Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it
by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and
television signals, and so on. Its image of immobility would then be
replaced by an image of complex mobilities. . . .”
8
The house becomes anal-
ogous to a machine manipulated by its inhabitants.
The house is connected to large systems that are themselves both natural
and technical. The local is not simpler than the national or global. Organi-
zational complexity is not simply a function of greater size as one goes from
a house to a street to a neighborhood to a city; different spatial scales—some
far greater than the city—have already interpenetrated the house itself and
are necessary to explain it. Where do the water, the gas, and the electricity
come from? To understand the nexus of spatial relations produced by the
house, it is necessary to understand regional, national, and even global rela-
tionships to the natural world, because each interpenetrates the house.
I think about Lefebvre's house a lot. It is, on everyday terms, an expres-
sion of the hybridity, the mixture of the natural and the technical, that
human beings create and inhabit. If you separate out the natural and the
technical, you don't improve the house; you destroy it.
The bad part about history, the essentially conservative part of the disci-
pline that I often struggle against, is quite simple:You can't ever begin from
scratch.You can only work on the basis of what has gone before.We live in
a world of hybrids.To ask how technology affects nature may be to ask the
wrong question. Look at the technology and you will see it interpenetrated
with nature; look at nature and you will find the imprint of human tech-
nology.This is admittedly an issue of scale. Go to the smallest or the largest
scale and there is nature, but this is not where we live.We live on the scales
historians examine.
If we begin with hybrids, if we see a landscape always already trans-
formed, then our concern becomes less one of maintaining an existing
purity (nature or “the” environment) on which we depend than one of
imagining new and better worlds.These worlds will themselves be hybrids,
and we will always be constrained by processes never quite under our con-
trol. But these are the only choices that history seems to have left us.
NOTES
1. Stephen J. Gould,
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
(Norton, 1989).
