What do you see when you look out of the window?
If you’re lucky enough it’s not only big bulky buildings and smoky pollution but some nature too, if not a forest then it’s city-cousing, a park. The trees are shaking their leaves off now, the memories of the gone summer, and tucking all their greenness safely away. So that it can all be reborn next spring. That is the way I like to think of nature’s dying, in cycles, forever persisting.
But what if there is no next spring to come? I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Mayas did actually know that somewhere in the future there is a point where 2012 doesn’t become 2013. No, they probably just run out of ink. But I want to ask, since it seems there is tomorrow, what is our place in it?
Falling (1956) by Okano Ue Toshiko
Are we going to fall to the trap we have created ourselves, the wheel of progression? There is going to be new things for certain, because human will to improve, the will to believe in great, bright future, seems to be something innate in all of us. In my Nothing to Envy post I admired human desire to live, our resilience to persist against any odds.
But have we taken things too far? Have we stopped creating things we need, and started creating things we want? Is it greed ruling our countries now? Thinking we are superior, that the human race is the conductor of this whole orchestra of life, have we started dealing out death too eagerly? And I’m not only talking about the sad, pointless killing of other people but of all our fellow beings, from the badger culls to stepping on the nature’s toes.
Ophelia (1955) by Okano Ue Toshiko
Have we forgotten there is things bigger than us in this world, things that were before us, forces to be respected? The sea, the very ground we walk on, the solidity of it and the platform it offers us to build our houses and dreams on, do we respect that?
Apple, New York Times by Carter Mull
Juxtaposing the ‘global warming-crisis!’ headlines with the articles about the cellulitis of various celebrities in the tabloids, what kind of picture of global warming does that create? Only in our privilidged, comfortable bubble of life can we afford tabloids and advertisement industry to make suffering into entertainment.
But what is our relationship with the nature? Is it symbiotic?
What is the future world going to look like when we truly see the consequences of our actions?
The Waste Land, Pictures of Carbage by Vik Muniz
Like this?
Is our future a wasteland, our heritage a pit of rubber and decay? Or are we even granted a future or is our weight too big a burden for the nature and for this overcrowded globe to bear?
(The photos of the artwork are from a book called Utopia, Dystopia – Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage, I own no rights. I’m only fortunate enough to own a copy of said book, it’s really interesting, check it out if you come across it!)
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