IELTS
JOURNAL
129
The US City and the Natural Environment
A
While cities and their metropolitan areas have always interacted with and shaped the
natural environment, it is only recently that historians have begun to consider this
relationship. During our own time, the tension between natural and urbanized areas
has
increased, as the spread of metropolitan populations and urban land uses has
reshaped and destroyed natural landscapes and environments.
B
The relationship between the city and the natural environment has actually been
circular, with cities having massive effects on the natural environment, while the
natural environment, in turn, has profoundly shaped urban configurations. Urban
history is filled with stories about how city dwellers contended with the
forces of
nature that threatened their lives. Nature not only caused many of the annoyances of
daily urban life, such as bad weather and pests, but it also gave rise to natural disasters
and catastrophes such as floods, fires, and earthquakes.
In order to protect themselves and their settlements
against the forces of nature, cities
built many defences including flood walls and dams, earthquake-resistant buildings,
and storage places for food and water. At times, such protective steps sheltered
urbanites against the worst
natural furies, but often their own actions – such as
building under the shadow of volcanoes, or in earthquake-prone zones – exposed
them to danger from natural hazards.
C
City populations require food, water, fuel, and construction materials,
while urban
industries need natural materials for production purposes. In order to fulfil these
needs, urbanites increasingly had to reach far beyond their boundaries. In the
nineteenth century, for instance, the demands of city dwellers for food produced rings
of garden farms around cities.
In the twentieth century,
as urban populations increased, the demand for food drove
the rise of large factory farms. Cities also require fresh water supplies in order to exist
– engineers built waterworks, dug wells deeper and deeper into the earth looking for
groundwater, and dammed and diverted rivers to obtain water supplies for domestic
and industrial uses. In the process of obtaining
water from distant locales, cities often
transformed them, making deserts where there had been fertile agricultural areas.
Dostları ilə paylaş: