Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Environment in Media Theory

The concept of "media ecology" relies on a metaphorical transfer that media theorists took over from urban sociology, where "human ecology" had in its turn developed out of a translation of categories from biological ecology. I would like to begin by exploring some of the implications of this double transfer obliquely, by way of a literary rather than a theoretical text: Gary Snyder's poem "Walking the New York Bedrock" (1987). In this poem, Snyder describes the densely populated and artificial environment of Manhattan in terms of natural metaphors that assimilate it to a biological ecosystem. At a literal level, he points to the natural organisms that inhabit the city, from the "spiderwebs, fungus, lichen" of subway tunnels to birds and gingko trees in parks and streets; metaphorically, he compares the movement of visitors in Manhattan's art museums to that of fish or planets, the back and forth of helicopters "[t]rading pollen and nectar" to that of insects, and the stratified human habitats, from the street level of the homeless to the top floors of skyscrapers, to plant growth of varying heights in a forest, the top ones being exposed to more sunlight and thereby able to perform "[m]ore photosynthesis." 1