TOWARDS A HOLISTIC urbanism.

COVID-19 required people to be sequestered in their homes for months in the United States and globally. Society existed through our computer screens, phones, and tablets. The world outside, even the air we breathe, was perceived as dangerous. The condition the world finds itself in should give us pause to reflect on what has been done to the earth, and how fragile (and dare I say tenuous) the human condition is when confronted with environmental threats.

One may say that this pandemic is a random event, a fluke not capable of being repeated, or at least not at this extreme. But I believe the world is now beginning to see the ramifications of what the Industrial Revolution started at the onset of the 20th Century, and what we at the end of the 20th Century, and first decades of the 21st have accelerated.

What this pandemic has given us is a window into our future. A future which is dominated by our environment, subject to pressures and scales of events at magnitudes and frequencies beyond the ability to control or stifle them. The innovative technologies created, the legislation passed, the practices taken on all pale in comparison to the trajectory the planet has been set on through the misuse and mismanagement of the environment. Even if all carbon emissions were stopped immediately (an impossibility based on economic pragmatics and political realities), the global temperature would continue to rise.

These realities beg the question, who are we as a species and what is our role on this planet? It is obvious that humans are not the dominant species (a microscopic virus has left us paralyzed with hundreds of thousands dead and the world on the brink of global financial ruin). Humans are one of many, subject to the same threat of extinction as all the others. This understanding is critical to our survival. The human species is part of a global community that includes 7.8 billion other humans and 8.7 million other species. With an ever-shifting climate affecting all of us (John Wesley Powell’s ‘Arid Region’ has extended 140 miles east across the United States since 1878), solutions must be found to not only coexist, but to thrive. It is this interface between humans and other species, plants, and the earth where the problem, and ultimately the solution, resides.