And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’

. . . Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life. In the middle of the street of the city, and on either side of the river, is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 21:1-4, 22:1-2, New Revised Standard Version)

While this has been true for millennia, what is unprecedented in our time is the scope and complexity of this “second nature” and the intensity of its interactions with the rest of creation — its consumption of materials and energy, its harvesting of the bounty of sea and land, the waste it produces, the space it occupies, the subtle manipulations it performs on the very stuff of matter and life.

Our human-made habitations are part of the “environment” too, and how we design them affects both ourselves and our fellow creatures. Urban “sprawl” is a concern, not only because land that is paved over and built up cannot be used for agriculture or wildlife, but also because it disadvantages those with limited access to transportation — a matter of justice. Because of their compactness, urban areas can help reduce per capita energy use and resource consumption, but they can also be very intensive users of water and sites of severe environmental health risks and air pollution.