The think-tank that I have been hired for, Ecology in the City, has met a couple times now. I just finished my first summary, we decided these would be very short explications of our thoughts concerning the material studied. I'm going to post these in hopes that you'll be interested in the work and will share your thoughts on what I'm missing.

Our first meeting was trying to sort out wilderness as a concept and real space. Here's my summary.

Wilderness is often thought of as a wild place situated outside the city. As such it is difficult for most disciplines to approach the topic, including the discipline of philosophy. We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Socrates, the archetypical figure of philosophy, was always to be found in the heart of the city, the marketplace, questioning the men of Athens. It is telling, then, that the one dialogue where he leaves the city walls is concerned with the question of madness. The dialogue takes place next to the river Ilisus, in the wilderness that lays outside of the city walls. We are then to think that this environment is perfect for a discussion of madness.

Historically, then, it has been the city, and not wilderness, that has been the privileged site of rational thought. Furthermore, it has been the city (polis) that has been the privileged site of politics, since only cities can have a polity. A politics has always been followed by the institution of law. Laws, finally, are the privileged structures that hold cities together. Thus, when the United States government created the “Wilderness Act of 1964” it was not working to protect the identity of wilderness as “apolitical”, but was attempting to bring the wild places under the same controls as the city. Such an analysis parallels the analysis given by Thomas Birch, where he explains that wilderness preservation is essentially done in bad faith, ultimately excluding wilderness the same way society excludes prisoners. Such exclusion is never done for the sake of excluding but for reforming, for normalizing the excluded in order to insert them back into city.

We can then see that all thought of wilderness is essential negative. Wilderness is ultimately the Other of the city, politics, philosophy, thought, and even life. Life is understood to be lived to excess in the wilderness, either ending in death or a savage humanity. Since it is questionable whether or not such a wilderness actually exists in modern America it seems helpful, for our task of bringing ecology into the city, to think of wilderness as an intensity of thought. What this means, rather simply, is that wilderness as something thought can open up the possibility of thinking otherwise. Ironically, such thought has already been seized by the marketing world: SUV commercials where the wilderness is the unknown to be explored, theme park commercials which offer a way to experience wilderness in the midst of civilization, and even the bizarre Burger King commercial for its new burger takes place in a kind of new wilderness being settled by a surreal gang of frontiersmen/burger enthusiasts.

What all of these commercials share is an exploitation of wilderness as an intensity of thought that can spurn the consumer to consume something new, while our hope, ultimately, is to find a way to think differently, to think anew, about ecology and its relation to the city. To do so it is not necessary to cease thinking of wilderness as Other to city and law, but we must show how this Otherness is found in the city itself and thus we begin to think of the city in its multiplicity, rather than as an entity unified by law. The city has its wilderness, and that may help lead us to new ways of thinking.