Commonality of Places

 Cedar Falls:

Cedar Falls in Logan, Ohio is a natural preserve, geological feature, hiking area, and one of many sites of the Hocking Hills State Park. The first time I visited the site was during the early 90's on a camping trip. We stayed on the main trails and observed the feature from below, hiking between the massive rock formations covered with moss and ferns. At the time, I could only imagine what the top of the falls looked like. Also, I did not know at the time what Cedar Falls would come to mean to me in just a few short years. At the time, I appreciated the site for the preservation of nature, the sanctuary from industrial life, and the excitement of its hiking trails. I enjoyed digging in the pool below the falls and searching for mini-lobsters (I refuse to call them crayfish), fish, snails, and rocks and saying, "cool!" or "sweet!" each time I found something new. 

Little did I know then that I would have a more extensive exploration of Cedar Falls in just a few years. When I visited my friend's family's land just up the road from Cedar Falls for a camping trip, we went to the site on our second day there. However, when we approached "Cedar Falls" I did not recognize it. It was a hot day in late April and the little wind that was present played rhythms on the  field of tall grasses and wildflowers as we walked towards an opening within a hedge of overgrowth. This was not the way to Cedar Falls that I remembered. I also noted on our way in that there was a cluster of natural gas pipes erupting from the seemingly untouched grassy landscape. When we hit the opening, I saw a babbling stream and my friends leap-frogging across it on small rocks caught on the bottom. I followed suit and was mesmerized how I had just crossed into a sanctuary; no sign of cars, gas mains, power wires, or even other people. It was just us, the sound of the stream, the sounds of birds chirping, and the evergreens with their fresh scent and pointy needles brushing the wind.

We have to communicate about the needs of each place, the balance and sustainability of each place for our relationship with the world to be healthy. We have to make sacrifices for the future. Our careers, aspirations, and profits will not mean anything without the planet. 

I returned many times that summer, and the following years visited regularly, leading all the way up to the present. The only thing that has changed is that my journey to Cedar Falls is much closer to home now and I see it more often. Within the past few years, a new bridge was constructed over the stream above the falls to allow access to the rim hiking trail over the falls. Now when I go, hikers are much more common, but it is still quiet and most people at the top are there for the same thing; the energy of nature. The gas main out front of the entrance is more apparent now as the grounds are kept regularly to encourage the bridge's access and you get the occasional bunch of kids who are excited by the prospect of being above the falls; they tire quickly though on the rim trail and I usually wait out the dissonance they bring. 


Who am I to complain though? It is a beautiful spot where people should be, where they should learn to appreciate nature and hopefully connect it to the fate of the entire planet, even the places where we stuff away our consciousness of pollution and extravagance at the expense of the interconnected global habitat. Are we kidding ourselves that everything will be all right if we don't address it? We have to communicate about the needs of each place, the balance and sustainability of each place for our relationship with the world to be healthy. We have to make sacrifices for the future. Our careers, aspirations, and profits will not mean anything without the planet. 

I feel a bit of Cedar Falls in every place of the planet, it is my ideal location, slowly changing but still a nature preserve. I feel that each place, no matter its "prestige" is just as important as any other because the spot next to a diesel exhaust pipe is the same as Cedar Falls or even Olympic State Park in Washington. But what is to come for this place? How will it be changed in the future? Will the stream run dry or become toxic from anthropocentric exigencies? As with the latest oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, we see how our dependence on this source of energy not only warms the globe and pollutes the air, but it kills animals and ecosystems through direct contact and polluting water. The place of energy impacts all of our sanctuary places too, like my Cedar Falls. Will the land be developed for more natural gas or even tourism? Will people crowd here after we poison other places and tuck them away from our consciousness? How far can we run away from the problem? How much place is left? How far are our sacred places from the effects of the doldrums in the pacific subtropical gyre and the countless other reminders of our anthropocentric wake? I believe it is not far away at all.

From Lawrence Buell's "Writing for and Endangered World," he discusses problems of place perception. While I love Cedar Falls, if all the places are not taken care of and consequently swept under the rug, Cedar Falls will eventually perish and become victim of our consumer culture. While industrialized nations and the affluent hide away the injustice of our "progress" in poor neighborhoods, third world countries, and rural lands while distracting ourselves with places we vacation to or hold as our ode to nature, we fail to see the path we are setting that runs right off a cliff. Buell states,

Nothing is easier than to slip into a kind of self-righteous hectoring didacticism when arguing for the importance of place: to make mantra out of that totem word, like the mantra of "family values" perhaps, as if returning home and committing one's whole life there, or to an adopted place like Richardson, Alaska, would somehow solve all the evils of the world . . . Place attachment can itself become pathological: can abet possessiveness, ethnocentrism, xenophobia. (Buell 76)

With Buell's thoughts in mind, certainly I must be cautious about my sanctuaries like Cedar Falls; they should not make me complacent when injustice is rife elsewhere in places on earth. Buell states, "a certain capacity for self-deterritorialization seems needful for resiliency and even survival. Buell is concerned with place-connectedness as a right to possess places and as "Wallace Stegner cautions, 'we may love a place and still be dangerous to it'" (qtd. in Buell 77). However, he is also concerned with my argument that we have to think of more than home, our sacred nature preserves, and that which is not seen or seen from afar via media. Those "spaces" need to become our sacred places too as their fates are all intertwined. Buell emphasizes that if 

one thinks of place sense as containing within it many different patches besides just home, including what comes to us via the world of images [e.g., BP oil catastrophe in Gulf of Mexico April 2010] as well as through live transactions, plus the changes in us relative to place and the awareness of landscape as timescape, then we are on the way to arriving at a conception more fit for local, regional, and global citizenship. At the turn of the twenty-first century, "place" becomes truly meaningful only when "place" and "planet" are understood as interdependent. (77)

When it comes to natural environments, I think there is a lot more that humans exploit as opposed to what humans pre/serve. I feel morally obligated to lessen my impact on environments by reducing carbon emissions, landfill contributions, and speaking my opinion about the importance of a national investment into solar energy (which we pitifully pay lip service to while Germany and Japan are leading the way with the technology). To me, the US policy on solar energy is not nearly as vigorous as it needs to be; perhaps lobbyists for oil and coal have something to do with our apprehension. We talk a lot about renewable energy, but how much are we really doing with it? 

Yes, there is no doubt that we do much to act as stewards of our environments, but I think we justify a lot of waste and overlook our impact based on the progression of civilization and our more immediate personal concerns. The videos below demonstrate a device that reduces carbon emissions on a public bus in New York City; this is a good thing and I like the effort. However, what about the impact resulting from the harvesting and transportation of that fuel? Just because it reduces emissions in one way is it making a difference for the place of earth? Without such a place, all our sacred places will perish. When do such "green" technologies become a more olive drab when we consider this (is anyone thinking of the issues with ethanol?)? 

Humans are arguably the most intelligent species on the planet, therefore humans have the greatest responsibility to pre/serve the copious life that shares our environment. We can do more than filtering emissions.

The environments I love most are those which I frequent, whether they are in a metropolis or out in the sticks. The environments I have never experienced, well, I am grateful for them too. An injustice in one environment is an injustice the world around. All I am saying is that every location, every environment is worthy of our stewardship. Even the doldrums in the Pacific Subtropical Gyre which few of us ever visit.

 Notice the yellow spots in the ocean. They represent concentrations of plastic debris that are traced hundreds of meters deep. Represented are two of five high pressure zones in the world.

More on Ocean Pollution 

(BLOG)

(ARTICLE)

Humans are arguably the most intelligent species on the planet, therefore humans have the greatest responsibility to pre/serve the copious life that shares our environment.

Such toxic discourse is essential for us to consider and is growing with importance in light of news about eco-ravaging by our human tendencies (BP's recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Mountaintop removal strip mining and its associated water pollution, plastic pollution in the doldrums, etc.). According to Lawrence Buell in Writing for an Endangered World (2001), toxic discourse is "expressed anxiety from perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification of human agency" (31). Such toxic discourse is increasing as the change to climate and ecosystems becomes more evident. As Susan Casey states in "Our Oceans Are Turning into Plastic . . . Are We?" that we've "bitch slapped the planet," she sounds less and less hysterical with each passing environmental catastrophe, with each person learning more about the true costs of our extravagance on this planet. Buell says that "although toxic concern dates from late antiquity, in recent years it has greatly intensified and spread. Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez" (32). In about ten years time we've had plenty more markers of why toxicity should concern us as mentioned above, and what are we doing about it but turning inward and hoping for the best. Citing Ulrich Beck's "risk society" and "solidarity from anxiety," Buell explains that our culture has been unable, "even with science's assistance, to calculate the consequences of possibly harmful exposure to environmental hazards in one's everyday life" (32). While the progress of environmental consciousness is growing through mainstream environmental groups of affluent classes, as well as the environmental justice movement "increasingly led by non-elites" concern is coming from more perspectives, but economic strife is interfering with the struggle to think about the problems of our habitat immensely (Buell 32). Perhaps more strides by individuals and campaigns to prove their conservation efforts make a difference will help jar loose the "solidarity from anxiety" or instincts we repress to pre/serve the planet.

In a culture obsessed with accumulation of things and focusing inward, we need to take our sights off of the place of self and places of sanctuary, and realize that what is outside us, is us as well. We need to realize that our culture is misleading us in many ways. Wendell Berry states in "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," 

When they want you to buy something 

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, everyday do something 

that won't compute . . . 

 . . . Love the World. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

I think Berry helps echo what I have said about extravagance; do something that won't compute in a consumer culture obsessed with the vainest of exigencies on a planet in need of healing. In a sense Berry is asking that we think about challenging that culture and act as stewards, rather than self-assured parasites who cannot reflect on the impact of their actions.

The Place of Cities

City environments are the origins of the bulk of our pollution and environmental impact. City pollution (such as plastic debris) finds its way through sewers, streams, lakes, and rivers and into oceans, it works its way into the air, into the ground, and even into our bodies. As with the bus videos above, if those buses were running on electric generated by photovoltaic arrays . . . 

 . . . as opposed to diesel fuel with a special emission filter, there would be a lot less consumption of carbon emitting fuel overall. What impact does the demand for the fuel overall have? Is that filter just a cursory nod to "clean" air? Just because the air is clean by the bus doesn't mean it is the best solution to a very global problem.

I don't want to find out what will happen if we continue to emit carbon and other pollutants at the rate we are now. More progressive changes in how we use and create energy is paramount. Switching to renewable energy must be a top priority if we want to preserve any place we hold dear to our hearts.

The Place of Earth

Essentially, my perception of place is that every location is worth preserving, worth pursuing a harmony between anthropocentric and ecocentric ideals, especially in environments predominately modern and civilized. However, there is a distinction here; in the spirit of national preserves of land or national parks, we must continue to value the autonomy of wilderness in a way that minimizes anthropocentric exigencies. This we have done well with, but the future is uncertain as our embrace of fossil fuels encourage rhetoric to emerge that supports opening the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. In this case, anthropocentric exigencies must be quelled. 

  
*How do these images reflect the conflict between Anthropocentric and ecocentric philosophies? Which image best represents Hemmingway's pastoral? Thoreau's?

How do we find harmony in our cities and towns, our dwellings, with eco-centric concerns that respect biodiversity and preservation of species? What is problematic about harmony when so much political influence is behind what we value and define as "harmony." What is the best way to act responsibly towards nature? Collective discussions, reaching across political divides, and realizing our fates and values are actually quite similar are keys to reconciling our needs as humans, but more importantly our needs as global citizens.

       How do natural surroundings shape our outlook, our purpose in life? How do we ascribe value to that?

Without the place of planet, our places of refuge and sanctuary will perish. Manifest that love of refuge and extend it to the world around. Consider what impact our demand for energy has on the world as place; consider energy possibilities outside of fossil fuel and herald the most sustainable and efficient.

Thank you for reading and nurturing the world. Your effort is essential to the success of the sustainability and environmental justice movements.

Best,

Russell Crooks