Something about the way we fall.

An interesting article came my way this morning titled "Imagine the world without humans," from an internet friend I play video games with. Though I guess when we play video games we are occupying a world without humans, because the humans are in their escapist imaginations. Anyway, the article (read it HERE) was in yesterdays online edition of New Scientist, and reads as though it were a Romantic meditation on the sudden absence of humanity, asking the question, 'what would the world look like?' An interesting question, and one that has been asked many many times with many different answers.

There are a couple interesting things I found in the article. For starters, it really downplays the anticipated effects of nuclear radiation, something I was not expecting. The author draws us to look at how ecosystems rebounded following the Chernobyl disaster, both small and large animals (mice and wolves). It would only be speculative for me to to suggest otherwise, because I'm not an expert on nuclear radiation and its effects on ecosystems. Secondly, I found the author's comments on the durability of concrete rather interesting. A quote from a Chernobyl expert notes that the 'most pervasive thing about the structure is how plant life has found it's way through cracks,' further splitting buildings and turning the place into ruins.

I know that during the enlightenment a number of European philosophers (guys like Descartes and Hegel) saw ruined buildings, clogged cities, and what they deemed to be an entirely cluttered landscapes, and they were absolutely petrified. They believed that the mission they were on would prevent humanity from slipping into chaos, that they were literally crafting an accelerated path to progress. History was the space of darkness and ruination and the future was the place of light and reason. The past literally represented that chaotic zone that acted as a vaccuum for all the nations and peoples that got it wrong. I think this idea has a certain amount of hubris to it does not acknowledge what the earth actually does at the end of the day, and that is it reclaims us and everything. This is why I appreciated the author's description of how ecosystems would take on a rather interesting integrated form.

I do have to take a step back from the romantic sentiments of the article and the pull of deep ecology, because I do rather enjoy being alive. However, there is something valuable to consider when we think of what Robert Pogue Harrison meant when he wrote in Dominion of the Dead that built,
architecture actually creates the places where human time, in its historical and existential modes, takes place. Such places - be they homes, buildings, cities or landscapes - are recesses of mortal time in which we go about inhabiting the earth histrocially rather than merely naturally.

As a society, I think Westerners by and large do not meditate on the implications of geological time and what it really represents to humanity. Instead, we've undertaken a process of building as high and as wide as possible, but even Gilgamesh, that first conqueror striving for immortality, had been told that 'Man the highest cannot reach the stars, and man the widest cannot cover the earth.' Of course once he goes beyond the city walls and into the Underworld he realizes that this is true and decides to take a permanent vacation.

Donald Fixico wrote that 'The arms on the clock have a stranglehold on the Indian mind,' and Hakuin wrote that 'from the nothingness there is a path that leads away from the dust of the earth,' but then again Rilke had meditated on these things, "if the earthly has forgotten you, say to the still Earth: I flow. And tell the flowing stream: I am." As a process though, the linear progress of time, the built structures that are meant to eclipse the flow of geological time, in fact, to conquer our own mortality, are the only processes that Western civilization enshrines. The sight of Ruins, Harrison quite rightly notes, fills us with a reflexive and a figurative and literal unsettling experience.

I guess it is appropriate that this article is published in the autumn, maybe the author had an unintended resonance with the Earth's annual reclamation of everything green. After all, he does note how the green reclaims the grey. I took this photo of an Ash (Yellow) and Maple (Red) last weekend when Mzin and I were in Jackson Park.