The Natural World

This past week I rode the aerial tram to the top of one of Costa Rica’s rain forest peaks. There, along with the toucans and the sloth and the giant frogs, we saw a big house recently built along the ridge line. Our guide launched into a passionate disquisition about the dangers which encroaching civilization poses to Costa Rica’s biodiversity. Houses don’t belong everywhere! Nor do people.

I have noted the same phenomenon near my house in northwestern Connecticut: the new mega houses colonizing the ridge lines. Historically, unless you were a king or a duke or a Vanderbilt there was no such thing as a vacation home. If you lived in the country it was because you had to be close to the land you farmed or where you pastured your animals. If you practiced a trade, be it blacksmith or baker or cobbler, chances are you lived in town. Houses tended to cluster together in the villages, usually near a church or synagogue or mosque; if you lived farther out your house was usually right on the road to make travel and commerce easier. Housing decisions were practical. Your real estate was necessary, but it was rarely fun. And because the business of life was all consuming, few people built homes in whimsical places.

Being separate from the natural world, as so many of us urban dwellers are, has rendered it a bit unreal, like a movie. And that unreality both romanticized and threatens it. We take safaris, we swim with dolphins, we gather behind cordons to watch just hatched sea turtles crawl towards the ocean. But we don’t actually live within it. Nature has become an experience rather than an environment, and it is increasingly an experience which can be bought. Do you want a giant house overlooking the cloud forest? It can be done. Do you want a third or fourth home in a beautiful, out of the way place? So do lots of other people. And soon it is neither so out of the way nor so beautiful as it was before.

I believe in cities. Their verticality is energy efficient and packs a lot of people in. The residents walk or use public transportation to get around, reducing each individual’s carbon footprint. I believe in rehabbing old houses rather than building new ones. I don’t understand the need for a 20,000 square foot single family home, with all the resources which building and maintaining it require. And I believe in the natural world; it should, to as great a degree as possible, be left to its own devices. Nature is far more efficient than we can ever be at managing populations and balancing ecosystems. Let’s make the most of the places where we ARE going to live, and where people have lived in the past. That might enable us to leave more of the places where we don’t HAVE to live alone!