practical lessons 2020

The destiny of humanity

We, as the human species upon earth, are caught between the pressure to conform, the force of our wants and some sense of an ideal existence. Most of us now live in cities, cocooned and insulated from the actual effects of our ways. We have become habituated to complain, to blame “them” who are supposedly governing, to deplore the state of things or to take for granted what comes our way. Our most basic and common attitude is to entreat whoever it may concern to “ please tell us convincingly and repeatedly that you have the solutions to keep us provided with the comfort and amenities we have come to prize, and we will trust you to deliver, we will mortgage and borrow to make it work, “just do it: j ust do it; we shall not look too closely into the consequences, as long as it works. ”

It is precisely in the cities, however, that our bodies have been gradually weakened, forced to cope with increasing vitiation, through the food, the water and the air and the subtler pollution.

Cities are in every way the most vulnerable configurations to all sorts of attacks and degradation, while they are also the most dominant factors of over exploitation and depletion of the earth’ resources.

The term “city” no longer applies to many of these sprawling toxic megalopolises that deface the land – magnetic monsters that grow and grow and reduce humans to shadows of themselves’ Long ago (relatively speaking) a city was a site of learning, cultural exchange and thriving trade: there was give and take, in and outflow of

20