits of today’s products: newness, greater size and greater amount, along with the producer’s necessity to increase profit through the speed of production, and speed of product replacement, work together to support a throw-away culture with a maximum emphasis on waste. The vast amount of pollution being created is normally not focused on, due to an under-emphasis of the power of common-sense and because of a decreased understanding of the human’s fragile condition within nature. This is compounded by the hyper-specialization demanded by the economy necessary to support a massive population. Because few people make their own food or collect their own water, there is little knowledge of where these things come from. Subsistence has been abstracted to earning money in order to buy processed and packaged foods. The basic understanding is that our food comes from a store or restaurant and our water comes from a sink or bottle.

As well, nature is generally believed to be that part of the world un-manipulated by man. It is common for an ecologically-minded person to concern himself with natural areas; to which they rarely, or perhaps will never, travel; promoting their protection, while not considering their own neighborhood. This ability to point at another culture’s environment without thinking much about one’s own influence, allows a conscious state of dislocation to develop, separating the relentless drive of the global industrial machine, and one’s own gains through its engagement, from an effect, somewhere far off, where no responsibility can be felt. A virgin mountain side in Colorado falls within the general conception of a natural environment. However, once this landscape is stripped bare and a subdivision is placed on it, it is now part of man’s domain and will no longer be considered natural. An appreciator of nature may live here and be alarmed at his fragile position when confronted by coyotes, mud slides or forest fires. He may also ride his mountain bike or off-road vehicle through the canyon bed for leisure activity, all the while, promoting the protection of a rain forest a continent away. Hypocrisy and denial are the two conditions a person will be forced to enter into when suffering from over-optimism and the belief that an action can be wholly positive and will not cause a negative effect elsewhere.

The consequence of this compartmentalization of nature is to disassociate oneself from active perception of large segments of the environment. A cultural ignorance has been fostered to effectively remove from cognizance those places that are objectionable to the natural sensibilities. However, as the man-made environment expands, with its ever-accumulating areas devoted to the storage, delivery and removal of waste, of the products of the global economy, the more difficult it is to maintain this disassociation from perception.

Sacrifice zones are those places which every sedentary society establishes, normally somewhere in the outskirts and separate from the residential areas, as a repository for that which does not want to be seen. The sacrifice zone is necessary for the livelihood and support of the civilization. These areas are the dumping grounds for the waste of industrial techniques. What is found here are such things as: car-smashing sites, garbage dumps, oil and gas storage tanks, nuclear reactors, nuclear waste storage sites, open-pit mines, electrical plants, switch gear, coal or salt storage for northern climates, food processing plants, clear-cut forests, storage grounds for transportation and infrastructure, military weapons graveyards and chemical plants. All of us naturally have a negative reaction when forced to drive through these areas. However, they are ubiquitous. Any town no matter how small must have a sacrifice zone to provide places for its waste and to allow for industrial processes.

Certain segments of the society may not be confronted by their sacrifice zones for long periods of time and are well habituated to ignore their existence. Others must work in these areas, and have an intimate knowledge of their landscape. These are normally the jobs of the lower classes. It does not matter if one is in Buenos Aires, Beijing, or Boston, these areas must exist for the sedentary society to survive. The term sacrifice zone has been borrowed from the writer David Watson. Watson says, “The empire is a brutal, mechanized pyramid that cannot exist without colonies and sacrifice zones: once established, quantitative value flows from one direction to another. Thus at one end of the spectrum we find an idyllic, manicured park, and at the other the slag heap which paid for it.”² These places are expanding around the globe as everywhere has been sucked into the global industrial mechanism.

In Pittsburgh or Cleveland, the citizen may say their city is much cleaner than in the 1970’s. Progress must have been made in these former heavily industrial cities. However, this is simply the result of colonization. The most polluting and toxic processes have been shipped off to Mexico, China, South America or other less advantaged places. The third world has become the first world’s sacrifice zone. However, the colonizing countries can not escape the effect of the industrial processes. These colonies are not far enough away. The distancing from locations of toxic dumping sites is limited by the Earth’s finite size. The pseudo-scientist will argue that we can send the pollution and industrial processes into space. We will fill the universe with satellites of space junk and industrial space colonies. The Earth would necessarily decrease in mass as material is continually stripped off of it and shipped into the Milky Way. We will create a Swiss cheese planet, where at some point one will be in danger of having her house yanked up to get the material beneath it. Under this scenario, the very matter of the Earth will be mined away until the last scrap is sent out to the space dump. The last of the survivors will be left to float out to space. Humans will finally have achieved the freedom of flight without the confinement of a gravitational pull. Unfortunately, there will be nowhere to come back to.

The global industrial machine does not sleep. It continues on relentlessly. Occasionally, the attention is caught long enough to look up from daily concerns and recognize some effect. Chemical spills and environmental disasters are guaranteed. The rule of any machine is that it will break. Airplanes will crash. Making a machine fly is not easy. We do not choose to recognize the inevitably of failures in a system growing more and more complex. When a plane goes down, as it must, we are re-awoken. We are hit by the pangs of the sympathetic nature. However, environmental disasters are happening every day. In the first three months of 2006, three oil spills of estimated: 19,000, 1,500, and 10,000 gallons, were reported in the Chelsea River in Boston. Coast Guard officials said there have been at least a dozen spills in the area in the last two years.”³ However, these types of spills, happening every day around the United States, get little public attention and the consciousness is only raised by the most egregious incidents. Disasters from the 1980’s like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India got great coverage at their time, and although the effects of these disaster still remain, they have largely faded in the popular consciousness. According to a London Independent article, “Twenty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, British soil is still contaminated with radiation...The Department of Health said that 355 farms in Wales, 11 in Scotland, and nine in England must remain under emergency restrictions because of fallout from the 1986 reactor meltdown in Ukraine, 1500 miles away. Sheep from those farms often show unacceptable levels of radiation.”⁴ The magnitude of an environmental disaster must be immense in order for it to reach public attention, even though the mismanagement of the Earth continues without cessation.

At the same time as inevitable spills and leaks are happening, the properly functioning machine continues to make the Earth more inhospitable to the human being. Whether the oil is dumped into the sea or it reaches its destination, the effect on the environment is no less deadly for the human species. The oil that safely reaches its destination will be burnt up, increasing the levels of carbon dioxide and contaminants in the atmosphere. The complication demanded by the global economy continues on. The Earth becomes farther removed from its original found state to which humans were so well adapted.

Human activity is entangling itself and the Earth in a web of wires, pipes, and cables. A spider web of conduits is being spun over the Earth which can effectively never be untangled. The spaghetti network feeds the ever-widening global economy its information, water, and power, and sends its waste to the dumping grounds. Even with wireless and satellite communications making some of the old technology obsolete, the conduits will remain under the ocean and strung overhead, never removed but only deteriorated over millennia. Only once human activity has been brought into balance will these conduits rust away into oblivion.

In the sky, the airplanes continuously fly back and forth streaming their exhaust into the atmosphere. The airplane is one of the worst atmospheric polluters. The airport sits in a halo of smog, choking the environment with its haze of off-gases.

As well, the landscape is being smothered in a coating of black goo. The expanses of asphalt, necessary for smooth running wheels, has rendered formerly lush and green landscape more desolate than the side of a recently erupted volcano. The hardened crust of the parking lot is the predominant feature of the American city. The average Midwestern city is a desert of baking black top with glass, steel, and concrete towers sticking out of it. For a visitor from a more traditional human habitat, the effect of being exposed to this inhumane science-fiction moonscape is depressing to say the least. The architects of doom and the pseudo-scientists will continue to promote an even more inhumane environment with their dreams of future space station colonies.

Travelers love the historic, romantic streets of a European city. They will toil fifty weeks a year, in their inhospitable environments, to spend a week or ten days in cities made before the era of the internal combustion engine. Cities that were created before industrialization and mechanized transportation were necessarily compact and built for the pedestrian. We recognize the fact that they were built for the scale of the human being. This is appreciated by our body and mind and we are invigorated by the scale. Americans, who grew up in cities built, not on the scale of the human body but on the automobile, instantly recognize the difference in feeling. Although cities have gotten larger and streets wider, the human body has not, (even though the forced stuffing of the stomach is a current favorite leisure activity). We still respond to the old pedestrian scaled neighborhoods of our past. We may forget, when walking in these heavily-touristed areas, that they, as well, have their own sacrifice-zones.

In Europe, the antique pedestrian neighborhoods have been preserved like a gem. They are a valuable historic recording for the culture and the tourist. New development, however, is essentially no different than the American city. It is built on the scale of the automobile, forming a ring around the old town. Any city, with an area preserved from an early pre-automobile society, can serve as an example. In Vienna, Rome, or Prague, the development is necessarily the same. The new areas have been built on the scale of the automobile with the same familiar method as the American city. The American city has just had less of the pedestrian-scaled neighborhood to start with, and more zealousness in destroying those few that did exist to make way for the car and truck. In cities like Columbus, Ohio or Indianapolis, Indiana or Houston, Texas or Atlanta, Georgia, the percentage of areas surviving which were built for non-mechanized forms of transportation are so small as to be insignificant to the overall character of the place.

Why so few human-scale places exist in America is due to a shorter history of pedestrian development and the cultural value placed on suburban living at the scale of the automobile. A change of mind has arisen in most of the world lamenting the erasing of human civilization’s past. As well, the quaint character of the pre-automobile city is missed. Urban planners write volumes on the mistakes of: slum clearance, flight from cities, suburbanization, and sprawl, and the negative effects it has on the human experience. The automobile environment offers fewer interesting experiences in the same area, forcing one to live with an automobile as an extension of the body. When one sees a handicapped person going down the street in a wheelchair, a sense of pity is felt, knowing that this person’s freedom is lessened due to a necessity to use a chair with wheels to go anywhere. Our automobile culture is limiting our freedom in that we are forced to sit in a wheeled vehicle to accomplish the most basic tasks of living; from going to work or procuring food. What was conceived of as a means of increasing freedom, the automobile, has now become a veritable wheelchair making the legs unusable in areas designed without any consideration for the pedestrian or the bicyclist.

Whether you are in a small town in Ohio, Vermont, or New York, you must rely on the automobile to exist. The choices are limited. Lack of good choices results in lack of freedom. In the habit of the science-fiction dreamer, one could picture a cosmic visitor looking down at our civilization. The voyeur would wonder at the prevalence of one giant species, bilaterally symmetrical with a head and rear, with four turning wheels conveying it along lines of hardscape. Large numbers are at rest in fields of asphalt or in their own private shelter. The scale of the built environment is perfectly tailored for these large, wheeled creatures. The larger species dominates a smaller one which feeds, maintains, and washes it with the understanding that it can get on board for a ride.

The case against the automobile environment gets more serious, beyond its destruction of more interesting, historic, human-scaled environments (which happen to be safer and healthier for the active engagement of the body and mind, and provide greater freedom of choice for movement) when energy and pollution are considered. Ecologists, urban planners and architects have recognized this as well and promote public transportation. For a country like the United States, whose infrastructure greatly depends on trucks, and airplanes to transport goods internally, the issue becomes deadly serious as fossil fuels become scarcer. The United States is in the greatest position of vulnerability when hit by an upsurge in the price of oil, as the entire nation is a sprawling decentralized development only serviceable by automobiles. As well, emissions from the continued unrestrained use of automobiles, along with airplanes and power plants, are leading to a catastrophic warming of the planet.

It has been known for decades, that the activities of the human industrial economy are warming the temperature of the Earth. Swedish scientist Svante Ahrrenius, as early as 1898, warned that global warming would be an effect of CO₂ emissions from oil and coal burning power plants. However, because a theory of science which is confrontational to the powers-that-be, will always be refuted, until overwhelmingly verified by common-sense, it has not been until the last few years that for many people, the inevitable climate change has been fully believed. Global warming caused by human activity is a fact. The proof by common-sense and science is all around. Of course, the conservative nature of politicians and the predatory nature of the economically-dominant auto and oil industries will continue to fight any action to deal with it. This must be expected but not accepted. The White House is already attempting to muzzle the ethical-scientists who have taken the initiative to speak out.

Top NASA climate scientist James E Hansen, regarded as one of the world’s most renowned researchers on climate change, says “Humans now control global climate, for better or worse.”⁵ “If we follow a business-as-usual scenario, we will be creating a hammer hitting the Earth faster and harder than it has ever been hit, except perhaps when the Earth was hit by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.”⁶ “Industrial emissions of CO₂ are declining. The two problem areas are emissions from power plants and emissions from vehicles….For vehicles, efficiency is critical because of the rapidly growing global number of vehicles. It is false to say that hydrogen technology will solve this in the future. It takes energy to make hydrogen. Efficiency will always be needed.”⁷ “The two most important greenhouse gases, with chlorofluorocarbons on the decline, are carbon dioxide and methane.”⁸ Along with cfcs and methane, black carbon (soot) is the next most dangerous additional component of air pollution causing global warming. Hansen tells us that with an effective radical reduction in the emissions of these three components: CO₂, methane, and soot, global warming could possibly be limited below the guaranteed business-as-usual outcome. For those who think bio-diesel fuels provide a good solution for a renewable energy source, Hansen says, “Prime sources of black carbon are diesel fuels and biofuels (wood and cow dung, for example). These sources need to be dealt with for health reasons.”⁹ Soot from bio-diesel will contribute just as badly to greenhouse gases and smog. Thus, bio-fuels are no better a solution to limiting the toxification of the environment. Every major fuel source poses a serious heath risk and will not ease pollution. Nuclear energy, bio-fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, coal gasification, and hydrogen fuels all lead to assured greater toxicity of the environment. Even green energy, like solar, requires batteries which must be discarded into the landfill when used up. Every positive action has a negative reaction. The negative must be fully understood for wise decisions to be made.

Scientific American provides a good explanation of how global warming is happening. “The largest change of climate forcings in recent centuries is caused by human-made greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere absorb heat radiation rather than letting it escape into space. In effect, they make the proverbial blanket thicker, returning more heat toward the ground rather than letting it escape to space. The earth then is radiating less energy to space than it absorbs from the sun.”¹⁰ The two most dangerous effects of global warming are: rising sea levels, and the warming of the ocean. Rising sea levels will mean the loss of habitable land for humans and animals. The polar bear is already having his natural habitat melt away. “The North pole has been frozen for 100,000 years. But according to scientists, that won’t be true by the end of this century. The top of the world is melting.”¹¹ “The bears are unlikely to survive as a species if there’s a complete loss of ice in summer, which the arctic study projects will happen by the end of this century.”¹² The complete loss of ice will happen more rapidly than ever thought. Its acceleration will happen quicker as the underside of the ice melts and lubricates the ice causing it to crash into the water. A report by scientists Eric Rignot and Pannir Kanagaratnam says, “Those faster moving glaciers now dump in a year twice as much ice into the Atlantic as they did in 1996.”¹³ All this will be accelerated as more and more greenhouse gases are spewed into the atmosphere. We can now chalk the polar bear up on our list of species we have killed. The writing on the wall is clear for us as well.

With rising sea levels, our coastal cities will be flooded. American scientist Bob Corell who led the ‘Arctic Climate Impact Assessment” says, “Sea level will be inundating the low lands of virtually every country of the world, ours included.”¹⁴ Hansen says, “The dominant issue in global warming, in my opinion, is sea-level change and the question of how fast ice sheets can disintegrate. A large portion of the world’s people live within a few meters of sea level, with trillions of dollars of infrastructure.”¹⁵ “Dikes may protect limited regions, such as Manhattan and the Netherlands, but most of the global coastlines will be inundated.”¹⁶ The water level is already rising. This is not happening in a steady increase, like watching water filling up the bathtub. Rather, it is happening in a series of violent and deadly storm events such as Hurricane Katrina which destroyed a major part of the city of New Orleans. As the residents affected by this storm know, there will not be time to simply get out of the way after watching a slowly rising water level.

The ocean temperatures that have been warming for the entire 20^th century (due to the greenhouse effect), are causing more serious storms. Corell says, “The one thing we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence is the severity of the storms, how strong the storms, these cyclonic events like hurricanes and cyclones in the Pacific, are going to get- they’re gonna be more severe.”¹⁷ “The oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are the warmest they’ve been on record. When they get up in that temperature, they spin off hurricanes. Well if it goes up another degree, it’s gonna spawn these with more intensity.”¹⁸

Yet another effect to the natural world, due to the warming ocean, is seen in the bleaching and dying of coral reefs. The coral reefs provide a buffer to slow down wave action as it crashes into shore. With more and more humans living in coastal areas, they will be in the path of ferocious storms. Coral reefs which help to block some of the energy of tidal-force waves and halt erosion are dying. “Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record, and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels. Sea temperatures touched 84 Fahrenheit, the upper limit of coral.”¹⁹ Coral bleaching is a sign of mass death of coral. Queensland Island Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg who heads a group of 100 scientists monitoring bleaching says, “The 2006 Great Barrier Reef event comes soon after the worst incidence of coral bleaching in the Caribbean in October 2005.” He goes on to say, “We’re starting to get into very dangerous territory where what we see perhaps this year will become the norm and of course extreme events will become more likely, the climate is changing so quickly that coral reefs don’t keep up-the loss of that ecosystem would be tremendous.”²⁰

The arctic ice record and observation of the recession of arctic glaciers provides irrefutable scientific evidence of the warming of the climate. Scientist Paul Mayewski at the University of Maine has led 35 expeditions collecting deep ice cores from glaciers. “The ice captures everything in the air, laying down a record covering half a million years. We can go to any section of the ice core, to tell, basically, what the greenhouse gas levels were; we can tell whether or not it was stormy, what the temperatures were like…As for carbon dioxide levels, we haven’t seen CO₂ levels like this in hundreds of thousands of year. Even if we stopped using every car, truck, and power plant-stopping all greenhouse gas emissions, the planet would continue to warm anyway.”²¹

The warming of the climate which has been obviously evident through common-sense is backed up by science. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies has announced that 2005 was the warmest year on record.²² Weather information shows that the average temperature for the month of January, 2006 in New York City was nine degrees warmer than normal.

On February 8, 2006, the condition of Walden Pond was vastly unlike how Thoreau had experienced it 150 years ago. The weather was in the mid 30’s, a sunny day, not too cold as the entire winter of 2005-2006 had been in the Northeast United States. The winter of 2006 was the warmest and mildest by far of any ever experienced. Everyone was remarking of this. It did not matter how old. The weather has definitely gotten much warmer. Walden pond was not frozen. There was a small amount of ice, a thin layer on the very end of the pond, more a film with a somewhat soft surface appearance. It was certainly not capable of supporting any weight and was interspersed with areas of open water. The remaining 95% of the pond was totally unfrozen and the water rippled in the wind. Consulting Thoreau’s book to see how unusual the state of the pond was on this day, in comparison to the recent history of winter’s past, he says on page 245, “In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22^nd December, ….in’46, the 16^th; in ’49, about the 31^st’ and in ’50 about the 27^th of December; in ’52, the 5^th of January; in ’52, the 31^st of December.” He goes on to say on page 281, in the chapter The Pond in Winter, “Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field.” The weather certainly has changed. The pond would certainly not be confused with any thing other than a pond, and there is not a flake of snow to be seen on the ground. This is not due to a suddenly warm week. The entire winter of 2005-2006 has been warm with no accumulation of snow lasting more than a few days. The weather has simply not been cold enough. Page 300, Chapter Spring, “On the 13^th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.” However, a century and a half later, it is doubtful if the pond will ice over at all. When did the ice completely leave the pond in Thoreau’s time? From page 300, “In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1^st of April in’46, the 25^th of March, in ’47, the 8^th of April; in ’51 the 28^th of March; in ’52, the 18^th of April; in ’53 the 23^rd of March’ in ’54, about the 7^th of April.” The general pattern during his time was apparently that the pond froze over sometime around the end of December and the ice cleared the pond sometime around the beginning of April. The rule was that the pond was frozen solid for about 3 months of the year.

On February 16, 2005 the buds have come out on the trees, the temperature is around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, in Boston, MA. This is highly unusual. Temperatures had become more normal during March with highs generally in the mid to upper 30’s, however, with no lasting snow accumulation in the city of Boston. This pattern of unusually warm weeks causing overall higher average temperatures, is exactly what scientists have predicted.

The warming of the Earth continues on. The human being is turning the Earth into a hell, (the very place his mythology has told him to avoid). Every realistic concept of a Garden of Eden or Paradise is based on a vision of something that exists on the Earth. The richness of a bounty of nature perfectly suited to the human being already exists. Even the notion of floating in fluffy heavenly clouds is a depiction of the Earth’s sky. These heavenly places are all around. However, they are quickly being eradicated.

If one travels to New Brunswick or Oregon, they will see the effect of the clear-cutting of forests. Acres and acres of trees have been cleared off the land leaving bald swaths of ground. These lands are re-planted with thin whips of saplings in the characteristic man-made arrangement, row after row. These poor trees will not be allowed to grow to maturity, but will be harvested long before their time, to meet the demands for paper and building products by the relentless economic machine. The green plant, the one creature we have who can absorb some of our excess carbon dioxide and protect us from some of our waste, is being cleared off the Earth by the force of an ever-accelerating and out of control global economy.

Meanwhile, man consciously adds to his mismanagement of the environment simply through willful and wasteful behavioral choice. An activity such as auto racing is the epitome of man’s need to find great meaning in an activity of pure uselessness and which only promotes the waste of resources in order to appreciate the exertion of the human will to dominate. Auto racing is considered one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States, as well as in Europe and South America. The activity does not involve reaching some far off destination, but simply driving around and around a track while burning up great quantities of fossil fuels and rubber. The witnessing of the exertion of one driver to win is gratifying for the fan. This activity is no more useless than any other sport, only more polluting. Perhaps, boxing could expand its appeal, in the same manner, by allowing fighters to punch the general public’s faces, in order to simultaneously exhibit the sportsman’s muscle while destroying public health.

The culture of contemporary building plays its part to add to the degradation of the environment. The architect, who feigns to think she or he is having some control over the built environment, has become just a tool at the disposal of the private developer. Even knowledgeable and talented designers, who would like to contribute to a more sustainable man-made environment, are powerless to have any real effect. Development is not dictated by designers but by the direction of government policy for road building, sewer and utility extensions. The people guiding the choices for development are politicians, lawyers, business moguls, and private developers. The dominant motivation in development is to maximize profit by any means. In the United States, the developer, supported by the government, is free to acquire almost any parcel of land, and to do with it what they may. Review boards and weak laws, such as wetland protection, give an illusion that the health and well-being of the general public is being cared for by some wise leader. This, of course, is not the case. Zoning laws and building codes do little but guarantee the construction of ever-more monotonous and homogeneous environments. The provision for the automobile is the utmost concern for zoning laws. Minimum parking ratios and wide streets are required. Setbacks and low-density regulations, which were thought to protect green-space, do exactly the opposite. These planning laws only increase the inevitable sprawl of the suburban, automobile-scaled environment. The protection of green space and non-man made environments are undermined by the very laws enacted to try to protect them. The American landscape is dominated by object buildings set in the landscape, with no means other than the automobile possible to deliver the population its services and transport its goods. The environment is gobbled up in large parcels of low-density development, leaving less and less land area for agriculture or for the habitats for other species of the planet.

The landscape architect, architect, and city planner of the United States, spend their off-time in the streets of Europe laid out before the advent of the automobile. Some pledge to do something to make the American environment more engaging to the body and less destructive to the planet, but are left completely impotent when mandated by zoning laws to provide such things as a sea of parking spaces, and excessive widths of passages for both automobiles and people. Their building and landscape designs must conform to ever-more complicated building codes designed to place all the responsibility for the protection of individuals on the architect and designer and little on the citizen himself. American building codes, whose methods are being adopted throughout the world, would assume that a planet, that is spherical with many natural undulations of terrain, could be ironed flat. This two-dimensional pancake of an earth would then be equally accessible to all, and make every experience equally safe, boring and monotonous. Political correctness at the expense of common-sense is a trade-off that is being made. Enforcement of the building and zoning code is the lawyer’s influence on the environment. By force of fear of litigation, the lawyer causes the designer to cater to the lowest common denominator. A stair handrail or a public toilet is forced to look only one way because of fear that the user has so little bodily control that they will be unable to navigate these spaces without injury.

The typical architect is left to the demands of the private developer whose basic values are determined by the economic system. Lower cost of building materials, greater size of interior space and an emphasis on speed of construction (which undermines overall construction quality) are most in demand to maximize profits. The more stubborn designer, supported by a higher-minded developer, will be resigned to making the most out of their object building. He or she will maximize any number of formal gymnastics or develop their own esoteric fetishes for ornament to convey existential meaning. The less-motivated architect will be left under the influence of the more typical bread-and-butter developer’s market to adopt an attitude exemplified by the phrase, “As long as I can’t see it from my house, they can do whatever they want.”

The degradation of the environment rolls on, everyone accepting that environmental mishandling is necessary to achieve temporary profit, to sustain quality of life within the global economic system. However, the human’s intrinsic appreciation for quality and usefulness still remain, even if it becomes more difficult to find good examples of these traits in the landscape. The higher quality environments are home to the more affluent and more highly-educated as proof of this. Even though this is generally the case, even this is misunderstood. At a dedication for a new campus building at an elite American university, a dean made the following point in a speech intended to laud the progress made. Although this new building was obviously of a lower quality than the two historic, and full-of-character buildings, which had been ripped down to make way for it (and only made the physical experience of the quadrangle less enjoyable), the dean said that, although those old buildings may be missed, a university is not great because of its buildings but because of its people. On this point he was exactly wrong. The university is seen to be great because great people value great buildings. The environments and buildings people choose to associate themselves with are a direct reflection of their values, education, and wisdom.

It is often the case that in the haste to make something new, it may not turn out so well but this is ok and it can be fixed later. However, this is also not the case. Building the man-made environment is extremely difficult and requires vast expenditures of time, labor, and capital. Every building represents the toils of the people of the past. When good construction is ripped down, the people of the past are dishonored, in the same way a soldier would be dis-honored by desecrating his grave. The elements of the built environment can not simply be fixed easily. This is extremely difficult. The unwise decisions that have gone on to make the current American environment must be dealt with by generations to come. This will prove to be extremely difficult.

Notes

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden. New York: Time Incorporated, 1962, p.318.

2. David Watson, Against The Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Enemies. USA: Autonomedia, p.14.

3. Beth Daley, ‘Crews Collect 12,000 gallons of oil in spill’, The Boston Globe, March 11, 2006.

4. ‘Chernobyl Fallout Lingers’, The Week: The Best of U.S and International Media. Volume 6, Issue 251, March 24, 2006.

5. James E. Hansen, ‘Is There Still Time to Avoid Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference with Global Climate?: A Tribute to David Keeling’, Write up of a presentation on December 6, 2005 at the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, CA, p.6.

6. Ibid, p.10.

7. Ibid, p.12.

8. James E. Hansen, ‘Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb’, Scientific American, March, 2004, p.75.

9. Ibid, p.77.

10. Ibid, p.71.

11. ‘A Global Warning” CBS News, Write up of a 60 Minutes story, February 19, 2006, p.1.

12. Ibid, p.4.

13. ‘Greenland Glaciers Moving Faster’, CBS News, Internet news story, February 16, 2006, p.1

14. ‘A Global Warning’, p.1.

15. Hansen, Scientific American, p.73.

16. Hansen, Scientific American, p.75.

17. ‘A Global Warning’, p.3.

18. ‘A Global Warning’, p.3.

19. ‘Ghostly coral bleaching haunt world’s coral reefs’, Reuters. Sydney, Australia, March 20, 2006, p.1.

20. Ibid, p.2.

21. ‘A Global Warning’, p.2.

22. ‘Rewriting The Science’, CBS News, Internet news story, March 19, 2006, p.1.