The prospect of continual conversion of natural environments into human settlements and engineered projects has always been of interest and concern to me.
This illustration-- an obvious overstatement-- is from One Earth. It is a limited edition artist's book that I printed on my 1913 letterpress. There are three sections to the book: "Harmony," "Hurt," and "Hope." The "Sphere of Cubes" is from the second part.
Of all the drawings, this one is the most disturbing to me because it depicts an Earth fully dominated by human artifice. While this is undoubtedly impossible, it is nevertheless unsettling as we watch wild places continue to disappear under the expanding footprint of progress.
Even though the book appeared more than twenty years ago, my politically incorrect use of the word "man" in the caption was intentional-- just as it would be if I wrote it today. The domination of Nature, in my view, continues to be most securely rooted in the Western culture, masculine gender-role stereotype.
"Sphere of Cubes", a page from the artist book One Earth. © Fred Montague
