About the Author: Robert Hay has been involved with environmental issues in B.C. for the past two decades. He has worked for the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Royal B.C. Museum on bird and mammal censusing. He completed his doctorate in 1990 at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, studying the sense of place of Maori and European-descent residents. He has since taught at the University of South Pacific (Fiji), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), and presently teaches environmental and resource management courses in geography at the University College of the Cariboo, Kamloops, BC.
The environment of modern people has shifted, from a spirit world interwoven with nature, to an urban one of noise, distraction, fractured time sense and individualism. Three themes have emerged to cause a sea of change in our way of life: individualism vs communal ties to place; urban living vs being in nature; and a focus on electronic milieu vs directly sensing the richness of nature. The result has made sustained and beneficial relationships of any kind difficult to both develop and maintain, with people, place or with the environment. There has been a resultant change in being, producing a relatively barren, narrow mindset, concerned more with things and material form than with the quality of relationships which sustain us.
The humanized landscape is now dominant on earth, represented by urban townscapes and by various types of monocultures, whether intellectual, agricultural or forested. The cultural landscapes modern peoples have produced are both temporary and artificial, a reflection of their collective mindset. In ecological terms, one could say that these landscapes have been created by a "disturbance", and regeneration to a more natural state would be expected at some point. However, our modern way of life is itself disturbed, and has interrupted natural cycles on earth to the point that such a return may be a long time coming in the most degraded ecosystems. We require great amounts of fossil fuel energy to maintain our urban and agricultural systems in their present states, but these fuel supplies are both diminishing and polluting the earth. One could thus question recent efforts toward sustainability by Western governments, if they would remain dependent on such energy systems.
The nature of modern consciousness has a profound effect on one's sense of being-in-place, developing a self-centered character who is too often removed physically and emotionally from both community and nature. A number of factors have contributed to this condition, including our style of mobility and migration; emphases on consumerism and mass communications; patterns of urban design and economic development; influences by the bureaucracy and the state; sensory conditioning; use of language; and even personal orientation. Paramount to this development has been a focus on "things" versus the relationships between beings. As Evernden (1985, 133) states:
...imagine the effect of reversing the polarity of attention, so to speak, so that the bond of relationship is more significant than the end-points it joins. Regarding the relations as primary is like reversing figure and ground, like stressing Being over beings.
Without an insightful understanding of relationships, as well as the aforementioned factors, our efforts at environmentalism, though laudable, may result in few positive gains. To internalize a new environmental philosophy we must go beyond regulation to the voluntary restriction of consumerism, and beyond extolling biocentrism to a basic change in consciousness and sensory perception, akin to that of hunter-gatherers. Only a fundamental return to the land will suffice, involving not just some tinkering with lifestyles and endless intellectual discussions, but digging down past sensations and thoughts to our very spirit. Such a return would likely take us beyond environmentalism itself, and its inherent conflicts, toward a more communal style of living in nature.
Geographers study how the surface of the land is formed by physical processes. They also try to understand the origins of the cultural landscape, including the relationships between people and place. More recently they have extended their research into environmental issues, but geographers have been studying the environment for a much longer period. At the turn of the 20th century there was a lively debate between two schools of thought, environmental determinists and possibilists, with the former advocating causal reasons for human behaviour and morphology due to environmental conditions (e.g. steep, rugged mountains produced rugged people with strong legs; see Tatham 1957). Possibilists opposed such generalizations, pointing instead toward people's freedom of choice and the influence of culture on behaviour. In the early 20th century, the genre de vie, or way of life, of French rural towns was considered by Vidal de la Blache as evidence that there is a wide range of human relationships possible between people and place (see Buttimer 1969).
Logical, objective enquiries and empirical studies by scientists are the norm of American geography in post-World War I (Entrikin 1989). Applying this mode in regional analyses, Hartshorne (1939) explicitly focused upon "things" in his positivist treatment of areal differentiation. This was accomplished through attention to the location of objects in geometric space, with geographers delineating spatial patterns of such objects (chorological) and searching for relationships in the distributions of phenomena. He considered studying the connecting links between phenomena, but concluded that it was more important to focus on "a particular circle of facts...in order then to search for causal relationships" (Hartshorne 120, 126). The nomothetic, or law-seeking enterprise of such scientists was usual, but became idiographic when dealing with specific places, as the individuality of places and value-laden issues had to be considered (Entrikin 1989).
In contrast, cultural geographers of the Sauer school at Berkeley in the middle part of this century were interested in the chronological dimension, as well as processes that affected the evolution of the cultural landscape. They were empirical in their investigations of material form, noting the distribution of phenomena to define culture areas and ethnic islands, and studying factors which have affected the diffusion of ideas and technology (see Leighly 1963). Pattison (1964) includes this human/land tradition of cultural geography as one of the four traditions of geography, together with regional studies, a spatial perspective and earth sciences. The definition of "phenomena" was still tied to objective science, as the humanistic approach and the phenomenological perspective had not yet been explored by geographers. Cultural ecology arose in the 1960s to show links, particularly among native peoples, between the physical environment and people's ways of life, noting feedback mechanisms between ecosystems and the human world. Culture was seen in constant interaction with nature, with people making choices in shaping both landscape and behavior to maximize their standard of living, while preserving the integrity of their environment to enable future use. The spiritual dimension of such relationships was not a major focus of study; instead, it was the functional realm that predominated, with studies still being oriented to "things", i.e. descriptions of their material form, spatial extent, and the utility of natural resources (e.g. Clarke 1971).
In the past two decades, behavioural geographers employed positivistic methods to study people's functional relationships with place as well, at times looking into people's feelings for place using quantitative methods (e.g. Eyles 1985; Taylor and Townsend 1976). Some humanistic geographers researched the importance of the emotional realm in our human relationships with place using a more reflective approach, concentrating on such topics as aesthetics and interpretations of artistic representations of place, especially in relation to the modern condition (for a condensed review, see Hay 1988). "Affective ties" (i.e. bonds) to place were examined on occasion, and were said to gradually develop through long residence in a defined place (see Tuan 1974). People were said to consider place at several levels, including one's room, home, neighbourhood, town, region and nation (Tuan 1975; Relph 1976), basing these considerations on human meaning. However, it is most often the intermediate realm, i.e. the region or town, that relates to our concept of "place".
Tuan later (1980) separated rootedness from sense of place, believing that an appreciation of place in the latter is a self-conscious condition; he did not refer to the residential mobility (i.e. rootlessness) of North Americans in his development of this conceptual division. Relph (1976) stated that the deepest level of place bonds is subconscious, that habituation and familiarity with place have erased our conscious affection for it: it is now merely taken-for-granted most of the time (see also Ley 1977). My own fieldwork on sense of place (Hay 1990), involving hundreds of in-depth interviews with both modern and indigenous peoples in New Zealand, found such speculations to be unfounded, as a deep relationship with place need not be subconscious, especially in the case of indigenous peoples.
The material functions of place had now been combined with the emotional realm by a few geographers, but something was still missing. Not enough attention was being directed at environmental problems and the attitudes that help to create them. Also, a phenomenological view was needed in research. Phenomenology looks beyond the "masks" of everyday life to reflect on original experiences as they are given, attempting to identify and reduce presuppositions. Phenomenologists believe that we constitute our lifeworlds by holding objects unreflectively in our consciousness, forming a relationship with them; phenomena are defined as the "objects of experience", including physical things or conceptual objects (e.g. society or place)...they only have meaning when our intentions are considered (Pickles 1988, 237-238). Through phenomenology we could uncover the essence of our relationships toward other beings, peeling away layers of abstractions in our thought. A more thorough examination of our relationships in place is thus called for to get at the root causes of our environmental dilemma, going beyond the traditional approaches of geographers.
The relationships which are often thought of as most important to modern peoples are those involving our mate or love "partner", nuclear family, close friends, and the home/property where we live. Beyond this first group is another, which includes work/career, extended family, community/neighbourhood, place and nation/country. These are of value to some people all the time, and to others when they are more involved with them or when their consciousness has been raised (e.g. concerns about jobs in this recession, and whether Canada will survive as a nation-state). A final grouping is more nebulous for our culture: nature, region/state, domestic pets, avocations, and material possessions (e.g. Americans' love for their automobiles).
In this last group are some relationships that our societies should exalt, such as those with nature, and move them up the list, and others which may jeopardize our actions to preserve place and nature, such as desires for faddish material possessions. The importance that we place in relationships can be seen through the grief we feel when homesick or when we lose a close friend or family member. A reverse view of relationships can also be enlightening: one of society's gravest penalties is to ostracize someone, with solitary confinement in prison formalizing this practice. It must therefore be known to our collective consciousness that even the most limited relationships aid in the development of being-in-place, and thus the feeling of belonging and security. Researching meaningful relationships around the concept of "place" would provide a contextual basis to organize information that involves human meaning. However, we have not delved into this realm enough, with the result that a complete understanding of place itself is lacking, let alone how various relationships affect our concept of place.
Too often a positivist, specialist stance was adopted by social researchers, robbing our lifeworlds of context and emotional fullness. Experts would carve out niches of authority concerning different meaningful relationships that we have, such as with our work, mate or the nation. But a synthesis of these and other relationships is lacking. Subjective qualities, especially those involving people's depth of feelings, were also downplayed or disregarded, as these were difficult to measure and quantify. Although objectivity may enhance one's clarity, it is limiting in that a sense of detachment pervades such researchers' being, thus colouring the relationships that they have formed with the world. Within our lifeworlds, this detached approach can affect research, blocking out large portions of reality (see Relph 1981). We are not just the spectators of our own lives: we are absorbed in them, only pausing momentarily to assess our own situations.
Besides the humanist critique, the fallacies inherent in the type of social research that solely employs objectivity became all too obvious when the lifeworlds of indigenous peoples came to our attention, more often only of late via the media. The richness of their natural relationships was apparent in contrast to our usual spiritual impoverishment, especially in our relationships with nature. They were not just the "primitives" of typical anthropological discourse. Indigenous peoples often have less material wealth in Western terms, and their lands are under assault by industrialists for resource extraction. However, a way of life resembling that of their forebears is maintained in some form by many of these peoples. Particularly important are their ancestral connections to the land, defining their sense of place and bringing them in conflict with colonial powers, most recently concerning land claims (see Hay 1990 on the Maori of New Zealand, and Brody's 1983 descriptions of the Beaver Indians of northern British Columbia).
A few geographers broadened their investigations to include indigenous peoples (e.g. Bonnemaison 1984; Hay 1989,1990; Murton 1987; Yoon 1986), traditionally the exclusive realm of anthropologists. Empirical studies, using sensitive research methodologies, were launched to focus on these people's relationships with place. In my 1990 review of results from these studies, rituals were seen to reaffirm ties to place in conscious ways, accomplished through dynamic actions (e.g. dances) within a tribal group. Storytelling further solidified tribal beliefs, continuously connecting indigenous people with place through the wisdom of elders (see Knudtson and Suzuki 1992 for a recent review). The result is a minimal degree of conscious separation between themselves and their tribe or environment: these join to form a whole, with the tribe's cosmology denoting its origins in place (see Hay 1990; Stefanovic 1991).
Throughout human history people have had tribal connections to place. Whether the clans of Scotland or the tribes of Africa, homogeneous people tend to band together in places for mutual defence. Territoriality is linked with a sense of place: "What is common to all human societies is their need for a sense of "place" - a feeling of living in an environment which has boundaries and identity" (Marsh 1988, 27). Insiders gain feelings of belonging from their social group, and display a deep knowledge of their surroundings. Native intelligence is related to local conditions, and is built up over generations of the same family in one place. Sense of place and bioregional awareness are thus linked to our relationships with the environment through the development of insideness, belonging and native intelligence.
The orality of indigenous cultures is significant, since our way of relating to the world in modern societies changed with the advent of literacy among the majority. When the form of communication is speech, as is the case in non-literate societies, the speaker is always in the presence of his or her audience, making conversations relational (Meisner 1991). Spoken words also engage the body, with much of the message coming through facial expressions and body language. Sound tends to penetrate and envelop the body, immersing a person in sensation, whereas sight "situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance" (Ong 1982, 72: emphasis added). Vision can thus be said to dissect experience, creating an ambience of detachment and predisposing us to spectatorship. Ong further states that:
Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld. (49).
Literacy within our culture allows us time to reflect on what has been written, to study and form complex positions, as in the field of philosophy. But it also tends to remove us from direct, active experience, taking us into a world of intellectual abstractions (see Meisner 1991; Ong 1982). We can lose the contextual basis of meaning as we become less an oral culture and more separate from nature, although this is a subconscious process. Indeed, Meisner tells us that "reading and writing are solitary activities" (7), while Highwater (1981) points out that, even when indigenous peoples become literate, their writings are:
...tribal rather than individuated...the reader tends to know characters by their actions and not by an outpouring of feelings and various internal states of mind...primal peoples tend to strive for the depiction of essences rather than appearances...(117-118, emphasis added).
And so, as we become literate we tend more toward detachment, abstraction, objectification and classification. Nature becomes "a static place of objects, rather than a dynamic field of relationships" (Meisner 1991, 7: emphasis added). We therefore lose much of the refined abilities of indigenous peoples to integrate the senses, participate in nature and relate activities directly to others through animated, vivid storytelling. We have become, in Ong's words, "interiorized persons" (1982, 74), caught up in subject/object dualism, and without the wherewithal to achieve holistic perception and thinking (see also Berman 1984).
Contrast this modern condition with that of indigenous people, whose senses are closely attuned to nature, as it is both their larder and the home of spirits: their abilities in mimicry of animals represents both functional knowledge and respect for the creatures that dwell with them on earth. Their sense of wonder at the complexities and mysteries of the world is everpresent, as described by Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian:
You see, we only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or we don't. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves. When nothing is for sure we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as if we know everything (in Castaneda 1974, 17).
When such beliefs are tied as well to animism, where the world is alive with spirits, place ties become stronger through cosmology, and the world becomes more mysterious. However, among modern peoples, the spirit world has retreated to that realm beyond the doors of the church. As such, our forms of spirituality are less place-based than socially-based; we exalt healthy, moral relationships with people more than those with nature (see Glacken 1967). In our everyday lives, only inanimate objects and families of similar organisms (e.g. pine trees, seagulls etc.) present themselves to perception. And so, the world quickly becomes taken-for-granted after early childhood.
Modern bonds to place are significant in that place provides the context for other meaningful relationships to develop, and, as these develop, place becomes more meaningful itself. However, we jeopardize these relationships by the typical way in which we form place ties. This process is affected negatively by such factors as our own mobility; whether the place itself changes; whether there is some autonomy over the public or private "space" involved, as in one's own home or office; and whether there is time for reflection among long-time residents and between like-minded groups.
In our lifeworlds, pursuits such as work, social outings and outdoor recreation take local residents away from home in a local area for short periods of time. This familiar region of habitual routine, our action space (Horton and Reynolds, 1969), becomes our "place" as length of residence increases and we form bonds to it. We assess such dimensions as our own home's real estate value; regional employment opportunities; proximity of friends and family; aesthetic qualities; and availability of amenities, subsuming our bonds to place to such "practical" considerations. Most modern residents would only realize the extent of their place feelings after many decades there. If we had experienced disturbances of our usual rhythms, such as through an extended holiday away, threats to the integrity of our place (e.g. wars, place change etc.) or following a permanent relocation to a more distant location, our feelings for place would be more apparent (see Hay 1986, 1990).
Those who do develop a strong bond to place exhibit territoriality and local knowledge, which deepens through both aging and length of residence. Those without such bonds normally move on. Others who have lived only part of their lives in the place often have a more rational, detached relationship with that place, at least for the first few years, as they may yet move on. Many modern people have such a high rate of mobility, moving every few years, that forming bonds to any one place is difficult. Indeed, half of the U.S. population relocates at least once within a five year period (Shumaker and Conti 1985), and Americans average 14 moves per lifetime (Heller 1982). Most of us, therefore, seem to have lost the ties to place that come through long residential and ancestral connections to a specific locale.
Mobility may promote individual freedom and appreciation of one's nation, but it tends to erode the development of a strong, local sense of place. Time in one familiar bioregion, not periodic, long-distance migration, is needed to build place ties through stability and continuity (Pred 1983). Modern life tends toward excessive mobility and migration, fragmenting our lives as we rush along through them. Americans are now working longer hours to maintain their former standard of living, and to meet expectations of larger homes containing more conveniences; leisure time that is unstructured is on the decline (see Schor 1991). The extreme of this situation is workaholicism, where 16 hour working days, seven days a week, can be the norm. If one relationship becomes paramount in place (e.g. to work), it is often at the expense of others, such as those with close family and friends. The stress of such styles of working can also cause early deaths, terminating all relationships (Dossey 1991).
We have become individuated, shifting from place to place, and spending little time in any one activity: our destiny seems to change as easily as the push of a channel selector button. As we constantly shift places, we lose our center, and our own characters remain largely undeveloped, as there is a need for a layering of experiences in one place to achieve depth in our personalities (see Proshansky et al. 1983). This depth is developed over time through a number of connections, such as ties to friends and family; involvement in the community; habitual, rhythmic patterns of activity (e.g. gardening, recreational pursuits or trips to the office); and dwelling experiences in one's own home. Social networks enable the development of feelings for people and various places, tying us to our larger "place" in an ever-stronger web as the years roll on. Perspective on the significance of such connections, as it is gained through time spent away from one's place, helps to consolidate these feelings and one's own character.
And so, the association with places over a long time can build feelings of security and at-homeness. Our personalities, let alone our lives, are diminished, though, without the development of strong social networks and ties within a place. The multitude of connections to place may only become evident once one has left and feels homesick, or when the place has changed so much in one's lifetime so as to feel alien. At such times one feels isolated and stranded, perhaps like the modern conception of a "thing", cut-off from society and without meaningful relationships in place. We can try to keep in touch with loved ones in distant locales, but periodic visits, letters and telephone calls are not quite the same as being-in-place together. We may have "high quality" relationships with such people, but most of us would like to feel "closer", to spend more time with each other. There is a price paid for the freedom of mobility.
This condition is similar to those who are currently alienated within our society due to their social "place", such as inner city youths, some of whom feel compelled to join criminal gangs to gain a sense of belonging and security. By their nature modern societies spawn a multitude of people who are rootless to some degree: we always seem on the move, whether shifting residences voluntarily, being transferred, commuting to work or going away on vacation. Even when modern people spend time in one region, the bonds that do form are to a compendium of places, discontinuous in space, and unrelated or unlikely. One's own home, workplace, school, town and a physically-defined place (e.g. islands and valleys) are common examples, but people can also express varying degrees of affection for such places as playgrounds, restaurants, prisons, ships at sea and automobiles. The nature of many of these relationships changes as places change, material possessions are discarded and people die or move on. The fabric of the community is particularly altered by the latter, with few members left to provide continuity, to reminisce on the importance of our own past lives in places.
Besides individual and communal perspectives on place, there are love relationships within a place to consider (see Hay 1991). This can include relationships with family, friends, lovers and even domesticated pets. The strongest feelings often occur between love partners: a place normally "feels" better when one is in love; it is seen in a better light, and thus may be highly valued, causing a person to remain in a place and defend its integrity. As one's character becomes interwoven with place and people, losing one of these can affect the relationship with the other. If one falls out of love, there may be an impetus for one of the partners to move on. The significance of migration can be noted through the analogy that, to change one's own character, it is often easier to move to a new and different place and start afresh, due to the subtle effects of association that occurs between people and place over a long period of time, placing one's character within set bounds. A positive, ongoing dialogue is needed to maintain both love and place relations; mobility, alienation and place change make this more difficult.
Other forces at work in modern society may do additional damage to our feelings of being-in-place. The mass media, consumerism and international styles of modern architecture are causing a homogenization of culture, making many Western, urban places similar in material form through symbolization that is not tied to local culture (see Meyrowitz 1985; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). A sense of "dwelling" is often lacking, in that the organic wholeness of place has become fractured (see Stefanovic 1991). The design of office buildings, apartment blocks and suburban housing tracts is often repetitive and bland; chain retail outlets and strip developments along arterial roads are seldom aesthetically pleasing. Streets without sidewalks, walled residential enclaves and houses that lack front porches give more emphasis to commuting and security than to a feeling of neighbourhood. As crime rates rise in North America's cities, these precautions may seem prudent, but as Relph (1976, 143) earlier warned, these landscapes and cityscapes tend to create "an environment without significant places". Regional differences are also diminishing in the face of national media forces, with "no sense of place" the result, according to Meyrowitz (1985).
Governments can intrude negatively in the formation of various types of relationships between people and place, by promoting immigration of different ethnic groups, at times causing cultural clashes; boosting long-distance migration through economic development; providing distant educational opportunities; requiring job transfers; and entering into wars, often creating massive displacement: there are an estimated 16 million refugees worldwide (Moussalli 1990, 65-66). As we become individuated "units" with fewer ties, particularly to place, it is easier for governments and industry to manipulate our desires (see Ellul 1964). The make-believe world of marketing, consumerism and the multi-media have become so compelling and persuasive that some people are beginning to live within these illusions (see Sack 1988). Postman (1987) in his review of the effect of television on culture, asserts that we are "amusing ourselves to death".
Technocrats play a role in shaping the character of place, with their total destruction called topocide by Porteous (1989). Their desacralized, rational view of the world reduces places to mere commodities; their planning procedures often take little or no account of the importance of developing a sense of place (see Hay 1989). Municipal zoning bylaws are exclusionary, restricting people's choices in house design, numbers of occupants and the location of family businesses (Johnston 1988). National political boundaries are often there to keep citizens "in" and foreign ideologies "out", but the latter goal of the state is becoming more difficult to accomplish in our electronic age.
Our sensory capacities and orientations themselves are changing. Within our own regions the majority of our urban populace endures a cacophony of sounds and a myriad of sights, bombarding their senses from every direction, both within and without their homes (see Schafer 1977). Indeed, across the breadth of our continent our senses have become oriented to the urban world, and being the clever creatures that we are, we have learned to adapt in a fashion to this bizarre compendium of stimuli. Some even take their noise into the countryside: too many of us have had to endure raucous sounds emanating from ghetto-blasters, with the stillness of parks shattered by "music" blaring at full volume. Besides blocking the sensation of natural sounds, such modern technology seems as out-of-place in the wilderness as talking on a cellular telephone. Both noise and talkativeness reduce our perception of the exterior, natural world.
Our youth culture is urban-based in its values, even if many youths live in far flung, rural locales. In this youth culture it is often more important "to be seen" than to "see". By the time urbanites are middle aged, their sensory capacities have usually been diminished by years of traffic/airplane/manufacturing/musical noise (loss of hearing); drugs and/or alcohol (perhaps some brief heightening of the senses in the former, with loss of motor skills in the latter; after prolonged use, often a loss of perceptual abilities due to either); smoking, including the passive kind (loss of taste and smell); and television (loss of immersion in the active world). Through urban living we have reduced our time spent outdoors in nature, and therefore our appreciation of its wonders. Within the natural world there still can be found peace for those who care to search for it, and a greater diversity of stimuli that is soothing to our senses: the voices of the sea and wind; the gurgling of streams; the pleasure of hearing birdsongs; smelling fresh air that is scented by trees and grasses and flowers (see also Ackerman 1991; Porteous 1992; Schafer 1977).
Our relationship with nature is now in jeopardy. Some of us still go to the wilderness to be refreshed, for recuperation and re-creation, but others insist on using nature for outdoor recreation. In hunting, fishing, and off-road adventuring in 4-wheel drive vehicles. Our wilderness areas are being encroached upon by large-scale utilitarians too, such as the big oil, timber and mining companies and jet aircraft. To save the intrinsic values of pristine areas, greater public action is needed in the face of this onslaught, since the wilderness is the last preserve of a diversity of wildlife and even our own sanity (see Nash 1988; Stegner 1960). Within nature lies our heritage, a scientific storehouse of discoveries to be made and keys to how we can live sustainably on earth. Yet relationships with unspoiled nature seem to be an abstract concept for most urban dwellers - will they be willing to restrict their consumptive behaviour, even in these recessionary times, to save these last wild places?
This review has described how various factors are adversely affecting our creation of meaningful relationships in place. A brief chart of these is included below by way of summary. This chart points toward a way of life that could support better relationships within our place.
@CENTERTABL = Factors that Influence Meaningful Relationships in Place
@BT-TAB = Positive Influences Negative Influences
@BT-TAB = cosmology tied to the place detachment from world/abstract/dualism
@BT-TAB = dynamic actions/experiential/rituals in place visual orientation/spectatorship
@BT-TAB = orality/contextual life within group and place literacy/individualism
@BT-TAB = wonder/spirit world taken-for-granted/desacralized/too rational
@BT-TAB = long residence/insideness high rate of mobility and migration
@BT-TAB = ancestral connections to place place change/commodification of place
@BT-TAB = local knowledge/bioregional awareness nation-state/homogenization of culture
@BT-TAB = layering/web of connections in place busyness/hurried pace/fragmented rhythms
@BT-TAB = social networks/territoriality urban sprawl/mass design/ties to career
@BT-TAB = perspective on place ties alienation/little time for reflection/no continuity
@BT-TAB = being in love in a place .consumptive/materialistic orientation
@BT-TAB = local autonomy/community feeling zoning bylaws/job transfers/wars/ethnic mix
@BT-TAB = diversity of natural sensations sensory bombardment and conditioning
@BT-TAB = being-in-place/living in nature loss of wilderness and wildlife/utilitarian
@BT-TAB =
@BT-TAB = Note: Not all influences will necessarily be either negative or positive (e.g. place change); this depends on whether those influences are of benefit or not to the integrity of nature, the place and its people.
@BT-TAB =
It should be clear that humans are not just independent "subjects", considering "objects" in geometric space for our own utility. Life is more complex and enriched than adherents of classical mechanism and economics would have us believe (see also Capra 1983; Schumacher 1973). Through phenomenology researchers could uncover how our meaningful relationships interact within our lifeworlds, discovering their relative effects, strengths and significances. Such examination would go beyond the study of causal relationships, by considering meaningful relationships in conjunction with natural, physical processes and with more functional, economic interactions within places.
Since the mid-1980s there has been increased attention devoted to environmental ethics, with philosophical arguments advanced concerning the intrinsic worth of other species; the need for modern peoples to use their technology in such ways as to allow a high quality of life for future generations; and the importance of bioregional strategies to link us once again to a natural "place" on the planet. These thoughts can be considered extensions of historical developments in geographical thought, with the recent emphasis on bioregions strongly tied to antecedents from research on sense of place, cultural ecology and possibilism. But have we learned from such research?
It is only since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century that humankind has become a despoiler of the environment on a large scale. Ours is the first society on earth where the majority of citizens, including many environmentalists, feel they have the luxury to largely disregard detailed knowledge on flora and fauna within their own bioregions, instead importing foodstuffs and other resources to satisfy material needs. We downplay the importance of our spiritual and personal connections to particular places on earth, too often moving on or putting short-term economic gains first, thus allowing our own places to be ruined in increments through urban development, pollution and the export of raw materials. And yet, we now clamour for protection against the environmental crisis that is our own creation, without wanting to change our way of life, our way of being.
Environmentalists and local inhabitants have a vested interest in their place, however, and resist the actions of technocrats and state governments when they advocate wholesale changes to the nature of their place. Both "insiders" in such places and "outsiders" from the cities often join forces to preserve important values. They instinctively know that the destruction of the symbols of place reduces their feelings of identity. People who try to stop inappropriate economic development in their own region may thus realize that it affects their own characters - our environmental problems are but a reflection of ourselves (see Taylor 1990).
Part of the reason for resistance to large-scale economic development and/or resource extraction is that people seek to retain their autonomy and uniqueness in the face of bureaucratic, corporate and state actions. The environmental movement worldwide has drawn on people's sentiments in this regard, particularly their strong ties to place and their local knowledge, to both preserve and clean up the environment. As political systems begin to change, allowing for local participation in decision-making, people are publicly expressing their love for place, and fighting to keep its environmental quality. These people are expressing the maxim that one must love one's own place before one can love the world.
Individualism, urbanization and a sensory focus on electronic media are now eroding the contextual basis of most modern people's lives, replacing them more and more with feelings of alienation from the nurture of nature. Many have been cast adrift, not bonded to any one place, seemingly only able to consume the earth while watching their society's gradual downfall on television. Too caught up in abstract thinking and spectatorship, too materialistic and intellectual for our own good, with our senses conditioned and our use of language unknowingly putting a clamp on our minds, the potential for a dynamic life in nature passes us by. We say that we prefer urban living, yet clamour for outdoor recreation opportunities and a "clean" environment. We desacralize and dissect nature, but then want to gain solace and enjoyment from it. Amongst our contradictions, we still believe that "it" (nature) is "out there". Contrast this modern condition with that of the nature writers of the 19th century, some of whom still have a large impact today (e.g. Thoreau and Muir), who lived in nature, developing positive relationships there from which came their eloquent and insightful poetry and prose.
There are too many environmentalists who are simply products of their own cultures...who are, often without their even knowing it, grasping in their thoughts and actions, while condemning materialism; unnecessarily intellectual in their arguments, while bemoaning the excesses of the scientism; celebratory of the wholeness of nature, yet captured by mere images conveniently provided by the media; and disdainful of consumerism, as they parade environmental logos on expensive clothing. Some environmentalists are beginning to shed such consumer goods, but most of them simply head down what they perceive to be the wide, straight path to fight the good cause. To them, the crusade is clear - it is an "other" that must be fought, a behaviour in someone else to be changed, or a clean-up elsewhere to be done. Many of their efforts are laudable, but they are still the "flip side" of the degradation practices of our culture, the yin for the yang in the modern wheel of life. Their own way of thinking, of being-in-place, is not at issue for them.
But what if modern people instead believed that there are spirits in nature, and that nature dwells within us...that the earth is not just a machine, but is alive? Could we then feel the pain of a degraded environment? Could we perceive that our own character becomes flawed as we chip and gouge away at all that surrounds us? We are not separate from nature in body, but we maintain an illusion of separateness in mind. If our senses began to recall the wonder of a child when a bird is first seen to take flight, or when the wind breathes through the forest, could we then let our minds be blessed with that of nature, instead of continuing our path of self-absorption and destruction?
If we do not want environmentalism to be just another growth industry, our entire way of life, with its too narrow range of consciousness, needs to change. We need to pay more attention to our language styles, our abilities in sensory perception and even our everyday thought processes. We are familiar with ecological inter-relationships after 25 years of research and subsequent exposure by environmentalists through the multi-media. It is now time to further explore relationships which bring meaning to our lives. Perhaps then we could see that these relationships make up a large part of our world, and that they need conscious attention if we want to preserve nature.
Nature is part of us through the air that we breathe, the food that we eat and the water that we drink: indeed, we are our environment. Physical elements, cycled through ecological processes, together with the economic flow of goods and the circulation of people, describe our functional relationships in place, but it is the more meaningful connections that create bonds and make a place into a home. We could live in harmony with ourselves, our communities and nature, and become more concerned with being-in-place than with treating our places as "things" or commodities. Our whole being, involving relations of meaning between ourselves, community, place and nature could thus be renewed once we look within, rekindle our ties without, and join these in spiritual union. Maybe then we will begin to see that sustainable development is a process of personal growth, rather than material gain.
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