Copyright, William Irwin Thompson, 2005
This
Time, Let's Build a New Venice and Not Another New Orleans
A new and architecturally more beautiful
London rose on the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666, and this allowed the genius
of Wren and Hawksmoor to shine forth in stone, brighter in its human spirit
than the flames of destruction that consumed the old Tudor wooden
edifices. So let us imagine a truly
"New" Orleans in which Cajun gondolas and Creole vaporettos, aloud
with Dixieland and Zydeco, glide past buildings on high concrete foundations
and decorated with balconies of iron with lace filigree. John Todd, of the University of Vermont's
Institute of Natural Resources, has designed canals for Chinese cities which
were formally filled with garbage and redolent of the stench of human waste,
but now are filled with plants that cleanse the waters so that fish may safely
swim. So there is a Green Architecture in America up to the challenge.
The Army Corps of Engineers with its
national system of dams and levees has shown us what happens when the
military-industrial approach in which Man dominates nature is put to work in
eliminating wet lands where wild birds gather and sedimentary islands build up
to break ocean surges. This form of
engineering is the same kind of military-industrial thinking that salinates the
soil with center-pivot agriculture and drains the Ogalala aquifer to replace
biodiversity with monocrops held in place with the chemical warfare of
pesticides. And the animal prisoners
taken in this war are held in place in the concentration camps of feedlots and
drugged with antibiotics and growth hormones to prepare them for mass
slaughter. Their carcasses are then
processed in fast food fuel stations along highway strips that are the same
ugly clutter of signs and stops from Anchorage to Miami. Our President is comfortable with this
mentality because for him nature is basically a golf course or a ranch--or a
national park turned into a country club where folks can burn off stress by
speeding over the snow while polluting the air of Yellowstone with gas-guzzling
skidoos.
We have more than New Orleans to
rebuild. We have to rebuild our whole
idea of America. And while everyone is
too afraid to mention it, it is now only too clear that we are not prepared for
the earthquakes of California or the volcanoes of the Northwest. Only poets like Gary Snyder talk about living
"more lightly on the Earth," but it is beginning to be time for the
rest of us, if not to be hobbits in their ecologically embedded dwellings in
the Shire, at least to be humans who can learn from their mistakes.
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