Habitats for Humans

Animal welfare campaign organizations articulate their case around ‘five freedoms‘ that animals under human control should have: freedom from hunger or thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and disease, freedom to express normal behaviour, and freedom from fear and distress. Perhaps because we don’t like to see ourselves as being free rather than ‘under control’, nor indeed do we like to see ourselves as animals, it’s not clear to me that we seek to grant ourselves the same freedoms in the habitats we create for humans. There are parallels between the five freedoms and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The second and sixth of these are ‘zero hunger‘ and ‘clean water and sanitation‘ for example, while the third is ‘good health and well-being‘. But discomfort, expression of normal behaviour, and fear and distress are more tangential.

In the UK, planning legislation has been relaxed allowing the conversion of unused office accommodation into flats, some with floor areas as little as 13m². Though this might seem a pragmatic approach to resolving the country’s housing crisis, ‘zoning‘ in city planning can mean offices are built in places that do not provide convenient access to services that residents need. With accommodation such as this being chiefly aimed at the poor, this ‘inconvenience’ means exacerbating hardship.

The trend, however, as been more generally towards smaller room sizes in new build British homes, as developers seek to maximize returns on investment. While an article in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds little evidence of larger living space leading to greater subjective well-being, another article in Building Research & Information reviews various health issues that can be caused by being short of internal space in homes. The main basis for the health issues is argued on needs for privacy and space for socializing, and the article concludes by saying that one fifth of English households have insufficient internal space. Insofar as socializing and needing privacy are normal behaviours, these changes deny humans a basic freedom.

The question of what is ‘normal’ behaviour for humans is an interesting one. Our day-to-day lives are very different from those of people 100 years ago. As for our genes, evidently ‘native’ Europeans with lactose intolerance haven’t even caught up with the invention of agriculture. (To the extent that right-wing extremists drink milk to prove their ‘supremacy’ — don’t tell them about lactase persistence among African pastoralist communities.) Normality is heavily culturally determined, of course, and culture can change more quickly than genes, but still, it’s possible some cultures are out of step with what human bodies and brains have been programmed to expect. Is patriarchy ‘normal’? Or sitting in a chair all day staring at a screen? Or commuting? Or microwaving a TV dinner? Is there any part of our daily lives that really allows us to express normal behaviour for humans?

Freedom from fear and distress is interesting too. The film ‘The Matrix’ posits that the first ‘paradise matrix‘ was rejected by human brains — they kept trying to wake up from it. Indeed, in popular psychology ‘paradise syndrome‘ is described as a feeling of dissatisfaction despite having achieved a great deal.

That is a dark assessment of the human psyche: a belief that happiness is impossible or unbelievable. Normatively speaking it could almost be seen as a tool of mass-manipulation, encouraging people to accept unhappiness as a way of life. For the architects of the ecocyborg, it poses a difficult question. If we really believe the world needs a little fear and danger in order to keep us happy, the ecocyborg cannot be a 100% safe place. We may even already be seeing a reaction to this among those who pursue ‘adventure sports‘. What are the designers to do, then? Deliberately create places with the potential for harm?

The five freedoms are articulated around moral responsibility towards captive animals. We may not think of ourselves as animals or as captives, but clearly the more a society imposes constraints on its citizens, the greater the responsibility it should take for their welfare. If we cannot live anywhere we want, but only in built environments we can afford; if we cannot do whatever we want to enhance our lives, then to some extent we are confined. I contrasted urban and rural environments for the very different attitudes we have towards freedom in them in an earlier post. When the ecocyborg takes over, there will be no rural environment, no nature and no wilderness. Captivity will become the norm, and we owe it to ourselves to think about how we can enrich habitats for humans to maximize welfare.

The Body Ugly

The body is the link between the mind and the environment. From the inside out, it is our ‘user interface’ to the world; from the outside in, it is that part of other people’s environment that they associate with us. A society accustomed to the convenience of designed environments will inevitably have designs on their bodies. Who wants badly-dressed, smelly, overweight, spotty, dandruff-ridden misfits in the perfect, shining, modern architecture we have created for ourselves? Who wants saggy, blemished, mis-shapen lines where smooth, clean contemporary lines belong? Every hair, every wrinkle, every mole, every pimple is like a spot of rust on a steel girder, a patch of lichen on a block of concrete, chewing gum on a granite paving stone, bird shit on a smoked glass window. We do not belong in the perfect environments we create for ourselves. We spoil them by our mere existence in them, just as we spoil the natural environment by building them in the first place.

Our bodies are our ‘original sin’ in the consumerist religion. Never mind the sins of the flesh; the sin is the flesh. We face a choice: either retreat back to the grubby, cockroach and mite-infested holes we call home, and interact with the virtual world through a beautiful avatar, surrounded by festering pizze and flat cola; or do penance for our wretchedness on the operating table and have the ‘confidence’ to venture out into the city. There are few flaws that cannot be fixed. Just like the Christian Church in medieval times, some sins can be forgiven, others are deadly, but for an appropriate fee, forgiveness can be obtained. Each cut of the surgeon’s knife is a mortification, a flagellation to repair our faults. And when the bandages are removed, we are reborn, perfect and sinless (once the swelling and bruising dies down).

For those pilgrims unwilling to undergo the rigours of plastic surgery, there are still options. We can paste over the cracks and blemishes in our skin with any number of unctions; we can perfume ourselves to hide our own foul stench; we can anoint our hair with styling products and our scalp with laboratoire-formulated shampoo to keep on top of the dandruff. Our hair can have a glossy sheen in any colour but grey, our skin can glow, our teeth can be purest white.

We shape the environment, the environment shapes us back.

Nature, the Replicator and the Holodeck

Nature is typically cast as a mother. As such can be seen along the lines of the feminist charicature of the stages in the life of a woman. As a virgin, we see a pristine ecosystem, a bounty waiting to be exploited. As a mother, Nature’s provision is bountiful and sufficient, and her authority beyond question. As a whore, nature’s resources are exploited and spoiled. As a crone, the exploitation has gone on long enough that she has dried up: withered, wrinkled and infertile, Nature’s bounty is no longer enough. There are two trajectories after that – one is death; the other, resurrection: ‘Nature’ is rebuilt to serve human needs.

Many years ago, I listened to a talk given by Dr. Keith Farnsworth, an ecologist now based at Queen’s University Belfast. It has stuck in my mind. He did not use language such as the above, but the parallels in his theorization of stages of human-environment interaction are striking. The first stage he described as ecosystem occupation — humans move in to an ecosystem. The second stage is ecosystem adaptation, in which humans make alterations to the ecosystem so it better meets their needs. The third and final stage Dr. Farnsworth outlined is ecosystem domination: humans completely control the ecosystem so it meets only their needs.

His theorized trajectory, which I cannot find written up among his extensive list of publications, could be refined with a fourth stage: ecosystem elimination. Ecosystem elimination occurs in two ways: destruction and substitution. The cause of the former case is simply that the control the humans have exerted over an ecosystem in the domination stage is temporary because we have not fully understood the processes by which the resources we rely on are renewed and regenerated. The domination is unsustainable and after a period of time, the ecosystem collapses. There are plenty of examples of this in the history of agriculture, especially where agricultural practices that have evolved in one biome have been transferred to another. That’s beside the point that domination of any kind seems rarely to be sustainable indefinitely. Worms turn.

Ecosystem elimination by substitution is still in the realms of science fiction; but it happens when we no longer need ecosystems to sustain human life. In Star Trek, ecosystems have disappeared into a machine, the replicator, that creates food presumably from waste, by decomposing the latter into its constituent atoms and reconstructing it as a meal. This is the ultimate junk food; quite literally, eating shit! (This is not entirely fantasy I suppose, since faecal coliforms have been found in hamburgers.) Recognising the amenity value provided by ecosystems, a holographic projection suite with haptic enhancements, the holodeck, is provided for the crew of the Starship to enjoy some recreation. These simulated spaces presumably have none of the inconveniences of real ecosystems (unless requested by the user): no biting insects or ticks; no poison ivy; no allergens or pathogens; never too hot or too cold. Instead, simulated wind in simulated trees on a simulated balmy evening; breathing simulated fresh air while listening to simulated birds singing simulated songs as they go to a simulated roost. All available at the push of a button, whenever the mood takes you, without having to wait for the sun to set. This is Eden made real, or as real as needed to pass the environmental equivalent of the Turing Test.

Are contemporary cities much different from space ships in science fiction? Instead of replicators, we have supermarkets. Supermarkets are increasingly moving away from selling fresh ‘raw’ ingredients to providing ready-meals. These have more ‘value-added’ than raw ingredients, and hence better profit margins. One could almost pretend the microwave oven was a replicator. Of course, supermarkets obtain their produce from farms, arguably dominated ecosystems, but for how much longer? Architects have already designed skyscrapers where each floor is given over to hydroponic systems for growing food. Hydroponics are indeed already widely used for growing fruit and vegetables under glass, allowing their availability on the shelves even when not in season.

If supermarkets are replicators, then parks (or ‘green spaces’) are holodecks. These spaces, which are too small and too disconnected to support much in the way of wildlife, often consist of an expanse of lawn with a few trees growing in them. Sometimes there are shrubs and flowerbeds, and a pond, lake, river or stream. Paths will be provided so we can walk and enjoy the amenity without getting our shoes muddy. The countryside is not really needed. This matter was brought into sharp focus for me when I left an employer based in London to take up a position in Aberdeen. My colleagues were mystified as to why I would want to move away from the UK’s capital. “What is there in Scotland,” they asked, “that you could not get in London?”