Earth's Habitat Change
Pouchulu architect
5 - Migrations
World population will be soon reaching 10 billion. Our ingenuous believe that the Earth had endless resources -and some capacity to compensate pollution- is destroying the environment and its biodiversity, breaking ecological and food chains. Genetically, our conscience and sense of time give us the impression that things happen slowly, we tend to survive rather than admitting the damage we produce, therefore we do not alter direction in time. The classical civilisation we built and enjoyed is ending into cyber extensions, mere parasite systems of our body and mind and as such, they started to affect our humanistic perception and reaction, of biological nature. This includes our emotional response to life itself, based on education, reasoning and morality, which are of culural nature. What we understand as Western Civilization was defined and described by the great Aristotle 1.300 years ago in his amazing 'Politics'. Keeping his discernments alive will help us to establish a re-balanced reality. We cannot stop the effects of Habitat Loss: the Earth will absorb it and react in different ways. We will have to adapt to our new scenario, which could well be an unimaginable one, but we will adapt. If you doubt it, fly over Dubai at night and compare it with the oberture opening sequence of Blade Runner, by Ridley Scott and Vangelis; the Tyrell Corporation's nightmare is here. Massive migrations existed since ever; the current ones are related to overpopulation of pre-historical and agrarian societies and their collective memories, wars and poverty. But it is not all: Habitat Change is visible everywhere. We are altering the Earth. Climate has little to do with this.
There is one aspect not frequently analysed, and has to do with our cultural prejudice in relation with our own collective primitivism. As species, in relation with our behaviour, we act as mere animals. The way we destroyed forests and rich soils during ten millenia, the particular frantic path of industrialisation, our irrational preference for fetish contaminant libido-objects like cars, mobile phones, skyscrapers, not to mention absurd and extreme air conditioning and heating, and a dozen more symptoms (including the amount of rubbish produced every second), probably indicates that we still live and move following pleasure and violent patterns of survival.
In this context, it is interesting to observe the growing population in countries like China, India, Nigeria or Brazil: apart from China, where birth control was imposed decades ago but it did not work (in fact, it promoted the killing of millions), in some cases the population multiplied geometrically, even exponentially, and they they do not have difficulties feeding their population. In part, this has to do with a collective memory of agricultural societies that used to need as many hands as possible and at all cost; a couple of hundreds years ago many countryside mothers used to loose six or seven children out of ten. Those cultures still associate many children with future labour possibilities and more capacity for surviving. However, many more people are working today, even in decent jobs, than decades ago. This is a paradox.
e labour and more capacity for surviving.
Parliament Square, 2009. Because of Habitat Change, South-Sudan refugees occupy parts of London. Photomontage, UN photo of Sudan over photo of Parliament Square, 2008 (Ideas competition organized by Pouchulu, with compliments to Elizabeth Ajith).
Industrialisation has reached and transformed the whole planet. Developed societies pollute more, because they produce and consume more. At some point, probably till 1700, European society had reached some sort of labour equilibrium where there was a massive working class, large enough and well complemented by a (smaller) body of qualified workers. This is gone. The new industrial paradigm transformed the migrations path in a radical way, from the the mid 19th century onwards. On one hand, Industrialised countries permanently gain both non-qualified and qualified jobs, in different proportions; there is a regular flux from undeveloped countries to developed ones. Even if some countries are behind the possibility of industrial development because of political, geographical, or economical reasons, the whole globe has been deeply transformed: it is a big factory where the division of work and jobs has to do with specialisation. Every single country produces and or gets industrialised products. In that context, the void left by the US (producing good quality products for middle-class) has been replaced by China, that exports good quality products for low, middle and high income population. On top of this, the so called AI, which isnot intelligence but just sophisticated, programmed software because machines cannot reason or feel, strted to replace human labour at a high speed. The few offer of jobs will be offered to high-qualified professionals. We approach a terminal crisis, because this de-humanising digital and computerised model cannot sustain itself.
In old times a maker of any product -the Homo Faber- used to select a piece of material and started to transform it, step by step, by imagining, inspecting, cutting, mounting, painting, polishing and even selling his product. From tools, clocks, clothing, carriages, books, weapons, pencils, paper, every single product before the machine age was done by industrialist artisans, from beginning to end. Including architecture. Today all objects manufactured are produced with the machine as a frame and the belt as a vector. We have created machines that systematised the process, where a worker collaborates in minor or even irrelevant steps, or just controlling the computerised machines and software. As a consequence, neither artisans nor workers are master of their objects, but some kind of cog; we either imagine, inspect, cut, mount, paint, polish or sell, but only one action per worker. Even more, we started an era where every single object, including software, are build by specialised machines and robots. This is of central importance when considering migrations. More and more people will loose their jobs.
The world has been saturated with products, and we actually love it. Another paradox. Children cannot distinguish an orange tree from an apple one, but they are surrounded by all kind of virtual images that represent oranges and apples. The lack of balance between our needs and what we can obtain from the market, wherever we are, is diverse; it seems our immediate needs tend to be solved by industrialisation (in fact, we are forced to buy and use things we really do not need), our will is fragile and constantly tempted by objects more or less irrelevant, imposed by marketing. That's fine, industry gave jobs to millions. The problems is the antisustainable and polluting origin of the majority of those objects, entirely made of plastic. We end up buying more than what we really need. This is one of the key elements of capitalism -to create the need, then to produce, finally to create jobs, and it worked- but at the same time the system is so changing and dynamic that many people are discontent, both for not having the resources to get more goods and for being unable to update the "last" version of a particular item like phones, clothing or cars. Only a more solid culture based on learning how to reason and discern can correct this, and it seems it is not meant for all.
The intrinsic nature of the machine era (fast tracks where industrialisation runs), the ultimate goal of capitalism (to employ those who can work) and the prerogative of the secondary systems (framing citizen's life under the State) are more or less independent from each other. Our habitat is made of traces of improvised social and economical relations and evolves in a randomly way, full of patches. We constantly modify the environment, but through unmethodical interventions, interrelated indeed, but far from desirable planned strategies. No one imagined the necessity and possibility of building monstrous highways till the moment cars -mostly Ford T- started to occupy and conquer our pedestrian streets, till that moment beautifully shared in peace by horses, carriages and pedestrians. That proved fatal to cities, that used to belong to people, and now belong to cars and transport. Any innovation in urban reality implies further, unstoppable changes that are not normally considered before that innovation appears and is offered to people.
To suppose that migrations are only or mainly produced by wars or lack of jobs, is a simplification. When people migrate they also follow the perception of development and success, even the mere possibility of progressing projected from big industrialised centres, poured into developed and undeveloped societies as cool advertising images of an ideal and wealthy society. Industrialisation also means a non-rational lifestyle objective. This happens every day, every hour, every minute by frenetic and distressed propaganda from a digitalised world, represented in information now literally at hand. We carry the news with us. Ironically, media devices (texts, images, moving images, sounds) are called mobile but are almost 'fixed' to our body. This has changed the behaviour of our species, pushing to unknown territories where we pay more attention to the representation of the world than to the world itself.
Unlike a few years ago, when to go abroad meant to really abandon our home, current migrations are softened by the virtual world, invaded with messages that hold migrants close to their homes and loved ones. Our grandparents or fathers migrated with a few belongings, some family pictures, a few books... to a foreign country to start a new life and in most of the cases, if they were in contact it was by post once a year, sending and receiving real handwriting letters. Today people migrate with virtual communication in their pockets, perfect place for a "smart" phone. In many ways migrants never leave their mother culture and tend to keep a permanent contact with family and friends, which changes the way in which they acts or conducts toward a new culture and Habitat. The trip's emotional side has been diminished, if not even dissapeared.
In the year 2000 a word described better the life of a migrant: 'transculturalism'. We face a new situation, we could name it 'interculturalism', where the interaction and contact between host and guest cultures is different, poorer, more distant; both parts live a virtual reality, only at times framed in reality: the former understands that the other holds a different background, needs and dreams, which is also the attitude of the latter. Somehow both parts are mirrored in virtuality, they see themselves reflected in the other's screen, rather than in a real dialogue. But there is more. By diving in the virtual digital world, it does not matter where we live or if we left, we all became migrants, we are leaving reality, moving towards uncertain virtual lands. Our main migration problem is not moving to another latitude, or trying to reach another shore on a rubber boat... it is living in a virtual reality, while nothing has changed in our surroundings. This virtual world can be clearly seen as a type of nightmare or even schizophrenia. Nothing good comes from virtuality.
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