I have been thinking about my future career again, and my future life, and what I believe I ought to do with it. I’ve been watching lots of documentaries and video essays, and reading statistics and articles too, of Australia where I plan to move.
One of the things I say the most in friendly conversation is that I do not like the pattern of city-building that is urban sprawl.
What is Sprawl?
Sprawl is something I’m sure we’ve all heard as a term: Very American, endless highway-sized roads and all of the landscape now paved over for cars, fast food, gas stations and parking lots. It’s a description of the experience you have when you are trying to get around, mostly. People don’t connect it as much to the experience that a modern suburban home provides, looking out down your driveway and to the left and right, but that sort of suburban living is also sprawl. Sleep or wake, it’s sprawl.
It is a problem of rich countries with far too many resources on their hands, and thus the ability to leverage debt to pay for these sprawling communities. Single-family homes, empty streets save for rush hour, car dependent lifestyles… All of these things go hand-in-hand with the sprawling city planning pattern so much of the Western world knows all too well. It also goes hand-in-hand with a hyper-individualist lifestyle, and the entitlement to your own plot of land. The plot of (unproductive) land is your goal, culturally, for the most part, as homeownership. The city planning style plows down the natural environment in incredibly unsustainable ways to give the consumer such. Residential density is discouraged, and the economy sprawls and spreads thin too. You have less neighbors to build anything meaningful with (businesses, friendships, community projects, any number of things really).
My Opinion
It is one of those things… Where we asked “can we do it?” before asking if we should. What do I mean? And who is “we”? I am American, so let’s look at America to see.
Sprawling development of cities (creating the modern suburbs) began properly in the 1950s, as post-war development. The housewives, the baby-blue cars, the cartoons, the novelty and silliness of it all now defines that moment in American history. Drive-in theaters, teenagers with slicked-back hair. All of that. They were dreaming of the future, it seems. Of space, aliens, and the architecture reminiscent of such. They were done with war, and looking on to better things.
The protection of the natural environment was not one of those things, and this is my greatest problem with it. The desecration of biodiversity pains me in a way nothing else can, and that desecration is key to the sprawling pattern of urban development we have found ourselves in, in America, for the last seventy years. We live wastefully–in that we build our cities in a very inefficient, wasteful way today. Wasteful to the environment, wasteful to our other resources like energy. As a single country which holds control over so much land, we have never done a great job at being a good steward of it. Our power over it always seems to be destructive, never constructive.
Back then… “Could we? Should we?”
The answer turned out to be that we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t have built like this. We should have thought before we acted, but so far that’s not something that humans ever do. They needed as people to work towards something, and this ended up being that something. They did not have a global lens. They treat the natural world as a gift to be taken, not a resource that we need to maintain.
We are part of a global ecosystem, and we are taking too much without giving the bare minimum back to keep the ecosystem running. It is easier to take… It has been human nature as far as I can understand, since forever.
The sprawl is unnecessary. It is wasteful and destructive, and does not care what it is killing in its path and in its continued existence. There need not be statistics for this part to prove it… Just think about how much habitat would be saved if we didn’t have the single-family homes we’ve grown accustomed to, if we didn’t have the mega-highways, if we didn’t use up all our money on things we didn’t need, when the world aches each time we do. There is a big issue in current farming methods too, but that is not a topic for today.
Theory and Talk
Why is the choice that gives two positives always seen as so far away, so bad, so hard? A conscious effort to protect the environment could be something like living closer to work. Or a government that incentivizes companies to hire individuals who are closer rather than further, when the choice is comparable.
I don’t just want to be a person in the system. I was born to take control of my own life. Be difficult and make the world work for me. Every rule we have is made up… I just want to be able to convince people that this world is all of ours, and the destruction they contribute to is real destruction not offset by anyone else. That also means that any creation they do is real creation, creation of a better world that’s not going to just be killed as soon as they turn away. I want to say that people can be trustworthy, if you spread your net far enough. And I want to say I don’t have all the scientific/statistical proof of me being right, right off the bat, but I also want to say that that way of convincing you is just the way that we’re used to being convinced of things. Seems like the white people way, or the corporate way, or the extremely-well-organized and rich organization’s way. I am not extremely well organized, nor do I have a people to make this clean for you to read. Sometimes, things are bad for reasons you already know. You don’t need another thesis proving it as such. The destruction of the environment is bad for reasons we already know. We ignore countless bouts of data thrown at us regularly for any number of things, to keep our heads. We can’t let everything in so heavily. But at the end of the day, winding down, we end up doing absolutely nothing at all.
My generation is sometimes called the “information generation”. I like this title the most out of any of them. We are bombarded by information on the daily. It feels like we have to become data analysts in our own right just to get through the day of owning a smartphone and social media. Accept, deny, accept, deny, for any piece of information, at amazing speeds, if we are to build our own worldview out of all this mess!
Personal reflection on this post
In this post, I say both that humans should have thought longer before they acted (before they built sprawling city systems instead of dense ones), and that people today who care about the environment should get off their asses and just do something already. What’s the right way to act? What’s the right way to act, in my opinion, as a human then? Wait around for what you believe, or just be a person and act upon the world already?
The answer is that you should just be a person. I am also a person. I just want you to be a good person. I believe that if people had been able to listen to something greater in the Earth than what average society was heading towards (sprawling cities and greater, thus completely unnecessary, environmental destruction), we would have been better off. So what I mean by wait and think about your actions… I mean that you should think about your actions while sitting in nature for a while. And imagine where your house now stands, and where farmlands that grow food that just get thrown out by our corporate grocery stores and factories now stand, and remember that it used to be a habitat for actual living creatures. Living creatures that did not just move somewhere else, they died and their children died, oftentimes their whole species died, oftentimes before anyone you have ever known or ever will know could have ever told you what they looked like, sounded like, and they are not coming back.
Personal reflection – Native peoples
Like I said in the beginning of this post, I have been watching a few documentaries (and TED talks) related to Aboriginal Australian history and modernity. In one of these TED talks, an Aboriginal man quotes numerous European explorers’ journals to show that Aboriginals themselves had extensive agriculture, to the point of even baking cakes. He speaks of yam fields and grain fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. Again, these accounts were directly quoted by him from historic European journals.
He asked the audience after quoting many of these, why else in the world would the very best soil in Australia be almost completely devoid of trees? Why does it look so close to a monoculture of crops based on these historic records? His answer was that, it was a monoculture! And as someone who has read a pretty good amount of natural history books, and has also seen how much more truth just learning at the current state of a place can give you than any theory in a book, and as someone who really doesn’t have time to pretend that the more complicated answer when it comes to people who eat every day like we do and are right there is true… I believe this simple answer of agriculture existing to be true. I really don’t have any reason to believe a colonial “official story” over the story of the people of the land. I really don’t.
And why does this matter? Because it tells me more about human nature. The way we keep going until we can’t anymore. I am also referencing the great book Guns, Germs and Steel in this argument: How it describes the loss of megafauna in Australia was due to them being hunted by Aboriginal people. Just like all the other giant animals on every other continent of the world, except Africa where our species is from.
The presence of agriculture and the hunting-to-extinction of megafauna in Australia feels like such a prime, cut-and-dry example of how humans function as a species in a new environment. In any environment. Never do I feel like we are such an invasive species, except when I recount this pattern we have. A track record of destruction.
And when I remember this far, because it is not always possible to remember the big picture… Sprawling communities feel inevitable. We only stop when we are fought against from expanding our settlements any further… By other humans, by natural boundaries, by famine or drought or natural dangers like animals, insects or disease, or by anything else that’s temporarily stronger than us. Other than that, we need to stop ourselves from the inside. That is, members of our own society need to stand up and stop society from progressing in ways that harm the environment. Nothing else is left to do it. We overcame everything else. Now, we are in charge of everything on this planet. The only thing left to fight is ourselves.
The Role of Women’s Rights
I believe women are the key to turning things around. It is not true that we can’t be as environmentally destructive as men, if we want to, but… We tend to not be. And it’s not a good person/bad person thing, either: Plenty of women don’t give a shit about the environment or protecting what we already have on this planet.
But we do tend to have more individual empathy than men. I don’t think too many people can deny that. Women are usually lifetime caretakers of something or other. We have all those stereotypes where we don’t want to see bugs killed, and shit like that. Death of little animals hurts us more, in some way.
Nowadays, women have louder and louder voices than in the past. We are becoming masters of our own species’ destiny alongside men. Government officials, community speakers of any age. Activists. So, so many female activists. The internet and all this global interconnectedness, I believe, has helped us greatly in this.
The whole topic of women’s role in the protection of the natural environment is huge and complex, and I wouldn’t know very well how to draw any definite conclusion. I just haven’t read enough. I don’t even talk about this enough, because I really don’t like how my words on this sound right now (I’m not trying to draw a picture of what women should be like–I’m only trying to describe what I already see, no judgement or critique or even any praise, because I feel neutral about how women act). But I know that there is something in me that wants to take care of the things we already have (i.e. the Earth) very strongly, and I know that my heart can’t take on the knowledge of things being destroyed for seemingly selfish (human-beneficial, nature-detrimental) reasons. I know women are great activists, and many do care about the environment.
I might be wrong, and the act of protecting our global environment lies equally on the shoulders of women and men. It might not even matter in the end. Adopting a philosophy into one’s mind doesn’t really require any tendency towards one skillset or another, does it? Do you have to be a member of the world’s designated caretaker, mess-cleaner-upper class to also care about the environment? Do you even have to care about the environment for the reasons of wanting to take care of the Earth and be respectful to it to be an environmental activist, or do things that are for the good of the Earth? Are all of these ultimately just stereotypes anyways? I don’t know. I’m just not yet educated enough.
I try to drop as many nonsensical stereotypes I have about the world as I can. By this, I mean gender roles. I really want to be utilitarian in how I do things, and not get all stupidly shaken up and caught on the barbs of worldviews I’m really trying to make work. I would prefer if I could just take in all my information by observation, not hearing people’s theories on their own observations, but that’s not how people get educated. And it would certainly have made getting educated much more dull. At least when I have to read an article or book or what have you by someone trying to sell me a certain worldview they have, I get the mental stimulation of both background and conscious mental work. I get to listen to the words, and break down the bullshit if there is any. But there always is a little bit.
Conclusion
This has just been me running my mouth. It’s a journal, so there’s not a huge point to me to make this very clean at all. I hope you enjoyed this mess. It was fun and completely unedited and published a week and a half late. It tried to be inspirational, but honestly I’m having a hard time doing much of anything good for the environment right now, and I don’t think I sufficiently inspired myself for anything. All I could think about after discovering that Aboriginal people already had agriculture–monocultures specifically it sounded like–was that the pattern of human development I’m so pissed about (sprawl) is just inevitable, or something. And then I thought, at least one day I still have a dream that fits into this worldview and fits into the path of human nature and doesn’t have to be trampled by it over time. That dream is to build a nature preserve, a permanently protected space. That dream is a much more human-level dream than turning back the tides of human nature, keeping us out of the woodlands and brush. Out of the bush of my future homeland (Australia).
Only like two people read these so it doesn’t much matter what I say. I’m having fun with this blog, writing and throwing my words into the sea.
So messy and unprofessional. But I’ll make good stuff eventually. I have some good posts. But not everything here is worth polishing, really. Sometimes it’s better to just get the words out and move on. Right?
Thanks for reading today’s string of thoughts. Have a nice day, eat a cookie or something, and go be a better person for the environment tomorrow. You have my good luck.
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