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.During the nineteenth century, European production of iron and steel increased fourhundred-fold, and may be said to have inaugurated the Age of Steel.Public transportationsystems proliferated, along with mechanized factories.England, richer and more intenselyindustrialized than the continent, saw mass migrations from country districts to factorytowns.Deprived of the traditional communal lands that yielded fuel, game, and pasturage,poor agricultural families, children included, labored in mines and factories up to eighteenhours a day at bare subsistence wages.Hunger and misery were so widespread that thegovernment grudgingly and gradually enacted a series of reforms to avert a revolution.In America, too, industrialized cities attracted displaced and unemployed workers.In1790, there were fewer than a million residents in American cities.By 1860, there wereeleven million.The poor were crowded into dark, airless tenements and damp basements,where they suffered from poor sanitation, epidemics, and fires, but the plight of the"huddled masses yearning to breathe free" was no concern of the real estate speculatorsand factory owners yearning to be rich.In New England, led by Emerson, a group of intellectuals persistently denounced the167new commercial ethic.They warned their fellow citizens against money-lust and itsconsequences.Henry David Thoreau didn't mince words.In an essay titled "Life without Principle,"he said, "This world is a place of business.What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almostevery night by the panting of the locomotive.It interrupts my dreams.There is no sabbath.It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.It is nothing but work, work, work.I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollarsand cents.An Irishman, seeing me make a minute in the fields, took it for granted that Iwas calculating my wages.If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and somade a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chieflybecause he was thus incapacitated for--business! I think that there is nothing, not evencrime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessantbusiness."Thoreau took to the woods to escape incessant business, but his famous retreat toWalden Pond was less wild and solitary than he intimated.He brought manufacturedimplements for building and planting, friends from Concord helped him roof his cabin, andhe supplemented the diet he describes in Walden--plants he gathered or cultivated himself--with the suppers he ate during his frequent visits to his sister's house in town.A lifetime fugitive from regimentation and acquisitiveness, Thoreau sporadically re-entered the money economy as a handyman, surveyor, writer, and lecturer.He could not beaccused of truckling to his audience.He began a lecture on "Walking" with thisdeclaration: "I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, ascontrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil--to regard man as an inhabitant, or apart and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.I wish to make an extremestatement.If so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions ofcivilization: the minister and the school committee, and every one of you will take care ofthat."Despite his expressed contempt for civilization and civilized conventions, Thoreau wasenough a member of his society to find Walt Whitman's erotic references offensive ratherthan "part and parcel of Nature." He recognized Whitman's originality, but his ascetic soulwas as much repelled by the poet's sensuality as by his fellow citizens' luxurious living.It is this streak of asceticism in the neo-Thoreauvians that our contemporary consumersociety rejects.Asceticism posits limits, and the consumer society, by definition, repudiateslimits: as long as there is as drop of oil or a speck of gold to be wrung out of Nature, itbelongs to the takers for marketing.Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), like Thoreau, deplored the effects of the new cities on "aworld of professional illusionists and their credulous victims." Unlike Thoreau, he did notbelieve in arrant individualism.He decried the new economy's creation of alienatedindividuals." Freed from his sense of dependence on corporation and neighborhood, the168'emancipated individual' was dissociated and delocalized: an atom of power, ruthlesslyseeking whatever power can command.With the quest for financial and political power,the notion of limits disappeared--limits on numbers, limits on wealth, limits on populationgrowth, limits on urban expansion: on the contrary, quantitative expansion becamepredominant.The merchant cannot be too rich; the state cannot possess too muchterritory; the city cannot become too big.Success in life was identified with expansion.Thissuperstition still retains its hold in the notion of an indefinitely expanding economy."He argued that humans, who belong both to the natural world and the artificial worldof their own making, are capable of designing wholesome living environments, that citiesare as much natural structures as anthills or beaver colonies.In The Story of Utopias (1922)he admonishes planners of ideal communities to be practical, to study the intricate human,natural, and commercial networks both of the site of settlement and the entire region.Influenced by the Scotch botanist Patrick Geddes, who urged planners to adopt a widerscheme of ecological reference, Mumford helped found the Regional Planning Associationof America, which promoted detailed regional surveys, decentralization, green urbanspaces, and lower density in dwellings and commercial buildings.Like Thoreau, Mumford was a great walker and observer.Traipsing through the meanstreets and great avenues of New York, he saw the juggernaut of laissez faire capitalismdestroy neighborhoods, pack tenants into small spaces, pollute the air and water, andcreate a mass of rootless workers.There seemed to be no limits to exploitation anddestruction [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]