Passage #185: 6 February 2013
Second Nature
Boy, oh boy, do humans like to wrangle nature. We chop it, extract it from the ground, refine it, move it, dam it, shape it, smack it up, flip it, rub it down, just generally bend it to our will in every which way we can. Yeah. Do we ever.
And from this we get cities. We get food. We get transportation. We get the computers that this is message is being composed upon and will be read. We get, in short, civilization. Cool.
Yet we also get an environment that is radically altered and perhaps irreparably damaged. We get smog and "superstorms." We get wars for oil. Blech!
This week on the ride we investigate a couple of the city's nature stories. And because this is Los Angeles, they are both bold and uncanny, beautiful and perhaps wrong.
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