The Significance of Place in Sustainability

All the time we are aware of millions of things around us... aware of these things but not really conscious of them… We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Okay, take a minute here… Close your eyes and imagine your tree. You know the one. Your tree. The one from your childhood that your mind’s eye can follow from trunk-base to twig-tip.

Maybe it was the one you first climbed, ate fruit from or maybe just sat under. And it’s very likely that you remember not only whether it's leafy or needled, tall, thin, short or squat, but also probably recall the texture of its bark, and maybe even bring to mind its unique fragrance.

You have sustained that image, texture, smell and breadth of emotions your tree evokes through all the events and distractions of life’s path to date. And if you take a couple of steps back, you will without a doubt, set the Place of your tree in time and space. We can all do this. Imagine!

As Educators working toward a sustainable future for our ourselves, our students and our planet, this is a powerful tool in our kit. As Nathan Hensley says (2011, p.108), “cultivating an ‘internal reflection’… is central to an education formulated to... equip students with the ability to think holistically and understand the challenges which face our biosphere”.

I used play tag with friends in a huge Manitoba Maple (Acer negundo) in my yard, swinging from limb to limb.

That was My Tree.

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Your Big Here (and Theirs...)

The late Peter Warshall, ecologist, writer and activist felt that connection to Place was intrinsic in fostering an immediate connection to the planet. He created The Big Here quiz, a series of 30 questions (with four “Bonus” questions) as an enlightening way to really find out what you know about your Place. It can be modified for any age group or biome. You’ll come away with a deeper appreciation of the workings of your Place, and (this is the important bit) a little itch to find your missing answers.

It dives right in with a very simple put-you-in-your-Place question: Point North.  

Today, our students and the public often seem more aware of environmental  or sustainability issues far away from their immediate milieu. Media and concerned groups are attracted and rightly so, to high-profile stories and strong visual narratives.

Grounding ourselves and understanding the systems, patterns, supports and ecology of our "Here", affords us deeper perception and insight to interpret these issues elsewhere. Our fellow student Barbara Sheridan's experience thwarting a ludicrous plan to build a garbage dump over her aquifer is a tangible example. When the people of her community, especially the kids, hear or see a story of water contamination in Borneo say, they will feel a visceral response, and no doubt an empathy for local people trying to likewise protect their "Here".

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Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow

It seems every author writing about sustainability begins with a reflection on the Place they first became interested in the planet. 

Hensley (2011, p96) talks of “walking in nearby parks, rolling in oak leaves, looking for frogs”. He recalls having his interest “sparked… playing and getting my hands dirty in an environmental restoration project” in the mountains of western Arkansas.

In his Ages of Gaia, independent scientist, author and architect of perhaps the most profound environmental model since Darwin’s Natural Selection, James Lovelock (1988, p.xii) states that “there is no other way to work on this topic… without a description of Place”. Lovelock is a personal hero of mine. His Gaia Theory frames sustainability for me, and most certainly will be explored in future posts.

Martin Mulligan has worked around the globe with a keen focus on sense of Place and local community resilience, notably as chief investigator for AusAID in the post-tsunami recovery effort in Sri Lanka and India. But his initial work was back home in Australia, working with Aboriginal people “to 'sing up' the stories that are embedded in landscapes” and “re-enchant conservation work” (Mulligan, 2001).

Ecologist and futurist Stewart Brand, author of the seminal back-to-the-land publication Whole Earth Catalogue of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, recalls taking the “Conservation Pledge” through the magazine Outdoor Life at the age of ten (Brand, 2009, p21). It was Brand who petitioned NASA to release the first pictures of Earth from space in 1967 which arguably became the symbol of the conservation movement. He stays as relevant today, an iconoclast to what he calls “the stagnant Green Movement” and identifies his “4 Environmental Heresies” in his new book Whole Earth Discipline.

These short bios, like your tree, serve to show how our earliest and most poignant connection to our planet, our Place, can be starting point and foster our personal evolution as Educators for Sustainability.

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In the Beginning…

Many authors identify the 1969 Ohio Cuyahoga River fire, the fiasco of Love Canal in Niagara Falls and Rachel Carson’s brilliant Silent Spring as the pivotal events that now shape the growth of global environmental awareness and sustainability as a movement. But these started as local stories, Places in time and space. 

1962 - Silent Spring (first-born child) begat
1967 - Spaceship Earth (star child) begat 
1972 - Stockholm Declaration (loudest child) begat 
1987 - Brundtland Report (prodigy child) begat 
1992 - Rio Earth Summit (extended-family child) begat 
1997 - Kyoto Protocol (partially dis-owned child) begat 
2009 - Copenhagen Summit (toothless child) begat 
2012 - Rio+20 Earth Summit (spoiled child) begat
2015 - Paris COP21 (our latest hope-for-the-future bouncing baby).

The on-line environmental magazine Grist takes you to a Family Reunion dinner party to explain what’s currently on the menu. Perhaps this time the appetites are heightened and the proposals more digestible.

But really, this family tree doesn’t have long lineage. It has grown from Local to Global within two generations. This doesn’t minimize the challenges and our planet’s precarious future, but perhaps instead underscores the critical role and potential for change we undertake with our next two generations as educators in sustainability.

We are required to both “Think Globally – Act Locally” and “Think Locally – Act Globally” because, as Futurist and blogger David Houle posits, “the concept of place has changed forever”.  

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Falling Into Place

Our classmate Randy and I met for coffee the other night.  Think about that… Here we were, signed up for the same online course delving into the concept of Sustainability; a course as readily open to someone hoping for spotty satellite internet access in the tropical shrub land of Tanzania, or a commuter on his tablet packed cheek to jowl on a train in Mumbai, or an advertising executive in her downtown loft apartment in any busy metropolitan city you care to imagine.

Yet at 49º 49 min 24 sec N by 97º 5 min 1 sec W, Randy and I were discussing our first assignment and sharing experiences and ideas over a cup o’ joe, connected by a happenstance developed in a University 3º latitude and 37º longitude away, about issues encompassing the globe…

When we really consider our own personal Big Here, we find we are intricately interwoven to the Bigger Here. We automatically find ourselves acting globally. The great traditions, philosophies, religions and indeed the sciences and arts have been telling us of this interconnection for millenia. Care for our local connections prompts us, urges upon us care for the Bigger Here. Curiosity for our local minutia provides us with empathy for another’s minutia half a world away.

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The call to action is elegantly simple: Stop. Close your eyes. Remember Your Tree. Smile. 

Open your eyes. Go plant another one. And then, help someone learn to plant theirs.

(Real-world Tree Planting at Charitree Foundation 
and at Plant A Tree Today Foundation.)

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Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.  - Pirsig.

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Works cited:

Pirsig, R. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York NY: Harper Collins

Hensley, N. (2011). Curriculum Studies Gone Wild: Bioregional Education and the Scholarship of Sustainability. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Lovelock, J. (1998). The Ages of Gaia: a Biography of Our Living Earth. New York NY: WW Norton and company.

Mulligan, M. (2001). Environmental Values: Re-enchanting Conservation Work: Reflections on the Australian Experience. In philpapers online. (http://philpapers.org/rec/MULRCW-2).

Brand, S. (2009). Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands and Geoengineering are Necessary. New York NY: Penguin Group