Jungle City
Concepts of Co-special Modes of Life in Near Future Cities
Plant presence within the environments in which humans have lived and interacted has preformed varied and vital psychological and sociological functions according to the particular societal anxieties of different time periods. Plant presence within human-built environments fulfills the need for a connection to the non-human, and the non human-artificialy constructed environment in which humans evolved. However, the relationship is strained and is largely absent in modern metropolises. The plants that do exist in today’s cities are managed to the extent that a connection to nature (in this essay nature will refer to that which is non-human and arranges itself according to principles independent of human control) is impossible. The plant in the city has become a human construct equivalent to a building or a car.[1] This essay will survey past and contemporary efforts that resulted in human-plant interaction (though this in itself was rarely the specified goal) and conclude with recommendations for a new conceptual framework to be adopted vis-a-vis inter-species relations in contemporary and near-future urban environments, or Jungle City, an environment which allows the agency of nature and the human within it.
The essay will begin by outlining historical demarcations in horticulture and plant presence within human-built environments in the Western tradition. The evolution of human-plant interaction may be laid out in several broad historical phases:
Phase I: Anxiety of Attaining Physical Safety and Adequate Nutrition
Phase II: Anxiety of a Shifting Role — From Dominion of Nature to Dominion Over Nature
Phase III: Anxiety of the Health of the Nation State
Phase IV: Anxiety of Morality and Psychological Health in the Modern City
Phase V: Neo-Malthusian Crisis, Scarcity, and Degradation Anxiety
Phase VI: Jungle City: A human, non-human synthesis
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Phase I
Anxiety of Attaining Physical Safety and Adequate Nutrition. In this stage the duality between nature and humans emerged with a barrier established through the use of nature to form a dwelling. Plants occupied the periphery, or perhaps even, a structure was built directly on a plant (a nest in a tree for example). In this phase nature is happened upon and then rearranged.
Physicality, thus rearranged, resulted in a barrier between the creature and the un-arranged environment, both physically, and importantly, psychologically.[2] A duality emerged between the artifact and “first nature.”[3] This mode of interaction between creature and its environment is important in that the creature directly interacts with the physical environment in which it finds itself. effecting change to its surrounding. Thus were the first retreats created, areas removed from and apart from that which surrounded the retreat (but from which it itself was composed) to provide a physical and psychological zone of removal. It was only much later that this retreat would be so far removed from nature that nature would have to be reintroduced in the form of the garden.
Phase II
Anxiety of a Shifting Role: From Dominion of Nature to Dominion Over Nature. The Hanging Gardens of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, a wonder of the ancient world, are long gone. Yet the garden’s descendants have lived on throughout the world, whether expressly arranged or happened upon, as zones of retreat from the mental turmoil brought about by the travails of mono-special interaction, i.e. surviving within and comporting oneself according to social and legal norms and regulations. Indeed, it was not until humanity had achieved sufficient separation from nature that the garden as a zone of retreat became necessary. At one time it was not humans one would seek respite from, but rather, respite from nature.
In this phase, as in all phases, there is a human need to maintain a connection to nature. But now the human is dominant, at some point having achieved and then surpassed power parity with animals and having begun the domestication of plants. The Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution occurring in some parts of the world about 10,000 years ago resulted in human domestication of plants, or in other words, control over the reproductive capacities of plants.[4] Humans continued to be intimately engaged with the rhythms of plant life but acquired new responsibilities and abilities in this altered relationship. The rise of cities alienated segments of the population from direct connection to tilling the soil, yet localized climatic events, such as floods or droughts, were still felt acutely by everyone, regardless of their livelihood.
City dwellers established gardens for nutritive, medicinal, commercial, and psychological purposes. Gardens, or Edenic Microcosms, were created by those seeking rejuvenation from the stresses of life. The garden also became a way of bringing order to chaotic nature and also bringing order to the chaos of the mind; the surroundings effect the mind, and vice versa. In this phase, humans subdue nature instead of nature subduing humans — a marked cultural transformation.[5]
During Phase II the semi-mediated nature outside of the city was accessible for pasturage and exploration. Nature also served as a place to escape and find oneself. The Commons, areas of land held in common and owned by no one individual, were zones that Europeans could use for grazing or other nutritive purpose. In Japan, the term Satoyama indicates a similar intermediary zone between human settlement and wild nature.[6] The biblical Fall from Grace is a narrative of this phase, one of becoming sedentary and losing connection to nature and a narrative, of course, concerned gravely with femininity and reproduction. Maintaining and managing the fertility of both soil and humans was critical to human survival in this stage. The medieval European hortus conclusus served as a metaphor both for the woman organized in her proper sphere, as well as the plants of a garden, ordered in their proper places.[7] The garden served as a reflection of mastery over chaotic elements of the wild, an individual bank depository, and security both financial and psychological.
Useful plants, such as culinary and medicinal herbs, were kept close at hand, potted or in small gardens, while more substantial food and cash crops were grown outside of the city. The interactions between humans and plants permitted the human to fulfill the instinctive impulse to make a mark on its surroundings. Even the simple act of plucking a leaf from a plant or cutting a stalk of grain for use allowed the human a chance to alter his or her small world. Elites surrounded themselves with walls and within these walls created pleasure gardens, personal Edens. “Botanical gardens fulfilled a complex sociological role in the recreation of an earthly paradise.”[8] The gardens of Suzhou, of Roman Villas, and of Japanese Zen attest to the importance that plants played within human-built environments.
Beyond these private pleasure gardens, nature itself was not far beyond the city and was accessible for leisure and caloric purposes. Though the Japanese Satoyama existed as a zone intermediary to those of complete nature and human habitation, there were always mediated boundaries that clearly delineated different zones. Certain actions and activities appropriate for one zone would not be appropriate for another.
Gardens were particularly important to the ancient Romans and Greeks. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum reveal 17% of the city area devoted to gardens, a percentage roughly equal to that occupied by roads and public squares.[9] Plato claimed a negative effect of the too rigid separation of city and nature “where an innate beauty and truth reside that are critical links in the acquisition of fundamental human knowledge, knowledge of the self.”[10] Experience in and of nature then was critical to the moral integrity of the inhabitants of the polis, and therefore to the survival of the polis itself. But, the relationship is complex and nature unmediated by humanity has also been seen as holy and superior to artifacts mediated by humans, an ecological biology resulting in a natural piety.[11]
The forest, throughout many traditions, has embodied the wild and chaos, and disorder of the human mind and action. According to John Locke, “inhabitants of cities were ‘civil’ and ‘rational,’ while those from ‘woods and forests’ were ‘irrational, untaught.’” [12] Satyrs, nymphs, witches, and spirits inhabited wooded areas, and animality posed a danger to the rationality of humans, even to the extent that humans might revert to animality.[13] Therefore it was imperative that nature be tamed, and in extreme forms, even removed entirely from zones where humans lived. However, once mediated through the skill of the human, an ordered nature could be achieved. The Roman villa, which typified a harmonious balance between the country and the city, was also the center of industry whereby pastoralism and market activities came into one and profit ensued.[14]
A further psychological value of having plants (and animals) in close proximity to humans is articulated by Paul Shepard in The Others, as quoted in Epic City. Shepard states that by interacting with the non-human, humans became themselves. This is an echo of the theme earlier articulated by Plato. It is thus surmised that in environments without other species, humans will lose their humanity. At least they will be apart from others, and alienated, envious of the harmonious web of non-human life. The presence of plants in proximity to humans results in a “biologically renovated morality,” whereby humans dispel alienation and become harmonized within their environments.[15] “That all human societies, everywhere and throughout history, have existed within and depended upon biotic communities is true of huge cities as well as small farming villages and hunter clans.”[16]
Phase III
Anxiety of the Health of the Nation State. In this phase plants become enmeshed with ideas about the state, national conquest, and colony. Global trade networks meant that local food supply problems would be reduced in severity with the support of new food crops that diversified the human diet. Mastery over plants resulted in plants becoming fully tame or at least able to be scientifically and rationally understood. This victory over nature made it no longer necessary for the majority of humans to be concerned with agriculture, much less be involved in it. In the form of the modern botanical gardens, exotic species came to embody colony as well as human and national dominion over distant lands. Botanical gardens also represented “the organization by man of nature into art.”[17]
In this stage a conquest over nature is complete. However, the very conquest and removal of the physical necessity to have interaction with plants creates an existential crisis: who is the human without anything to measure the human against?
Phase IV
Anxiety of Morality and Psychological Health in the Modern City. With the enormous increase in size of cities and the decreasing ability of urban residents to interact with nature, social theorists concerned about morality speculated on the effects that plants would have to dampen the ills of city life. Nature being accessible to people, was viewed as important in improving psychological health, as well as providing inspiration. American landscape painters, typified by the Hudson River School, tended to avoid painting urban scenes, even removing any vestiges of humanity from the scenery — such as a person or a bridge — in painted form. Thomas Cole specifically declined to paint urban scenes because he viewed urban environments as “lacking in those wholesome qualities which allowed art to be a source of moral inspiration.”[18] Urbanity then was seen as lacking in morality.
Recording a visit to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the late-Qing reformer and intellectual Liang Qichao wrote:
“Writers on city administration all agree that for a busy metropolis not to have appropriate parks is harmful to public health and morals. Now that I have come to New York, I am convinced. One day without going to the parks leaves me muddled in mind and spirit.”[19]
Referencing tenement slums in New York in 1903, Liang Qichao continues: “Such dwellings are not only unhealthful but also harmful to morality” going on to detail the high crime rate in tenement neighborhoods.[20]
Social theorists and city planners like Frederick Law Olmsted and Ebenezer Howard attempted to introduce nature in grand scale to built human environments. John Ruskin advocated that nature and fresh air be visible and accessible from every part of the city within a few minutes walk. In his design of Central Park in New York, Olmsted looking forward into the future, constructed the park four miles away from the city, presciently anticipating the future expansion of New York City.[21] Olmsted’s public park was to be appreciated but not used in the same sense that commons areas were used before — that being nutritive, industrial, and commercial purposes. In his elaborate and detailed manifesto for the use of Central Park, Olmsted banned quadrupeds (excepting obedient and controlled dogs and horses.) People were not permitted to climb trees, nor were they allowed to harass the waterfowl. Olmsted expounded in great detail and length on the role of park authorities in maintaining order in Central Park, reflecting Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and the ability to manage humanity through efficient and regimented oversight. Olmsted faced the conundrum that though the natural place was a wellspring of morality and psychological health, it might also encourage lawlessness and base instincts among certain elements of the population. Earlier anxieties and contradictions about the role of nature in human conception emerged in microcosm in ideas about Central Park.[22]
Olmsted was concerned with people’s freedom of access to nature, but at the same time sought to place strict management upon people’s interaction therein, reflecting a utilitarian ideal. “Cities are now grown so great that hours are consumed in gaining the ‘country,’ and, when the fields are reached, entrance is forbidden.”[23] Central Park was to help the visitor “free himself from thoughts of business and city activities.”[24] Similarly, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City treated the suburb as a “planned community where successful citizens who labored all day in commerce could retire amidst a cultivated park like nature.”[25] Access to the Garden City was predicated on social class, and use of Central Park restricted by social custom.
Phase V
Neo-Malthusian Crisis, Scarcity, and Degradation Anxiety. The scale of anxiety is no longer local and locally-requiring solutions. A local problem such as famine or drought may be alleviated by transfer along global trade networks. The Malthusian scarcity model now exists on a global rather than local scale. With global integration’s continuing process since the Age of Exploration, individual agency in food and energy production has been declining to the state that today in the city, production of these essential components of survival is entirely abstracted from the individual. The individual is reliant upon the whim of nature and government and has no capacity to produce food and energy. This causes an unremitting anxiety towards the fundamental requirements and experiences essential to the existence of humanity throughout the ages down to our primate ancestors.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought to focus the failure of science to solve all problems while the science of global climate change suggested that human impacts on earth are tending towards a crisis state. Concerns over the quality of food supply motivated a return to agriculture movement in the 1970’s and fossil fuel supply anxiety motivated searches for alternative fuels. Urban gardening, including urban medicine and cash crop production, has became very popular. So-called green living has encompassed new designs for buildings, including green roofs and walls, gray water systems, geothermal and solar heating, and even public compost collection, along the lines of municipal trash and recycling collection services.
However, in the modern city environment, although plant and garden presence are often the articulated policy and goal of city administrators, with trees keenly planted and flowerbeds maintained, plants and gardens are divorced from actual use and thus fail to satisfy the connection to the natural world that humans require. Birds and squirrels sitting in trees are not interacted with beyond visual or auditory contact and the closest approximation to a pastoralist sense in the modern city is dog walking. Feeding squirrels or pigeons (squirrels being only present in cities unusually well endowed with a natural base upon which the natural superstructure grows) is viewed as an eccentric activity, while the feeding of a different class of animal, the pest, is almost entirely unintended.
Enter Jungle City
“Nature, sentimentalized and considered as the antithesis of cities, is apparently assumed to consist of grass, fresh air and little else, and this ludicrous disrespect results in the devastation of nature even formally and publicly preserved in the form of a pet.”[26]
Jane Jacobs’ description of nature contained sums up a problem that has not yet been addressed by city planners and which the concept of Jungle City, herein illustrated, seeks to resolve. Jungle City aims to create an environment where human and plant life both exist in abundance, one not to the exclusion of the other. From plant life follows animal life, and thus various species of earth will coexist without artificial divides such as city and wilderness.
Hitherto, city planners have ignored the agency of nature in the self-organized design of harmonious environments within the human sphere of influence. “Protecting and managing natural regeneration [of trees] is much cheaper [than planting] and produces better results.”[27] Nature’s ability to replant is better than humanity’s.
Frederick Law Olmsted claimed that European parks were deficient due to their occurrence by “accident” with limited suitability to use by people. However, these parks still served a purpose by “mitigating and limiting the special evils of great cities, in varying but always notable and important degrees.”[28] Jungle City refutes the idea that something occurring by “accident” is inherently less suitable than a park designed for use by people. If we imagine the usefulness of a park to also encompass the usefulness of the park to non-humans, i.e., plants and animals, (whose presence are of inestimable value to humanity) it is clear that the park “by accident” has greater utility than the park by human design. As William Cronon points out, different priorities should inform the management of nature depending on whom it is intended for.[29]
Jungle City is not concerned so much with preservation of aesthetic landscapes or faithfully conforming to an idealized appearance of “nature” but rather is concerned with the simple presence and multiplicity of life. Let the plants grow everywhere, in patches, or singularly, and let squirrels leap without regard for proscribed notions of where squirrels should wander or birds fly. After all it is said that the drums of man may be silenced, but who can prevent the birds from singing?[30]
Jungle City employs the existing landscape of cities and relies upon the agency of individuals living within the landscape to effect change most desirous. Moreover, processes independent of human agency are allowed to act unchecked by human interference. Through beneficent neglect, meticulously mowed grass median strips will rapidly grow into wild woodland avenues. Within months, the process of ecological succession will result in automatic urban-greening, providing habitat for plants and animals. There will surely be more road kill but this is preferable to the animals never having been there in the first place. With increasing worldwide urbanization and the destruction of previous plant and animal habitat, new habitat must be opened up for life or such life will decline towards disappearance.
Might the tree roots crack the pavement? Allow the pavement to be cracked. Countless dollars spent constructing road obstacles (speed bumps and humps) will be spared as these same will occur spontaneously. What’s more, these speed deterrents, as we understand the purpose of road obstacles to be, will be all the more effective by their unpredictable placement and highly variable capacity of velocity reduction, thus imbuing an enhanced imperative of caution in those motoring in Jungle City. What city planner, mayor, or citizen does not desire this? In addition, the perverse fetishizing of the speed bump, or hump, must be dealt with. This is only a phallic fascination, part and parcel of the male-dominated skyscraper-scape. Why is the meticulously and artificially constructed bump preferable for reducing speed over the organically occurring and equally efficacious speed pothole? The critic of sharp wit may remark that the speed pothole will visit undue stress upon the undercarriage and joints of the automobile. All for the better! The artisans at the local mechanic shop will be kept in business in their ground floor shops, while vagrants, the scourge of civil society, will be prevented from loitering under the keen gaze of the local merchants.
By allowing processes to occur unchecked, harmony and economy will ascend. An added incentive offered by nature’s speed control regime is the out-of-area transit tax levied upon those without the requisite local familiarity to avoid the more economically-stimulating road obstacles. Such a tax levied without the need to hire additional revenue agents will be a boon to the city, not to mention industries that spring up such as internet “app” producers of highly-localized maps detailing road economic stimulants.[31] The more enterprising of Jungle City’s residents may take it upon themselves to hasten nature’s progress by means of pickaxe applied to the road surface, though such actions should be discouraged.
Gone are prohibitions on public artistic expression, often malignly referred to as “graffiti.” Those living within and of an environment have an inherent appreciation for that which beautifies the surroundings and a hostile aversion to that which does not. Advertisements, gang symbolisms, and obscenities which offend the senses, will be the first extricated and replaced by tasteful murals and mosses.
Already it is accepted practice in municipalities that trees and bushes on public or private land are not to be cut unless under the authority of the municipality or by the private owner of the land on which the trees reside. Similarly, animals dwelling in trees, or even on buildings absent of vegetation are afforded protection, to the exclusion of species deemed “pests” or in the case of plants, “weeds,” in which case their removal and killing is sanctioned.
The human appendages of concrete and steel that we have built rest upon, are of, and are within the base which is non-human. It is upon this human superstructure that a base might be reapplied. That is, creation of soil, or more importantly, the allowance of soil to create itself. It is no accident that Jericho and other ancient human cities are only accessible today by digging down through meters of earth. Left to its own devices, nature will create soil through the forces of erosion and via the assistance of nature’s own set managers, the insects and the microbes. Upon this base nature will construct its own superstructure of lichens, weeds, grasses, shrubs, bushes, trees, and animal life — including human — in great abundance. It is therefore proposed that the cacophony of this base and superstructure and associated actors interact and live together, superstructure upon base, upon superstructure, upon base.
Of principal concern is a restoration of agency both to nature as an actor (beyond the role of causing disasters only — as nature has very little other role for the urban denizen) and also, critically, for the humans who inhabit cities. [32] A human walking down a concrete sidewalk has no tangible impact upon its surroundings. Walls are covered in advertisements, and public art is prohibited. The ground will not give or bend way, or change tactile form no matter how much rain has fallen over the past week. The sidewalk like, Focault’s highway, gives only the illusion of ambulatory freedom, for the sidewalk inevitably terminates in front of a merchant’s door. [33] Attempt a noise too loud or an action deemed not in conformance with the surroundings and the constable will be summoned. Attempt to elevate oneself beyond the socially-allowed six or so feet and one will immediately become the object of unsolicited attention, whether by virtue of innate height, climbing a tree, or perching upon an artifice raised somewhat above the surrounding level.[34] Should this human be feeling particularly adventurous and seek to attain even greater vertical dimensions by ascending to the upper floors or even top of a building, this effort will be checked, first by the doorman, then by security key on elevator, or locked stairwell, doubly-locked roof hatch, and finally should this effort be successful, the lock of the jail cell.
Dynamic vs. Static Surroundings and the sublimation of energetic impulses by nature
Contrast this experience with walking through a forest where the ground gives way and has texture according to natural conditions, where should one desire, one might deviate from the path, not be struck by a person commanding a vehicle, or be issued a citation. One might even climb a tree providing that the physical attributes of both the tree and person be permitting of this action. Striding through a forest, a person may brush against an object, without a cry of protest emanating from another, or a pain in the shoulder from contact with concrete or brick.
A walk in the forest permits a human to exercise agency to directly affect his or her surroundings, to move the leaves with one’s feet, or pick a clover. Creativity is also stimulated. One may pile a group of sticks together or construct something of trivial physical dimensions but which has enormous psychological value. To take a more urbane example, compare the enjoyment derived from playing a video game with active versus static surroundings. When piloting a machine over a landscape, shouldn’t the trees bend and break rather than the machine passing through them with no effect? The effect of a person walking through a city on pavement, surrounded by static and inviolate objects, such as corporate advertisements, is the equivalent of engaging in a mind-numbing video game. Imagine the sense of absolute in-effect that this would engender in a person. Pound the pavement as much as one likes with the sole of the foot, and no impression will be made. Compare this to treading upon dirt, feeling the variation of soil dependent upon recent precipitation.
The desire to leave an imprint upon ones surroundings is so great that in an environment devoid of the opportunity to make an imprint on the surroundings, the natural recourse of “criminality” is the result. The only non-static elements within the city are other people. Energetic impulses that would otherwise be sublimated into nature are instead transposed onto the only other non-static elements within the environment — other people, or oneself. Note the incredibly high rates of violence in areas without plants (though certainly there are many factors at play here a correlation must exist).
How Might Jungle City Be Achieved?
The conception of humans as being apart from nature and the idea of a wilderness is part of the problem that Jungle City seeks to overcome.[35] By situating the wilderness within the city, “a dialogue between humanity and nature in which cultural and environmental systems powerfully interact, shaping and influencing each other, without either side wholly determining the outcome” may be achieved.[36]
Nature will be allowed to become the Millsian “energetic barbarian” that reinvigorates the city. Those concerned about masculine virtues declining in urban areas can be confident that such virtues will not wane in Jungle City. [37] Hunting leagues, anti-hunting leagues, people being chased by dangerous animals — all will add vigor and excitement to the monotonous urban sprawl and decay of today.
It is important to note that implementing Jungle City, like other efforts at “greening” cities, such as painting building rooftops with reflective paints, does not require fundamental changes to the underlying structure of the city.[38] Changes are made largely in the conception of what a garden should be with slight modifications to existing structures. Buildings faced with grooves that accumulate soil and dust running in lattice work, or vertical and horizontal bands along the faces of buildings can be cut in existing concrete and brick, teardrop-shaped to accumulate and keep soil. Different thicknesses can be cut for attracting different plants. Planter bowls and pouches resting on the sides of buildings for plants and trees can be constructed with minimal effort while water catchment tanks on roofs can provide irrigation. In this way, water will not run into city sewers but remain in the city environment. Vegetation and surface characteristics of cities will create not only micro-ecosystems, but also microclimates. Increased vegetation will also help ameliorate the heat-sink effects of cities.[39]
Of great advantage in terms of labor output is that the truly jungled-city gardens require absolutely no maintenance. When structures, whether occupying physical space, or mental space, are created, they must be maintained. The abundance of time predicted by enthusiasts of labor saving technological devices did not take into account all the new surfaces that would need to be cleaned, that would still require human labor. There is as yet no machine that cleans the interior and exterior windows of an airport terminal, for example. Left to its own devices, a garden will design and maintain itself.
Per Donald Worster: “As the earth becomes more densely covered with its human populations, it becomes necessary to retain portions of it in a wild state, i.e., free from the organizing mania of man, as national and city parks or reservations to which we can escape during our holidays from the administrators, organizers, and efficiency experts and everything they stand for; and return to a Nature that really understands the business of organization.”[40]
The separation between human and beast in the modern world is unnatural. We eat pork, not pig; beef, not cow. Food comes in a package, not as a breathing creature. Because we draw so much of our human experience from animals, by de-animalizing (de-souling) the animal, we lose our own sense of being. By having animals in Jungle City, hunting them, and eating them, we will again be compelled to engage with the reality of the origins of typical packaged food, and restore a more healthful interplay between humans and non-humans.
Most city planners and the current wave of greening enthusiasts envision a museum nature within our cities, one that can be seen but neither touched nor interacted with. Glaeser exhorts us to remain in the blacktopped city, saying, “If you love nature, stay away from it.”[41] E.O. Wilson in Half Earth calls for vast natural wildlife reserves where human entry is forbidden. Beyond being impracticable, (even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean our trash precedes us) this is the wrong attitude for Jungle City. It is essential that nature be allowed within the city and the human be able to interact with it.
Hunting is to be allowed in Jungle City with “primitive” weapons (bow and arrow, atlatl, knife, sharp rock, etc.) An article from 1974 detailing hunting of wild animals for food among recipients of state-provided housing in Brunei can be seen as a model applicable to Jungle City.[42] Should hunting be deemed too anti-social an affair, robot automaton animals with coupons attached to their backs (redeemable with partner merchants for the caloric equivalent of the facsimile animal) can be unleashed upon the city and the traditional human activity of hunting will be brought into the modern age.
Improvements in dexterity, social skills, confidence and the ability to matriculate in the professional workforce will accompany activities of everyday existence in Jungle City. The poor particularly, who tend to have less frequent recourse to leaving the city, will benefit especially. Jungle City will become a training academy for the urban dispossessed. It will similarly provide lunch-hour recreation and team building for urban professionals and business units who might organize themselves and collectively hunt rats in the basements and alleys. We have heard much of cities increasing the efficiency of people, how much more so if these cities also contained the wilderness, which is a source of rejuvenation and even religion?[43]
Conclusion
Jungle City is the next stage upon which the human and the non-human will interact and alleviate the anxieties of the present and near future. Already there is immense history of plant-human interaction. Human and non-human interaction must increase if bio-diversity is to be maintained on earth. The solution of isolating disparate zones of humans and the wild is not practicable in any case, and is thus not a viable solution to environmental problems and the anxieties of humans in regards to the natural environment.[44] By permitting nature to reclaim its agency in the areas in which humans live, humans will also regain an agency denied them in the modern concrete jungle.
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Endnotes
[1] Or as Carolyn Merchant would have it “Nature is an order and a process which we did not create” yet we are bound up in it and it cannot be separated from humans. Carolyn Merchant, Major Problems in American Environmental History (Wadsworth: 2005), 8.
[2]Gadgil and Guha present a hypothesis regarding the perception of separation. “By surviving successfully in harsh and variable environments, and with little attachment to any particular locality, nomadic pastorals were perhaps the first societies to perceive human communities as separate from nature, and therefore in a position to dominate it.” Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Berkely: University of California, 1993), 29.
[3] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis Chicago and the Great West (New York; London: Norton, 1991), 152.
[4] Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, 30.
[5] Michael Williams, Deforesting The Earth (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
[6] Cath Knight, “The bear as ‘endangered pest’: symbolism and paradox in newspapers coverage of the ‘bear problem’ (Routledge, 2008).
[7] “Marcella Pattyn.” The Economist 25 Apr. 2013: 86.
[8] Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 480.
[9] Annette Lucia Giesecke, The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome. (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2007), 102–03.
[10] A. Giesecke, Epic City, 85.
[11] Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1994 (1977)), 335.
A. Giesecke, Epic City, 110.
[12] M.Williams, Deforesting The Earth, 146.
[13] Dusan Boric, Images of Animality: Hybrid Bodies and Mimesis in Early Prehistoric Art (Course Reading, GEH: Bloomington, 2013)
[14] A. Giesecke, Epic City, 110.
[15] D. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 325.
[16] J. Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World, (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 6.
[17] A. Giesecke, Epic City, 88.
[18] Carolyn Merchant, Major Problems in American Environmental History (Wadsworth, 2005), 190.
[19] Liang Qichao visiting America in R. David Arkush and Leo Ou-Fan, Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkely: University of California, 1989), 84.
[20] Arkush and Leo, Land Without Ghosts, 87.
[21] Melvin Kalfus, Frederick Law Olmsted: The Passion of a Public Artist, (New York: New York UP, 1990), 11.
[22] Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Theodora Kimball Hubbard, eds., Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822–1903 (New York: B. Blom, 1970), 437–471.
[23] William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, London: Norton, 1996), 107.
[24] F. Olmsted, Jr., and T. Kimball Hubbard, Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 473.
[25] C. Merchant, Major Problems in American Environmental History, 192.
[26] J. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 582.
[27] Heidi Cullen, Weather of the Future (Course Reading, GEH Week XI: Bloomington, 2013), 78.
[28] F. Olmsted, Jr., and T. Kimball Hubbard, Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 466–67.
[29] William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, London: Norton, 1996), 101.
[30] Bible, Psalms.
[31] For concept illustration, see film Escape from New York. Demonstrative of importance of map in navigating obstacled bridge. Escape from New York. Dir. John Carpenter. Avco, 1981.
[32] Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Metropolitan Books, 1998).
[33] Idea first articulated by Michel Focault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
[34] Such was the author’s recent experience when attempting to view a sporting event from without a fence while standing upon a raised platform in a parking lot.
[35] Char Miller and Hal Rothman, Out of the Woods Essays in Environmental History, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).
[36] Carolyn Merchant, Major Problems in American Environmental History (Wadsworth, 2005), 17.
[37] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis; New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1956), 113.
Andrew Isenberg, “Introduction.” In The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Bloomington: GEH Course Readings, 2013), 5.
[38] Scott O’Bryan, “Mapping the Thermal City: Meteorology, Built Environments and a History of Heat in Tokyo” (Bloomington: GEH Course Spring 2013), 17.
[39]Robert Claiborne, Climate, Man, and History (New York: Norton, 1970), 393–406.
[40] D. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 330.
[41] Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 267.
[42] Joseph Judge, “Brunei Borneo’s Abode of Peace,” (National Geographic Feb. 1974), 207–25.
[43] Muir, Thoreau, Emerson among others who worshipped in the cathedral of nature.
[44] Note the Pacific Garbage Patch, a region far removed from humans but seemingly irreparably tainted all the same.
