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.Environments in our world are just about as diverse as the people who inhabit them. This is especially true because humans have always been compulsive technicians. Humans have rarely left the natural environment entirely to itself; they almost always have cultivated the environment in some way. This is what we call "human technology." Clearly, in some quarters of the world, today, technology has gone so far that what environs those people is almost completely human-built. Sitting at my desk, looking out onto campus walks and lawns through large shaded institutional windows, I have to realize that almost everything I see is a human artifact. Even the big oaks, while natural objects, were planted here (where they do not naturally belong) by humans years ago. The campus environment as a whole is a human artifact even though natural objects are integrated into it. I have to walk across the street to the Bernard Field Station in order to see an environment that is very close to a natural one, that is, in which natural objects reside in natural relations to each other and to the regional climate.
When we put the ideas of technology and reciprocation together, we have to realize that human-built environments make us who we are just as natural environments do. In that sense, technology is no value-neutral re-formation of environmental objects, no one-sided alteration of the physical world. Technology, by shaping an environment, reciprocally shapes us; human life becomes something different in response to the human-built environment. An extreme example, perhaps, is the psychological damage that we can do to a person by placing him in "solitary confinement."
We will begin the semester by reading Technopoly by Neil Postman. This is a book about the cultural impact of modern technology. Postman demonstrates many ways in which the environment that we make for ourselves by adopting one technology or another winds up changing the ways we relate to each other and, hence, re-defining ourselves. Postman does not ask us to dispense with technology as such; however, he does ask an extremely important question about the relationship between technology and human culture. "Technopoly," according to Postman, is a new historical epoch in which the technological process has postured itself outside human culture so as to dominate human culture. Hence, humans are moving in a stream of technological change over which they no longer exercise creative power. Technologically dominated environments are making humans who they are; humans themselves are no longer authors of themselves. All of this highlights the issue of "cultivating environments (and, hence, ourselves)." How can we return to a sensible, creative human culture?
One way of answering this question is to assume that humans have a natural place -- the "natural environment" -- and that we can best re-discover human culture by re-discovering the experiences of this natural environment. Henry David Thoreau's book Walden is the preeminent model of this undertaking, and it virtually defines the genre of nature writing. We will also read his late essay Walking for further insights.
It is difficult to read Thoreau, of course, without becoming very much aware that his thinking centers around the specific environs of Concord, Massachusetts. We have to realize that there is no single "natural environment;" in fact, the world is filled with diverse natural environments, each quite unique. Like Thoreau, Aldo Leopold devoted himself to the experience of natural landscapes, and his A Sand County Almanac will provide us a more nearly contemporary view of human life engaged with nature. Leopold's environment was an abandoned old farm, in Sauk County, northwest of Madison, acquired in 1935. His special experiment with this environment was that of watching it recover the being of a natural place, after long abuse; as he and his family lived and vacationed at what came to be called "the Shack," he watched the natural order return to this smallish piece of land.
Pure observation of natural environments is by no means our whole task, though. Environment and that which is environed come together in what we call "place." Understanding a selected region as a place is crucial to understanding the relationship therein between human life and whatever specifically environs it. It is a matter of both natural and human histories --- of images and of narratives. In Wallace Stegner's The American West As Living Space we see one approach to defining place. In the University of Michigan conference from which these three essays are derived, Stegner and other speakers were asked to characterize the American West. Having grown up in western Canada and the US, Stegner was an excellent choice because most of Stegner's writing -- both fiction and non-fiction -- has been a reflection upon the ways in which humans have mixed their lives with Western landscapes, all too often with little understanding or imagination and not infrequently with disastrous results.
Gary Snyder is also a product of the American West, having grown up on a farm near Seattle, been educated at Reed College, and lived among the Beat Generation in San Francisco. Snyder, today, is a professor at California State University, Sacramento, and lives in the Sierra foothills near the Yuba River. In The Practice of the Wild we have a selection of his essays that continues to point the way to our conception of place and, at the same time, suggests some things about the cultural values of respecting, even nurturing the wild -- both inside of us as well as within the natural environs.
The final two readings on the notion of place are B. H. Fairchild's small volume of poetry, The Art of the Lathe, and Wes Jackson's book Becoming Native to This Place. While Fairchild is a resident of Claremont who teaches at CSU, San Bernardino, and while life has taken him to many parts of the world, his poems consistently return to the place of his youth, a small town in Kansas, where his father operated a lathe in a machine shop until the Dust Bowl beat them out and pushed them west. While Jackson's book develops an argument about agriculture that is motivated by his role in founding The Land Institute, it too weaves a subtle story about a small Kansas town, abandoned in the Dust Bowl era. Jackson, however, rather like Leopold, has returned to that town to find a way of healing what happened there seventy years ago.
Fairchild and Jackson provide good passages away from natural environments to human-built environments. Both are very conscious of the ways in which human lives mix with the environment to create powerful (numinous) places. When humans create elements of their environs, they fashion the worlds that in turn fashion them and, of course, their children. We will end this course by thinking about architecture because architecture is the technology of fashioning human-built places. When we construct a building and when we design a landscape to surround it, we are fashioning a place in which we will dwell or work. Respecting the reciprocal relationship between life and environment, it is clear that architecture has a profound impact on human culture. What, for instance, do we teach our students when we design a campus in a particular way? What does living and working within that campus do to the ways we think, communicate, and re-create ourselves? What is Claremont as a natural or human-built place; and why have all the colleges created campuses that defy the natural environments of this region?
When we think of architecture, we should at least think of America's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. We will read about Wright's unique insights into the relationships between architecture and nature, and we will view portions of a recent video on Wright's life. In connection with this, we will study and critique some campus buildings and landscapes in Claremont.
In effect, this course is about relationship -- humans and the rest of nature. Granting that humans will always build something, we ask what relationship with other natural objects they will express by their building. When humans build in ignorance of nature, what are the consequences? Likewise, if they build in knowledge of nature and in compatibly with it, are the consequences better? The human of today is a product of natural evolution within a stream of competition and development of thousands of natural entities. The question is really how far humans can attempt to move outside of and in opposition to that natural stream without drastic results.
No matter how extensively we build and thereby create our own environments and no matter how completely the immediate human (e.g., urban) environment may successfully escape natural relationships, movement outward to the borders of these human-built environments always eventually brings us back to the natural order, that is, to nature and its evolutionary forces. We are always surrounded; and nature is always eventually supreme in power. For this reason, no human fabrication is without cost. The more unnatural the human-built environment is, the more it costs us in human energy to maintain it. Modern technology has enabled us to enlist huge resources in nature itself in maintaining our fabrications. What we have rarely observed about this helpmate, however, is the fact that it is non-renewable energy, drawn from primordial natural processes over a vast time scale. When these resources are gone, humans will have no helpmates in affording the cost of the extravagant realms they have created. Will they, at that point, wish they had pursued projects that represented a better relationship with nature and its time scale? I suspect they will.