Abandoned Cities 2: Flaw in the Design

I've previously written about what I call 'Abandoned City Ecology' here

            The other day, I went for a walk in Leigh Woods. I’d done this walk a few times before, but this time I got a little lost because I was being lazy and stupid with following directions, and so I got to walk past the Stokeleigh camp twice, and on the second amble past, I really thought about it, and imagined what it was once upon a time.

            The Stokeleigh camp is an ancient site in Leigh Woods, facing out towards the Avon gorge by Bristol. Two crescent shaped mounds are all that’s left of an iron age fort that once kept guard over the banks of the River Avon for reasons so far unknown. All that’s left are the two mounds, surrounded by trees, shrubs, grassland, and themselves completely covered in a variety of wildflowers and weeds.

  Between the two mounds at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods.

The Mound Rising up ahead at the Stokeleigh Camp, Leigh Woods, Bristol.

            I’d been thinking a lot lately about the impermanence of all things, especially artifices, and how cities have a lifespan. The abandoned cities archaeologists find weren’t always deserted during some cataclysmic event, rather citizens trickled out as life in the city became less and less viable. The cities we have opted to create in ridiculous climes such as Las Vegas, a city that functions as any other American city albeit in the middle of the desert with strained water sources; similarly, Cape Town in South Africa experienced a water crisis just last year. Whether we like it or not, artifices have a lifespan of usefulness that might be shorter than we expect; everything from a skyscraper to a coke bottle to a city has a timer counting down in its usefulness.

The problem with artifice’s useful lifespans is that, unlike organic features, artifices do not break down or transform on the demise of their usefulness. Where an eggshell, once empty, will dry up, the membrane and residues rotted away, the shell becoming brittle, eventually shattering, and then one day becoming powder, returning the mineral constitution of the shell to the ground. A plastic drinks bottle, once empty, just sits. It might tear or warp, and shed a few shavings of plastic into its surrounds, but generally it will not disappear.

The Stokeleigh camp, re-absorbed into nature being just mounds of dirt, seemed to me the most brilliant, unintentional design, because its demise was factored in, and this isn’t a spoon we’re talking about, but a fort. If we accept that an era’s worth of cities could well be left due to war, climate change, and  resources stress, then we should be designing and building with decay factored in. Nothing is permanent, including unfortunately us as a species; whether we evolve, planetary migrate, or go extinct, I’d hate to wander the globe a spirit, and see city stacks still stood where a rich base of habitats could have instead been fed and allowed to succeed us.

Followed up by Abandoned City Ecology 3: Cut in the Landscape 

Lives in our Death: Rewilding for a Post-Human World.

Apocalyptic visions are getting harder and harder to ignore in the 21^st century; they’re embedded densely in popular culture, the media frequently leans towards intense catastrophic fear-mongering, and many experts are espousing troubling theories about the nearing end-times, including the man who conceived of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, James Lovelock.

            Instead of spurring a drive towards correction, this kind of embedded fear has all too often led to frantic action and bizarre offsetting of fear; Slavoj Žižek observes that in the face of impending sea level rises and the loss of both ice caps, people are instead attracted to (and fed by the media) stories about possible carbon-saving boat travel across the newly created Arctic sea, or the possiblility of Antarctica as an entirely new plain to colonise. This impedes the kind of radical environmental action massively; people are either happy to continue with business as usual or are too pessimistic to do anything proactive.

            Rewilding is definitely proactive and radical; it suggests a drastic change in our approach to natural landscapes to just leave them be, or to reinstate vital aspects of ecosystems that we have helped eradicate (such as large predators) to enable them to be self-sufficient. Many, including George Monbiot in his seminal book on rewilding in Britain, entitled Feral, espouse human-oriented arguments that delve into the spiritual and the economic. I believe that, especially in the case of humans becoming extinct, rewilding is essential simply for the planet.

            As the global landscape stands, especially in Europe, where there are animals, there are fences. We alone can permeate these fences; we bring the animals their feed, we rake away their droppings. The space animals, especially livestock, are allowed to occupy is a liminal space, often without natural function. The same can be observed in some ‘wild’ and natural spaces; conservation organisations created ‘natural disturbance’ to manage the lives of the animals therein, also most likely fenced in. What happens to these animals when we die?

            Presumably, they also die. Without a supply of food, surrounded by their own muck and often separated from breeding partners, these animals will die, and rot, and provide food for the scavenging few that can even make it past the fence such as birds or insects. If this was a rewilded or truly wild space, it would be self-sufficient and naturally functioning. Animal carcasses would of course be present in the landscape, but they would be integrated into the natural processes present just as should occur in the wilderness. Species can roam, breed, interact, spread, just as animals and plants naturally do; they are fluid.

Although the lifetime of a fence is far greater than their own lives, the chance we would give them to be able to live and breed for generations yet to come before the fence finally falls is still a whole lot better than the meagre chance afforded to our pets, zoo occupants, livestock, pitiful nature reserves. To not think of the lives of those we implicate in our own past our species’ extinction is as absurd as assuming that when you die, everyone else dies. Besides, through proactive rewilding, we might even solve some of the apocalyptic issues currently plaguing our planet such as carbon emissions, deforestation, and the terrifying loss of biodiversity the world over.

Some thoughts on WALL-E

            I can’t remember when I first saw WALL-E, but I definitely was under the age of 16. Rewatching it now, as a twenty-two year old student, I have realized what an ecological marvel it is; I was pointed to re-watch it in part by a brief analysis in Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought.

            I was struck by the overwhelming scale artificial objects were given; everything is gargantuan, such as the ship the Axiom, that blocks out the sky and is filled with unknowningly complex interior workings. Importantly, many giant things are defunct, and simply rubbish. A huge ‘Buy n Large Ultrastore’ sprawls in the urban wasteland, no longer used; enormous freighters are lined up in a row, rusting away and useless.

Most noticeably of all, the amount of waste rampant in the defunct planet is paradoxically larger than the environment it exists in, even in the compacted towers that WALL-E (and supposedly his deceased comrades) worked to turn it into. How can there be more waste than… well, anything else? We find this question crop up again later onboard the Axiom, where WALL-E is trapped in the waste disposal zone. Here, two giant robots work compacting the eternal stream of rubbish thrown into their compartment. Why would a ship with the purpose of conserving human life be so inefficient as to create so much waste?

Interestingly, the robots compacting waste on the Axiom are simply larger versions of WALL-E, suggesting that instead of solving the issue that has apparently followed humans onto the ship (i.e. over-consumption, wasteful lifestyles) humanity has simply upgraded the solution that was there, not necessarily solving anything, but with all the appearance of productivity.