Invisible Cities

Imagining places that I love, places that are without the constructed presence of suburbs and layers of concrete, to one day be smothered with ‘civilisation’ makes me feel motivated to understand what is in us that creates/destroys at such a cost. The answer could simply be population of the planet, but how does this explain the dualism of perpetuating life, yet decreasing opportunity for continued life? .

Exploring our inner worlds and how that relates to what is created outside in the world, leads me to seek to understand if there is a correlation between our connection to our ‘true nature’ and our connection to nature.

What if….we shone some light on what we do to ourselves psychologically ? What if we recognised our grasping at the material world as a product of the separation from our true nature ? I know this is a huge question, to which various answers may be found depending on where you look. I think we can answer these questions for ourselves, or at least ask ourselves these questions, as a way of exploring current paradigms of living that may not serve us for much longer.

As we move further into the 21st century one thing is for sure, that if we do not resolve these kind of questions within ourselves, they will be resolved for us in some form. The natural world that we depend on, can not sustain us if we continue to become increasingly disconnected from it/this part of ourselves.

Nature’s Economy

“…..also, as I emphasize in my many friendly and well-intended rants on all the above in the last five years or so we need more than just better cities. We need to see that there is a whole set of integrally related important concerns that need a whole systems approach, just like ecology orders some very large sets of activities around various chemical and water cycles with various living creatures playing a multitude of large category roles: primary photosynthetic producer, prey, predator, decomposer, nitrogen fixer, pollinator, fertilizer and so on. Now is the time for the practical paradigm, the one that may not have to spend that much time philosophizing as I have here in this article, but instead get busy with the carpentry and plumbing of a decent set of ways of life on Earth.

….. for one thing, the way we build cities towns and villages as flat, scattered constructions. If stars, then planets, then life, then consciousness has evolved in steps toward ever greater miniaturization/complexification, which I prefer to contract to “miniplexion,” then our cities with the advent of cars are headed in exactly the opposite direction: they became giants covering vast areas of land, displacing farm and nature and consuming massive amounts of materials and energy. They’ve degenerated to zones of sameness, the simplicity of endless repetition of form and function in the grids and “dead worms” layout of vast suburban developments sprinkled with franchise restaurants and outlets, big box stores, freeways and parking facilities and common experience of guzzling fuel in epic quantities while expending large fractions of lives stuck in mind-simplifying traffic jams.

Why this counter evolutionary pattern? Largely because cars took over in the early years of the 20th centur….”

by Richard Register

Eco City Builders