Portland To Portland

Reflections on the American Infrastructure

The Covered Wagon

The epiphany, I suspect, can be credited to just the right ratio of caffeine, Adderall, and McGriddle—combined with the high-intensity atmosphere I found myself in while pulling the covered wagon through Chicago during morning rush hour. The “covered wagon” was the teardrop trailer I had purchased to serve both as a shelter from the elements and as a means to transport my earthly possessions on my trip from Portland to Portland. As I traveled down the six-lane freeway, I watched the cars bob and weave around me, each piloted by a lone occupant—each one clearly behind schedule.

I wondered if any of them, like myself, were questioning the validity of the artificial environment that surrounded us: the infrastructure on which we were traveling, and the purpose of their journey.

The Industrial Question

Throughout the trip, I sought solace in national parks while searching for answers to the questions that had first driven me to a career in Industrial Design. To what extent have the products of industry been conceived with regard to long-term human evolution? How much was created merely to fuel the ego and wallet of a few men and their progeny? How much consideration was ever given to the social, geopolitical, and environmental consequences of a product’s conception?

Why do I feel most alive with only the essentials for survival—confined to what I can carry on my back while hiking through undisturbed natural environments? Why do I feel only dissonance when surrounded by the corporate and fossil-fuel infrastructure that so dominates the American landscape? Is our energy-demanding civilization truly a manifestation of divine mandate—or is it all just the result of wishful thinking and pure, unadulterated hubris?

Revelation on the Freeway

It was in that moment—on a bustling Chicago freeway—that I realized nothing around me was the result of a grand master plan for humanity. The world I was moving through had not been shaped by collaborative wisdom or ecological reverence but by a fear-based ideology of competition.

Every bridge, billboard, office park, subdivision, and strip mall was born from the belief that survival required outpacing one’s neighbor, that success meant disadvantaging someone else, that progress was defined by accumulation rather than harmony. What I was witnessing from the driver’s seat was not infrastructure designed for the benefit of all, but the physical residue of a culture conditioned to fear scarcity, fear irrelevance, fear the natural world, and—above all—fear one another.

These miles of concrete and steel were not conceived through cooperation, mutual respect, or ecological intelligence. They were the outcome of millions of isolated decisions driven by rivalry, extraction, and the illusion that domination equates to security. A world built on fear naturally becomes a world of fragmentation: six lanes of single-occupant vehicles racing toward deadlines; corporate monuments vying for attention; entire ecosystems paved over because collaboration with nature was never part of the plan.

The intelligent design I experienced in the national parks—design refined through millions of years of ecological cooperation—had not been utilized in the creation of the world in which I found myself, but buried beneath it. We paved over cooperative intelligence with competitive ambition and called it civilization.

Conduct not driven by a moral code of equality for all life and respect for ecological law will ultimately manifest as the destruction of divine creation. Competition offered us speed, but not direction. Growth, but not purpose. Power, but not wisdom.

And it was then—somewhere between the honking horns, the exhaust fumes, and the metallic glint of vehicles jockeying for position—that I made the conscious decision to only recognize the authority of ecological intelligence and disregard that of the culture I was born into.

It has become imperative that we recognize the ills of a society based on competition and envision a model founded on collaboration if we are to continue evolving on a planet with finite resources. At that point, my journey east from Oregon to Maine became a symbolic reversal of the settlers’ westward expansion—a counter-migration to the self-proclaimed divine mandate that once justified conquest. Their belief in dominion over nature—and over all other cultures they encountered—had birthed the very landscape of alienation I was now traversing.

The Lost Wilderness

Yet I found myself envying those early settlers in their wagon trains—for the wilderness they encountered, and the hope that drove them forward. Their lives were hard by modern standards, yet I am certain they were filled with wonder at the boundless, untouched land and the endless variety of flora and fauna that made them feel connected to something greater than themselves.

My experience was something else entirely. What I witnessed was an endless parade of metal, rubber, plastic, and glass—vehicles traveling on blood-stained asphalt, cutting through ecosystems and migratory routes lined with roadkill in various stages of decay. Wide open fields once traversed by herds of grazing and fertilizing herbivores now replaced by vast bovine concentration camps consisting of sentient beings soon to be processed into burgers and lattes.

There was no reprieve from the repeating corporate monuments—the “winners” of the grand game of Monopoly—and their products of enterprise in the form of fast-food chains, big-box stores, and service stations. There was no access to the unique and vital ecosystems that once thrived beneath the pavement, no open land beyond the gates and fences, no stream to drink from, no game to hunt, no berries to pick. No stars above the glow of perpetual illumination. No peace attainable by moving at a human speed through the open air.

A Missed Opportunity for Wisdom

It is regrettable that the pilgrims did not take greater interest in the cultures and rituals of the native tribes they met along the way—that their quest for a new life was not also a quest to amend their own oppressive culture. After all, was it not the class system and inequality that drove them from their ancestral home?

Imagine what they might have learned had they made an effort to understand the indigenous social customs and land-use practices of those who evolved within—and as part of—the ecosystems they sought to occupy. If encounters with indigenous tribes had been met with a genuine desire for cultural exchange and amalgamation, would we still be facing ecological collapse today?

Perhaps if they had resisted prejudice and sought human commonality—if they had listened with open hearts, smoked the peace pipe—they might have remembered that all culture is secondary to universal human kinship: a truth understood at birth but buried beneath the weight of indoctrination.

Had the westward-bound pilgrims envisioned my experience traveling east, would they have chosen collaboration over conquest? More importantly—what will be the experience of the future traveler if we do not question the fallacy of our dominance over nature and fail to manifest a system of conduct rooted in homage to and utility of divine creation?

From Revelation to Responsibility:

Enter Anthropolis

The more miles I traveled, the clearer it became that the world built around me was not inevitable—it was merely the world that emerges when fear is mistaken for intelligence and competition is mistaken for human nature. Every freeway overpass, every subdivision, every corporate monument testified to the same misconception: that progress is something extracted, not something grown; that societies flourish by surpassing others rather than by uplifting all; that the human story is best written as a contest instead of a collaboration.

Yet beneath that misconception, beneath the layers of asphalt and ideology, I sensed a different possibility—one older than capitalism, older than the frontier, older than the myths of dominion that had justified so much destruction. It was the possibility embodied in every ecosystem I had hiked through on the journey, where balance—not victory—was the organizing principle, and where life thrived through interdependence rather than conquest.

It occurred to me that our true mistake was not merely environmental. It was conceptual. We designed a civilization around the false belief that competition refines the best of humanity. But competition refines only efficiency in winning. Collaboration refines intelligence itself.

If the freeway offered a revelation, the wilderness offered a mandate: we must build a world designed for the evolution of our species, not for the preservation of our fears.

Anthropolis is an attempt to answer that mandate.

Anthropolis does not arise from nostalgia or escapism, but from the recognition that our survival now depends on designing environments that elicit the cooperative capacities buried beneath centuries of rivalry. It is a model rooted in ecological intelligence—the same intelligence that shaped every thriving biome long before humans invented ideologies of supremacy.

Instead of fear-based competition, Anthropolis adopts the laws of nature as its constitution: reciprocity, balance, mutualism, and regeneration. It begins with the understanding that human wellbeing cannot be engineered through domination, but only through environments that reinforce empathy, shared purpose, and equitable access to life’s essentials.

The polis rejects the scarcity mindset that built the freeways and replaces it with a physical and social architecture that makes collaboration the default setting. Its circular form, its interdependent districts, its decentralization of power, its local production and shared commons—all are designed to counteract the alienation I felt watching the cars race past me, each occupant sealed in their own private climate-controlled cocoon, convinced that independence is the same as freedom.

Anthropolis asks a different question:

What if freedom is not escape from one another, but reconnection with one another—and with the land that sustains us?

The more I considered this, the more obvious it became that our greatest opportunity is not technological but civilizational. We already possess the tools—renewable energy, additive manufacturing, advanced materials, global communication networks—but we have never used them collaboratively. We used them competitively, which is why even our most remarkable inventions now serve narrow interests instead of the collective good.

Anthropolis proposes that we reverse that logic: that we direct our tools, our wealth, and our intelligence toward the creation of settlements designed not to extract value from life, but to cultivate it. This is not utopian thinking; it is ecological alignment. Every forest, reef, and grassland demonstrates the viability of a cooperative model. Only human culture has insisted on the opposite.

The question, then, is not whether collaboration can sustain civilization. The question is whether competition ever could.

And so the freeway revelation was not simply a critique of the world I had inherited—it was an initiation into a responsibility I could no longer ignore. If the landscape before me was built on fear, then the landscape after us must be built on courage: the courage to imagine a system designed for the benefit of all, the courage to dethrone the ideologies that no longer serve life, the courage to build Anthropolis—not as an escape from the old world, but as the scaffolding for the next one.