Gardner, Jean_Re-Membering-Soil for Resilient Cities

8/4/2019 Gardner, Jean_Re-Membering-Soil for Resilient Cities

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RE-MEMBERING: Soil for Resilient Cities

By Jean Gardner!2007

Abstract: Historical cities offer insights relevant to current efforts to build resilient cities. The

following essay explores the bonds between three soil communities and their cities, --Uruk,

Athens, and Machu Picchu. These cities illustrate three different relationships to soil, -- as a

Parasite on Soil, as a Disease of Soil, and as a Soil Maker. Based on this research, the authorsuggests how current cities can become soil makers, thus supporting the life community upon

which they depend.____________________________________________________________________________

Like a sage, a trickster or saint, Gilgamesh was a hero who knew secrets

and saw forbidden places, who could even speak of the time before the

Flood because he lived long, learned much.1

From out of the far distant past comes the story of Gilgamesh, King of

Uruk, a story of unexpected interest today. It is a story lost for millennia,

only to be rediscovered in the mid 19th

century. The story opens with the

tragic efforts of Gilgamesh to develop Uruk in defiance of naturesconstraints. The story endswith Gilgamesh realizing that human immortality

depends upon accepting natures limits. It is a story that the constructors of

the first industrial cities failed to heed, -- a story that speaks to us today.___________________________________________


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The Seeding of Cities

SIX THOUSAND YEARS AGO ancient Uruk formed part of a network of settlements that for

the first time made urban life possible. Located along the Euphrates River just north of thepresent-day Persian Gulf, Uruk was the chief cultural center of Sumer and its foremost religious

center. In the sacred precinct of the fertility Goddess Ishtar stood her Ziggurat, which represented

the Cosmic Mountain that arose out of the primal chaos at the moment of creation. Her Templewas never surpassed in Sumer in size and architectural articulation. The terraces of the steppedaltar regularly held the vegetable offerings of Uruks gardens and date groves, transforming the

tiered Ziggurat into a series of green roofs.2

It was Gilgameshs duty as King to embellish and maintain Uruk in celebration of its rulingdivinities. City walls were the dominant feature of Sumerian urban architecture, while gateways

displayed the citys wealth, impressed visitors, and served as civic centers.3

To enhance the wallsand gateways, Gilgamesh defied an ancient sacred prohibition against felling cedars growing on

the mountains to the north of the city. He and his companion, Enkidu, killed the protective forestmonster and then clear-cut the cedars to construct a magnificent new gate in the city ramparts.

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Gilgameshs actions angered the supreme Gods, who inflicted flood, famine, and sorrow on theinhabitants of Uruk. The Gods also cursed Enkidu, who personifies what is wild and untamed in

the human, with a painful death. Horrified at the possibility of his own death, Gilgamesh seeksimmortality. After fruitless wanderings, the King realizes that he can only achieve eternal life

through the longevity of what he builds to sustain Uruk. At the end of the tale, he concentrates on

maintaining the city walls, canals, gardens, and temple precincts.

Modern ecology interprets this nearly five thousand year old tale for us. Clear cutting mountainforests destroys wild nature. It leads to increased water run-off and unexpected, often destructive

flooding. Torrential inundations in turn drown crops in the surrounding low-lying lands, creating

famine. Cities and their civilizations face the likelihood of demise when their food supply ends.Their citizens face dire choices: starving to death, subjugating foreign territories that can supplythem with food, being conquered by enemies or abandoning their city.

Sustainable design, likewise, illuminates the Gilgamesh legend. Human communities form

significant relations with the natural systems of their locality. Through trade, these essentialbonds extend to the ecologies of far-distant lands. Sometimes, however, as in the case of Uruk,

cities develop life-dependent connections with remote territories whose natural bounty theyviolently seize. The Gilgamesh story, the oldest written record we have, warns us that in order

for urban complexes to achieve longevity, city constructors cannot ignore these ecologicalconnections. Instead, urban builders need to develop building practices that treat cities, their

surrounding regions, the lands of their trading partners, and appropriated lands as one integratedorganism.

History records that the rulers of Sumerian cities did learn to co-exist for an extraordinarily long

time within the Euphrates-Tigris river system, just as the story of Gilgamesh suggests. Theyachieved an urban energetics that gave their cities a longevity the Greek polis never obtained.

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Ultimately, the soils of Sumerian cities lost their viability but only after these settlementssurvived for nearly four millennia. Can our cities achieve a comparable long life? Can green

roofs and other soil-making constructions help in this effort?


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Cities Integral to Soil Communities

CONTRARY TO MODERN PERCEPTIONS, human settlements are not separate from thenatural systems they overlay or from their neighboring countrysides. Instead, cities form vital

relationships within their regional soil communities. British historian Edward Hyams describes

the basic characteristics of soil communities and the position of cities within them in hisextraordinary Soil & Civilization, a historical study of humanitys place within the Earthsplanetary ecology. Hyams reminds us that soil is not a dead inert medium but an organism. The

rock, humus, bacteria, atmosphere, water, fungi, and earthworms that comprise soil constitute abiological, organic, living community. Humans intrude into these communities when they create

cities.

Hyams organizes the relational dynamics that cities form within existing soil communities intothree energetics: Man as a Parasite on Soil, Man as a Disease of Soil, and Man as a Soil Maker.

In order for us to understand the functional place of green roofs and other similar soil-makingdevices within the existing soil communities of todays cities, we need to recognize the ongoing

historical consequences of these three dynamics. They continue to constrain human life today.

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What follows is a brief description of three historical cities, -- Uruk, Athens, and Machu Picchu -

-, that illustrates the three major impacts of cities on soil communities.7

Cities as Parasites on Soil: Uruk

The success of Gilgamesh and succeeding rulers of Uruk was due in large part to modulating

their agriculture practices to the cyclical rhythms of the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial river system.Hyams characterizes this relationship between Uruk and the river system as that of a benign

parasite to its host. In other words, the people of Uruk figured out how to feed on the fertility ofthe river system, much as a few fleas live off a dog, without doing any damage to the canine. As

Hyams indicates, the fruitful soils of the Euphrates-Tigris system do not owe their nearlyinexhaustible resources only to stored capital accumulated during countless years of silting, but

to annual renewal by present and continuing silting. Such soils are capable of supporting aparasitic community for long periods, sometimes almost indefinitely. For centuries, the parasitic

relation of Sumerian cities to this resilient region did no apparent harm. The annual flooding ofthe rivers regularly regenerated the soil community. The Sumerians used the flooding as the

basis of their irrigation-dependent agriculture whose fruits in Uruk they offered to the goddessIshtar.8

However, the waters of the river system, which were absolutely necessary for the Sumerian

irrigation, brought along with them not only fertile silt but, after several thousand years of urbanoccupation, salt. The Sumerians could see the accumulating silt and took precautions against it

clogging their citys irrigation canals. They made dredging and cleaning of canals a top priority.The salt was a different story. It was invisible. Hundreds of years after Gilgamesh first

challenged the forest god, the Sumerians gained control of new timberlands, which they began toexploit. This deforestation exposed expansive areas of salt-rich sedimentary rocks to severe

erosion. Devastating floods and rains occurred, carrying salt downstream. The salt accumulatedin irrigated farmlands and a serious salinity problem developedbecause of inadequate drainage

that, otherwise, would have flushed the salts out of the topsoil.Non-reversible and increasinglydestructive, the salt caused a progressive decline in crop yields, especially barley. After 2000 BC


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the Sumerian empire crumbled, in large part because of the decline of their food supply.9Sumerian rulers subsequent to Gilgamesh had failed to heed the lessons of their own ancestor.

The same story can be told about the civilizations of the Nile, Indus, and Hwang-ho Rivers,

which were born on the resilient soils of their river systems. Without their knowing, these

civilizations, like Sumer, had transformed from being parasites on their soils to being diseases ofthem.10

Cities as a Disease of Soil: Athens

Disease is a failure in the balance by which species live together in community, whether in arelationship of mutual aid, or one of parasite and host. Hyams argues that even in the former

case, there must be equilibrium. If there is an adjusted balance between parasite and host, theformer is fed, the latter not debilitated. This was the situation in Uruk for about three thousand

years after cities first came into existence and a thousand years after Gilgamesh reigned. Then,with the accumulation of salt in the soils, the balance was destroyed, the host soils collapsed and

with them parasitic Uruk. Unlike the ancient Athenians, the peoples of Uruk were unable to

devise ways to continue to flourish on their destroyed soils.

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Improbable as it may seem, it is possible for a city that is a disease organism to create prosperity.

The price can be high as such an existence is extremely precarious. Classical Athens is a case inpoint. Hyams argues that Athens was forced, by the ancient ruin of her original soil

communities, and the consequent spoiling of her top-soil, to conceive, build, man and master theart of a navy, which made her master of Hellas.

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The peoples inhabiting Classical Athens developed a city that is still much admired today. They

incorporated living vegetation, flowing water, topographically sited roadways and passive solarbuildings into a dynamic urban complex. They had gardens in the rear of their houses to supply

fragrant flowers to purify the air and ward off disease. Water was drained from house roofs toretaining basins for feeding the gardens. They had flower boxes against walls with vines trained

up behind them, which cooled the surrounding air. They also decorated their gardens withstatuary of important people and their Gods.

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When private green space was scarce, the Greeks devised rooftop gardens. During the annual

festival of Adonis, a Phoenician god associated with the creation and decay of nature, womencreated gardens atop their buildings by sowing seeds of wheat, barley, lettuce, fennel and

sometimes flowers in shallow silver baskets, bowls or even shards of clay. Images on Greekvases show them carrying these little gardens up ladders to the rooftops for the Adoniscelebration. Watered daily, the plants grew rapidly but because they had shallow root systems

soon died. At the end of eight days the pots of greenery were thrown into a stream or the ocean.14

In addition to these roof gardens, on the summit of Athenss sacred Acropolis, whose namemeans top of the city, was an olive tree. Tradition tells us that Athena caused this olive tree to

sprout when vying with Posiedon for control of the rocky, naturally fortified hill that came tooverlook the Athenian agora. At the time of the contest for the Acropolis, which was long before

the classical period, Athena was a Rock Goddess and Poseidon an Earth-Shaker or Lighting Godof the sky who could bring rain.


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To prove his ascendancy, Poseidon struck his lightningcreating trident in the rock and a springgushed forth, an extremely unusual event at the top of a hill. Athena magically evoked an olive

tree. The judges of the contest decided in favor of Athena, but Poseidon in great wrath would notaccept their judgment and flooded the plain. In ways that are, unfortunately, not handed down to

us, the gods brought about a union between warring Athena and Poseidon. As a result of the

peace between them, Athens honored Poseidon as well as Athena, especially on the Acropolis,where the Erechtheum was built to commemorate their generative powers. This mysteriousbuilding protects Athenas olive tree as well as the trident marks of Poseidon. Although these

indentations are inside the building, they communicate with the sky through an opening in theroof. Both the olive tree and the trident marks propitiate the gods in order to sustain the city

through the precarious cultivation of the olive tree on the impoverished soils of Attica.15

The olive and the fig tree as well as the grape vine belong to a family of plants, which can beused to exploit poor soils. Historical Attica, as Hyams demonstrates, inherited from

prehistoric times one of the poorest and thinnest soils in Hellas. Classical Athens refused to playthe inconsequential role necessitated by the thin and stony soils that its ancestors had created. Its

inhabitants learned to exploit the subsoil as well as create a contrived soil community in whichone of its members was a foreign market. Hyams demonstrates that the olive, in particular,

became unquestionably the spring of Athenian wealth, power, and civilization. But to feed300,000 inhabitants in the time of Pericles, Athens needed more than locally grown olives,

grapes, and figs, and locally produced oil and wine. The Athenians traded these commodities forwheat to make bread. Out of necessity they developed ceramics to contain the wine and oil and

shipbuilding industries to support their exporting enterprises. The rising commercial importanceof Athens in turn necessitated the creation of a fighting navy so Athens could defend herself.

Thus, the challenge of her wretched top-soil made Athens a great manufacturing, mercantileand naval power.

16But as Hyams warns,

It is not safe to forget that trading for food which your land will not afford directly, is a

precarious and vulnerable expedient. The mortal weakness of having a member of

your artificial soil community outside your control generates fear in proportion to what

you have to lose. Athens had an empire to lose, an empire largely created by her fear-

inspired arrogance (Nothing) could save the city from the trap which the poverty of

Athenian soil had set the disgrace and decline of the power, the name and culture of

Athens.17

Just as in the case of classical Athens, modern cities that are diseases on their soil communities

have much to lose. The United States has already lost one-third of its best natural topsoils and theloss of topsoils is accelerating on all other continents. World soil loss is on the order of 25-billion

tons annually and growing. Erosion, desertification, toxification, and non-agricultural uses

consume one-fifth of the worlds arable land. Another one-fifth will be gone by 2050. Thesefigures are for arable land only and do not include the general erosion and degradation of landsall over the earth from human activities such as deforestation, overgrazing, fire and other results

of injudicious human occupancy.18

What will happen when the trading partners of todays cities can no longer supply them withfundamental necessities, such as food and fossil fuels, which have become an essential part of

our global food production system? Do modern cities have alternatives within local soil


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communities to what appears highly likely: the end of petroleum, the driving power of ourindustrialized agricultural system. This food network includes petroleum-based fertilizers, which

make the soils producing the food nearly half the planets population eats. During the post-WorldWar II years of the Green Revolution, when scientists bred grains resistant to pesticides and

responsive to chemical fertilizers, agricultural production outpaced population growth. Today,

however, many agricultural lands once productive under the Green Revolution suffer fromvarious symptoms of mismanagement, -- overuse, salinity, chemical saturation and topsoil loss,all of which decrease crop yields. In addition, the world may only be able to feed a population

of three billion without the input of fossil fuels. The human population of the Earth alreadyexceeds six billion.

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A fundamental shift in perception might be necessary before we can address this and other

problems of human sustainability within todays soil communities. French archaeologists SanderE. van der Leeuw and Chr. Aschan-Leygonie contend that

most, if not all, of the environmental problems we encounter are exacerbated by the

nature-culture opposition in our minds. Separating ourselves from what we consider

to be nature, we have tended to favour human intervention in the natural domain asthe way to solve environmental problems. A growing awareness of this issue

has triggered a shift in the debate on environmental matters. the general tenor of the

shift in perspective can be summarized by pointing out that the role of human beings in

socio-environmental relations has gone from re-active, via pro-active, to inter-active.

The first two perspectives are anthropocentric: either we make exceptions of ourselves

by taking no responsibility, or we do so by taking all the responsibility.

In the last perspective, humans become just another unique species, and take

part of the responsibility which is much more difficult, as it necessitates

determining, in every instance again, where the limits of our responsibility as

human beings lie.20

(bold added for emphasis)

As our role in socio-environmental relations becomes more inter-active, we are increasinglyforced to decide what our responsibilities are in making cities more viable members of their local

soil communities. To what extent can green roofs and other soil-making constructions help? Canwe learn what the latter-day people of Uruk and the citizens of historical Athens did not? Can

we become organic soil makers? The ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu with its gracefulgarden and agricultural terraces atop an 8,000-foot high mountain demonstrates how a human

settlement in the most unlikely place can be a soil maker and an inspiration for current soil-making efforts.

Cities as Soil Makers: Machu Picchu

The true monuments of Inca civilization exist in a context too humble for ready transmission to

modern sensibilities. The Incas were arguably the worlds finest stonemasons, but they did notlavish their skill on ornate temple complexes. As ethno-astronomerWilliam Sullivan points outin The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time, Instead they built

soil. Soil is sacred to the people living in the Andes Mountains in South America. The Earthitself, the Pachamamma, is the Mother-Goddess of all things. By the end of the 11 th century

A.D. the Incas had organized the many local peoples of this rugged land into an Empire. Knownas Tahua-ntin-suyu or The Four Combined Provinces, it reached at its greatest extent 2700 miles

along the present Pacific coast. 21


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The strength of the Inca Empire was rooted in a soil community that blended humanly made-organic and native soils. As Hyams documents, successful soilmaking entails a strict social

discipline, which for the Inca nation meant becoming the most perfectly symmetrical and stable

political units humanity has ever achieved. Despite its complex organization, the Inca nation

retained the most important of their peoples ancient tribal customs, -- the communal ownershipand working of land. From 1400-1532 A.D., this collectively-held, humanly-made land produced

food surpluses used to supply its armies, feed its orphans and widows, eliminate poverty, and

thwart famine for the first and perhaps only time in history.22

How was such an achievement possible? Quite simply, the Andean people were not content to be

parasites on the sparse existing alluvial soils or to become a disease of their soils. In their

narrow, mountainous tract, they lacked not merely fertile soil, but level surfaces of any soil at all.

It was necessary to expand on to the mountainsides. To do this they must check the erosion ofthe slopes and build surfaces level enough to be worked even without the plough. In addition,

they must find ways to cultivate the rainless coastal strips of apparent desert as well as the inland

desert areas. In order to expand over soils that did not receive floodwaters, they must discover theprinciples of soil regeneration. By carefully regulated and controlled use of manures from fish,

by terracing, pit digging and irrigation, the Incas converted their poor natural soil communitiesinto rich, stable, humanly made, organic ones. In short, in contrast to the Athenians and the

inhabitants of most modern cities, the Incas were able, without recourse to trade, to feed their fast-

growing population by becoming organic soil-makers. 23

The city of Machu Picchu with its one thousand inhabitants provides us with a fitting example of

soil-making relevant to contemporary soil-making efforts. Green roof advocates hope to

ameliorate the impacts on the biosphere of constructing cities separate from natural systems.

Some of the functions that the builders of Machu Picchu constructed their sacred city to perform

green roofs accomplish today, -- providing and controlling water flow, making available much-needed space for local agriculture, medicinal herbs, and decorative gardens, and buoying up

human health and well-being.24

Until recently, no one really understood what an extraordinary civil engineering feat Machu

Picchu represents. Within the last twelve years Denver-based hydrologic engineer Kenneth

Wright and his team discovered that this magical city in the clouds is nothing less than an

astonishing interlocking preplanned system that integrates hydrology, hydraulics, drainage,foundation engineering, masonry building technologies, soil making and agriculture. After

twenty years of requesting permission to investigate Machu Picchu, Wright began extensive on-

the-ground research in 1994. To his amazement, Wright realized that this complex of massive

stone buildings and agricultural terraces was conceived and built as a single entirety.

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Reflecting on Wrights descriptions of what he found, I thought of the comparable size and

intricacy of the huge multi-functional structures being proposed today. Several of the giganticbuildings competing to win the Ground Zero competition even included terraced gardens in the

sky. None of these gardens were integrally related to the functioning of their supporting

structures, -- an indication that the civil engineering knowledge of Machu Picchu builders could

help architects who want to strength the relationship of our cities to their soil communities. Thecontinuing functioning of the integrated natural and urban systems at Machu Picchu attests to


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their sophisticated knowledge of city building, a knowledge that could nourish our own

regenerative processes.

Water is the key to understanding Incan civil engineering, just as water is critical to the

regeneration of the soil communities of todays urban-natural systems. Where did Machu Picchu

get its water? How did the Incas bring the water to the city, distribute, drain and carry it awayfrom their city? Even though U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham had uncovered the lost city of

Machu Picchu in the early 1900s, no one had documented the city from this point of view until

Wright began his work.

Farmers living near Machu Picchu led Ken Wright to the location of the water source on a steep

mountain slope north of the city. Wright traced the water from here to, through, and out of the

city-site. In so doing, he realized that the path of the water had determined the entire urban

layout, including the site of the emperors residence and the agricultural terraces. He saw thatthe Inca engineers had constructed an elaborate collection system, which funnels water from the

mountain spring. The present condition of the system surprised Wright. The spring works was

still intact and still working. It was still yielding a water supply after all these (four and a half)centuries of abandonment. Specifically, the water flows down the mountain through aconstructed, gravity-fed 749-meter long canal that is typically 5 inches wide and 4 inches deep.

After descending the mountain, the canal enters the city walls, passes through the agricultural

sector, and into the city center where it feeds a series of sixteen fountains known as the Stairway

of Fountains.

Wrights team found two control points before the main canal reaches the fountains. Thesecontrol points prevent the fountains from overflowing by spilling excess water into the

agricultural terraces or into the citys main drain. The citys main drain is only a part of anelaborate drainage system unstudied until Wright investigated it. He found 130 drainage outlets

integrated into walls and structures throughout the city as well as numerous drainage channelsincorporated into stairways, walkways, and building interiors, all built to carry runoff to the main

drain. To direct water away from building foundations, the Inca carved channels that collectedwater falling from roofs. When laying out the urban plazas, they created a deep subsurface layer

of rocks to help water penetrate the ground quickly.

Wright unearthed other drainage features, which have particular relevance to green roof building.He maintains that Machu Picchus over 12 acres of agricultural and garden terraces are the most

visually striking features of the drainage system. In addition to providing land for growing foodand medicinal and ceremonial herbs the terraces protect the agricultural sector from erosion and

promote good surface drainage. The Inca engineers efficiently drained these terraces, which are

within the city walls, by placing a layer of stones at the bottom, topped by gravel, sandy material,and humanly made organic topsoil. Wright maintains that Machu Picchus well-designeddrainage infrastructure is one of its most remarkable secrets. It is also one of the keys to its

longevity. The Inca constructors built for permanency. They didnt do anything halfway.26

The Flowering of Cities

IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES if we integrated our rooftops and other constructed open

spaces into metropolitan soil communities as part of an extensive soil making system. Envision a


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future city where green roofs are the most visually striking feature of citywide systems designed

to rejuvenate the Biosphere. Entire urban assemblages of buildings, walkways, streets, plazas,parks, water systems, sewage, waste disposal, -- all integrated into an urban energetics that

gathers the movement of water, air, energy, and materials into and out of the entire city as one

multi-faceted dynamic. No longer either parasites or diseases on soils, these future soil-making

cities could create a new, regenerative era in city building. Perhaps their inhabitants could evendevelop longevity for modern cities, as Gilgamesh and his successors did for Uruk.

When we plant vegetation on a roof and in a vacant lot, we create a place to collect, store, andtransform the suns energy into irreplaceable necessities that sustain life. Urban vegetation

provides fundamental natural dynamics within a city that help plants, air, water, energy, earth,buildings, people and other life forms form a self-regulating entity that is life supporting.

Vegetation cleans storm-water runoff, decreases the risk of flooding, mitigates the heat islandeffect by cooling the air, removes pollutants from the air, conserves indoor energy, improves

indoor air quality, controls noise, provides wildlife habitat and much-needed space for localagriculture, increases biodiversity, and sustains human health and well-being.

As we face the prospect of climate change killing off over 1 million species of plants and

animals, extensive urban vegetation could create a planetary network helping to rejuvenate theEarth. In addition, as Hyams reminds us, we could design the layout of the vegetation in ways

that remind us of our place in the Earth Community:

Everything touched by and serving living beings must either be adapted to the fact

that the users life is organic, or must corrupt the user by withdrawing his attention

from this fact.27

The Longevity of Cities

THE WRITTEN LEGEND OF GILGAMESH, the historical Sumerian King who governed over

four and a half millennium ago, is an instant vision of the complex, precarious process ofsustaining cities. The tale helps us re-member our dependent place in the living EarthCommunity. In the spring of 2003, German archeologists announced that they had detected for

the first time the physical remains of the Uruk that Gilgamesh ruled. Using a digital mappingmagnetometer, they traced the organization of some of the gardens, date groves, temple

precincts, canals and irrigation systems used as the basis for Uruks longevity in the FertileCrescent of the Euphrates-Tigris River.28 But, as we have reported, about one thousand years

after Gilgamesh, Uruk did succumb from the salinity of its soils. This event has significance forus when we consider the relation of urban vegetation to the larger regional soil communities of

our cities.

The collapse of Uruks agricultural system due to its contaminated water supply andsaline soils tells us Uruks inhabitants did not monitor their urban-natural water system

for changes necessitating adjustments in their practices. New York Citys response to a1989 United States Environmental Protection Agency water safety requirement indicatesthat it perhaps has learned the importance of such monitoring and adjusting.

The EPA law necessitates that all New York Citys surface water supplies be filtered

unless existing treatment processes or natural conditions provide safe water. In response,

the City developed a comprehensive long-range watershed protection program that was


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able to waiver the filtration process. The program creates a Watershed Protection and

Partnership Council, which serves as a regional forum for discussing and reviewing water

quality concerns and related watershed issues. The regulations also provide for Cityreview and approval of certain activities having a potentially adverse impact on water

quality. 29 Urban vegetation systems should be factored into the New York City systemic

of monitoring and adjusting as a key measure in providing a safer water supply. Such afeedback system is what Uruk needed to alert itself to salt washing down from mountainsso it could provide counter-measures such as re-forestation.

Because urban-natural energetics is dynamic, it demands constant attention to the ever-changing

relationships between soil communities and their cities. Such socio-natural energetics includes

recognizing both what we can and cannot control as we work to strength the resilience of ourcities. It means relinquishing our vain hope to manage nature. Such a sacrifice opens us to the

possibility of experiencing and responding to the acknowledged unpredictability of nature. A

nameless understanding emerges from this experience that takes us beyond the humanly created

technological and aesthetic sublime to a recognition of the horror as well as the awe and wonder

of our participation in the universe. This understanding could give our actions a much-neededaptness to the specifics of each natural event, which is lacking in present efforts to control

natural systems.

______________________________________________

Urban builders need to develop building practices that recognize the ways in which

cities, their surrounding regions, the lands of their trading partners, and

appropriated lands, all ultimately form one integrated organism.When sky gardens

and other urban vegetation modulate human interaction within existing soil

communities to the mutual benefit of both soil communities and cities, then cities

begin to transform into fertile places of organic regeneration. Urban settlements

and their inhabitants become soil-makers and thus, life-sustaining, responsiveparticipants within socio-environmental systems. Then we could join Gilgamesh,

who accepted his own inevitable mortality, in pointing proudly to our cities:

See if its wall is not straight as the architects string.

Inspect its walls, the likes of which no one can equal,

Touch the threshold stone - it dates from ancient times

Go up on the wall and walk around

Examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork

Is not its masonry of baked brick?

Did not the Seven sages themselves lay out its plans?

One square mile city, one square mile palm groves, one square mile

brick pits, and the compound of the Ishtar temple.30

With Gilgamesh, we could proclaim that we have contributed to urban longevity

by monitoring and adjusting cities to the unpredictability of natural systems, thus

supporting the resilience, not only of the human species, but of the Earth itself.

Earth, is this not what you want,Invisibly to arise within each of us? Ninth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke


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1Anonymous, Gilgamesh. http://gilgamesh.psnc.pl/start.html.

2S.Giedon, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1964), pp. 16,

203.

3 A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: A Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1964), p. 128.

4 Anonymous, Gilgamesh. http://gilgamesh.psnc.pl/start.html

5Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia p. 114.

6Edward Hyams, Soil & Civilization (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), pp. 18, 19, 23, 26,27.

7I have explored the three cities more extensively in my courses, professional writing and public speaking.

8 Hyams, Soil & Civilization pp. 28, 29.

9 John Perlin. A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1991), p. 43.

10Hyams, Soil & Civilization p. 29.



13 Jurgen Rohrbach, The Ancient World, Adonis and New Departures (Solon, Ohio: Eco-Roof Systems),

http://www.ecoroofsystems.com/history_files/c_historycont.html.

14 Jurgen Rohrbach. The Ancient World. http://www.ecoroofsystems.com/history_files/c_historycont.html.

15Apollodorus, The Library in James George Frazer, ed., Loeb Classical Library #122, (Cambridge, Mass:

Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 177-179. Special thanks to Metropolitan Museum classicist Susan Springer for

locating the recorded story of Athena and Poseidon and to mythologist Laura Simms for its interpretation.

16 Hyams, Soil & Civilization pp. 92, 98, 99, 103, 104, 106, 111.

17 Hyams, Soil & Civilization p. 114.

18Eric Squire, Hunger, Agriculture, and the End of Cheap Oil. http://www.geocities.com/ericsquire/globenag.htm.

19Eric Squire, Hunger, Agriculture, and the End of Cheap Oil. http://www.geocities.com/ericsquire/globenag.htm.


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20Sander E. van der Leeuw and Chr. Aschan-Leygonie, A Long-Term Perspective on Resilience in Socio-Natural

Systems, paper presented at the Workshop, Systems shocks-system resilience, Abisko, Sweden, May 22-26,

2000, pp. 4-5.

21 William Sullivan. The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time (New York: Crown

Publishing, 1996), p. 303. Hyams, Soil & Civilization pp. 205, 220.

22 Hyams, Soil & Civilization pp 202, 207, 223.

23Hyams, Soil & Civilization pp 219, 223, 228.

24Ruth M. Wright and Alfredo Valencia Zegarra. The Machu Picchu Guidebook (Boulder, Colorado: Johnson

Books, Boulder, Colorado, 2001), p. 98.

25 Kenneth R. Wright, P.E. and Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, Ph.D. and Ruth M. Wright, J.D. and Gordon McEwan,

Ph.D. Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel (Reston, Virginia: American Society of Civil Engineering, 2000).

26 Jeff L. Brown. Rediscovering the Lost City of Machu Picchu. Civil Engineering Magazine, American Society

Civil Engineers, Vol. 71, No. 1, (January 2001): 32-39,74.

27Hyams, Soil and Civilization p. 110.

28Rossella Lorenzi, Setting of Ancient Gilgamesh Legend Found, Discovery News, 2003

http://www.ancientsites.com/aw/Post/159308.

29 The City of New York, Department of Environmental Protection, New York City's Water Supply System.

Watershed Agreement Overview, http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/fadplan.html.

30 Anonymous, Gilgamesh.

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/archaeology/arne1001/2003/ARNE03-08.htm.

Documents

Gardner, Jean_Re-Membering-Soil for Resilient Cities