City Green / Country Green
The virtues of living in a city are practically endless. Culture, businesses, food, the mix of so many people with different stories and views, I could go on forever! In a way, city-living represents the pinnacle of human civilization, a hive of human activity, the ultimate cross-section of culture and different ideas and views, of large organizations, awe-inspiring ingenuity, cooperation. Things get DONE in cities — big things, things that change the world and the direction in which the human race is headed.
When it comes to global environmental issues, you’ll find no shortage of supporters and activists in city-dwellers, even as they are faced with one major problem.
This ‘environment’ they’re trying to save? They’re not really in it.
As far as I’ve seen, no one has summarized this better than comedian Louis CK in his 2011 special Live At The Beacon Theater.
“One time,” he says. “I was walking, and I [accidentally] dropped a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend, who said to me, ‘You just littered on the street! Don’t you care about the environment?’ I thought about it, and said….’you know what? This isn’t the environment . This is New York City. This is where people live. New York City is a GIANT piece of litter.”
If I heard this as a teenager, I wouldn’t have understood. I grew up in a small country town named Shippensburg in South-Central Pennsylvania. It sits in a valley with two mountains to the North and South. In certain parts of town, you can stand and see both mountains on either side. The tree-filled forests of the mountains were the calm, secret place we could retreat to. As soon as we entered the mountains, it was like we were in a sacred place, a sanctuary. We were calmer, happier, nicer to each other.
When I graduated high school, I was accepted into University of Pittsburgh main campus, and moved to a completely different environment.
This was a drastic change. Pitt’s campus was not ‘pastoral’. Oakland, its host neighborhood, contained a giant hill, and all up the hill were tall, massive university buildings, apartment buildings, houses, several large hospitals, and at the bottom, a four-lane thruway.
I hated this grimy, ugly city. But after a year or so, a funny thing happened. Even though Pittsburgh was, as Louis CK put it, a “giant piece of litter,” I started to like it there.
I realized what great educational opportunities Pitt offered, as a large university in a city. I started taking amazing classes — literature, world history, astronomy, biology, psychology, philosophy. I moved off-campus, switching from neighborhood to neighborhood, witnessing each one’s unique culture and character.
I felt energized by the crowds of people from so many different walks of life and cultures. It made the city feel alive, opened my mind to the possibilities of all these different points of view and ways of life. I met so many different people who awakened me to ideas of activism and global issues in their own ways, something I’m not sure I would have experienced if I’d gone to a smaller college in a smaller town.
Experiencing this duality of city versus country living made me think about how where a person lives can affect their perception of greater issues. Many of my conversations with people in my hometown revealed that they didn’t care about ‘the environment’ as in ‘global environmental issues’.
Shippensburg is also filled with a lot of conservatives, who aren’t too concerned with climate change (and would even argue it’s not “real”), or sustainability, or saving the rainforests.
How does the actual environment in which we live affect how connected we feel to nature and our planet? What makes certain people care about environmental issues and feel connected to nature, and other people not able to recognize it?
There are people in cities who care about the environment — informed, intelligent, caring people, whose city-living exposure to big-thinking and multiple points of view drew them into living sustainability. And, of course, there’s definitely a large percentage of people in cities who are not like this. Similarly, there are ardent environmental activists in rural America, but also plenty living in the mountains, forests, and fields, experiencing nature to its fullest without ever considering that there might be bigger issues with the planet, issues that could affect the harmony of nature they take for granted.
So I pose this as a question. City-dwellers, what made you come to care about global environmental causes? Country people, what made you come to care about global environmental causes? Is there a pattern? Can that pattern help ‘recruit’ more people to live sustainably, to ‘go green’? Is there some way we can get through to the city and country people who don’t care about these issues, to help them realize their massive importance? If we can find more ways to understand what draws people to the causes of environmentalism, the more chance we have of making a difference and saving the planet.
02/10/2015 @ 3:18 pm
I live in the “country”. My father farmed the land in South Dakota. He received a horticulture degree and was poised to do graduate work in Chicago when the lure of farming called him back to his roots. He and my mother worked long days coaxing a living out of the environment that is the plains of the Dakotas. His passion was to grow trees – acres and acres were planted through the conservation programs. And he taught his four children from an early age to recognize different species of trees, birds, animals.. Something we retain to this day, many years later. Awareness of your surroundings leads one to value the environment and education of such is a vital component to being involved in and caring for your environment. It is not something to be taken for granted. Today, I watch as my bird feeder has fewer and fewer species of birds and fewer and fewer birds in general. The meadowlarks which used to sit the fence lines in flocks are now a rare sighting in the summer. Butterflies no longer fill the skies nor do as many frogs sing from the ponds and sloughs.
02/10/2015 @ 10:20 pm
What made me care about the environment. I was born and raised in the inner city. My experience with slums, rats, burned out buildings and concrete playgrounds made me appreciate the lakefront and the city zoo when we could attend money and time being the obstacles. Another huge difference was reading Upton Sinclair s The Jungle, I realized the worker injuries in my family could have been prevented. What grows a person to be who and what they are, I own a printing company and was not happy with the toxic products used to produce print. After years of trial and error we print without the use of any toxic chemicals our workers are in a clean environment and our products can do no harm to the end user. My industry tells me we are unique in the country and possibly the world why is that? We do extremely high profile work and have won many awards, as a society we need to look at every aspect and demand sustainability.
08/26/2015 @ 5:17 pm
I was raised in inner-city Philadelphia, but growing up in the 70s as I did, we played outside. Behind our neighborhood there was a small patch of woods that was part of Pennypack Park and all the neighborhood kids would escape into those woods. In the woods we were no longer city dwellers; we were cowboys and Indians and we walked along trails and ran over logs that fell over the crick. In the summer it provided shade and in the winter there was an area large enough to freeze over that we could ice skate on and there was a hill to sled on. Of course there was never any swimming, our parents had warned us that the crick was too polluted to actually immerse yourself, and no one I ever knew went in. That little plot of woods in my old neighborhood is what made me an environmentalist today. We need more woods, bigger woods, and more areas left alone. Other than rats and deer there were no animals in those woods, no fish in the crick, but in our imaginations, lions lurked around the corners, bears were hiding in the trees and wolves were stalking us. We could at least pretend were were in a primeval zone, and I am still thankful for those days.