For fifteen hundred years from the decline of Rome until London in 1800 no civilization in the western world supported a city of a million souls. While across this era global population continued its steady upward crawl, it did so by populating increasingly marginal parts of the planet, adapting and improving them to support forms of living mostly familiar from antiquity. When the improved technology of early industrialization began to transform the possibilities of urbanism, drawing ever-greater portions of society into cites as it did, the pressures of density began the systematic transformation of every aspect of the human habitat.
Cities and the increasingly remote agricultural systems on which they depend became ever more man made artifacts. In the last 200 years we have remade our habitat to conscious tastes without regard to, in fact in near total ignorance of ancient genetic adaptations we physically embody for an organic habitat we have left behind and are now actively extinguishing. The demographic pressure driving this destruction has both aesthetic and ethical implications and before returning to aesthetics is Part 3, a digression into ethics is warranted because very real ethical constraints explain much of why the complexity of the modern world is so confounding .
