“A City of a kind has been made… the tidy townships, the suburbs that climb hill-slopes towards the sun, and the honeycomb of factory and office buildings where each man has his appointed job under the eye of the clock–these are the works of the City, finite, exact, and reasonable, designed for the fulfillment of limited aims. But alongside the human City, indifferent or even hostile, remains the Wilderness, whose time is still that of the sixth day of creation and whose works belong to the power that created her…. The City is never truly self-sufficient for it possesses only the power to use and organize a world which it has not created”
James Baxter: New Zealand in Colour
The word “nature” is a tricky subject for me. I’m consistently confounded by the dualisms and subordinance that it implies between human and natural communities. We operate with a vocabulary that distinguishes the human induced and non-human induced components of our environment, but I worry when the “nature” (defined as the accumulation of physical phenomenon occurring on the Earth) offered lacks any room for a human home. Lest I assume that ecofeminism is a colloquial term, I should proclaim the profitable intellectual bounty provided by this movement. Most importantly to me, ecofeminists point out that positing “Nature” as separate from human communities is often is the phrase “Man and Nature” where the Earth is made into the ripe, virgin seed onto which men may construct their cities. This of course perpetuates marginalizing anyone other than heterosexual males, the planet included.
The seminal dance artist Anna Halprin teaches us that Nature (very capital ‘N’) is not something out-there-somewhere, but rather the nature of the Earth exists in our very bones. The proportion of water/solids and the salt content of our body directly reflect that of the planet and the global oceans; we have entire ecosystems living on our skin and in our gut; we are microcosms of the Earth. We, therefore, are no aliens on a forested mountain or swimming in the sea; we are at home in the nature of the planet riding a subway as much as in a cavern. The difference is first having a grounded understanding of the intricate and dynamic linkages of the body that reflect and integrate into the planet. The same cathartic experience derived from climbing a mountain is possible from deeply probing the cycles of our bodies.
If the man/nature dualism comes out of considering human communities as the strongest/most-prevalent/most-pervasive, we should feel physiologically dwarfed by Edward O. Wilson’s “little things that run the world.” I say this by no means to minimize the environmental catastrophe fraught by human communities, but rather to expose the idea that we are by no means the most dominant forms of the Earth, just the most reckless. Indeed, our recklessness is clearly leading to the floundering of our species–just look at the causes of our current food crisis: climate-change induced drought and decreasing arable land available globally.
Ecology, the field of science most interested in the environmental impact of humans on other living things, is formed from the latin oikos for home. While this field may linguistically signify the study of home, it is constantly and consistently filled with man/nature language that disrupts the flow of objective information through a lack of specificity. A science of detailing destruction as the one-way street from human to nature cannot be objective–cannot bring us to a more informed view of how our home functions. The goal of focused ecological studies must be to reveal beneficial and antagonistic relationships between ecological factors in a wholistic view, else we develop a science focused on reasserting an antiquated Modern philosophical notion of man/nature.
The concept of a preserved Nature has been dissected historically through works like Dispossessing the Wilderness by Mark Spence, in which he reveals the indigenous history and oppression associated with Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite National Parks. These cases are quite representative of our national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges, in that they were 1) taken from indigenous peoples, 2) disproportionately sited on land that is not useful to agricultural or transportation networks (thereby not representing an adequate complement of conserved habitats), and 3) primarily for the use of bourgeois white people to recreationally seek some sublime connection to “Nature.” Nevertheless, land preservation is paramount under the definition of land remaining in its current use (e.g. forested or cropland instead of suburbs and strip-malls). But I concurrently believe wholeheartedly that the creation of preserves through the removal of indigenous people for sublime seeking recreationalists is one of the most insidious (and overlooked) versions of colonial/postcolonial spatial dominance.
The concept of “Nature” is a both culturally and geospatially constructed. We convince ourselves that the sacredness of the planet is both separate from ourselves. We demarcate specific boundaries in which it may be experienced. I submit that this cultural mode of perceiving and interacting with the environment is a major fuel oblivious environmental destruction, especially when motivated by economic. This brings me to landscape architecture. The Japanese landscape architect Ryoko Ueyama cites the following as her dogma for designing landscapes “to communicate between Earth and Heaven”:
1. “Cosmophilia” (Love of the Cosmos): By listening to the spirit of land and through the dialogue with “the other world”, I create what the site should be. In any place we create people feel the cosmos, which is the infinite aspiration of human beings.
2. “Memory of Land” : Every place has its concealed memory, indigenous and multi-layered. I find key concepts through exploring memory of land and create new layers of future.
3. “Land Art” : Using the land as a canvas, I manifest my message to the universe.
4. “Biomimicry: To Learn from Nature” : Inspired by Ms. J. M. Benyus, I make it my motto to learn from nature, which is ’symbiosis with nature’ in the fullest sense.
5. “One Hundred Years’ Vision” : I design space compositon, materials, even details in the time axis.
These five concepts are essential for us, landscape architects, to whom such precious lands are trusted.
These sentiments clearly illustrate the keys of ecological design. While she uses the term “nature” to refer to Earth systems not designed by humans, this usage maintains a respectful distinction between nature-as-greater-than-human rather than human-greater-than-nature.
I have become increasingly interested in reconfiguring what is classically understood as the Man-Nature binary into a dual consideration of the density and intensity of human presence. The human intensity gradient falls along “wild” to “domestic” and density along “rural” to “urban”. Wild here denotes the absence of a human management regime, and domestic can be understood as managed (changed/replaced vegetation) or built (replaced substrate) areas. A distinction between density and intensity is extremely important: take for example ruderal vegetation along train tracks in a central business district for a city–the plants grow with minimal human intensive management, but are subject to the environmental pressures of high human density.
It is my hope that we can work in this lifetime to subvert this language that restricts us from beneficial ecological action to invest fully in the work of restoring and redesigning our home.
This contemporary redefinition of oikos will be my main research project for the years to come through examining community environmental groups, important environmental design/land art, and the connection of body and Earth in dance.
