Imagine that you are sitting in a hermetically sealed concrete and steel tower, surrounded by other concrete and steel towers. Hear the constant hum of cars and electrical devices and phone conversations. The whirr of the hard disk, the printer chugging away in the corner, doors opening and shutting.

You’re sitting under artificial, fluorescent lighting, staring at a cathode ray or liquid crystal computer display, hands on a keyboard, typing, feet resting comfortably on carpet.

Now, imagine that you’re an urban planner, planning for the natural environment that is so far from where you are and your life (the man-made park, “ecoroof” and potted plants don’t count) that you’d have to get in your car and drive just to find it.

Thisis how we do things–the “environment” has become an abstraction. It refers to constructs like a narrow “greenway” along the front of the South Waterfront towers. A “pocket park” covering part of a city block. Landscaping in the parking strip, or your yard, or a sprinkling of street trees. Occasional trips to the beach or the Gorge or a camping trip near Mt. Hood–driving your car or SUV and carefully swaddled head to toe in all the latest gear from REI or Patagonia, of course.

This is part of why concepts like “sustainability” make little sense–we’ve abstracted the ecology of the world around us into something that has “needs” that, if only fulfilled while meeting the needs of the human community and its economy, we achieve “sustainability.” A wondrous “Triple Bottom Line“. Green. Natural. Profitable.

As we continue to abstract away and remove ourselves from the ecology we depend on, it becomes harder to even have a conversation about it with another human being. It becomes harder to care. Like distant relatives we’ve never met getting sick and dying, we hear reports of the sickness but to our dull surprise find that we don’t care so much after all. Our standards are so very, very low. We’ll accept that South Waterfront greenway, only willing to put up a fight when it comes to determining its width.

Soon, I think, there won’t be much “environment” in the city to fight over.