THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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world (the world of work transformers to serve human advantage) represents a kind of unnatural physics: so in almost the same way the metabolic interchange between
man and earth creates a kind of supernaturalized geography. With the difference that technology far more easily passes into the realm of cunning and overpowering, can
be far more contactlessly and abstractly calculated than the authentic landscape product of human work. This can of course also look artificial enough, in a
technological context, but earth nature collaborates even in the industrial landscape more visibly, and possibly more inhibitively than electrical nature in the dynamo. The
earth still remains the arena and framework even for such an extensive rebuilding, and a powerful and visible part of the material content as well. So this is precisely why
there is a concrete utopia of the future condition of the earth (compared with ancient geography) in every geography of improvement, a utopia which has its frontier
ideal in the dreams of the earthly paradise — an ideal not devalued by fantasy and mythology. This utopian fund fives without mythical wrapping in the Toturn (itself
always only a latent one) of political­cultural geography, after physical geography has been traversed and is adequately known. There are still lots of children in Gaia,
and she changes with them; just as the language of geographical nature is not yet an extinct one, and the face of the earth is not yet a hippocratic one which can only be
accepted as the past. With and through the changes made by human beings, the Pleistocene and Holocene epoch, and the Quaternary period of our planet can still be
followed by the Quinternary period, with a better attained fund of what the earth, no geological antiquarium, still potentially contains. The earth as a whole, in its latency,
is the unfinished setting of a scene in a play which has by no means been written as yet in our previous history.
If the changes are bad of course, then the land affected by them merely looks violated. This is particularly apparent in the hideous streets and suburbs which are a
legacy of the nineteenth century. They stand out as scabs and sores on the landscape, or rather: the latter is totally destroyed. And health, clean air, light, the casual
green of the trees along with it; it is almost odd to find all this still in the open countryside. The capitalist age built the endless streets, the profit­houses, all the spooks so
fleetingly conjured up that it is astonishing to find they are still there in the morning. Unless it is as the façade of Hell, fading, shrivelling up, not built on the good earth
and belonging to it. If the earth itself is included, as a so­called green belt or in the dispersals of the garden city, then this pastoral looks as if even the trees were fakes.
The artificial desert which interrupts the landscape as the urban form of the nineteenth century is stronger than the nature