When I teach my "Nature [and Culture] Writing in the West" class (next chance, fall semester), I always face my students' typical American dualism: wilderness-virgin, city-whore.
I'm adding City Comforts to the blog roll because I, too, firmly believed that if we loved our cities more and put more energy into making them livable, we would not be creating suburban (and exurban) sprawl.
4 comments:
That's unfortunate that your students are so ignorant of cities? i.e. I assume that most of them grew up in the suburbs? And simply don't have any idea what a city or town (for that matter( is.
How sad.
Quite a few of them come from the steel mill city of Pueblo, Colorado, which has its own urban culture. I think that the dichotomy mentioned is bigger than just one city, however.
It may be exacerbated in the West, however, where people often leave the city in search of some place with a sort quasi-environmental and quasi-moral purity.
And some -- young Greens in my experience -- are so snobbish about it; that anti-city bit is just so predictable.
You might find these web sites in London of interest to you,they demonstrate how much we love our city:
http://www.sohogreen.com/default.htm
http://www.thewayweseeit.org/latest.php
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