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Show SEMANTICS AND THE CITY So what will the end of nature as we have known it mean to our understanding of God and of man? The important thing to remember is that the end of nature is not an impersonal event, like an earthquake. It is something we humans have brought about through a series of conscious and unconscious choices: we ended the natural atmosphere, and hence the natural climate, and the natural boundaries of the forest, and so on. In so doing, we exhibit a kind of power thought in the past to be divine (much as we do by genetically altering life). We as a race turn out to be stronger than we suspected -much stronger. In a sense we turn out to be God's equal - or at least his rival - able to destroy creation. BillMcKibben ( 17 ) McKibben goes on: "The walk along the Mill Creek, or any stream, or up any hill, or through any woods, is changed forever - changed as profoundly as when it shifted from pristine and untracked wilderness to mapped and deeded and cultivated land. Our local shopping mall now has a club of people who go "mall walking" every day. " The "city" is a myth it doesn't exist spacially nor in the language. A mass of meaningless semantics lets us talk as if we were referring to someplace with a spacial makeup. Lets go over some of the words that refer to the city but really have to do with social function and everything else but space. Language must carry agreed upon meaning. If language ignores nature then we destroy it intellectually and hence actually. Here is a list of words and concepts which fool us by shifting our attention away from the real problem. A blunt example is Bruno Zevi who titled his book ARCHITECTURE AS SPACE. He says "architecture is its social content." (18) In other words architecture is really sociology. Would sociologists say that , their discipline is really architecture. Does A = B = C? Here is -39- |