A Year of Nature/Culture
A summary of the past year, and some thoughts about what comes next
I have never written consistently before. I remember distinctly finding a journal from my childhood in a box of forgotten memorabilia, containing six consecutive days’ worth of daily recaps. About one percent of the large notebook I had for the purpose was filled. I suspect many of you have similar artifacts lying around.
I set out, at about this time last year, to ‘become a writer’. Not a vocational sense, of course. But I had things I wanted to write about, and ideas I wanted to express, and I didn’t feel like shouting into the newsfeed. Writing something only once a month, and writing deliberately about only whatever I was really interested in, has been a pleasure. I’ve written plenty for purposes and on schedules not my own. I am not doing so now, and it is wonderful.
This month, I want to take a little bit of time to look back and to look forward.
My revealed obsession: size and scale
Probably the post most central to what I’ve written this past year was “Keep It Small, Stupid” in August. I reviewed an essay collection by Murray Bookchin entitled Toward An Ecological Society. I summarized my takeaway:
It is that technology isn’t the problem; that it is the scale and ubiquity and comprehensibility of the technology that is the problem. It can alienate us from the means of sustaining our own life; it can isolate us from each other; it can degrade our skills and crafts and competencies; it can render us inert clients to the mechanical bureaucracies of city and technology. These critiques are plentiful elsewhere, but the insight about scale isn’t.
We’re humans. We have eyes bigger than our proverbial stomachs. We strive for measurable excellence: bigger, faster, stronger. The story of the Tower of Babel, like so many stories from the Old Testament about hubris, rings so very human in our ears, even today:
And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
We build bigger and higher with the heat and light of Promethean fire. And in so doing, we risk outbuilding ourselves. In other words, the story of Babel is a story of humans building for themselves something which humans could never inhabit or maintain. So too do humans build cities and technologies which undercut their very humanity by its scale. Our genius and monomania erects for us alien canyons of steel and glass into which we bid humanity enjoy their life. Our venture capitalists, flush with the cash wrought by their technological anesthetization of human creativity, drive, and community, wring their hands about the loss of vitality evident all around them.
We see this death-spiral drive for scale in war:
We see it also in the ways cities are planned:
We see it in the structural configuration of mass agriculture:
We see it in our tendency to ignore anything of too small a scale, inferring that if something is small, it must be unimportant:
The vicious cycles I described in the preceding paragraph have their own unique dynamics, as well. I sketched out some of their characteristics in my first post, perhaps foreshadowing the way my obsessions would drift over the year:
But for all of this, Bookchin may have said it best. What I love about Bookchin’s work is that it brings me back to the cryptic title of this newsletter, Nature/Culture:
Bookchin's chimeric critiques of large-scale technology and the supra-human city read deeper meaning into each other. As a communitarian, he worried that its scale could pull humans away from each other. As an ecologist, he worried that its scale could pull us away from nature. Nature acquires a unique twist in Bookchin's work. He insists that, whether we think it or not, we are never 'disembedded' from nature, even in the tallest and most forbidding modern building, or even when operating the most alienating technical apparatus. For him, the only difference is what kind of nature we are embedded in: organic or inorganic, ecological or physical, real or mythic, whole or one-sided, subjectivized or mindless. He despised the way the modern city blotted out the horizon, hermetically sealing the inhabitant from the reality of his own surroundings. And he worried that technology that obviated the very real ways in which power, food, and resources (although he hated describing nature’s bounty as ‘resources’) come from nature would alienate us still further. He pushed for a specifically ecological relationship with nature; one in which the demands of our human-scaled technology would put us in context with nature; that dependence on sun, wind, soil, vegetation, and animals would re-wire our relationship with the natural world.
If I had to summarize this year in a sentence:
Building and working at the right scale can rebuild humanity’s social and ecological relations.
Writing elsewhere
Over the past year, if I have sensed (or if my wife has sensed) that one of my newsletter drafts could find purchase in the soil of another publication, I have pulled it out of the queue and sent it to a publication that may be interested in running it. I set out with the private goal of having three pieces published this year in some non-newsletter form, and I am pleased to say that I succeeded.
In January, I wrote The Mechanical Imagination, which was run by The Hedgehog Review. In April, I wrote The War Machine Is Not Ergonomic, for Front Porch Republic. And for the fall (print!) issue, I wrote In Your Face for The New Atlantis. It was through these three pieces that I recalled that the writing I have been proudest of in my life has been that was which was most thoughtfully critiqued, edited, and sharpened against another mind.
From my past, it was my grandmother, Joyce Schaffer, and the infamous deluge of blue ink she left on my high school essays, that required me to develop as a writer in order to survive. Coasting on the skills she left me, I didn’t encounter any serious editorial challenges to my writing until graduate school, when Dr. Rixt Woudstra, then a Ph.D student in architectural history, theory, and criticism, relentlessly but thoughtfully critiqued my class writing in a way that made me a much clearer and more incisive thinker as well as writer.
It is with those memories that I am grateful for
, Jeffrey Bilbro, and Ari Schulman and Samuel Matlack, who edited the three pieces I had published this past year. Writing for your own newsletter is indulgent; you never see your own mistakes, cloudy thinking, or knotty prose because you were the one who made them. It takes patient and thoughtful reading and critique to pull the weeds and water the garden.What comes next for Nature/Culture
To begin with, I will continue writing monthly. It’s a fairly sustainable pace for me at my point in life. In addition, I will continue looking for opportunities to publish pieces that I think have what it takes to succeed elsewhere. But I think that this year I will focus more on growing the reach of the newsletter.
I have done essentially nothing to grow the newsletter (and done at least one thing designed to limit its growth). The newsletter has two in-built limitations already which are, as the experts say, growth-limiting: I write infrequently, and about a wide variety of topics. But I will attempt to overcome these limitations in the most banal way possible: by simply following the recommendations Substack put together for growing a publication on their platform. I am sure that there are other good pieces of advice out there, but I don’t have the time to run them down and evaluate them on their own.
Actually, there is one piece of advice I will take that is not from Substack: I’ll start recording a podcast version of each newsletter and including it. This is specifically for my mother, who is always on the go but still wants to know what her son is thinking about that month. I love you, Mom.
As of this writing, I have sixteen brave subscribers. In December 2024, I’ll check in again and see if Substack knows what they’re talking about. To those sixteen of you reading this, thank you for thinking with me, and for making it this far.