Precarious Urbanity & The World WITHOUT us~

~For my 'Green House Series', I've begun each piece by outlining and painting a bare urban cityscape. I then slowly layer and clutter the nature (plants/trees/leaves/flowers/grass) on top... as if it is revolting to reverse the process of industrialization or even evolution. I've included metallics and lights to suggest the following possibilities:

* This "nature" is infact manmade and incorporated to meet the urban consumer lifestyle/taste.....
* OR that the industrial constructs are opposing and fighting the nature; forcing it to conform or get out.

I recently decided that I will add another layer of stars (and sky/ space references) to the lights to include the mystical element. Instead of a dual dialect, it's a 3 way call: the industrial modern pragmatic vs the innate natural environment vs the internal spiritual self or whatever.

Anyways, back to the URBAN/ nature conflict and the idea of "reversing the process of evolution".....
I found these relevant, interesting texts that discuss the subject and suggest the reality of Alan Weisman's 'The World Without Us':



Precarious Urbanity
I was lugging my bags through the NYC subway, first the G line which looks like someone forgot it exists, then the L, which had a creek running down the middle of the tracks, and finally the A to JFK which was just my usual experience of the subway there. When I'm standing on a subway platform gazing at the crumbling iron beams or grimy track beds, especially with water dripping everywhere, I marvel that it all keeps going. Add to that the aging water system, the potholed roads, the overheated crappy buildings in the midst of too cold weather... it's a wonder that the city doesn't just collapse. Riding around NYC on bike, gazing from bridges at the endless sprawl of highrises and cityscape, there's something mind-boggling and incomprehensible about all the human effort and just-barely-holding-on-ness that keeps the place running.
I've been reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which is a great book. He writes really well, breezily even, which is odd for a book that takes as its central pretense that all humans have vanished from one day to the next (rapture anyone?) and now he's trying to see how nature and planetary ecology quickly or slowly recapture the artifacts and environments created by humans... from vast monumental architecture to centuries-old fields of cultivated crops, most of it goes really fast. He brings in a lot of good journalistic investigation, talking with scientists and technicians who know a lot about how things work and what it takes to keep it all going, from oil refineries and nuclear plants to agriculture and water systems. He also goes way back in geologic and paleolithic history to compare processes of succession at different periods with our own. From an historical point of view, this book is brilliant at reframing things in much longer terms..." ~ CCARLSON @ THE NOWTOPIAN

From The New Yorker:
"Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experiment—what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished—Weisman has written a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house. Among the highlights: with pumps not working, the New York City subways would fill with water within days, while weeds and then trees would retake the buckled streets and wild predators would ravage the domesticated dogs. Texas’s unattended petrochemical complexes might ignite, scattering hydrogen cyanide to the winds—a "mini chemical nuclear winter." After thousands of years, the Chunnel, rubber tires, and more than a billion tons of plastic might remain, but eventually a polymer-eating microbe could evolve, and, with the spectacular return of fish and bird populations, the earth might revert to Eden."