It may seem strange to include Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map as one of my titles in this blog, but it has made me seriously think about how we live upon our planet. Johnson retells the story of how Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead teamed up to unraveled the mystery of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. The struggles that science had to prove itself in that day and age when the intelligentsia and even the scientists couldn't expand their thinking to encompass the possibility of disease causing agents which were invisible to the naked eye are well documented. Today because of our technology we are aware of bacteria, with the electron microscope we see into the structure of viruses, and with ever improvements we are now visualizing atoms. Changing the way people see their world was the biggest challenge that Snow and Whitehead had to face.
Having grown up in the suburbs I can only imagine life in one. After marrying my husband, we settled into a community thirty miles or so outside of Boston in what some would call "the woods." We love it, and I can imagine living anywhere else especially not the city. I went to college in Worcester and as New England's second largest city, I didn't feel it to be all that big, not like Boston. With my son heading off to college, and most likely one in Boston, I will have to change my country mouse ways.
Johnson's book, especially the last chapter made me rethink cities. Over the past two weeks, my ecology class has been studying human population and its growth. We've discussed the pressures that an ever growing population has on its immediate environment and the planet as a whole. Johnson makes an excellent argument for urban living. The footprint of the high numbers of urban dwellers is in fact smaller than us suburbanites. With more and more of us moving to urban areas will this in fact be a way to be better to our planet? I hadn't thought so, but it comes with the caveat that we will have to provide an infrastructure to protect the public health such as London did all those years ago by finally building a sewer system that removed animal and human waste and protected the purity of the public drinking water supply.
In the end this book has changed my life as it has caused me to rethink how I live and how I teach. I'm not just ready to sell my house and move to the city, but I will respect that cities have an important role to play in helping to "green" our planet.
