Urban Environment Quotations

"My life has been spent in urban and suburban sprawl where the natural world is largely obscured by the asphalt, steel, and concrete that weigh down the American landscape. Nature seems mostly absent from this world. . . . In fact, nature is there, but it has been so thoroughly controlled and mastered that, in a sense, it ceases to exist. Members of the metropolis take the domination of nature for granted. Indeed, the conquest of nature is so central to American culture today that we hardly give the idea a second thought." Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. xi.

"The construction of technological networks in American cities for the transmission of water, wastewater, power, communications, freight, and people dramatically altered the context of city life and the effect that urban centers had upon their surrounding environments." Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996), p. xxx.

"Urbanization removes much of the filtering capacity of soil and rapidly channels precipitation into available watercourses. . . . City building affects the atmosphere by increasing airborne pollutants and also creating 'heat islands' where temperatures are greater than the surrounding area. Various urban activities produce huge volumes of waste products that require complex disposal mechanisms." Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 4.

"Unfortunately, the urban ecosystem seldom treats air and water resources by riparian standards; that is, they are not returned to the ecosphere in the same condition in which they were received." Thomas R. Detwyler and Melvin G. Marcus, eds., Urbanization and Environment: The Physical Geography of the City (Belmont, CA: Duxbury Press, 1972), p. 21.

The urban system is "a giant manmade resource system." Its growth "involves the structuring and differentiation of space through the distribution of fixed capital investments." David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hoplins University Press, 1973), p. 309.

"Urban blacks have been increasingly imprisoned in the physical and social decay in the hearts of major central cities . . . . At the same time whites have fled to the suburbs and the exurbs, separating more and more the black and white worlds." Nathan Hare, "Black Ecology," The Black Scholar 2 (April 1970): 2-8.