Glaciers. Sewers. Gardens.
Geology (e.g. glaciers), engineering (e.g. sewers), living systems (e.g. gardens), three towering planetary systems, have recently shed their former association with glory and have adopted new identities fraught with danger, contamination, and alienation.
Glaciers once evoked images of majestic and enduring mountains of ice.
Now glaciers are melting, signalling changes in climate that are ominous, imminent, and global.
Once sewers were honored as evidence of humanity's problem-solving capacity and engineering ingenuity.
Now sewers are condemned for causing storm sewage discharges that typically contain loads of a gross solid wastes, a wide variety of pollutants, including bacteria and viruses, oxygen demanding and toxic pollutants, as well as persistent materials such as heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These pollutants can result in fish mortalities, shellfish unfit for human consumption, public health hazards and visual and odour problems.
Once gardens represented humanity’s ability to enhance the vitality, fertility, diversity, and productivity of living systems.
Now gardening is becoming infiltrated by high-tech gadgetry that effectively alienates gardening from natural forms of growth. Advances in garden tools and techniques, for example, allow gardeners to assert controls that distance them from ‘natural’ patterns of growth. The contemporary garden tool shed can replace spades and shovels with smart phone controlled vivariums, flowering computer peripherals, organic androids, nanoflowers, programmable planters, garden-monitoring aps, solar-powered herb monitors, bionic humidifiers, robotic tree planters, and other forms of automatic horticulture.
This trio raises questions about the changes that we are witnessing in our lifetimes. Are they desirable? If not, are they reversible?