What I'm about to write is a kind of parable. As befits a piece which is partly retrospective, it’s about the contrasts between past and future. In particular, it’s about a small part of the unfolding future which I’ve glimpsed recently.

Not far from where I live, in south London, is a park with, backing on to it, some large and expensive houses. Since the houses are priced towards £2 million, they’re occupied by the new feudal plutocracy of City and Plc, and at the bottom of their gardens, where the hoi polloi can rubberneck through the high wire fencing, a strange little rash of new buildings has sprouted. There are at least three of them now, as neighbor has copied neighbor, they look a little like posh garden sheds and they cost upwards of £10,000. Unless you knew the people concerned or had minutely observed the construction process, you couldn’t begin to imagine what was going on inside them.

Each shed contains, not the old-fashioned implements of toil, but a small and perfectly formed swimming pool where, in peace and total privacy, the new plutocrats can pit their wills and their stamina against an electrically-generated current precisely calibrated to their selected swimming speed. The pools are not much bigger than a bath so you can’t swim anywhere even if you wanted to. You swim, and swim, but you stay in the same place. The technical term for this exercise is “resistance swimming.” One of the models is known as an “endless pool.”

I was brought up on the outskirts of Manchester – which was a lot wilder than it might sound. We had an overgrown garden where I spent long periods up trees, a couple of nearby ponds, a wood and a semi-functioning farm within a few hundred meters and, beyond them, a peri-urban river valley with marshy bits and bulrushes. As for garden sheds, we had an outbuilding we called a toolshed. It contained, as the name implies, tools – rakes, hoes, spades.

Absolute wealth in those days was much less and inequalities less pronounced: ostentatious affluence seemed rare. No one worried too much about crime, no doubt in part because there was less to pinch, and children routinely undertook long solo journeys on public transport without the protection of mobile phones. Children also contributed to household tasks – one of my jobs was to clean the grates and make the fires – and were regularly subject to tellings-off by ‘strangers’ in public when they misbehaved.

I imagine these sorts of recollections will be shared by most people of a certain age. Those who feel excluded from them – usually because they are too young to have any comparable memories of their own – often resort to satire. Yet one of the inevitable consequences of aging – any aging, even from one’s twenties onwards – is that we acquire perspectives that are simply unavailable earlier. We neglect these perspectives, I think, at our peril.

I have no idea whether ‘life’ was ‘better’ or ‘worse’ in the 1960s: the question, as soon as you pose it, slithers out of control. What evidence we have suggests we’re nearly three times richer, in money terms, but somewhat less contented. But when one looks at how attitudes to the environment have developed, it’s difficult not to reach bleaker conclusions.

The orthodoxy is that the environment has been mainstreamed, embodied in institutions, policies and attitudes, and that green civil society has never had it so good. It’s a superficially attractive argument but it ignores some powerful countervailing forces. Among these I would list: the rise of competitive individualism as the dominant planetary ideology; the primacy of ‘feelgood’ commercial values; the decay of belief in collective action, coupled with a growing fear of the public realm; and the spread of material wealth. In particular, that threefold increase in income has enabled people to gratify their appetites in ways undreamt of in the 1960s, turning wants into needs, moderation to excess, abundance to satiety. Alcohol and cars, both absent in my childhood, have become toxic. Children, taught to regard designer labels as a birthright, are insulted if you ask them to wash up. Possessions, now ubiquitous, are the feedstock of crime.

Our new wealth, far from strengthening planetary awareness, seems to have dissolved, or at least diluted, it. I’m not sure which is the more depressing – the relative absence of environmental concern among teenagers and twenty-somethings, the relapse of our attitudes towards other species or the repeatedly demonstrated tendency of behavior to change only when crisis is imminent. Thus, while the 1960s gave us environmentalism, the 21st century, so far, has given us denial. In some all-encompassing way, human society has turned in upon itself and, partly as a corollary, our psychological freedoms – our sense of what it is to be a free individual – are trammelled and diminished. This, for me, is the most worrying change of all and I think it can be partly traced to the physical and demographic contexts of our lives.

Over the last 40 years, the UK, and the world in general, has become more populous, more urban, more managed, trodden, dwelt on. There are some seven million more people in the UK – a city the size of London, so that we live increasingly hugger-mugger with each other, our appetites and impacts much greater, our lives and living spaces, of necessity, more tightly controlled. For me, the ramshackle woods and ponds of the urban fringe have been replaced by the managed green spaces of suburbia. It’s hard for kids now to find trees to climb in, even if they were allowed to, gardens are getting smaller, tools are for the vanishing manual classes and most professional lives are spent staring at a computer. As a species, we have moved into the Great Urban Indoors, with its manifold diversions and distractions, and we are simply losing sight of nature, except as an occasional occurrence at weekend or on holiday, and then usually in surrogate or replica form. Is it, therefore, any wonder that what we don’t see, we don’t think about much, or don’t care for? Or that we withdraw into ourselves, our homes, our families, fetishizing what they contain – décor, careers, possessions, progeny?

In that sense, the endless pool is a version of the future – a vision of where wealth, overpopulation, individualism and commercialism are taking us. It’s about denial, certainly, but denial given a perverse twist by indulgence and extravagance – in this case, the pumping out of CO2 emissions for an activity, like patio heating or power showering, that is essentially marginal. It’s about how pathogenic our urban habitat has become – sedentary, claustrophobic, self-reflective – and thus about the contemporary ego, its obsession with body image, its deepening narcissism. It’s also about our relationship with the world beyond home, office and city, or such of it as remains. When I saw the first endless pool being erected, it struck me as another of the over-ripe fruits of privilege, another sign of how the superfluously rich are shutting themselves away from the rest of us, but I now think that’s only half the story. In reality it’s a journey into onanism, solipsism and decadence – a solitary traveller in an ersatz environment, moving constantly, seeing nothing, going nowhere.

_David Nicholson-Lord is chair of the Urban Wildlife Network and deputy chair of the New Economics Foundation and research associate for the Optimum Population Trust. His latest book is Green Cities: And Why We Need Them (NEF, 2003)

 
 

COMMENTS:

Where is this all going? A Star Trek-type holodeck for everyone in which any simulated reality can be experienced? Is this bad? Is this good? Is a moral judgement even relevant? The commons vanished so long ago that if I can afford to create my own virtual garden, I just might jump at it. I certainly don't see the old greens and ponds coming back any time soon. We are too numerous!
Chidi Ofodile

I don't think any of this is new. Sure it's worrying, but materialism and the hording of mammoth was condemned strongly in the bible, which was supposed to have been written 2000 plus years ago. Greenhouse gases and global warming (although it is being neglected by many top corporations) is starting to be taken seriously. What people have forgotten is the power of a collective in democracy. If you get 3 million people in a city of 5 million to converge on a point the government has to listen.
Ian Murphy

Having lived through the 1960s, the Good Old Days aren't always as good as I remember them. I can remember when visible minorities were to be shunned, women were supposed to give up their jobs to raise a family, and you had to dress up just to go to the market! You think the media was controlled by a few people then, I can remember anyone who wasn't a WASP was never on tv and even all newsreporters were male. Sure, things have changed, the whole world is always changing. Maybe 40 years from now, someone will be saying these are the Good Old Days.
Mike Smith

A well-articulated article. How London in particular has lost its soul. A myriad of inwardly career driven lost souls; invariably the mass influx of foreign migrants get sucked into this mentality. Sending money home whilst bemoaning Urban London life. As the onslaught of urban suburbia continues entire towns become mere commuter towns dreaming of wealth whilst oblivious to the bigger picture. Only I've succumbed and I'm not sure I know what that bigger picture is.
Nick Taylor

Dear David – The endless pool that you describe had a precursor, which still survives in the gym or health club. It is called the treadmill. Maybe you want to look into the origin of that treadmill. Going back to the source of replicating Nature, we may arrive at some answer. I want to share an experience that is becoming common among the affluent in India. I was on a train from Mumbai to Pune and passing through a mountainous section called the Western Ghats. As we climbed higher, a lady opened the window and suddenly exclaimed, "How cold! It's like opening the door of the fridge." She was comparing cold in Nature to the cold created by a fridge! Would she, I wondered, have exclaimed, "How cold! It's like being in the ghats, everytime she opened the fridge door at home?"
Joseph MP (Pune, India)

An amazing article! Having lived in East London 20 years ago and now returning to photograph and document the deprivation and, if you will, cruft that I expected to find I discover most of it has changed. Not for the better though in my opinion – there are no communities in the New East End, only blocks of isolation guarded from some everpresent threat of what? By all-seeing cameras and signs that put you in no doubt as to how welcome you are in the area. I fear that I may have left my research too late.
Peter Garner

I pity these people. Isolated from life. I can only think about the poor woman in the Loneliness and Technology article by Jenny Uechi. Behaviour like this will only usher the arrival of the greatest fear of the rich, upper classes: A lonely death. Good luck!
GLUE

We are livestock!! Stupefied and contained by concrete walls and concrete social ideals. Content in our ever present hunger for needless excess. We live in a world where it has become – if you are entrepreneurially minded – very easy to be very very wealthy especially considering the Internet. There are innumerable ways to spend our money we are blinded by our wealth. Our modern western capitalist society has created a new kind of nature moulded by fashion and pop culture. We are becoming something subhuman and unnatural. Grey is the new green. Don't submit to their shiny temptations. We are being farmed born to consume, excrete and reproduce. Eternally saddened and we don't know why we don't question it either. If we aren't superrich we want to be so we are still blinded by greed. Mass proposals for an overall alternative society is much needed the planet is sick of being ignored it will begin to fight back. Are you worthy to live on this planet? Submit to nature not to want.
Outer Entity

What is most evident and true to me from this essay is the emptiness of so many lives now, especially those with money to spend and time to do nothing. Even the reality shows on television now prize in these people that the rest of the country hopes they never become.
Gretchen

I recently saw that a study was done as well on techonology and how it seems to be leading to us further isolating ourselves from real human contact. The average person today has two close friends, compared to the late eighties where it was three. Not that this is an alarming change, but seems that just when it comes to cell phones and other tech gadgets we are increasingly loosing valuable social contact and replacing that with these tech items. I mean the corporations also want these tech gadgets to become fads so they can sell them and then sell add-ons and games for them. They suck off of our incomes and people don't care – I think cause for now it isn't a problem, not until there seems to be a connection found (perhaps a connection like cancer and cigarettes which took decades to finally prove!)
chris

And what do any of you propose is a viable solution? I'm sure the countercultural elites know the future for the planet better than the farmed masses.
Colin

I live in Austin Texas, a fairly green city by US standards, and every word you said I agreed with. It is sad that in a world so large, the same problems exist everywhere. I have friends younger than me who would never even think of recycling unless I harp on it. I worry what their children will be like. It is a dismal future for the planet.
Patty

Though this very thing is happening where I live now, I do not necessarily think that urban sprawl is all evil. To prevent it from becoming so you MUST become part of your local government, or if there isnt one yet, form one. This is pretty much the only way to defend yourself, or just to have a justified right to bitch about the state of things. Furthermore, are these things really a sign of humans outgrowing their ego? Of course not. As we the western world survive our quality of life constantly grows better because of this consumeristic fascismo anticapitalist buzz word... The only expense for this gain? The lives of expendibles, because as our quality of life rises, so does another fall.
MatthewSCUSA

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