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History is, of course, far more than books describe. Histories are carried by people in many ways, and they change over time. Our understanding of the past is continuously revised by our experience of the present. Hence, history is under constant revision and rarely in agreement with itself. When I say history, I do not mean "facts" I do not mean a mere list of occurrences, measurements of population, temperature, random photographs or observations. History exists in the present through the stories people tell about the past. The arcs of stories give history its shape and meaning. Without the story it would just be a collection of data. Because histories are shaped by that meaning-giving instrument, the story, they do not conform perfectly to facts, in some sense, they cannot conform to the facts.

But, the purpose of history is not to accurately reproduce some aspect of reality, but rather to accurately lend meaning to reality by translating it in to the kind of stories people use naturally in their thought processes to understand everything they encounter, including the evidence of the past. History is a story that requires a person to tell that story. History requires people to witness its passing. In a place with no people there is no history, beyond whatever we might deduce from layers of sediment and the stones.

The bulk of history emerges in places filled with people. Again, a history need not be momentous enough to take up space on the shelfs of a library to be a history. It need only be a story of real events worth recounting to someone, anyone. A story from life, a personal history, a company history, a universal history of human beings.

Most of the time, we make our history without even realizing it, but from time to time there are moments where we are aware of ourself and our place in the greater story of all people, and perhaps the planet and even universe. We might feel, suddenly, all of the intertwining histories that have led up to us, that are moving through us, as we make the choice that creates the future. In that kind of moment we simultaneously see our actions and the significance of our actions as a part of some greater story. This is a ephemeral and legendary moment.

In the city these moments are everywhere, we may watch the theatre of strangers in the street, or make our own stories for the crowd.

Standing on a roof at night one may see slices of many histories. On every roof and terrace there is life, people flicker by a narrow ally way, a young man smokes on the fire escape, in the street a man with a brief case drops it and a flurry of papers cover the street. Then a woman with a tiny dog tries to help, the young man is still smoking slowly watching the cars on the bridge in the distance, he looks up a waves, an ephemeral moment.

All of their histories became a part of our own history. And our history is theirs, observed, remembered, told in fragments, perhaps some flicker of the spirt of who we are remains in all this even after we are gone.

From: The Urban Naturalist

I never thought this essay really clicked. I've reworked it a bit. There is something in here, and I think it's worth including.

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Trains are holy. Majestic, other worldly. I think it is because somewhere in the national consciousness for Americans there is this faint memory of what rail travel once was, before it vanished, become impractical except for hobbyists and dreamers.

There are so many great songs about trains, I'm certain that when I die a train will take me to heaven. Cat Stevens had his "Peace train" -- and the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin had the Festival Express. But before all of those hippy trains there was this train, that the Impressions sang about in their 1964 hit song People get ready:

People get ready, there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket you just thank the lord

That's the train to the afterlife folks. But, if you're not ready for that train yet, maybe you'd just like to go home. A train can always take you back.

He's leaving
(Leaving)
On that midnight train to Georgia
(Leaving on a midnight train)
Yeah, said he's going back to find
(Going back to find)
A simpler place and time
(Whenever he takes that ride, guess who's gonna be right by his side)
I'm gonna be with him

Or maybe you're trying to get home to Chattanooga. (For some reason)

You leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner
Nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham an' eggs in Carolina

When you hear the whistle blowin' eight to the bar
Then you know that Tennessee is not very far
Shovel all the coal in
Gotta keep it rollin'
Woo, woo, Chattanooga there you are

Still, trains tend towards the mysterious. Think of the children's book: The Polar Express. A train pulls up on a suburban street and whisks a little boy away for an adventure. It's not the journey to the North Pole that is miraculous in this story as much as it is the idea of a working railroad in a suburb. When my father was little you could catch the "dinky" train on tracks just a few blocks from his house to downtown Pittsburgh. Buried in snow it was a real winter wonderland. Trains are something like mythical creatures that we tell out children about-- not a serious form a transportation. Well, not for most people anyway.

If there is anything to look forward to in a resource scare carbon sensitive world it is the return of the trains. And I hope I get to see them before I have to catch that final ride.

Transportation:

1. Plane
2. Bus
3. Foot
4. Train

Last: 11. The Wounded City
Next: 16. Share

These little snapshots of transportation are part of a larger series called "The Urban Naturalist."

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When I'm jogging, that's when it really hits me. I get road rage. The traffic, the thousands of cars plowing through my neighborhood, over the bridges and around the corner, barley stopping for red-lights, almost knocking me over. Filling the air with dirt, and I don't need to read a scientific paper about the impacts of pollution to know it, because I can feel it. It's like smoking, but without the buzz. It's like smoking hot ash. I quit smoking but I just can't seem to quit breathing exhaust fumes. I have the insane urge to connect the exhaust pipes up to the cabins so people can get a taste of what they're leaving in the air. They don't know, they can't know, if they did they'd stop. Even if it cost more.

Forget, the greenhouse effect and global warming and the acid rain: you're killing my lungs. Adding seconds and minutes to my miles times, I'm running slower. In the summer the street signs warble as the heat comes off of the pavement. The urban heat island effect cooks the city, making mothers keep their kids in at rush hour to avoid the stench coming home in their clothes. In the winter the snow is black the the warm exhaust forms dense white clouds. Shaving months and then years off of people's lives.

But on foot you see everything. You meet people and they wave and say hello. You'd be surprised how well you get to know places when you travel on foot. I know how to find everything, I know every little shop and park. I know where you can find sidewalk sales, and endives and a water tower where you can see the whole city if you climb up a tiny spiral staircase. I know where the most beautiful graffiti in the whole city is and you can't see it from a car.

Walking is king.

Transportation:

1. Plane
2. Bus
3. Foot
4. Train

Last: 11. The Wounded City
Next: 16. Share

These little snapshots of transportation are part of a larger series called "The Urban Naturalist."

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All Rosa Parks ever wanted was a chance to ride on the bus like everyone else. The bus took protesters to Washington for numerous marches. The bus is the vehicle of everyman, but more specifically the poor and disenfranchised man. If you live in the US your local bus service is probably mostly for poor people and old people and especially old poor people. The service is infrequent and unreliable. In Seattle my friends who work for dot.coms that survived the crash never ride the bus. They drive. The other passengers on the bus are too scary, they say. And the service sucks.

The bus stops are dreary. You stand by the road watching the more privileged and valued citizens of this country in motion, in cars, stamping your feet in the exhaust stained snow. They are going somewhere and you are waiting. The sign post for the bust stop is bent, it was hit by a car: watch out.

But the bus is the future. Even if it isn't a natural gas bus, or an electric bus, a regular bus, be it greyhound or the city, is one of the best and most environmentally friendly options for travel. A packed bus is the best of all. Economies of scale. It really helps when you let one engine move a whole crowd of people rather than taking your own car.

In the US we have done everything we can to discourage people from riding the bus. The bus is the ghettoized transportation of last resort. When you think of a nice place it is never a bus station that comes to mind.

The things is: a bus is almost as good as a train and in some cases better.

The bus is the future.

Transportation:

1. Plane
2. Bus
3. Foot
4. Train

Last: 11. The Wounded City
Next: 16. Share

These little snapshots of transportation are part of a larger series called "The Urban Naturalist."

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The first time I came to New York City it was by jet plane. Flight remains, I think very futuristic, taking a plane ride is bound up with all kinds of symbolism, freedom, the future, finding new beginnings.

I think of Stephen King's short story The Langoliers (that was made into a very bad TV movie): in it airplanes and airports provide an escape portal to the future (and the past) the story ends with a vibrant description of an airport infused with newness as the present catches up and the heroes are returned to safety. In my experience, in some way airports are always infused with newness. So much so that the modernist architecture is often the subject of ridicule.

I also think about the last scene in the play "Angles in America" where Harper Pitt addresses the audience from a plane:

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

Again, we have the imagery of airplanes intertwined with images of the future and new beginnings, and yes, death too, but the kind of death that is a new beginning.

And then there is that cheesy song by John Denver, Leaving on a Jet Plane.

But, I'm leavin on a jet plane
Don't know when Ill be back again.

And, yes, the first time I saw New York City: it was from the window of a plane. So, I am as enthralled as anyone in the magic of air travel. It is strange to think that I will probably never ride on a plane again in my life. Not by choice in any case. (Not unless there was some great emergency.) Despite all of this futuristic, clean imagery-- air travel is extremely dirty, brutal and destructive to the environment. It's worse than driving and most certainly worse than traveling by train.

But, none of these cultural images of air travel even hint at this aspect. It's not really something that people think about often, I think people may be more aware of the damage caused by cars.

If our leaders become at all serious about cutting carbon emissions we'll find that air travel is much more limited than in the past. The moments described in these works of fiction will seem mysterious, even hard to imagine for our grand children, they will wonder at the fact that people once took to the sky so carelessly.

Transportation:

1. Plane
2. Bus
3. Foot
4. Train

Last: 11. The Wounded City
Next: 16. Share

These little snapshots of transportation are part of a larger series called "The Urban Naturalist"

Humans are competent to do many things. But I do not think we are competent to run a global ecosystem. Something has been irretrievably lost by the time we begin to believe that we can manage nature for people. The essence of nature is that it is not “for people.”

The 17 Percent Problem and the Perils of Domestication
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 13, 2007
The New York Times

While I agree that humans are struggling to manage our influence on nature, and that our inability to manage the resources on this planet may pose a threat to our survival and the survival of other organisms, I don't see what other alternative we have. It's not as if, absent the influence of humans "nature" manages itself. A world without humans isn't like the garden of eden, species will still go extinct, and climates will still change. But the course of those changes will occur in a vastly different way without us. It is wrong to simply assume that wild, uncultivated lands and natural resources are inherently good.

The environmental movement arose as a reaction to the 19th and early 20th century notions that nature was wild, untamed and primarily benefited from the influence of humans. It recognized humans as a potentially destructive force. However, it also romanticized the idea of wild nature. I think we're finally coming to a kind of crossroads in the environmental movement where we can let go of that notion. Humans are a part of nature. Human forces are natural and natural forces are neither inherently good nor bad.

It has taken a long times for people to recognize our power to influence the environment in negative ways with respect to our future survival. There is still resistance to this idea, like those who resist the notion that extinction or global warming is due to human actions.

There are two main points I'm making here:

1. Stop romanticizing nature.
2. Recognize that humans are a force of nature.

It's childish to hope that, if we simply withdraw influence, "nature" will automatically solve the problems we have created.

Environmentalist Suzuki to quit spotlight for simple life

I don't know much about Suzuki, but he sounds like a pretty great guy. He's one of the people who championed environmentalist ideas back when they were much less popular. And for that I commend him.

But, I must say I wonder about his desire to "live the simple life" --I didn't get the impression he was doing it to save the planet, it sounded more like he was doing it for personal or spiritual reasons and I wouldn't want to criticize that.

But, why is that so many people feel that one must go out into the woods in order to be "in-touch" with nature? Nature encompasses all living things and their environments, including humans. Why is "the environment" only considered to be places with lots trees and not many people? The environment is the entire planet and the environments that demand our greatest care and respect are those densely populated places where people live-- too often, they are unbalanced places that fail to serve any purpose for life, human or otherwise, except to conduct humans from one place to another, often to "escape" the very kind of place that evolves as a result of trying to escape.

Part of me wonders if "the simple life" is just another kind of escapism. Living in some rural setting may do greater harm to the environment, and in any case, it is a luxury that we simply can't offer to all of the people in the world. We just don't have the resources.

And as a luxury, is it even that compelling? Wouldn't it be more spiritually satisfying to find the power of nature working in all environments?

To each his own, I suppose. But the day will come when we'll find these notions of "purifying nature" absurdly quaint.

Seattle has a new slogan to boost tourism: metronatural

Unfortunately, they picked the name because of "the nature surrounding the city," rather than in some kind of recognition of the natural qualities of vibrant urban landscapes... but, I'll take what I can get.

Aaron and I may go there by train on our honeymoon-- so, maybe I'll find out what they mean by metronatural then. What's next?

Naturoplis
Metrograian
Enviropolitian
Urbanmentlist
organopolitian

What I need is a good name for the city-as-an-organism... got any sugestions?