This morning I found myself in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, not two blocks from home, looking at a stack of books by Annie Dillard, whose works I have not read.
I opened up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which won Dillard a Pulitzer Prize) and landed on this passage:
The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously, and we vertebrates are positively piteous, like so many peeled trees.
This oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed as by Pliny, who writes of nature, “To all the rest, given she hath sufficient to clad them everyone according to their kind: as namely shells, cods, hard hides, pricks, shags, bristles, hair, down feathers, quills, scales, and fleeces of wool. The very trunks and stems of trees and plants, she hath defended with bark and rind, yea and the same sometimes double, against the injuries both of heat and cold: man alone, poor wretch, she hath laid all naked upon the bare earth, even on his birthday, to cry and wraule presently from the very first hour that he is born into the world.”
I am sitting under a sycamore tree: I am soft-shell and peeled to the least puff of wind or smack of grit.
Humans are a dynamic, weedy, and increasingly urban species.
Soft-shelled, we armor ourselves with technology. We build humancities, our correlate to anthills and beehives. As a social species, like ants and bees, our well-being depends upon mutual aid, social networks, and cultural adaptations — of which technology is a manifestation.
Winston Churchill’s oft-quoted aphorism applies here: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
Earlier this week, the World Health Organization celebrated its annual World Health Day. This year’s theme was “Urbanization and health: urban health matters.”
The 21st century will be the urban century. By 2030 three out of five people worldwide will live in cities. In Latin America, already three out of four live in urban areas. In China alone, more than 100 cities currently have a population over one million. As the world population expands from just over six billion to a projected eight billion people, virtually all of that additional growth will occur in urban areas.
How cities shape consumption, promote health and equity, and nurture creative collaboration may determine the arc of the planet’s future. Urban management may be the ultimate multiplier, either minimizing poverty and supporting equitable cities or hastening the collapse of ecosystems. This may be especially true in small to medium cities, where most of the population growth will occur; these cities, however, will also face a dearth of skilled managers.
Learning to shape our cities is a great human challenge.
***
A few flicks of the thumb took me to this passage:
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people—the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, “next year…I’ll start living; next year…I’ll start my life.” Innocence is a better world.
Not having read the entire book (something I now intend to do), I wonder whether Dillard equates “innocence” here with forswearing the city and living with nature? [English majors/readers weigh in.]
Urbanism may once have been consonant with a “sophisticated,” inward-gazing disregard for anything beyond the city, including a disconnect from the sources of materials and cycles of nature and an obliviousness to the externalities of a consumptive lifestyle. In American society, however, a form of this mentality has become pervasive. Nature deficit disorder is the norm. Life occurs inside the armor.
Does the rise of an urban planet suggest humanity is losing its innocence?
This transition may be implied by the proposed name of a new phase in global history, the “anthropocene epoch,” which seems to be gaining traction. The anthropocene (or “new human”) epoch recognizes that mankind’s collective impact is having an impact on the interdependent global processes and may potentially surpass “a safe operating space for humanity” (full article here). Humanity is certainly not apart from nature.
Thoreau wrote in Walking, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
How can cities and wildness thrive in tandem? Can cities be the salvation of the world?
A self-conscious (and self-preservationist) response to the anthropocene era broadly demands more extensive global management or stewardship — including fostering better cities, cordoning off critical wilderness, and even reintegrating wildness and cities. The developing understanding of socio-ecological systems is an extension of human cultural adaptation. (Check out the work of Nobel prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, and of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.) Whether institutions and collective behavior will be able to adapt is now the question.
Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com calls for “bright green cities,” choosing to focus on how we can move forward with optimism and human ingenuity, as opposed to dwelling simply on the myriad environmental and social threats. Steffen prioritizes the challenge of harnessing collective problem solving in pursuit of a positive vision.
***
One last passage, again serendipitously found:
In the lower Bronx, for example, enthusiasts found an ailanthus tree that was fifteen feet long growing from the corner of a garage roof. It was rooted in and living on “dust and roofing cinders.” Even more spectacular is a desert plant, Ibervillea sonorae—a member of the gourd family—that Joseph Wood Krutch describes. If you see this plant in the desert, you see only a dried chunk of loose wood. It has neither roots nor stems; it’s like an old gray knothole. But it is alive. Each year before the rainy season comes, it sends out a few roots and shoots. If the rain arrives, it grows flowers and fruits; these soon wither away, and it reverts to a state as quiet as driftwood.
Well, the New York Botanical Garden put a dried Ibervillea sonorae on display in a glass case. “For seven years,” says Joseph Wood Krutch, “without soil or water, simply lying in the case, it put forth a few anticipatory shoots and then, when no rainy season arrived, dried up again, hoping for better luck next year.” That’s what I call flying in the teeth of it all.
Perhaps with global urbanization, we are “flying in the teeth of it all.”
The ailanthus, also called the “Tree of Heaven,” is a weedy species, famous for its role in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The ailanthus is not native to Brooklyn; it’s an invasive species that can flourish in urban areas. (I live in Brooklyn, but, unlike my wife, I am not native to this place.)
Cities have always been nodes of commerce and international transport (once by ship, now also by plane) – which has also abetted the spread of invasive species. But I believe cities can coexist with and foster diversity. Most human settlements have grown up along coasts and rivers, many originally near rich, diverse habitat.
New York City rests — if one can imagine New York resting — amidst one of the most remarkable estuaries on the continent. It’s also one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. But, yes, the “clatter of quickening stimulus” can easily crowd out any awareness of the natural world and its remarkable patterns.
I’m interested in reconnecting urbanites—including myself—with nature (easier said than done), certainly aligned with the current efforts to combat nature deficit disorder and rethink food systems. These are opportunities that should be available to all communities in the diverse cities; much can also be learned from the various cultural approaches to nature.
Of equal interest to me and this blog is the question (to which I have few answers), how can the underlying natural context for human society and the natural connections between places be integrated better into our way of thinking?
Rapidly growing urban areas, especially in developing nations, have often squeezed development into every last square meter of the city. The economic and social concerns squeeze out interest in the natural world. The “shifting baselines” phenomenon eliminates knowledge of nature from cultural memory, as can urban migration. Conversely, preserving biocultural diversity can support efforts to promote resilience by maximizing approaches to identifying problems and solutions.
Ultimately, I wonder: if urbanization is one of the forces driving the global future, can our weediness be tempered by wisdom?
[As I was writing this, a tweet about David Quammen's piece "The weeds shall inherit the Earth" in The Independent (also published in Harper's as "Planet of Weeds") crossed my desk/screen. H/T @BillNigh and @InvasiveNotes.]
Related posts: