ABSTRACT
First, there is the alienation of urban society from environmental values that embrace both the cities and their larger regions. The technologies that sustain the modern city have touched every corner of human life, every landscape and wilderness, no matter how remote, and reinforce this isolation. This fact was forcefully demonstrated to me on a journey I made to the Hudson Bay lowlands many years ago. As a newcomer to Canada, I searched for an image of the great unspoiled Canadian wilderness, free from the sights, sounds and pressures of the urbanized south. Armed with hip waders and binoculars, I spent many days tramping through a landscape of water, muskeg and granite boulders, the dome of the sky creating a feeling of extraordinary wildness and beauty. Forget the dense clouds of hungry mosquitoes and blackfly (known as the scourge of the north), the discomforts of permanently wet boots; here was wild nature. Yet one day, a pink object, lying in the tangle of sedges at the edge of a pond, caught my eye. It was the rubber nipple from a baby’s bottle, abandoned there by a passing group of Inuit. The rude shock of this relic of human society, so alien to the environment around me, brought me abruptly back to reality. The incident was a powerful reminder that the pervasive influences of the city are everywhere, even in the remoteness of the Hudson Bay lowlands. The nipple, my hip waders and binoculars, and the fact that I was there, transported by plane hundreds of kilometres from Toronto, verified that urbanism is a universal fact of life. This is so, not only for the white Canadian, but for the native individual today who uses the white Canadian’s canned foods and machinery, hunts with a rifle, travels by skidoo and lives in permanent northern communities. And as I learned much later, evidence of human activities are evident in the presence of DDT that has been found in polar bears, the effects of greenhouse gases on polar ice, evidence of climate change and consequent implications to the northern landscape and to life systems. The perceptual distinction between cities and the larger landscapes beyond them has been a root cause of many social and environmental conflicts and the lack of attention to the environment of the cities where most problems begin.
