Matthew Klingle Quotes

How is it that people look at the same city and see such very different places? The answer lies in history, or, more accurately, in how people have chosen to remember the past. The habit of regarding culture and nature as binary categories has shaped how we view cities and their dynamic environments. The result is a kind of intellectual myopia in which 'history is experienced as nostalgia and nature as regret--as a horizon fast disappearing behind us.

Nonetheless, as Seattle's leaders and residents would discover, this new urban environment was a palimpsest of exploitation, conflict, compromise, adaptation, and defeat. Physical forces and creatures beyond human control always pushed back. So, too, did the people who suffered from the changes. The new urban ecology was never the result of purely natural forces but the combination of human power magnified or thwarted by an unpredictable physical environment. The non-human environment that enfolded the city was not predetermined, nor was the poverty that the decades of shaping and reshaping Seattle had aggravated. In the end, the ecology of urban poverty was altogether a human creation.