Godforsaken

Today I drove to the north of the town and looking on the stony, dried up landscape with it's thin soil, I found myself thinking "What Godforsaken country this is."

I was raised on more fertile land in a higher rainfall area, and not in a time of extended drought, so the sight of the poor, stony soil, the stunted shrubs, dried up waterways and scrubby, struggling trees did not bespeak beauty or prosperity to me. I would find greener, lusher landscapes more pleasing. Fertile valleys blessed with abundant water and tall stout trees - fields, lumber, gardens, irrigation - agriculture and wealth. Of course, such valleys were the first selected and cleared, and are intensively farmed and productive areas now. The little water that remains in the rivers and bores waters crops to feed the cities - cities that have effectively paved over many square miles of good farmland.

It occurred to me as I drove past the barely-viable sheep pasture that such blighted landscapes would have been last cleared and least improved. The first to be given up on and allowed to return to bush. The last bastion of many hardy species of native "weeds" and the wildlife that depend on them. The harder land is to develop, the more likely it is to be left in it's natural state. The areas least compatible with human life have the highest likelihood of maintaining an intact ecosystem.

After all is said and done, what the farmer and colonist in me reflexively rejects as Godforsaken country may be some of the most precious, in the end. Long after humankind and all our blessed valleys have died from toxicity of our own making and decayed to nothing, somewhere, far, far out in a vast desert where a bare human would die in days, a deep-rooted shrub will draw on water from rain that fell many years ago, and produce sap that tiny ants will feed on. A gecko will eat some of those ants and high above, a bird of prey will watch it all...

Uncoordinated design.

PFH wrote of Nature and Melbourne: "It would be possible to design something better."

Terrific post. On the whole I agree, but it occurs to me that regarding the line I've quoted above, it really depends on what you consider to be "better". Simplification of forms and systems might be appealing, but when applied to nature, reducing complexity ultimately reduces the universe to nothing. Or uniformity. Not sure which, but it does not sound like a whole lot of fun.

I believe that optimal system efficiency is when the simplest effective robust form is established that is unstable enough to adapt whilst still being stable enough to persist. Personally, I'm liking the "intricately beautiful and complex state of self-balance" thing that nature has going on. Looking outside the influence of humanity, uncoordinated efforts - unconscious efforts by unthinking organisms - have resulted in ecosystems that survive indefinitely. Perhaps that is as simple as it is possible to be without de-evolving? Perhaps it is not the lack of coordinated effort on the part of humanity that is causing so much chaos, but the explosive rapidity with which we change the way we interact with our environment? Evolution evolves... but that is another post.

Coordinating the efforts of humans on a scale as large as a city would necessitate monitoring and auditing effort and ambition. Some coordiating entity would have to have oversight in order to develop plans, the means to raise revenue to implement said plans and power to enforce the population's compliance with said plans. Said entity would have to be far, far more powerful than the existing (and again divided and uncoordinated) governing bodies that already administer the city. A democratic system would not be a viable option. Individual freedoms would go out the window. Continuous monitoring of the systems and inhabitants of the city would be essential to verify efficiency and make adjustments (to the populace or the systems, whichever is more efficient).

Ironic that the solution to this civilisation that is indeed so unsatisfactory as to make it appear that "some power hungry cartel of shadowy capitalist overlords" is running it to their own evil ends, is to establish a "vast conspiracy" of similar, if (originally at least) nobly concieved, function.