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In geometry class, if you start with a false assumption, the proof that follows will also be false, no matter if all the intermediate steps were reasoned correctly. America started with just such a false presumption — the idea that there is always more to be had from the natural world. More oil, more land, more air, more water, more soil, more nature.
No matter how much you consume, there is always more to be had over the next hill, in the next valley, on the frontier, somewhere else.
The American presumption is older than the nation itself, formed in ignorance during the time of European discovery and settlement, and then codified into our system of laws and economic practices. When the country was first explored, sciences like modern geology and ecology were still hundreds of years away and few understood how land was created or how the qualities of land varied and were sustained. Sadly, that same original presumption persists today in how Americans manage our cities, despite centuries of accumulated knowledge. We build cities as if the fossil fuels that power them and the concrete that hardens them were infinite in abundance and can be deployed without regard to the air, water, soil and climate on which all life depends.
Fortunately we are no longer mired in the ecological ignorance of the 18th century or the industrial rampages of the 19th century. The last century saw the defeat of totalitarianism and significant advances against poverty and hatred and racism. Opportunities abound for a smarter, wealthier, better connected, more creative world population that plans towards a healthy environment for the future, but not if we continue to make the old mistakes.
We must collectively discover new solutions that simultaneously satisfy economy, culture and nature, and there is no place better to start than New York City's borough of Manhattan, the iconic center of the city of cities. With Manhattan in mind, I have been working with a team of ecologists, planners, and programmers to develop a platform to re-imagine our future and measure the environmental results.
Out of these efforts has emerged Mannahatta The initiative is modeled on a previous one I developed in That was a book , exhibition and web-based tool that allowed anyone to look back to the time Manhattan called Mannahatta by the Lenape Indians was originally settled years ago in to see — block by block — what the ecology looked like local fauna and flora, but also topography and geology.
He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City—area hospitals.
He then traveled to Washington, D. Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years.
He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass , which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet. Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life.
In Washington, he lived on a clerk's salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him "purses" of money so that he could get by. In the early s, Whitman settled in Camden, New Jersey, where he had come to visit his dying mother at his brother's house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found it impossible to return to Washington.
He stayed with his brother until the publication of Leaves of Grass James R. Osgood gave Whitman enough money to buy a home in Camden. In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy David McKay, After his death on March 26, , Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.
Along with Emily Dickinson , he is considered one of America's most important poets. For me this project took me beyond the love of historic maps and connected these maps with ecology of place. The book Mannahatta , published in is a great resource on process still today.
Mannahatta may refer to: the Lenni Lenape name for Manhattan, meaning "land of many hills"; Mannahatta (poem), a poem by Walt Whitman · Mannahatta. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City Paperback – May 28, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the astounding result of those efforts.
As objects, maps are fascinating artifacts. Even more interesting is using these remnants of history to attempt to visualize and recreate a baseline, whether that be social, ecological, or other.
The work of Dr. Eric Sanderson and the Mannahatta Project takes this concept to a whole new level. My reactions to the schizophrenic nature of the book notwithstanding, I was totally drawn into the chapter on Mannahatta, in method and vision. Today, Treehugger profiled this project, featuring a talk by Sanderson and a range of visuals to provide a vision for what is now New York City — of over years ago.