HOME SWEET HABITAT

No progress on the wheel bearings yesterday. Reassembled twice, 
still can't see why it's not quite fitting together properly. But 
as usual, just keep banging that head against the brick wall and 
maybe somehow you'll break through... I usually do.

Yesterday I was actually aiming to wind my way to talking about 
housing. The other day I saw part of an interview on TV with 
someone who had done a study that claimed in the next few days the 
total mass (well I'm guessing mass, maybe volume but that seems a 
less reasonable measure) of man-made materials will exceed the 
total of all living things. Also noted was that the average human 
(nobody ever wants to be him) accounts for their own weight in 
man-made materials every couple of weeks. Clearly this is the sort 
of headline-grabbing study that it isn't wise to place very much 
faith in (even less my paraphrased version of it), but regardless 
it's a good starting point to look at where those materials go and 
what they are all really for.

Cutting to the chase, because I need to get back to swearing at my 
wheel hub, it's houses. Not just the building, but the habitat that 
they provide, that we create for ourselves. They are capsules that 
protect us from the Earth, because honestly as much as we praise 
it, we hate it out there. It's always either too bright, or too 
dark, or too cold, or too hot, or too wet, or too dry, or too 
uncomfortable, too dirty, too public, or just too boring. So we 
pool up all our energies to make and maintain our own ideal 
habitat. To do this we pull in a seemingly infinite variety of 
resources that come together in goods made from materials 
completely unknown to the natural world, often formed in ways 
beyond our own individual understanding. In pulling these materials 
in, the houses themselves also pull themselves together. The strain 
against the environment is less easily shared over distance. So 
towns form, within them factories, services, to create and operate 
more goods so that everyone can live more comfortably in their 
personal habitats, ever more removed from the world outside. Towns 
grow into cities, where more factories and services serve other 
factories and services, and from them all that can be seen, sitting
atop the earth on layers of concrete and tarmac, is the framework
supporting these capsules, which are drawn together ever more
densely, ever more removed from the world that they're made from.

That the natural world suffers from this should surprise nobody. To 
consider nothing more than the now-barren earth underneath the 
buildings of all the world's huge cities, the impact is undeniable. 
As for whether it can be sustained, well there are already 
countless cases where towns and even cities have become abandoned 
because their locations made them unsustainable within the vast 
economic structure that supports most of them, once whatever 
resource they relied on failed to take the strain against the rest 
of their displaced natural environment. This will go on, and get 
worse. But at home we'll keep on living in the best environment we 
can, pulling against nature with all our strength, pulling along 
with some and against others, but all against the world that we're 
from.

 - The Free Thinker