Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sound making and the versatility of the hand (from tool making to caress-
ing to piano playing), in their double task of executing the brain directions
and as maker of the brain itself, our species has opened the safe of the uni-
verse to find in it the dim but indispensably rich ancestry of our presence.
In terms of Historical Fitness, we should carefully calibrate our endeav-
ors in ways that seem to work for and not against the progression of more
and more mind being extruded from matter, a theotechnology of sorts
(technology is present at the very beginning of things, of the universe itself,
that is).
The price of civilization with the extraordinary fruits it has generated,
science and technology as we regard them now among others, has been
high, too high, especially if we now think of plunging into the rematerial-
ization of life promised by hyperconsumption.The historical fit we may be
seeking seems to be related more to the not-so-noble drives history has
showered upon civilization and culture: personal opportunism, greed,
hypocrisy, envy, ill will, hatred, the enemy at every crossroads, racism, and
xenophobia.
Civilization was the invention of cities in an almost runaway mouth-to-
tail cartwheeling of the mind and the toil of generations succeeding gen-
erations. The urban effect is not really the invention of man from zero
point. All organisms are urban effects, the unbelievable coming together of
the miniaturized and the complex. Man as hyperorganism is the coming
together of trillions of events, all spatial, by the way. Without an implosive
miracle of such extravagant nature, no organism would exist in the bio-
sphere (the microchip is now attempting a similar feat on silicon matrix).
Getting away from the city is not only counter culture and civilization,
it is counter life. One has only to imagine what the global hermitage gen-
erated by unleashed cyberspace would deliver. Three billion enclaves
“served” by an impossible logistical grid, in perpetual gridlock. Sub-urban
and ex-urban sprawl are promising the Garden of Eden and are in the
process of delivering despair: physical absurdity and mental anguish. We
must halt the folly.
THE EVOLUTIONARY COHERENCE BUBBLE
It was with the first sparks of consciousness millions of years ago when tiny
flakes of the noosphere began to manifest an utterly new presence on the
planet. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was the first man to use the term “noo-
sphere” and the electronic envelope now being knitted around the globe is
