You Are Here (38 page)

Andrea Polli’s project
Airlight Taipei
may be a step in this direction. This installation provides a repeating audible signal that reports the measurements of air pollutants by a local monitoring station. One could imagine more complex auditory signatures to signal relationships between local activities and their effects in the larger environment.

Educating children to make better connections with space, redesigning parks to make them functional parts of the urban core, and tapping into Wi-Fi networks to let walkers hear sounds that correspond
to their own movements through city streets might seem like paltry suggestions in the face of a world that many experts tell us is at risk of drying out and catching fire within as few as two generations. My suggestions for redesigning cities, suburbs, and parks might risk comparison with a call to rearrange the deck chairs on the
Titanic
. There would be some merit to this criticism if I were suggesting that adopting the measures I have described in this chapter could reverse our current trend toward increasing destruction of our natural heritage. I am not so foolish as to think that my suggestions will be of any benefit unless many other, more dramatic measures are put in place. If we are to save ourselves and the plants and animals that we live among, we will need to rapidly develop alternative sources of energy. We will need to massively invest in carbon-sequestration technologies that capture the carbon produced by certain types of industries (oil sands extraction, for instance) and return it to the ground, and we will need a fast rollout of many other types of technology to halt and then reverse the trend that is beginning to boil our waters and scorch the earth. These measures will take time to put in place, and there is not a moment to be wasted.

But as much as I am aware of the urgency of our plight, it also strikes me that we have known for decades about many of the problems that are now acute. One might argue that only a simpleton could think we could get away with pouring poisons into the air and water of a finite system forever without eventual catastrophe, yet this is how we have behaved. What is even more striking is that we have long understood clearly where much of the excess greenhouse gases are coming from (I remember learning about this as a student in elementary school), and it is within our means to begin to halt the process. Inflated or nonsensical geographic footprints, unflinching appetites for vast quantities of cheap manufactured goods, and a feeling of entitlement to any goods from any location on the planet
provided we can scratch up the cash to pay for them all contribute to our environmental crisis. Large coal plants in the United States belch out pollution because people demand and expect uninterrupted services and ice-cold air-conditioned environments in huge houses filled with all manner of power-guzzling appliances on days hot enough to cause the grass to literally catch fire. We burn enormous quantities of gasoline in a daily commute from jobs in the city to houses on the outer fringes of the suburbs, where we convince ourselves that we are in contact with nature, and then we spend our weekends using machines run by inefficient gas motors to shape, chop, grind, pulp, and blow away any parts of
real
nature that have the audacity to invade our high-fenced outdoor great rooms.

These are not technological problems but psychological ones. The real reason that our planet is dying is not the coal plant in Ohio, the auto manufacturer in Detroit, or the mammoth Asian factories spewing poisoned water into rivers. These are merely the symptoms. The late Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University and a masterful popularizer of the history, lore, and wonder of nature and life, argued famously that “we will not fight to save what we do not love.”
¹⁶
To this argument, whose deep truth I cannot doubt, I would only add that we will not love what we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. The measures I have described in this chapter are not meant as a cure-all but merely as starting points on the road that must be traveled if we are to find ways to remember that the spaces of our perceptions and thoughts must connect with the spaces of our bodies and the fields, forests, streams, and oceans that lie beside them.

O
ur journey has been a long one. We began in the sediments at the bottom of cold mountain lakes where single-celled animals navigate using onboard iron compasses locked on to the earth’s magnetic core. We clambered through thickets of different types of animals, each offering new and clever solutions to the overarching question of every animal’s life: where am I? Along the way we discovered things about our own unique way of drifting through space using a compass course set slightly off kilter from the main path. Like Icarus soaring high above the planet on wings constructed by his father, Daedalus, the first engineer, we have minds designed to look down on a space of our own conception. But like those who died in the legendary labyrinth of Knossos, Daedalus’s other famous construction, we abandon our connections to earth too quickly, lost unless we cling tenaciously to the artifice of Ariadne’s thread. All who have mastered survival in wild places, be they ancient seafarer,
wandering Inuit hunter, or modern woodsman, have understood in their bones this delicate balancing act between our soaring mental spaces and our feet planted precariously on solid ground.

We have much in common with every animal from the single-celled amoeba to the bear lumbering confidently through the boreal forest. All animals that move must be able to find the things they need and avoid those that can harm them. At the very foundation, this means possessing the hardware to systematically reduce or increase our distance from identifiable targets, ranging from the box of cereal on the supermarket shelf to the fanged predator lurking in the bushes. Though some clever tricks might be required to coordinate different parts of our body (eyes, feet, hands) with the things that we see, such target-orienting tasks hardly require sophisticated mental maps of space.

When we need to find our way to invisible or remote targets using more complex routes, more sophisticated means of wayfinding must come into play. Like most other animals, we have found ways to use landmarks both to mark positions and to point the way ahead. Just as wasps and birds may use visible features of the terrain to mark a nest or a cache of food, we can learn to use both obvious urban landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or, with training, more subtle features of the natural environment such as a particular species of tree or even a notable formation of rocks to send us on our way. Many early human cultures much more attuned to the land than we are learned to embed such subtle features into long narratives that helped them to locate themselves but also helped to make the emotional and spiritual attachments to place that seem to be lacking in our modern way of life.

Some of nature’s most sophisticated navigators are capable of constructing accurate maps out of brain tissue, letting precisely organized connections between neurons stand in place of the grid
lines on the paper maps that are more familiar to human beings. Though people also make maps with minds, they are most often composed of a slippery, rubbery substance where distance and angle mean little but connections between one thing and another count for much. This type of map, more flexible and less constrained than the metric map offered for sale at a gas station, can change in size and shape according to need, purpose, and even mood. Such maps, though they might not lead a bee to nectar, can serve us well by making it easy for us to remember simple, well-traveled routes and to communicate these routes to other people. But in the face of the least uncertainty, unfamiliarity, or unexpected change of course, such maps can leave us quickly and irredeemably lost. Not only this, but such topological maps, based largely on collections of quick glimpses, snapshots, and vistas, can generate idiosyncratic views of how larger spaces fit together. These strange views, in turn, can have strong influences on how we think about and behave in our homes, the places we work, our cities, and our greenspaces.

Now, in the twenty-first century, we have been successful in using our ingenuity, along with vast amounts of energy, to essentially eradicate real physical space from much of our lives. Most residents of modern cities live in climatically controlled environments, carefully shielded from the outside world in every sense, but particularly in the visual one. When we are outside of our dwellings, our views and vistas consist of the square corners of the carpenter and flat ribbons of road and sidewalk. The most salient connections that we make between one place and another are often forged by electronic switching stations and fiber-optic cables. Though this may not always be an aesthetically pleasing way to get through a day, modern life has its advantages. Acting as though geography does not exist allows many of us to eat and drink whatever we want, do pretty much whatever we feel like, and talk to anyone who is within
reach of a telephone, a cellular network, or a computer. More than at any time in our past, human interactions are unfettered by the laws of physics. As I have tried to argue in this book, the makeup of our brainware has not been responsible for our current state, but a brain that allows us to weld together collages of space from one long series of snapshots after another has helped to lay the groundwork for such a transformation. What reaches a kind of apotheosis in the highest accomplishments of virtual reality technology is also apparent in much more humble contexts. We human beings don’t just live in space—we make it. By letting go of Ariadne’s thread, we may lose our grip on the planet’s surface in a way that would be anathema to an ant, a bee, or even a desert scout in a preliterate human society, but we can gain immeasurable riches when we take mental flight, looking back down on geography of our own devising. What happens next?

It might seem hard to imagine any kind of impediment or braking force on the human tendency to effectively shrink all space to a single point. As foreseen by Paul Virilio, the notion that we might not need to frame our existence in anything like Euclidean geometry suggests that the current trends to instantaneous communication, virtual existence, and a kind of distributed embodiment in which we live everywhere and nowhere should only accelerate. As technological developments continue, especially those in the realm of computing and information processing, the most straightforward prediction is that we will continue to leverage our current abilities to produce artificial immersive experiences so that physical movement from place to place becomes less and less important. If we can raise a convincing simulacrum of a beach in Tahiti from our basement VR theater, then why bother climbing into our flying cars to go to the
real thing? If we can flick a switch to embody a fully equipped avatar sitting at a conference table on the other side of the globe, then why put up with the cramped quarters of an aircraft cabin?

This conjures images of a kind of post-human existence in which we would live in ways functionally equivalent to brains in jars jacked into computer terminals, and there are reasons to be skeptical that this is how our future will unfold. Technology has made it possible for us to warp and weave our way through space in paths that defy physics, gravity, and essentially everything other than the speed of light, but there are already plenty of signs that there are limits to the extent to which we can allow such technologies to rule over our spaces while maintaining our happiness, or perhaps even our sanity. Although we may have left some of the wayfinding skills we share with other animals in ancient dust, we still sometimes seem to respond to the call of old biological circuits that remind us of the importance of place.

The current fascination with GPS and geo-coded data is one sign of an inner sense of the importance of the
wheres
of our lives. Michael Jones, the chief technical officer of Google and the developer of geospatial applications such as Google Earth, describes a romantic fascination with place-based computer data that draws hundreds of millions of users to such applications first to play and explore but ultimately to learn and to draw connections between themselves and the real places of the world.
¹
The best example of this is the Crisis in Darfur project, a joint effort between Google and the United States Holocaust Museum, in which virtual visitors can zoom over villages burned to the ground by Sudanese soldiers.
¹²
Viewers can interact with villagers one on one by flying in close to see and hear firsthand accounts of atrocities from victims and their families. As always, a part of what moves us is the narrative, but being able to attach the story to places that can be seen on the screen
adds considerably to the impact of the presentation and leads to a greater likelihood of action on the part of remote bystanders sitting at computers in another hemisphere. As has ever been the case, attaching story to place enhances the power of both.