6 - Asphyxiated Habitats

Summary

From dawn to dusk you will see a constant multitude … that comes and goes along the ten great streets that open on to the square.… In the space of one paving stone you will see a civil guardsmen, a match-seller, a financier, a poor man, and a soldier. Groups of students pass by, servants, generals, ministers, respectable folk, bullfighters, ladies, … everywhere high hats, a smile on the lips.… And it is not the bustle of a busy people; it is the vivacity of cheerful persons, a carnival-like joy, a restless idleness, a feverish overflow of pleasure that takes hold of you and makes you want to go round and round the square without leaving it.

Human activity has ranged across the landscape leaving footprints in every corner and clime. Some of our tracks are insubstantial and easily effaced by natural forces; others are disfiguring, virtually indelible. We have trampled the earth, creating pockets of devastation, temporary and permanent – holes in the forests, holes in the mountains, and now holes in the atmosphere. But in favored locations, civilization has built rather than gouged. If deforestation, mine tailings, and ozone depletion are the negative evidence of culture's historical presence, the city is culture's positive manifestation, testimony to human creativity in the midst of so much destruction, evidence of the attempt to achieve constructive permanence among so many other transitory undertakings.