What's in a name

A Sense of Place is a concept of Human Geography, introduced to me in the writing of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. It arises when space is given meaning, value and history by people. 

 

Space is a more abstract concept than place. Space is something we can fill, or occupy, it is something we can take from. It is boundless, expansive and unfathomable. Wide spaces, like the broad river valleys of the Southern Alps, the endless sagebrush plains of the Great Basin in Wyoming, the limitless cresting waves of the Pacific Ocean, or the desert arroyos and mesas of the New Mexico bootheel, all exist on the threshold of today’s society.

 

We know they are there, and we know they are big, but to many of us, space is all they are.  

 

How can we understand spaces like these without a grounding of experience, of story, of memory, of connection? Once you have smelt the dirt in the antarctic beech forest in the rain, after you have crushed the fragrant big leaf sage in your palm as the pronghorn herd scuds across the horizon, when you have heard the pinyon jay flitting through the branches of the pines, you anchor yourself in these spaces, imbuing them with meaning and memory.

 

Big spaces have an enduring capacity to make people feel small, to strip away the ego and leave their humanity bare. To invoke a sense of wonder and awe. These spaces connect us to nature in ways that are obfuscated in the built environment of cities and suburbia: we are made of the world, and the world is made of us.

 

When people give meaning to a place, when value is imbued in it through senses and stories, the land is seen as a partner, one that requires respect and care in return for sustenance and survival.  A sense of place provides continuity, identity and personality.

 

Space, to a capitalist society, is something that can be used, exploited, strip-mined, drilled, dumped into, fracked, burned and defiled. It is a blank vacant area on a surveyors map, ripe for roads to divide into a grid of resources. Place is home, it is nurturing, it is an anchor, it is something worth fighting for, it is something worth living for. 

 

Those wide vast expanses of the world that exist as open space in our cultural dialogue, those broad plains, endless oceans and towering mountains can become home for us. In truth, they already are - many of us have just forgotten. To transform them from a blank space on a map, to a place in the hearts and history of a people, we need to love and experience these places. Get down on your knees and stick your nose in the earth, smell the dirt. Feel the wind on your cheeks and the pull of the ocean currents against you. To protect something, you must love it, and to love something, you must know it.

 

Developing a sense of Place is more than just building a connection to nature to protect nature, it is re-centering ourselves and our cultures to be within nature, not separate from it. In the words of a wise friend, “To go out is also to go in, because what we feel and sense out there is the very same as our own internal fabric.” You don't have to journey to the edge of the map to get back to nature - it's all around us and within us. And truly, developing a sense of place for where we are at, and connecting with nature where you are, is the most important thing of all.

 

This little venture of mine is about making things that last. Making things that work. And making things that allow people to get deep and thrive, whether it is deep in the mountain backcountry, or grubbing in the dirt of their backyard. It’s about mending that which we already have, and doing things in a more examined way.

 

I leave you here with a rather lengthy, but poignant Barry Lopez quote, a reminder, to love each other, and the world, and to fight with love in your heart to save everything that we have: because everything that we have is all we ever will.

“Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc—ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war—we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas—the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak, and that to be generous is to be foolish—can have no future with us

It is more important now to be in love than to be in power.

It is more important to bring E. O. Wilson’s biophilia into our daily conversations, than it is to remain compliant in a time of extinction, ethnic cleansing, and rising seas. It is more important to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost.

Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known

~ Barry Lopez

 

Further Reading:

1. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place; The perspective of experience, 2001
2. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, 1989
3. Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, 2022