Street lights at the end of the universe? (navigating sub-urban space)

[Opening paragraph] What a help it would be if good, apparently sober words like urban and rural, society and environment, culture and nature, technology and ecology, made sense of the chimerical space in which we now (must) find ourselves. How confusing it is that their apparently once-stable referents are dissolving in floods of technological possibility. How frustrating it is that such signs are no longer simply unreliable but often positively mischievous.