Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

by Tyson Yunkaporta

A city is a community on the arrow of time, an upward-trending arrow demanding perpetual growth. Growth is the engine of the city—if the increase stops, the city falls. Because of this, the local resources are used up quickly, and the lands around the city die. The biota is stripped, then the topsoil goes, then the water. It is no accident that the ruins of the world’s oldest civilizations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn’t desert before that. A city tells itself it is a closed system that must decay in order for time to run straight, while simultaneously demanding eternal growth. This means it must outsource its decay for as long as possible. For this reason, a city is dependent on the importation of resources from interconnected systems beyond its borders. The city places itself at the center of these systems and strips them to feed its growth, disrupting cycles of time and land and weather and water and ecological exchange between the systems. The exchange is now going only one way. Matter and energy are still neither created nor destroyed in this reaction; they are directed into static heaps rather than cycled back through and between systems.

I think West's studies of cities contradicts a lot of what is written here.