Concrete Copulation

A fish develops legs, 

crawls onto land, 

invents a mortgage, 

and spends the next several millennia 

trying to get back indoors.

We call this civilisation.

We spend millions of years evolving on the earth, 

billions of dollars extracting things from it, 

and the rest of our lives trying to get as far away from it as possible.

Eventually, we discover concrete.

Sand. Stone. Water. Cement.

The earth, after a brief and involuntary career in geology, gets promoted to real estate.

Mountains become raw materials.

Rivers become supply chains.

Beaches become investment opportunities.

And the species responsible for the arrangement 

starts advertising harmony with nature 

in brochures featuring infinity pools.

The infinity pool is particularly inspired.

We have managed to make water look infinite 

by putting it in a rectangle 

beside a planet running out of it.

Civilisation is full of these little triumphs.

We excavate mountains to build skyscrapers, 

then stand on the forty-seventh floor and admire the view.

We put fences around land 

that existed before the concept of a fence. 

Draw borders across geological formations 

that have never heard of countries. 

Print deeds establishing ownership of a planet 

that has been operating quite comfortably without a legal department 

for four and a half billion years.

Somewhere, a tectonic plate is moving a few centimetres a year, 

entirely unaware that it has violated somebody's property line.

We are the only species 

that can stand on borrowed ground 

and demand the owner produce identification.

And then there's sand.

Sand is what happens 

when a mountain spends a few million years breaking itself down.

We looked at this and thought:

Excellent. Construction material.

Not every grain of sand is suitable for concrete, of course. 

Its usefulness depends on where it came from, 

how it was shaped, and what it can do. 

River sand, desert sand, crushed rock. 

Geology has its specifications.

Even the earth has a quality-control department.

We have a procurement team.

And our procurement team has been having a spectacular century.

We dredge rivers until their beds begin to collapse.

Strip coastlines of what protects them,

then commission studies to determine why they are collapsing.

This is what we call progress: 

making a problem expensive enough 

that the people who created it can build careers solving it.

We will destroy a wetland

to build a luxury housing complex,

install artificial landscaping,

and advertise the development as an escape into nature.

The trees are ornamental.

The lake is a feature.

The birds are a bonus.

The entire ecosystem has been reduced to amenities.

Nature has finally found employment in the service industry.

It is not permitted to unionise, though.

We paved the earth against the rain,

then built drainage systems

to make the water someone else's problem.

The sky kept its appointments.

The soil could no longer keep them.

But the city looks beautiful at night.

This is important.

The city must look beautiful at night.

Otherwise, somebody might notice what it took to make it.

Every civilisation has its preferred method of concealing a crime from itself.

Ours uses architectural lighting.

Glass facades. Illuminated towers. Landscaped terraces. 

A marketing department that can make the excavation of a mountain sound like a lifestyle upgrade.

Luxury redefined.

Usually by the square foot.

We have even managed to make impermanence aspirational.

Buy a home, they say. 

Build equity. 

Leave something behind for your children.

Leave them what, exactly?

A thirty-year repayment schedule? 

A shrinking coastline? 

A river converted into a municipal problem? 

A city where the temperature is rising, 

the groundwater is falling, 

and the air purifier needs a replacement filter 

that costs more than an entire village's monthly water bill?

Our ancestors left us rivers, forests, coastlines, and soil.

We are leaving our descendants the invoice.

And concrete. So much concrete.

Concrete is humanity's favourite love letter to permanence, 

which is a little like writing a love letter to a corpse 

because you appreciate its commitment to staying in one place.

We have spent thousands of years 

building things that promise to outlast us, 

and naming them after places we are busy destroying.

We are not the landlords of this planet.

We are an unusually destructive tenant 

with a god complex, a construction loan, 

and a remarkable talent for blaming the building when the plumbing fails.

The lease was never signed.

The deposit was never paid.

The landlord has never once acknowledged our existence.

And still, we keep renovating.

Because what else would we do with the time we have?

Sit on the ground? 

Feel the sand between our fingers? 

Look at a mountain without calculating its commercial potential? 

Allow a river to be a river, a forest to be a forest, 

a coastline to exist without somebody submitting a proposal?

That would be absurd.

We are civilised.

We have paperwork.

We have cranes.

We have an entire species dedicated to converting the things it cannot create into things it can sell.

And the fish?

The fish left the water,

crawled onto land,

invented a mortgage,

and spent several millennia trying to get back indoors. 

And when it finally did,

it found the water waiting for it.

In a rectangle.