Phytopolis

PROLOGUE

Over the course of just a few decades, humanity has come up against a revolution in its ancestral habits. Without our really being aware of it, but step by step, I would say mile by mile, our species, which until just a short time ago lived immersed in nature, inhabiting every corner of the Earth, has reduced its active range to the point of concentrating most of its members exclusively inside of urban centers. In just a few generations, we have transformed ourselves from a species able to live anywhere into beings specialized in city life. A revolution comparable only to the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers that happened 12,000 years ago.
Today, cities, not the entire planet, are the place where we live. Consequently, the way we have imagined and constructed them, their efficiency, and the effects of their existence on the rest of the world now extend far beyond the realm of urban planning and, on the contrary, have an impact on the lives of all living beings. Life in the city ensures our species improved functionality in many different fields: from energy consumption to transportation, from education to health care, from work and professional opportunities to cultural advancement. Everything works more efficiently in an urban environment. At the same time, the move away from our natural home is the principal cause of many problems of modern life. In order to resolve this apparently irreconcilable conflict between city and nature, the cities of the future, whether constructed ex novo or renewed, will have to bring nature back inside our new habitat, transforming cities into phytopolises (phyto, or plant + polis, or city), living cities in which the relationship between plants and animals approaches the relationship that we find in nature: 86.7 percent plants and 0.3 percent animals (humans included). This would involve dedicating a large part of the surface area of a city to plants, which is the exact opposite of what happens today. I can’t think of anything more important than this for the future of humanity: recalibrating our relationships with the other living beings, first among them our relationship with plants.
The relationship between people and plants is a challenging one; it involves something whose very essence escapes the understanding of most of us, despite being so simple it can be described with just one word: dependence. Animal life depends on vegetable life. Without plants the life of the entire animal kingdom would be impossible. Plants, in the admirable definition of Kliment Timiryazev, a Russian botanist working at the beginning of the twentieth century, are the link between the Earth and the sun.
Thanks to photosynthesis, plants can perform the apparently miraculous feat of transforming the luminous energy of the sun into the chemical energy (sugars) that allows animals to live and multiply. Photosynthesis is the true engine of life: Water, light, and carbon dioxide combine to produce sugars and oxygen. There is nothing of greater importance; we depend on plants for everything. It is common knowledge that plants are the base of the food chain and that the oxygen that we breathe comes from them. Often, however, it escapes us that fossil fuels (like oil and coal) are composed of the fossils of plants, and that most of the active ingredients in medicines, textile fibers, and building material (wood) is of vegetable origin.
And if all of this still were not enough, add to it that plants are also our home. Literally. Our ancestors were arboreal beings, that is, they lived in trees, as most of the primates who are our closest relatives still do today. This long familiarity with the crowns of trees, with their limbs and foliage, has had more profound effects than we are able to imagine. In a certain sense, our bodies, from their overall structure to the features that we hold to be most characteristically human, faithfully reflect our arboreal genesis. Our binocular vision with eyes pointed forward; the differentiation between our anterior limbs constituted of arms and hands suitable for grasping, and posterior limbs formed by legs and feet suitable for locomotion; our erect posture; our fingers clad with nails instead of claws; the crests on our fingertips that we know as fingerprints, among other things, are all evolutionary modifications that originated to allow primates to live in trees and that have had fundamental consequences for our history.
If you have ever responded to the atavistic impulse to climb a tree, you know that the crown of the tree is a space that is difficult to move around in; a tangle of branches and twigs that grow thinner and thinner toward the perimeter of the crown, where we find the productive part of the tree. In these conditions, having binocular vision makes it easier to judge distances and to move with greater surety; an erect body with prehensile arms is able to climb the trunk and swing among its branches; and, finally, having hands endowed with soft padded fingertips covered with prints and protected by nails makes it possible to reach even the thinnest branches to gather fruit and leaves. Those same hands, suitable for living in trees, also allowed humankind to develop the capacity to make tools.
Much of what makes us human derives from trees. Not only because for millions of years our ancestors lived among their crowns, modeling their own bodies in response to this green environment, but also because, thanks to wood, they succeeded in building their own primary shelters and tools. Humans have coevolved with plants and have always lived in environments in which plants accounted for practically the entire ecosystem. In evolutionary terms, the breaking of this bond is extremely recent. For a few decades now, we have been spending our time in front of computer screens and for three to four generations we have lived inside rooms illuminated with electric light, but before that we were farmers for about five hundred generations, and for something like twenty thousand generations we were hunter-gatherers intimately connected with the natural world and, therefore, with plants, of which that world is almost entirely composed.
Well, twenty thousand human generations do not go by in vain. Those twenty thousand generations of living among plants have a much greater influence on our way of being human than the five hundred generations of agriculture and civilization. Green, for example, is the color of which our species can distinguish the greatest number of different shades. That our eyes are so capable of distinguishing the color of plants, with greater detail than any other color, almost seems a suggestion, as though the very roots of our history indicated where it is important for us to focus our attention. It is as true today as it was three hundred thousand years ago that our capacity to survive depends on plants. However, despite our historical relationship with plants, we now seem intent on imagining ourselves as a species situated outside of and, obviously, above nature. We have erased plants from our horizon, becoming blind to the very world on which we depend.
Put another way, our relationship with plants is not limited simply to our nutritional or energy dependence, however we want to define that, but goes much deeper and involves the strong impact of plants on all aspects of our lives. Even when it comes to constructing or changing how we conceive of our cities, listening to those twenty thousand generations that preceded us and whose home was a forest may turn out to be fundamental. In a period of such drastic changes, in which resilience and the capacity to adapt become fundamental values, imagining our cities as diffuse organisms in community with all other living beings—in short, imagining our phytopolises as though they were organized like plants—could bring enormous advantages to our species and to our planet.