Systematic Difference and Correlation in Urban and Rural …
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which is a wet blanket on their enthusiasm. The second is public acceptance. Even
when management catches up, most residents don’t take waste sorting seriously and
the sorting facilities in cities are left idle. According to foreign experience, legal
measures have to be taken to enforce waste sorting, but the division of duty and
degree of punishment are both hard to come through. AI has been introduced to help
in certain areas, but public cooperation remains indispensable because, given the
special nature of wastes, if AI facilities are installed all over the country, the upkeep
cost would be unimaginable.
Ecological problems are also reflected in the excessive expansion of artificial
nature, represented by the vanishing boundary between cities and the countryside.
In an article published in 2019, I said nature had a function that I called “accrete
self-organization,” which was the result of natural evolution over a long period. The
“accrete self-organization” is one that includes vital activities, a function that, once
lost, would throw the world back to primitivity. The nature we see can be categorized
into primitive nature, humanized nature and artificial nature depending on how much
its “accrete self-organization” function is maintained. Primitive nature and artificial
nature represent the highest and lowest end of maintenance, with humanized nature
in the middle. Cities are a typical example of artificial nature while the countryside is
an example of humanized nature. The essence of ecological civilization is utilizing
natural resources on the premise of protecting nature’s accrete self-organization function to the largest extent. Industrialization and urbanization are twin brothers. Adam
Smith in his Wealth of Nations ascribed the greatest improvements in the productivity
to the division of labor, which aimed at a high level of concentration of manpower
and materials. That is how urbanization brings economic efficiency, but at the price of
losing the accrete self-organization function. When concentration is of a small scale,
the shortfall can be compensated by the limited humanized nature both within and
around the city; but once concentration reaches a certain scale, especially after a city
belt is formed, “urban maladies” would rise considerably. Urban malady, essentially
caused by the lack of accrete self-organization function, cannot be cured simply
through sanitary means. Replacing the term “Cheng Shi Hua” with “Cheng Zhen
Hua” (both meaning urbanization, the former highlighting “city” while the latter
“city and town”) reflects the consideration to keep humanized nature as much as
possible. The problem now is that man has thought too much of itself and tried to
make artificial nature bigger, stronger, faster, higher, deeper and more convenient,
which unfortunately weakens the accrete self-organization function unlimitedly. The
“landscape” concept proposed by German geographer Humboldt A. encompasses the
existential status and ratio of the three kinds of nature. The landscape in a lot of areas
where fertile land used to stretch far and wide has been devastated. “Nostalgia” will
become a word of the past if urban expansion is not curbed effectively.
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which is a wet blanket on their enthusiasm. The second is public acceptance. Even
when management catches up, most residents don’t take waste sorting seriously and
the sorting facilities in cities are left idle. According to foreign experience, legal
measures have to be taken to enforce waste sorting, but the division of duty and
degree of punishment are both hard to come through. AI has been introduced to help
in certain areas, but public cooperation remains indispensable because, given the
special nature of wastes, if AI facilities are installed all over the country, the upkeep
cost would be unimaginable.
Ecological problems are also reflected in the excessive expansion of artificial
nature, represented by the vanishing boundary between cities and the countryside.
In an article published in 2019, I said nature had a function that I called “accrete
self-organization,” which was the result of natural evolution over a long period. The
“accrete self-organization” is one that includes vital activities, a function that, once
lost, would throw the world back to primitivity. The nature we see can be categorized
into primitive nature, humanized nature and artificial nature depending on how much
its “accrete self-organization” function is maintained. Primitive nature and artificial
nature represent the highest and lowest end of maintenance, with humanized nature
in the middle. Cities are a typical example of artificial nature while the countryside is
an example of humanized nature. The essence of ecological civilization is utilizing
natural resources on the premise of protecting nature’s accrete self-organization function to the largest extent. Industrialization and urbanization are twin brothers. Adam
Smith in his Wealth of Nations ascribed the greatest improvements in the productivity
to the division of labor, which aimed at a high level of concentration of manpower
and materials. That is how urbanization brings economic efficiency, but at the price of
losing the accrete self-organization function. When concentration is of a small scale,
the shortfall can be compensated by the limited humanized nature both within and
around the city; but once concentration reaches a certain scale, especially after a city
belt is formed, “urban maladies” would rise considerably. Urban malady, essentially
caused by the lack of accrete self-organization function, cannot be cured simply
through sanitary means. Replacing the term “Cheng Shi Hua” with “Cheng Zhen
Hua” (both meaning urbanization, the former highlighting “city” while the latter
“city and town”) reflects the consideration to keep humanized nature as much as
possible. The problem now is that man has thought too much of itself and tried to
make artificial nature bigger, stronger, faster, higher, deeper and more convenient,
which unfortunately weakens the accrete self-organization function unlimitedly. The
“landscape” concept proposed by German geographer Humboldt A. encompasses the
existential status and ratio of the three kinds of nature. The landscape in a lot of areas
where fertile land used to stretch far and wide has been devastated. “Nostalgia” will
become a word of the past if urban expansion is not curbed effectively.