Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
unsustainable development. Only by fashioning a 'third nature' will the full potential
for freedom, rationality and subjectivity be realized, and the media and education
have an important role to play in this.
Bioregionalism
It is the nurturing of this third nature that appears in the highly engaging social
philosophy of bioregional urbanist Lewis Mumford. In his early essays for the
Sociological Review
in the 1920s, and especially in the seminal texts
Technics and
Civilization
(1962, first published 1934) and
The Culture of Cities
(1966a, first
published 1938), Mumford clearly articulates the intricate and inextricable relationship
between human social organization, economic production and ecology, stating that
through sensitive regional planning an appropriate balance could be achieved between
human institutions and natural, regional, resources. He saw the modern age as
offering great hope in that new environmentally benign technologies could emerge
to rectify the destruction wrought on the Earth through the desire to increasingly
accumulate material wealth and financial profit. For this change to happen, though,
a fundamental shift in human values and the human personality was needed. There
could be no ecological balance without human balance, no one-sided or indefinite
progress. What should emerge is a 'dynamic equilibrium', with a conservation ethic
replacing the all-too-apparent 'reckless pillage'. For Mumford, this dynamic
equilibrium would entail the building of
eutopias
(good places), similar to the
decentralized garden cities envisaged by Ebenezer Howard (1902) in our modern
world. This would encompass:
Equilibrium in the environment: Conservation and restoration of soils; reliance
on kinetic energy (sun, falling water, wind); the larger use of scrap metals; and
'the conservation of the environment itself as a resource, the fitting of human
needs into the pattern formed by the region as a whole'.
Equilibrium in industry and agriculture: A balanced industrial life in every region
of the Earth; the decentralization of population into new centres; the widening
of market gardening and mixed farming, with specialized farming intended for
world export reduced to the essential. The
raison d'être
of capitalism will diminish
as human and environmental exploitation is replaced by alternative modes of
living and working.
Equilibrium in population: The balancing of the birth rate and death rate, and
of rural and urban environments and the wiping out of 'blighted industrial areas'
in favour of 'a rational resettlement of the entire planet into the regions more
favourable to human habitation'.
(Mumford, 1962: 430, 432)
Visionary, practical, optimistic and frustrated in turn, Mumford is a neglected
thinker, whose insights and prescience warrant greater recognition (Sale, 1991;
Guha, 2006); like other bioregionalists such as Wendell Berry, Kirkpatrick Sale and
Peter Berg, he emphasized the need to 'reinhabit' the places we live in but have
abused ecologically and become socially alienated from. We need to recover what
it means to be 'native' to a place, to refresh our relationship with the non-human
