When we view our cities or think about them, we can imagine the change that must have occurred. We can even understand without difficulty that much of the change has been damaging to the environment, but according to some psychologists, we don't always make the connection to how it is damaging us. The world we are born into becomes the baseline from which we form our basic, normative perception of the world we live in, against which we measure change later in our lives. A kind of environmental amnesia sets it, and our sense of what once was, what was taken away, built over, was always there, and it always will be.
But what if we had access to that distant past? What if we are able to connect our present sense of the world - the world we grew up in - to the world that once gave so much to us in return? Would we be motivated to shape it? Would feel a greater responsibility to act?
This podcast series is an attempt to do just that.
Access to full report of LA River Watershed's Historical Ecology
