Dwelling in a land that we do not know...

On a previous post, I tried to touch on the issues surrounding New Orleans and the forces of nature that destroyed the city to try and wrestle with why I am angry with the way we, as a Nation, have treated the situation. At the end of the past discussion, George asked some pretty difficult questions about how and why we build or settle a region. I was challenged by those questions and decided to take a moment and try to come to some sort of conclusion about these and other questions. I feel that the questions can be grouped into a few categories (however, it should be noted that these categories are for discussion only and are in no way designed to separate the issues due to the fact they can not be separated, but merely grouped).

The first group of questions I would like to address are the one centering around the landscape, since that is my official training. These seem to focus on directly on the landscape and the settlement patterns we apply to them. The landscape is separate from us in that it is independent of mankind, being able to operate without our influence. However, through inhabitation we become part of the system, separate but integrated. In Anne Whiston Spirn’s ‘The Language of Landscape’ she postulates that the landscape has a language of its own. It has the grammar and sentence structure of the physical laws, a vocabulary of the taxonomy of species, and a meaning of interpretation. She also states that because of our current mode of living, we no longer understand this language. She describe current building practices by observing that, ‘Once a creek flowed – long before there was anyone to give it a name – coursing down, carving, plunging, pooling, thousands of years before dams harnessed its power, before people buried it in a sewer and built houses on top. Now, swollen with rain and sewage, the buried creek busts pipes, soaks soil, floods basements, undermines buildings. During storms, brown water gushes from inlets and manholes into streets and, downstream, overwhelms the sewage treatment plant, overflowing into the river from which the city draws its water.’ Or by ‘vacant lots overgrown by meadows and shrubby thickets near boarded up homes and community gardens filled with flowers and vegetables follow a meandering line no one seems to see. In a school that stands on this unseen line, the gym floods every time it rains. Once a year, teachers take students on buses to a place outside the city to see and study ‘nature’.’

I stated in a comment to the previous post that I don’t feel that we should have built in the fragile landscape region of New Orleans. This may have been general and a little vague in the reasoning why and I will try and clear that up here: If our inhabitation of a place is link to the physical place we inhabit, then we must understand the dynamics of this place in order to survive. I don’t think that there is a landscape that is more fragile than any other, (that is without man’s interventions and mistreatments) but there are landscape that react to more or less stimulants than others. Picture a lawn of Z-52 Zoysia, cut to perfection, with only the traces of footprints from the pick up soccer game that just finished. Now, picture a lawn of lichen and moss, moist and shaded, completely destroyed from the pick up soccer game that was just played. What is the difference in these two ecosystems? Not there complexity, because we could study both for the rest of our lives and only begin to understand the relationships. Certainly not their fragility, because they both are governed by the same biological laws of plant physiology. What makes them different is that the stimulus of soccer was benign to one and terminal to the other. In order to dwell in a landscape we first must understand it, and from this understanding will come away with a way not to destroy it. I do not feel that man has the capacity to benefit his environment (and by benefit I mean to make the system run more efficient), but rather he possess the unique ability to destroy his host, either aware of the fact or not, either intentional or not. In biology this is represented by the host/symbiant relationship, the tick and the dog. We are the tick, and there is only so much blood.

When this is applied back to New Orleans, we see an inhabitation that degraded the landscape to the point that it is no longer able to support the inhabitants. In Jared Diamond’s book, ‘Collapse’, he talks about the people who first settled Easter Island and how they harvested every tree on the island in order to erect the giant stone heads as a competition between the warring tribes. Here were a people, isolated on an island, with the only resources they have are on the very island they live, so caught up in their own race for dominance they cut down their means of survival. With out trees there was no shelter for plants or animals and no building material for homes. They out-kicked their environmental coverage. We posses the ability to understand our landscape unlike any civilization prior to us. We have amassed the greatest amount of knowledge and understanding about our world, we have stood on the shoulders of the thinkers before us, but it is us, in these current times, who are the least ‘connected’ to our physical world. We have the greatest knowledge but the least amount of understanding. It was because of these factors that New Orleans is now and will be an artificial city. It will be alive as long as we let it. When we pull the plug it will die a watery death. Only a few other cities can claim this award for last place. New Orleans won’t change and adapt with its economy or landscape or people. It will survive until we, as humans, end it or are unable to save it. Pull the pull on New York and you will still have life and interactions they will just be in the dark, pull the plug on New Orleans and you will have Katrina.

I have chosen not to speak of stewardship here for the reason that I feel that its definition is subjective at best and I don’t want to cloudy this more than it is already. Instead I would like to talk about our understanding of this planet we live on. So many times I hear, ‘what kind of plant is that?’ or ‘how do I get my grass to grow here?’ Both valid questions, but I ask you what farmers does not know what trees are on his land or the pioneer what berries he can eat? Have we out-kicked our host environment and is that going to come back to bite us?

Before we pipe a stream under a parking lot, or pump out the swamp should we not first understand that system and how it will be impacted by our actions, if not for our immediate future then for our children, or the poor people stuck in the 9th ward when the waters flow in?