Designing Our Way to a Better World by Thomas Fisher

Author:Thomas Fisher [Fisher, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: ARC001000 Architecture / Criticism, ARC010000 Architecture / Urban & Land Use Planning, SOC026030 Social Science / Sociology / Urban
ISBN: 9781452951638
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2016-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Dutiful Landscape

In Western cultures, and indeed in most cultures around the world, the landscapes to which people seem most attracted and that receive the greatest care are those related to our ancestors and to our past. Such landscapes can range dramatically in type. On one extreme are the cemeteries where we bury and memorialize the dead. These landscapes typically remain cleared of their native habitat, as if we don’t want many nonhuman “sentient beings” among the nonsentient human remains interred in such places. Cemeteries stand as idealized landscapes, carefully planted, tended, and maintained at great cost, in terms of both money and resources, to remind us of the open ground and occasional tree cover that characterized the African savannas in which we evolved as a species and from which we have spread across the globe.4 In cemeteries, at the least in the West, we return our bodies to places that remind us of where the human genome began.

At the other extreme, we set aside wilderness areas, forest preserves, and “national parks” in which the natural world, at least as we define it, can flourish without much interference from people. These places, mostly cleared of human habitat, reflect the sense of responsibility most governments now have toward at least small parts of the landscape and the sense of loss most people have toward the world as it was before our species became so dominant and ever present on the planet. Some, such as the environmental historian William Cronon, have criticized the setting aside of wilderness areas as our attempt to assuage our guilt for the environmental damage we continue to do everywhere else.5 Still, wilderness areas do represent some sense of our ethical duty to nature and our desire to carve out some part of the landscape so that it is available to everyone and not beholden to private property rights.

The care with which we tend to these landscapes that hold the remains of our ancestors or the memory of our species recalls the duty ethics most often associated with Immanuel Kant.6 Kant argued that we should do what we know to be right, regardless of the consequences to us personally. He also argued that we all know what is the right thing to do in a situation, even if we don’t act on that knowledge, because of what he called “categorical imperatives” such as treating others as ends and not means and acting as if everything we do holds as universal. Kant saw those categorical imperatives applying to other human beings, although taken at face value his ethics applies equally to our relationship with the natural world. We can take Kant’s argument to mean that we have a duty to treat other species, as much as other people, as ends and not means, and to act with the laws of nature always in mind, regardless of the consequences this might have for us personally in terms of lost wealth or power.

Kant also saw a connection between ethics and aesthetics that relates to how we see these landscapes that memorialize our past.

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