Something Aldo Leopold mentions in his essay stuck out to me because it is a concept I have worked with before. As a student of religion here at Indiana University, I studied how deeply Biblical ideologies have shaped mankind's perspective on their role in the world. Specifically, the idea of anthropocentrism, wherein God created Earth for humans to have have dominion over. In Genesis 1:26 God says "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on earth." That sounds pretty creepy if you ask me...

Adam with his inferiors.

So, when Leopold brings up Abraham's perspective that land has no intrinsic value other than to supply him with milk and honey, it reminded me of that Bible verse. Of course humanity has created society with complete disregard to our environment; Earth was created for us! We can build wherever we want, fish as much as we want, and pollute as much as we want because Earth is ours. We own it. This perspective is deeply engrained in our culture, policies, behaviors, and attitudes.

In order to create a sustainable society, we must shift our perspective. Humanity needs to become aware of their actions, and view themselves as agents that participate with their environments, as their environments participate with them. We need to create infrastructure and lifestyles that interact with our environment in a symbiotic way. Ebenezer Howard believes "Garden City" is the answer, but is it?

A documentary I watched a few years ago in which city planners created a suburb in Colorado based on some of the same principles as Garden City. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it or I would link it here. The suburb was circular in shape, with the homes of families on the perimeter and a community living space in the middle. Kind of like these housing plots in a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The houses were built with high-tech features like solar panels, energy-efficient appliances, and sustainable architecture. Like Garden City, the Colorado suburb behaved like a co-operative community, meaning they shared certain specialized objects, such as lawn mowers and garden tools. This allows the community to benefit from having access to a large variety of gadgets, while saving significant costs to the individual. They don't just share tools however, they share responsibility through allocation of chores, such as cooking, babysitting, gardening, etc. This allows for more time spent with family, friends, working on hobbies, or however you wish to spend it. I love the idea of co-operative communities for their social, environmental, and cost-effective values. However I have two major problems with them.

First, the people who are able to afford a transition into places like a Garden City tend to be people from affluent, privileged communities. Rarely do those of a lower class, people who stand to gain the most from a sustainable lifestyle, have access to these kind of environmental endeavors. Underprivileged populations don't have the money to invest in cutting-edge, energy-efficient technology. They likely also don't have the resources or job security to uproot their lives and move to a utopian suburb on the outskirts of town. This brings me to my second point. Is it really environmentally responsible to create entirely new sustainable communities and leave our previous unsustainable communities in the dust to rot and decay? Or should we work on improving our already existing infrastructures? Professor Brown said in class that lots of people have tried to create the perfect utopian society, but none have succeeded. Maybe we should shift our focus from creating the best community ever to bettering what we already live in. If we work on improving our current systems, then all populations in the community are better off, not just the ones with privilege.