Ecosystem Notes #13 - City

Social Leadership Daily - Day #835

I’m away from the Forest, walking through London today in the rain. Some features are common: there is scale, from the cracked paving slabs, to the church spires and skyscrapers.

There is a canopy, but here it’s porticos, scaffolding, awnings and arcades. There is nature, but here is is enclosed, observed, managed for utility, or vandalising structures as weeds or moss. Breaking up the straight lines, or as green slimes where the plumbing has failed.

There is a sense of insulation from texture, or the banishment of texture. The earth is covered: I’ve walked eight miles today through the city, and my knees ache. All of it has been on hardened surfaces, paving slabs, concrete, bricks, tarmac, marble tiles, or kerbstones. Some of these have been textured by design, others by decay, but none of them natural, none of this place.

And over them all the rain has fallen, unable to drain, diverted into the gutters and gulleys. Runoff.

I have seen trees with security cameras bolted to them, isolated in tubs and hermetically sealed in lobbies and penthouses, perched high up on roof gardens (I assume tethered to prevent them skydiving in a storm), as well as cut, trimmed, pruned, or simply vandalised. Some have posters or signs nailed to them. Some stand sedate in manicured parks.

Here, nature is invariably enclosed, tolerated, curated, pruned, tamed for aesthetic value or occasionally common utility. Much of it is held within obscure rule sets: private, permissive, or public, but not always clearly so.

I am constantly channeled: by pavements, alleyways, escalators, subways, and signed.

In the ecosystem work, I am developing vocabulary: work like this, today, reminds me of how far I have travelled so far, and how far I still have to go.