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I believe that our inability to make connections between different types of space—the indoors and the outdoors, the urban and the rural—has a basis in the makeup of the human mind and the way that we engage with space. We handle the immediately visible spaces before us very well, but our mental understanding of how those spaces are connected to the larger realms beyond our purview is fuzzy at best.

Concerns about the state of the environment have been with us for a long time. When I was growing up in the 1960s, I well remember the alarming descriptions of air pollution and the devastation of the waters of the Great Lakes in North America. It seemed as though every newscast brought messages of doom and gloom sufficiently urgent that I wondered whether I would survive to adulthood or be choked on exhaust fumes and then washed away in a sea of oily
lake water. Organizations such as Pollution Probe gave shrill warnings that unless we started to fix things
now
, the planet would soon be uninhabitable. At the same time, and just as vividly, I remember the soothing reassurances of many of the adults in my life, who told me that “science” would find answers to these problems and that, ultimately, we would all be living underneath giant glass domes, hermetically sealed from the “outside” no matter what devastations might have been wrought there by the errors of the past. In other words, the ultimate solution to environmental destruction would be to shift the lines between inside and outside so that the ambit of our thermostatically controlled living rooms would be extended outward to encompass the nice parks that we would need to play soccer and to have picnics. The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but moving the walls essentially redefines the world for us and so allows us to maintain our current habits and way of life, regardless of what might be happening outside our safe domes.

It isn’t just the enclosing walls of the built environment that make us feel separated from the natural world. Distortions in the natural relationships between human movement and the scale and aspect of space can also rend the connections between our mind and biological space. When Bruce Chatwin sat in a fast-moving car beside his Australian Aboriginal friend and listened to him try to warble a speeded-up version of a songline that had evolved over thousands of years to match landscape to a man walking through the wilderness, he was hearing a remarkable illustration of the breakdown of the integral relationship between our own movements and our conceptions of space.
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Though our large cities and fast-paced way of life may make them necessary, modern methods of rapid transportation have completely changed the meaning of space. Now, rather than
being the main way that we get from one place to another, walking has become a sporadic event, a small punctuation used mostly to convey us from one moving machine to another. We can cope well with these staccato transitions from place to place only because the structure of our mind makes it easy for us to relinquish our grasp on the metric of space, but the distortions that result from such quick movements serve to increase the fragility of our understanding of spatial connections between different parts of the world.

I often travel by airplane with my children. Recently, I’ve noticed an interesting thing about my toddlers’ experience of flight. As far as I can tell, they have no clear understanding of the purpose of the airplane other than that it is a machine that makes a huge amount of noise and traps them in a space that is slightly too small for their spirit of wanderlust. When they emerge from the plane, the machine has transformed everything. The climate is different, the people often look and sound different, and our home (the hotel) has been radically reorganized. I’m convinced that children at this age have little idea what has really happened to them. Because the movement, gigantic in scope compared with anything else in their experience, was disconnected from their immediate sensory experience, and because they cannot yet understand space on the geographic scale, they apply the simplest explanation: the airplane has stayed in exactly the same place but has magically changed its surroundings. It’s a bit like the famous Holodeck on
Star Trek
. Though we can smile and nod at their adorable confusion, the reality is that children and adults may not be as different as we think.

Children can be famously and sometimes hilariously confused about geography, especially in matters of scale, but we adults can be too. Especially when we are transported passively over long distances, it is easy for us to lose any real sense of the scope of space. It is a cliché to say that modern transportation has made the world
into a smaller place, but this is exactly what has happened. Not only has the world become smaller but the spatial arrangement of features of the world has become less intelligible to us. This loss of intelligibility has come about in part because there is no longer a reliable connection between the effort that we expend to reach different destinations and their geographic relationship to us. For many journeys that involve flight, the time taken to travel from one’s home to the airport can be greater than the time spent in the air. Intellectually, we are perfectly aware of the explanation for this— airplanes fly very quickly! But in terms of our implicit understanding of the spatial order of things, such distortions serve to loosen our shaky grip on the geometry of the world.

It might seem that this kind of mischief making with space, making the world seem smaller, should help us to overcome our inability to see the connectedness of different locations on the planet. But exactly the opposite takes place. Because rapid transit decreases the intelligibility of space, we throw up our hands in despair at making sensible spatial connections between things. Rapid transit has made it possible for us to be able to see much more of the planet than would otherwise have been the case—if I can scrape together the cash, I can go and witness firsthand the melting polar ice caps. But I question whether my ability to connect my home with the ice caps by means of an exotic air trip helps me to appreciate the absolute connectedness of the two places. Returning from my Arctic adventure, I don’t arrive home with the feeling that the lines connecting me with the rest of the world are any more direct.

Given the way that our mind organizes and schematizes space, it is almost inevitable that there will be a harmful and dangerous schism between our inside and our outside worlds. If the parts of our brain that deal with space have strong preferences for enclosed
views, and if we patch together a mental collage of space by combining these views, then any time a builder erects a wall, he is influencing our conception of the spaces in which we live. We can’t avoid this by simply running through forests as naked nomads, basking in full-frontal contact with field and stream. But though complete integration with nature may be out of reach for most of us, it doesn’t explain our modern tendency to run in the opposite direction, shunning natural settings for the air-conditioned comfort of our homes. Although our minds may be predisposed to detach us from real space, much more than a psychological predisposition has been at work in driving us from Eden to Gotham.

Jane Jacobs blames our tendency to insulate ourselves from nature on an impulse born of the European romantic movement, perhaps transported across the Atlantic in the guise of the New England transcendental movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
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At first, the connection between intellectual movements that cherished emotional contact with wild nature and the current difficulties in our relationship with the environment may be difficult to discern, but Jacobs’s argument was that by raising wild places onto a pedestal, we convinced ourselves that life in our cities had nothing to do with the natural world. An impulse born of the noble desire to find truth in the forest had the result of increasingly polarizing urban and wild places. Whether through televised nature documentaries, urban zoos, or, if we can afford it, air-conditioned safaris through Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, we are taught to cherish nature, but from a distance. Perhaps in part because most of us fear true wilderness, we take nature in small, digestible gulps, contained in boxes, framed by the edges of a television screen, or even rendered in plastic facsimiles like lawn ornaments or fake houseplants. One might argue that in an urban environment this is the best we can do and that it is better
than nothing, but underlying this attitude is still the general notion that nature has no place in the city and that only pristine wildernesses completely out of reach of any but the hardiest and most intrepid travelers really “count” as nature. In short, we love nature provided that it keeps to its place—out of our city streets and out of our homes.

Some architectural styles seem to almost shout the news of the divorce between city and nature. A good example is the on-again, off-again North American romance with the Georgian style, popular in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and revived during several periods on our continent. Georgian houses possess clean lines separating the enclosing walls of the house from the surrounding grounds, avoiding even the presence of a porch to draw a connection between house and yard. Most modern suburban homes appear to contain similar carefully structured divisions between the outdoors and the indoors. From the double or triple garage doors fronting the street to the imposing foyer that serves as a kind of hermetic airlock between the inner and the outer worlds, such homes make no pretense to be any part of a natural landscape. Even the expansive plots of land surrounding such homes tend to be bordered with high privacy fences, cutting off views and turning back yards into not much more than giant outdoor great rooms with groomed grass carpets and high blue ceilings. It isn’t uncommon for the owners of such homes to spend most of their summer weekends in the sweaty business of ensuring that only those guests—plant or animal—that have been explicitly invited into the yard are able to remain, while all others are killed with chemicals or booted into the compost heap. If this is how we live our lives, then it isn’t very surprising that we have difficulty making connections between our own actions in cities and the devastation of our environment, both urban and rural.

Our daily economic dealings with the world seldom have much to do with place, further breaking down our relationship with geographic space. A walk down the aisles of any grocery store will make this point abundantly clear. Where I live, the produce aisle may have some local fruits and vegetables for a few weeks out of the year, but most of the time the fare comes from farms that are thousands of kilometers away from my home. We joke about the fact that most of our household goods are made in Asia, a state of affairs brought about by a combination of the low cost of fuel to ship products and the low cost of labor to produce them, but this too tends to erase issues of place from our consciousness. In an era when any product or service can be obtained easily from anywhere on the planet, what reason do we have to think about the origins of things?

In 1996, William Rees, a bio-ecologist at the University of British Columbia, published an epoch-making book with Mathis Wackernagel, one of his graduate students. The main idea of
Our Ecological Footprint
is that it is possible for us to calculate a reasonably accurate average value describing the size of the area of land— our footprint—that each of us is using to take care of all of our earthly needs, such as production of food and goods and disposal of waste.
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The numbers that Rees and Wackernagel generated were shocking. For one thing, there were enormous disparities between the ecological footprints of members of typical Western countries like the United States and Canada and the ecological footprints of developing countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam. In addition, if one calculated the global average for the human ecological footprint, it was clear that in the long term there was not enough
land to go around. As if any other evidence were needed, Rees and Wackernagel’s simple set of numbers suggested with stark immediacy that, as a species, our behavior was not sustainable. Either we would need to find a way to make our average footprint smaller or the population of human beings would have to decrease.

The idea of the ecological footprint has been enormously influential as a shorthand method for calculating the progress of a nation or a community on the path to sustainability, but what is most interesting about it in the context of our discussion of space is the great disparity between one’s ecological footprint and one’s geographical footprint. If we take the latter to mean the
location
of the mass of land that each of us requires in order to sustain our way of life, then for many modern humans, especially those of us who live in the superdeveloped West, the idea of a geographical footprint is almost nonsensical. As our goods, products, food, and services really come from everywhere, each of our individual footprints is globe sized. And if our lives are situated everywhere, then they are really situated nowhere.