I've landed in Tokyo and am in Narita airport waiting for my connecting flight to Bangkok. I’m feeling a bit disconnected. It’s the sheer structure of the airport. Who built this? How did they know what would be needed? The pathways, bathrooms, kiosks, currency exchange centres, 
movators, stores, terminals, windows, seats, light fixtures, appropriate carpeting and countless other items that all combine to form complex interconnected systems. When the flow of time and the human factor is added to the mix, the complexity skyrockets. Where is the repository of foresight needed to create this hive structure? All this human-made complexity is overwhelming my tribal brain. The airport laughs smugly at the notion of a pastoral redemption.
When Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins took pictures from the moon, humanity saw Earth for the first time from space - and we were awed and humbled. This beautiful blue-green marble looked beautiful, wondrous, fragile and finite. The borders were clear finally. A lonely sphere - spaceship Earth, with all of us creatures its witless and intrepid passengers. A spacecraft gave us this gift of perspective.
Now an aircraft has given me more. Every time I fly, I am disturbed by my overhead perspective. The surface of the planet has been terraformed by us. Perfect circles and squares of manicured and cultivated green, monocultures of course, interspersed with grey-lifeless swaths of concrete,
steel, asphalt and glass. Lonely islands of hemmed in wilderness sprout up here and there like broccoli heads. What are we that can make these things? We are prodigal, amazing - enfant terrible. I cannot help but feel that we will get our comeuppance in some epic way. What can be more epic than extinction? One big difference between us and all other creatures that have gone extinct before, is that we can see it coming - like a chill in the room, we can see the breath of it in the air, but we refuse to acknowledge the need for a sweater.
movators, stores, terminals, windows, seats, light fixtures, appropriate carpeting and countless other items that all combine to form complex interconnected systems. When the flow of time and the human factor is added to the mix, the complexity skyrockets. Where is the repository of foresight needed to create this hive structure? All this human-made complexity is overwhelming my tribal brain. The airport laughs smugly at the notion of a pastoral redemption.
When Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins took pictures from the moon, humanity saw Earth for the first time from space - and we were awed and humbled. This beautiful blue-green marble looked beautiful, wondrous, fragile and finite. The borders were clear finally. A lonely sphere - spaceship Earth, with all of us creatures its witless and intrepid passengers. A spacecraft gave us this gift of perspective.Now an aircraft has given me more. Every time I fly, I am disturbed by my overhead perspective. The surface of the planet has been terraformed by us. Perfect circles and squares of manicured and cultivated green, monocultures of course, interspersed with grey-lifeless swaths of concrete,
steel, asphalt and glass. Lonely islands of hemmed in wilderness sprout up here and there like broccoli heads. What are we that can make these things? We are prodigal, amazing - enfant terrible. I cannot help but feel that we will get our comeuppance in some epic way. What can be more epic than extinction? One big difference between us and all other creatures that have gone extinct before, is that we can see it coming - like a chill in the room, we can see the breath of it in the air, but we refuse to acknowledge the need for a sweater.(All images in this post taken from the web)
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