Anthropocentric Myopia

Hayley Richardson | Fri, Mar 14th, 2008 | Category: Commentary | Tags: hayley richardson, building, magazine, anthropocentric, anthropology, skyscrapers

“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.” –Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac.

It’s the time of year when I start fetishizing trees. As a current urbanite who’s spent years traipsing around Colorado and Maine, a three month barrage of concrete winter wreaks havoc upon my soul.  In my March imaginings, I’m standing on a wooded hilltop, caressed by a rogue leaf, warmed by the sun.  I’m awash in the kind of wonder I can’t seem to elicit from a cityscape.

But wait a minute, I love cities, am thrilled with the fact that 80% of the population now lives in urban areas. I’ve said many times that I believe that cities are our best hope to learn how to coexist, to problem solve and to innovate. But what about the other inhabitants of the planet? At what point do we learn how to live with them?

I have many friends from New York who don’t know what a canoe looks like. My “inner city” campers at the Fresh Air Fund were repulsed by pond muck and frightened by the quiet of the country. When someone isn’t exposed to nature, it’s understandably difficult to see its relevancy in their daily life. But given the dire threat posed by climate change, this insularity has profound consequences.  Are we urbanites so divorced from the natural world that it seems auxiliary to our existence? Are we afflicted with a case of anthropocentric myopia?

Take, for an example, the night sky. As Dave Owen wrote in last year’s New Yorker “most of us have been deprived of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery.” Half of the current generation of children have never seen the smoky tendrils of the Milky Way galaxy.  According to the national nonprofit the International Darkness Association, a stargazer at the top of the empire state building can see only 2% of what Galileo would have seen with his naked eye. Many of us will never know what we missed, which tends to inspire only apathy. How are children who’ve never seen a tree frog supposed to care about its demise?

Is it possible to bridge this disconnect? We could demand more wilderness experience programs, urban gardens, and city ecology centers. We could lobby for greater light pollution restrictions. Perhaps more profound, however, is what environmentalist William Cronon explores in his book, Uncommon Ground. He argues that our mistake is to conceptualize a dichotomy between city and nature. We shouldn’t view nature as something “out there,” something that’s relegated to the pages of National Geographic Magazine and campaigns to save the rainforest. He ventures that we should begin to value the nature that’s become mundane to us –patches of grass and tiny brown songbirds—just as much as we do sweeping vistas and snowcapped peaks. We should respect and be inspired by that which lives outside the human jurisdiction, even something as miniscule as a forsythia branch gracing a median.  But I have to wonder whether this is enough.  Don’t we need something that forces us to step outside ourselves, something that forces us to examine our miniscule yet consequential position in the universe?

In my March reality, I’m surrounded by skyscrapers under the orange perma-glow of the eastern seaboard, feeling not wonder, but an acute sense of despair. 

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