HOME SWEET HABITAT
No progress on the wheel bearings yesterday. Reassembled twice,
still can't see why it's not quite fitting together properly. But
as usual, just keep banging that head against the brick wall and
maybe somehow you'll break through... I usually do.
Yesterday I was actually aiming to wind my way to talking about
housing. The other day I saw part of an interview on TV with
someone who had done a study that claimed in the next few days the
total mass (well I'm guessing mass, maybe volume but that seems a
less reasonable measure) of man-made materials will exceed the
total of all living things. Also noted was that the average human
(nobody ever wants to be him) accounts for their own weight in
man-made materials every couple of weeks. Clearly this is the sort
of headline-grabbing study that it isn't wise to place very much
faith in (even less my paraphrased version of it), but regardless
it's a good starting point to look at where those materials go and
what they are all really for.
Cutting to the chase, because I need to get back to swearing at my
wheel hub, it's houses. Not just the building, but the habitat that
they provide, that we create for ourselves. They are capsules that
protect us from the Earth, because honestly as much as we praise
it, we hate it out there. It's always either too bright, or too
dark, or too cold, or too hot, or too wet, or too dry, or too
uncomfortable, too dirty, too public, or just too boring. So we
pool up all our energies to make and maintain our own ideal
habitat. To do this we pull in a seemingly infinite variety of
resources that come together in goods made from materials
completely unknown to the natural world, often formed in ways
beyond our own individual understanding. In pulling these materials
in, the houses themselves also pull themselves together. The strain
against the environment is less easily shared over distance. So
towns form, within them factories, services, to create and operate
more goods so that everyone can live more comfortably in their
personal habitats, ever more removed from the world outside. Towns
grow into cities, where more factories and services serve other
factories and services, and from them all that can be seen, sitting
atop the earth on layers of concrete and tarmac, is the framework
supporting these capsules, which are drawn together ever more
densely, ever more removed from the world that they're made from.
That the natural world suffers from this should surprise nobody. To
consider nothing more than the now-barren earth underneath the
buildings of all the world's huge cities, the impact is undeniable.
As for whether it can be sustained, well there are already
countless cases where towns and even cities have become abandoned
because their locations made them unsustainable within the vast
economic structure that supports most of them, once whatever
resource they relied on failed to take the strain against the rest
of their displaced natural environment. This will go on, and get
worse. But at home we'll keep on living in the best environment we
can, pulling against nature with all our strength, pulling along
with some and against others, but all against the world that we're
from.
- The Free Thinker