If I look out my bedroom window, I can see spring arriving in the pond that used to be my backyard. The snow—which is actually now semi-frozen ice—and the ice proper beneath it is melting, flooding entire portions of my backyard. The end of a little ice age.
Bits of autumnal debris slowly raise themselves up from the muck: leaves and branches, planks of wood. Hey, look, a shovel. The meltwater flows around these objects, pooling at the depressions in the yard. It flows around the garage too, and the wood and barbecue sheds. This microcosmic clash of human urbanity and nature strikes a chord in me, because it demonstrates how much humans have shaped the face of the Earth.
If I look up from the ground, straight ahead, I can see the houses behind mine, the ones across the back lane that face outward to another street. And beyond them, more houses. Two or three storeys high, that’s all. I don’t live in a crowded metropolis like New York, nor a sparsely-populated rural area like Kakabeka. And that makes the subtle distinctions even more refined, because I‘m at that midway point, where we’ve built up our suburbs, but nature is still evident in the carefully manicured boulevards and precisely planted birch trees.
It’s the ice, though, that gets me. The ice melts and flows around our man-made structures. I look across the yard and notice that during the winter it was entirely covered by snow and ice. Patches of brown grass are seeping through now. And I wonder, what would this look like without the buildings? Why, it would be a huge plain of ice, ice covered by snow, snow being blown about by a wind that was free of the interference of tall buildings. Such places, I hear, do exist, for I have seen them on TV.
Humans (at least those of Westernized culture) are quite backward creatures really. We gave Darwin a miss and decided that, instead of adapting ourselves to the environment, we should merely adapt the environment to ourselves. Heck, we can move mountains if they are in our way. The mere existence of the word “cityscape”, (which Firefox does not mark as incorrectly spelled, even though it believes “Firefox” doesn’t exist) emphasises how we’ve shaped the Earth.
I‘m not drawing any real conclusions here, nor are these observations all that original or revolutionary. But it’s good to stop and think about this stuff once and awhile. Again, as a species we‘ve sort of removed ourselves from the environment and created this own, extremely elaborate fictitious universe that we collectively inhabit. It’s only healthy to break way from that fantasy every so often and actually look at the world around us.
» 2 people have an opinion
Yes, bees and other social insects build habitats. So do beavers.
In terms of scope, however, no species rivals humankind in what we have done. Beavers dam rivers. We destroy enter mountains so that we can build train tracks—or, alternatively, we carve the faces of our leaders into the mountainside. We transmute one element into another by smashing atoms together. And unlike bees, who generally exist in harmony, we make a mess of ecosystems.
Leave your opinion
The Website field is optional, but you must enter your name, email address, and of course, a comment. In order to make it harder for bots to spam my blog, you need to answer a simple addition question. But if you select Remember me, then your details will be saved, and you won’t have to answer the question again.
Formatting
- Bold
**Bold text**- Italics
//Italic text//- Underline
__Underlined text__- Monospace
''Monospaced text''- Link
-
[[http://google.com/|Google search engine]]Bare URLs will automatically become links.
- Images
{{http://imageurl.com/image.png|Alternate text if the image does not load}}- Quotation
-
> This is a quotation.
> It can span multiple lines.
>
> Or even paragraphs, as long as each line has a > before it. - Unordered list
-
* List item (note two spaces preceding the asterisk)
* Second list item - Ordered list
-
- List item (note two spaces preceding the dash)
- Second list item - Definition list
-
t: Term (note two spaces preceding the t)
d: Definition (note two spaces preceding the d)
Well, technically we have adapted ourselves to the environment.
Bees build beehives to survive.
We build houses.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 at 8:56 PM