Houston, Texas: Waking to a new world.

I awake in the dark, momentarily disoriented. The room smells inexplicably clean and there is a mechanical hum coming from an unknown source. Remembering that I’d arrived at the hotel in Houston the day before, I rise and go to the window. Darkness. Being unfamiliar with the Texas climate, I wonder if it should be dark at 7:30 a.m.

Suddenly rain spatters the thick, black glass of the inoperable window. I hear only a soft, almost distant percussion, as if far more than a pane of glass separates me from the world outside and whatever storms there are. The air-conditioning clicks on again, seemingly louder.

I dress, grab my umbrella and go in search of breakfast. The elevator delivers me to the cheerfully lit, wood-paneled lobby twelve floors down. As I descend an escalator towards the basement I briefly glimpse furious gray gusts of rain through the plate glass windows. No one is visible outside.

There are people underground. A long queue stretches away from a tiny coffee shop next to the escalator. Others hurry by on their way, presumably, to a workplace. An expansive but low-ceilinged food court is softly lit in cool shades of white. Fast food vendors, most of which are closed, surround it, white steel grills drawn down over glass counters.

Exiting the nearly empty food court, I head into the West Dallas Tunnel.

Houston’s subterranean tunnel system extends approximately seven miles in a labyrinthine network of pedestrian passageways, ramps, shops and food courts. It has little relationship to the street grid above and bears absolutely no resemblance to the natural world. A hurricane might be crashing through the city and, unless there was a power outage, no one down here would even notice.

That seems to be the point. It’s raining hard outside but everyone I pass is as dry as I am, dressed in power suits without outerwear or raingear. My unopened umbrella dangles from my arm.

In Houston, though, people are driven underground more often by the heat. Even in the brutal Houston summer, the climate-controlled tunnels allow them to remain comfortably suited and sweatered on their way between air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned offices. To what end, I wonder, does the march of civilization lead?

The West Dallas tunnel becomes the South Louisiana tunnel. The names vaguely correspond with street locations on the surface of the earth but nothing is straight or direct for more than the equivalent of a block down here.

Underfoot beige tile gives way to pale granite. The walls narrow into a sterile white corridor. I am reminded of a movie by George Lucas – THX 1138 – that is set in an underground city in some dystopian future. But this is not the future. It is all too present. Echoing the movie’s title character, my instinct is to escape.

I pass a block-long mural of the surface of the moon. I’m certain it is meant to be uplifting, but the irony is stunning. Who designs these places and then decides that the airless and barren lunar landscape is what we should see as we walk through them?

Just when I begin to despair of finding anything green or growing, I come upon a diminutive plastic jungle tucked in a corner, bracketed with brushed steel and ceramic tile. Green but not growing, it is scarcely more soothing than the moonscape. Is this meant to nurture our need for a connection with nature? Instead it puts me in mind of natural history museum dioramas that depict extinct species.

Every few hundred yards I stop to check the map posted on the wall or propped on a floor stanchion. If it didn’t say “you are here” in different places each time I would have no idea how far I’d gone or in which direction. North, south, east, west are equally meaningless. Distances are exaggerated by twists and turns.

I pass through the Tunnel Loop and wander down the East McKinney Tunnel before I discover that I’ve overshot my destination. I should have turned at the connector leading to the Lamar Tunnel, which runs parallel to the McKinney. The determined crowd surges around me. I am lost in a sky-less maze of polished steel fittings and white surfaces washed with invisible light sources. Urban wilderness is taking on new meaning.

King Minos of ancient Crete is supposed to have commissioned the world’s most famous labyrinth, which was guarded by the bull-headed Minotaur. Maybe that is an unfounded myth. In any case, all that remains of the powerful king and the Cretan civilization are the ruins of his palace at Knossos. Feeling not at all like Theseus, who penetrated the labyrinth and killed the monster, my hesitation and disorientation give me a moment to reflect on this modern-day labyrinth.

This is not a diatribe against cities. I believe in cities. Today we must turn Thoreau’s famous dictum on its head: In cities is the preservation of the world. I mentally genuflect to Thoreau and ask absolution for this heretical pronouncement. But the fact of the matter is, the preservation of wilderness now depends on making cities both livable and an attractive alternative to sprawl. That means bringing nature back into cities from which it has been abolished. Sustainable cities, like humans, need open space in which to breathe.

Neither is this an indictment of Houston, which may or may not deserve indictment. I have not explored it sufficiently to pass judgment. But how are we to survive if our cities lead us to mole-like lives in caverns and tunnels, unable to see the sun or smell the changing seasons?

Backtracking, I come finally to a two-story rotunda that is open to a street-level lobby above. I take the escalator, stepping briskly to speed my ascent. A soft glow of daylight gradually mingles with the unearthly shine of tunnel illumination.

I push open the heavy glass door and step out onto Main Street hoping to see trees or a planter with flowers in it. This view across the street is not reassuring.

The environments we create for our cities more and more have come to define the world we live in. A world in which nature is reduced to a twisted topiary in a concrete urn is not the world I want to wake up in tomorrow.

This is the first installment of a trilogy from Houston’s urban wilderness. To read the next, click on Buffalo Bayou, Part 1. If you want a taste of the cultural side of Houston, go to my Arts Without Borders blog.

Finding fragments of Nature in Atlanta

There was a time when there was no division between the natural world and the human world, when there was no concept of “wilderness” because the undifferentiated world was simply where we lived as a species, among others. Civilization changed that. When humans became civilized, nature became “other” and untamed nature became wilderness. Now, after millennia of the inexorable civilization of the wilderness, precious little of it remains. By the end of the twentieth century it became possible to contemplate what Bill McKibben termed “the end of nature,” a global environment so totally compromised by human activities that no place remains untouched, no landscape remains pristine, no environment unaltered.

Today, most people live in densely populated cities, where nature is reduced to bits and pieces, if not bulldozed into oblivion and replaced with symbols. Parks and lawns represent what has been lost. Trees dwarfed by architecture symbolize the great primeval forests. But we must have our symbols, lest we lose our souls. The bits and pieces must not simply represent but embody the whole. Nature cannot be denied. When we chose civilization over wilderness we began a long gradual process of alienation from the soil, plants, and animals, as well as the natural processes that we once knew as instinctively as a Monarch knows how to get to one mountainside in Mexico. But we did not and cannot separate ourselves from our own natures.

When I went to Atlanta for a conference recently I found myself in a wholly “civilized” environment. My need for a connection with nature was not appeased by the tenuous indoor approximation provided by the conference hotel: the tepid, chlorinated atmosphere of its atrium with an undulating pool and potted tropical trees. Although others found it relaxing, I needed to be outdoors. But, with little time and no transportation, I was trapped downtown in a citadel of skyscrapers. There being no wilderness, urban or otherwise, within reach, I sought out bits and pieces, the symbols of nature that we plant between sidewalks and streets, in tiny public plazas, and even tinier window boxes.

We have spent millennia casting out the wilderness, trying to create an orderly environment. As a consequence the world has become abstract, geometric, civilized. And so I offer this small sampling of images, of nature abstracted, fragmented, distilled into minute traces. We are capable of creating a world that looks like this, but is it the world we want to live in? The problem with the “end of nature” is that it is based on a false premise, the false dichotomy: we humans are not – and never have been – separate from nature. We have tried to tame it – perhaps too successfully – but nature includes us. We cannot escape from our own nature. Whatever environment we create, that is where we must live. When the wilderness has been completely tamed and the world once again is undifferentiated, will it look like this?

To see more images from this series, go to my flickr page.

To read my post about the conference I attended, which was called Science, Poetry, and the Photographic Image, go to ArtsWithoutBorders.
To read my reflections upon finding a dinosaur in the Atlanta airport, go to Encountering Yangchuanosaurus.