Concrete traces
Dear Jolene,
I found these bird footprints in the cement outside my hotel on Avenue Parc in Montreal, technofossils that preserve a record of both the bird who walked on it, and of the man-made cement forms I walked over on my way home. The discover was another bleak joy -- a surprising trace of sky on land, of motion in the immovable. I grew up in an Edmonton suburb where everything was either pavement or lawn, and so am not able to read the traces well enough to tell what kind of bird or birds landed there, or guess whether the wet cement hardened on their feet, making it hard for them to walk or fly.
When they paved the sidewalks in front of my house, long ago, we ran outside as soon as the workers were gone, and with a twig I broke off my tree, traced our first initials, mine a wobbly M preserved forever, saying I was here. This was an act of preservation tied, as so many things we do, to some kind of unarticulated anticipated grief around disappearance. What is that need to leave these kinds of anonymous monuments behind? It feels childish now.
I work in a cement brutalist building on a campus full of cement brutalist buildings in a cemented city full of cement architectural structures. The planetary cost of cement is terrifying. Cement is humanity's most abundant manufactured material. More than 500 billion tonnes of cement are produced globally annually. Landscapes are torn up for the sand and gravel that are used to make it, and they're torn up whereever the cement is lain. The manufacturing of cement has a high environmental cost too; it is responsible nearly 8% of all anthropogenic C02 emissions. Cement cities are heat sinks, and when cement's hard surfaces replace porous surfaces, there is significantly greater flood risk.
And of course, cities pave over immensely productive soil that evolved over millennia, damaging the microbiome forever. The compulsive overpouring of concrete is another slow and smothering violence, and all for what? an experience of permanence as we're facing down extinction?
We need to soften the cityscapes. Let them be porous; let moss and lichen and flowers grow in every crack. Let's forest floor the roads, and cover every wall and fence with climbing plants that provide cooling shade and safe harbor for bees and birds. Let's remeadow every meridian. No more technofossils; just living breathing dying absorbing soft cities.
Sources
Fuller, Matthew, and Olga Goriunova. Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “The Technofossil Record of Humans.” The Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 1, Apr. 2014, pp. 34–43. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019613514953.
