Santiago is a cool town. I’ve been twice and I would definitely recommend a visit. It kind of answers the question, “what would Mexico City be like if it were in a developed, first-world country?”
Nature is beautiful. Majestic mountain ranges. Sharp pavement roads. Concrete everywhere. The tiniest touch of green regulated to little parks. Not another animal in sight except for pigeons finding trash in vacant parking lots. Sometimes I like to sit on a porch and really take in all the air, noise, and light pollution. Ah
Yeah I can’t help but feel so frustrated seeing people develop places like this. In order to support wildlife they need valleys as well as mountains. You can’t just build on every strip of usable land because a lot of animals need to graze and nest there too.
Then you should do some reading. Latin America is the most urban region in the world.
We have small pockets with high density like Santiago. It has 1/3 of the population of NYC but 150% of the population density. And NYC is by far the densest US city.
The result of this is wide swaths of nature, I grew up used to seeing no buildings or anything else man made all the way to the horizon. When approaching my hometown we would first see the city glow, because you get actual darkness out in the country. In the US’ lower 48 only part of Oregon and Nevada get close to that.
Of course now US companies are once again trying to destroy our land with careless mining.
I’m glad to hear that’s not the case! I was speaking on my own experience living out west in the US where there is still a lot of public land. The attitude in the western US is unfortunately pretty bad. They want more and more public land to develop into low density single family home markets like Phoenix. It’s pretty infuriating hearing the locals moan about BLM and concoct conspiracies about how they stole land from them and show zero interest in the health of the local wildlife.
There’s still quite a bit of untouched land in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Navajo, basically anywhere that has large amounts of BLM land, but this unfortunately is getting pushback from locals who want everything to be developed.
Artist Bordalo II creates representation of animals on a large scale, built almost exclusively with garbage (as Bordalo says, the same material that kills them), aiming to provoke a different look at our consumerist habits.
“Half Rabbit” GTM | Gaia Todo um Mundo in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, 2017
mildlyinteresting
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.