Bright lights, urban sprawl
On the trip home from Minneapolis, I had no book to read. (I had foolishly taken only one along and surprised myself by reading it entirely on the trip there.) Frankly, I doubt I had the energy to read anything, anyway. So I spent the bulk of both flights leaning my head against the window and watching the world go by.
I used to think city lights and road networks were pretty at night. At 27,000 feet, you can just barely distinguish features the size of a large shed. Noise and pollution and the problems of daily life are invisible. The world in miniature looks like the handiwork of some master craftsman. A town is beautiful.
A town is beautiful. Mile upon mile of towns, not so much. The entire flight corridor from Minneapolis to Milwaukee to Newark, apart from twenty minutes over Lake Michigan, passes over an unbroken stretch of towns. They crowd too closely; none of them quite ends before the next picks up. There is no dark velvet of empty land for the city lights to stand against, like diamonds against a bad metaphor, or inky depths into which the highways can vanish. Lift your gaze higher in the airplane window, and you can see the little cities stretching away, appearing flatter and flatter toward the horizon, but never thinning out.
You can see it on those satellite maps, too. You know, the ones that photograph the light emitted over a country or continent? Those lights used to look like spider webs, gently tracing out the borders with coastal towns and major routes radiating from Chicago and St. Louis. Now – and it can’t be more than forty years of growth since the dawn of satellite photography – they look more like cancerous growths, blots where somebody spilled white ink all over the Boston-DC axis.
The real ugliness lies in the realization that under that light lies pavement. It wasn’t too long ago that I watched a news clip warning of the shrinkage of unpaved space, not for the loss of natural habitats, but simply for the loss of somewhere rain water could sink into the earth. We’re already straining abusing our existing water supply. What happens when we cut off its source? What happens when rain runoff is too poisoned with petrochemicals to be useful?
I don’t usually trust alarmist reports very far. Population explosions and ozone depletion are plotted as exponential curves depicting what will happen if the trend continues indefinitely. Trends like that don’t, because they develop slowly and continuously. We don’t suddenly wake up fifty years hence and discover we can only feed half the world; food slowly gets scarcer, and births decline. Ready oil deposits are drained, and the price of oil rises as we pull it from increasingly difficult sources, and demand falls. Forests start to vanish, and wood becomes more expensive, until it becomes economical to replant them. The longer we take to smell the coffee, the worse things become, but never to the point of catastrophe. Desertification is different, though, in that it operates on a vicious cycle. As water dries up, the plants necessary to maintain the water table thin out and, ultimately, vanish. There’s a built-in catastrophe at the point where desertification becomes self-sustaining. And then we’re screwed. It’s already happened, too, on a small scale in the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, and an intermediate scale in nations around the Sahara. We could wake up and smell the coffee too late.
Asymptotes are a bitch. I guess science can, occasionally, spoil an appreciation of beauty, after all.