The Allenby Column: Environmental Conservation and Our Flights of Fancy

The routine was not unusual. The flight took off from Phoenix, wheeled, and headed east over the Superstition Mountains. The announcement of the (highly forgettable) film was accompanied by an admonition to lower the aircraft's windowshades to enable those who were utterly bored with life to continue the process via video. Inside the darkened cabin the monitors stuttered for a few moments, and settled into silent life.

I could not help wondering how it was that an entire planeful of apparently sentient individuals could so easily close off one of the truly grand vistas of flight -- the mountains, rivers, and peaks of the American Southwest that spread from horizon to horizon from their window -- to pull down their shades and turn their attention to the plane's micromonitors. Some of them, of course, just wished to avoid being chastised by the observant stewardesses, but this only begs the question. After all, if more people wanted to watch the scenery below them than the monitors in front of them, the airlines, not being stupid, would cooperate.

This is not just a cheap anti-video shot; rather, it is part of a broader observation about the increasing dominance of the created over the ambient environment. In many airports, for example, it is now virtually impossible to escape from the large strategically placed screens that effectively saturate public space with the drone of CNN and the pleasures of 24/7 infotainment ("news").

The airplane as video space is thus just an extension of a trend that has been building across all of our shared spaces, the substitution of the virtual reality of the monitor screen, regardless of content, for what would otherwise be the ambient environment. It should concern environmentalists more than it does, because of what it implies about the construction of individual psychologies in urbanized and high information density societies.

But wait. The view I get from the airplane window of the Superstitions is by no means unmediated. My elevation, and the placement of the window between me and the natural environment, gives me a privileged position vis a vis the individual who toils across the jagged terrain laid out so elegantly underneath me.

It is the modern, democratized, technologically extended version of the first aerial views, the stunning visual mapping of urban environments the inhabitants of the first skyscrapers, such as the Woolworth Building in New York City, obtained.

Such viewpoints are not just new ways of perceiving the same thing; rather, they construct profoundly different realities. If I am hiking a desert wash, or strolling down Fifth Avenue, I am embedded in the immediate environment, and the people, plants and animals, and physical structures around me are integrated at human scale. But the window of the skyscraper or airplane frames a different world, one in which the detail at human scale fades to irrelevance, and where, instantiated as a privileged and external observer, I see context, not the real people and plants of urban and desert environments.

Moreover, the window is not simply a frame. It's also an identifier of power, because the technology (of skyscraper or aviation) provides me with a privileged observational position. If this strikes you as fanciful, just consider how much of a movie and television staple the skyscraper office with its vista window behind the executive/power broker/international criminal mastermind desk is. Power gets cities, and mountain ranges, laid at its feet.

Finally, in delicious irony the viewpoints of virtual realities reflect back to the perspectives of the earlier technologies: flying and fighting in cyberspace relies on perceptual education gained through the mediation of windows of automobiles, airplanes, modern urban built environments.

So I kid myself when I purport to compare the "natural" vistas from the window of the plane curving east above Phoenix with the obvious artificiality and banality of the inflight movie. In fact, my cognitive systems are already so modified by technological environments, and the information density and complexity of the modern world, that the mediation of the window fades, and I easily conflate the map enabled by my window seat in the plane with the thing mapped

I can't help wondering, as I give in to protocol and slide the shade shut and the movie starts, whether environmentalists realize how culturally contingent their underpinnings are, and worry as much as I do about what will happen as more and more people are separated by more and more windows from the world that they seek to preserve.