Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
engineers and other innovators, like the contributors to this topic, to guide
us and to devise the technologies that will make it possible.
We need to redefine progress away from growth, away from what Paolo
Soleri calls the “pursuit of improved wrongness,” and toward sustainability
and justice for all Earth's creatures. Soleri tells us that if we don't like cities
we should make bigger ones, not build “sub-exurbias.” Following his rea-
soning—that we should not attempt to solve the problems of cities by
bombarding the landscape with single-family houses—I say “If you don't
like technology, make it more sophisticated and lessen its impact on
nature.” I do not mean that we should return to pastoralism or primitivism;
I mean that we should conserve nature by developing higher but more
benign technologies. And that, in effect, is what the contributors to this
topic are exploring: how to lessen our impact on the planet, how to live
without a huge flow of resources to meet our needs, how to leave a smaller
footprint.
This vision of a more efficient, lower-impact technology is a common
denominator of many of the essays in this topic. This new environmental-
ism encompasses architecture and planning, water systems and public
health, and the use of innovative building materials. It demands new
approaches to energy and transportation. It aims to preserve biodiversity.
Ultimately, its realization depends on economics, education, and govern-
ment based in an ethical concept of community not limited to humans but
including the whole biosphere.
Richard White's discussion of hybridity reminds us that human technol-
ogy and the natural, non-human environment are so intertwined as to be
inseparable.There can be no turning back to a pristine natural paradise, nor
can we ever fully control or predict the outcome of our best-laid plans.Yet
White sets us the task of imagining new and better worlds.
The historians Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella remind us of utopian
efforts of the 1930s in their stories of two planned techno-cities. Both Nor-
ris and Salzgitter reflected the social, environmental, economic, and politi-
cal values of their time, and both drew on the knowledge, insights, and skills
of respected professionals. And both were failures owing to “contingency,”
that chain of historical and ecological interconnections that White cautions
us can never be fully controlled or predicted.
Timothy Davis gives us another historical example of urban planning in
his essay on the evolution of American parkways. Here was a nineteenth-
century attempt to re-create the natural landscape in the city while serving
