On the other hand, the city has become an ecosystem designed exclusively to function, that seems to isolate the individual from the material experiences that sustain life through the flat and sleek surfaces of cement buildings. The city does not sing its song, but emanates a constant, deep hum that is ever-present and unescapable, creating a soundscape of distance and fret, where also birds have to sing louder to hear each other. [1]
In the famous essay by Langdon Winner 'Do artefacts have politics?', a park bench, an automatic door, a public parkway can be analysed not only according to function, utility, or environmental impact, but also for their embodiment of specific forms of authority and power. The city then becomes a landscape of symbols, that surrounds the individual with labyrinths of control, surveillance, competition, eradicating him from any sense of home and throwing him in a landscape where the soil is thick with asphalt and does not allow him to bury his roots. This is the hidden message of contemporary 'Hostile Architecture', a modern design trend that aims to make public spaces unfit or uncomfortable with measures such as studs, bolts or ''anti-homeless spikes''. These exclusionary practices deepen the wound that has now been open across the cities for centuries, and unconsciously moves citizens apart, imprisoning them in social categories and leading to discrimination. In this sense, the spaces we live help condition our thoughts and beliefs, contributing to the creation of our morality. The prime example of the detachment that has occurred between human beings and locality is the phenomenon of 'moral commodification', where products are simply detached from their geographical setting and stripped of their material contexts and productive histories. In a logic of profit such as this, we can recognise the perversion of classic utilitarianism into solely economic terms, where objects, places and often people become valuable only for marketability. This reduction makes us blind to our responsibilities as members of a community and as consumers in a society. Through such practice, the consumer is denied a connection to his suppliers and the conditions they experience, consequently becoming unable to appreciate or even recognise their labour. The danger of this delocalised economy is that the unawareness of people and spaces involved in the processes of production does not enable the consumer to empathise or understand the causality of his actions and as a consequence the political power his consumption can have. Perhaps now is the time to revalue and reconsider the richness and beauty of simple living. Only though the tracing of our food up to the sources, the practices, the hands that create it, for instance, we are able to find the seeds of hope that may bring together our humanity. It is then clear that locality also becomes a motivational force, that both sustains life and moves us to engage, identify and defend our environments. As intangible values and physical surroundings co-constitute our world, the necessary connection that involves place and mind, and by extension nature and humanity, becomes the core of our moral landscape, of the constructions of beliefs we collectively build in a society. In a world where these two elements condition each other so deeply, as our land shapes us through language and identity, whilst we transform it with economy and design, this conjunction of material structures and human values should always aim to coexist and create a space where our ethical judgement involves both external, surrounding life and internal, psychological landscapes. [1] Birds sing louder amidst the noise and structures of the urban jungle https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120222132930.htm
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When we are aware that the actions of man can transform the environment, we must realise that not only the landscape, with all its internal relationships, conditions and resources are changing; but also the interrelations of different ecologies that lie adjacent to each other. When the carbon footprint of a car speeding through the European countryside has the power to impact the entire ecosystem of a different continent, and our society is fully aware and scientifically informed of its causality links and repercussions, then action must not be separated from responsibility. In the words of José Saramago, perhaps ‘’without responsibility we don’t even deserve to exist’’, especially if the responsibility we should endorse is of this calibre.
In our planet, only 3% of the entire water mass is non-salty, and 70% of this small percentage is frozen, in the form of glaciers or ice sheets such as Greenland and Antartica which are on land (95%) and of floating sea ice in the ocean (5%). As the global temperatures rise however, sea ice will be the first to melt as it is in direct contact with warming waters, causing the dispersion of entire natural habitats for a great amount of sea creatures and polar mammals, as well as ocean dwelling animals such as narwhal, beluga and bowhead. As the Arctic regions are shrinking, many energy and oil companies are also reaching further north to undergo practices known as ‘seismic blasting’, where high air pressure blasts are made to explode every 10 seconds underwater (every single day during the ice free season), to search for oil deposits beneath the sea floor. This is extremely harmful to the ecosystem’s creatures that use sound to communicate and to the overall equilibrium that is affected by their disorientation and shift in habits. Although the sea ice might not cause any emergent rise in sea levels, the danger comes when land-based ice begins to melt, which could possibly rise the level to 70 meters higher. As well as this, the presence of great white ice continents helps reflect the sunlight into space. If these melt, the warmth will be absorbed by the dark masses of land and ocean water. The oceans are currently mitigated by a set of currents that help carry nutrients and chemicals because of the differences in saltiness of areas. These currents are crucial to all sorts of sea creatures, but also contribute to climatise the lands; for this reason crops and mass agriculture will have to be relocated to appropriate climates. However, not only the wildlife and the flora are affected, but also indigenous humans are seeing their landscape transmuted by recent changes. The Inuit, for instance, have settled and practiced a hunter-gatherer life in Canada for millennia. In 1939, these peoples were affected by the government’s decision to impose Canadian laws (and the respective punishments) on the native population, further impacting the original lifestyle with occupation during WWII due to the strategic position of their land. In the 1950s, the adoption of Western manners was bartered with the presence on the land, and the Inuit population was stripped of its nomadic traditions and forced to adapt to imported infrastructures. This led to the Inuit becoming the indigenous people most endangered by food insecurity in the developed world. The local stores in fact, exploit their sporadic presence to increase normal prices ridiculously. As well as this, oil and gas explorations remain a constant possibility and threat in the area. Furthermore, the anti-seismic legal battle against a 5 year project that was approved in 2014, without appropriate consultation of locals, was delayed by the residents of Clyde River in 2017, yet the practice still remains a common danger all over the world. Once more, not just climate indifference, but also deliberate environmental harm in the name of the economy, steps over the fundamental rights and legitimacy of indigenous peoples, who have built a way of life deeply embedded in the natural surrounding world. Yet should we respect their rights to the land only because these people seem to be the most endangered by the consequences of environmental change? In fact, along with this tight dependence on the land, comes the necessary and often implicit development of a land ethic, which determines limitations on the freedom of action in the name of survival and symbiosis with nature, which is profoundly lacking from our landscape of stone and concrete. This ethic and connection with the land creates a deep relation with place and a further great ability to easily adapt to the changes in the environment because of the deeply embedded habit of listening to its voice. For this reason rapid climate change may not necessarily create insurmountable difficulties for indigenous people in general, who are part of the environment and therefore are spontaneously prepared to change with it. On the other hand, our modern world which is nurtured with an overwhelming amount of information, we are still lacking the natural wisdom that comes with recognising and caring for one’s environment, and that has been annihilated by the sheer greed of wealth. Our measure of success should transcend profit and rather look to become the most compatible with our nature, finding a land ethic of our own that also enables us to recognise and respect the autonomy of others. |
THE ANTI-NEWS.
TO CARE IS A POLITICAL ACT! Archives
November 2023
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