{"id":403,"date":"2013-05-09T17:28:50","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T17:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=403"},"modified":"2013-05-15T22:39:11","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T22:39:11","slug":"wilderness-after-the-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/urbanities\/wilderness-after-the-wild\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilderness after the Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"image\"<\/a>Urbanities unfold new stretches of wilderness. They are home to the weedy species<\/a> of the world\u2014\u201cplants, animals, and other organisms that thrive in continually disturbed, human-dominated environments.\u201d These species proliferate today, after the \u201cend of the wild,\u201d forging a new wilderness of hinterland and city: the city as hinterland and vice versa. Stephen M. Meyer has catalogued them: raccoons, coyotes, rats, and deer, among others. I\u2019ve seen unperturbed raccoons rummaging through trash in neighborhoods all over Portland, impervious to human presence. Sometimes they approach you like stray cats on the sidewalk. The new wilderness abounds in strays. Like city limits, the boundaries of domestic and feral space become semi-permeable.<\/p>\n

But not always and not everywhere: This new wilderness has plenty of fortresses, secured walls that seek to keep predators out. Fenced houses and gated communities, policed by exterminators. Office parks. Walls at borders. Immunizations against the threat of invasion.<\/p>\n

Peter Sloterdijk has written<\/a> eloquently on the connection between interiors and immunization. In one interview, he describes Walter Benjamin\u2019s arcades as vast, fortified immune systems. \u201cCapitalist man,\u201d in this formulation, \u201cuses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands.\u201d These islands can be as small as mud huts or as expansive as air-conditioned malls. \u201cIn the case of the arcade,\u201d Sloterdijk continues, \u201cmodern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated materials in order to build the largest possible interior.\u201d This interior is semi-public, permeable to light (like a greenhouse) but isolated from the air outside.<\/p>\n

The Talking Heads once sang<\/a> about the dangers of undomesticated air:<\/p>\n

What is happening to my skin?
\nWhere is that protection that I needed?
\nAir can hurt you too.
\nAir can hurt you too.
\nSome people say not to worry about the air.
\nSome people never had experience with…
\nAir… air.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Against this threat, the new wilderness is air-conditioned, whether by window units or by the enormous greenhouse walls ringing our planet. Everything is sealed, but every seal is porous. Hotel guests lie down with bedbugs, not noticing them until much later, after they\u2019ve stowed away, laid their eggs, and made a new home. Tourists live transitorily in a sphere maintained by others whom they most often barely see or acknowledge. \u201cAt reception we request a key to an apartment that will be a substitute for our home,\u201d writes<\/a> Lola Arias in her contribution to Ciudades paralelas<\/i> (Parallel Cities). \u201cWe spend the night in anonymous rooms where anonymous beings make our beds, clean our baths, change our sheets. Most of them are foreigners. And we too are foreigners in the hands of other foreigners who look after us in our absence.\u201d Strays, again, all of us in the endless hinterland of the world.<\/p>\n

Urbanities unfold in places like this, places like everywhere. This blog is a glass house where their manifestations may reside.<\/p>\n

– Craig Epplin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Urbanities unfold new stretches of wilderness. They are home to the weedy species of the world\u2014\u201cplants, animals, and other organisms that thrive in continually disturbed, human-dominated environments.\u201d These species proliferate today, after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-urbanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}