Last summer I rode 2,500 miles across the country, interviewing people about “the sacred” and our human connection to land and place. This is the second of two posts about my experiences–if you want to start with the first one click here.

Wes Jackson’s ‘Becoming Native’

“The wilderness of the Sierra will disappear unless little pieces of nonwilderness become intensely loved by lots of people.” – Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

A challenging aspect of my bicycle ride from Minneapolis to Seattle this summer was the growing awareness that many of the small towns of the plains that we cycled through and past — towns like Malta, Montana, which I discussed in Part I — are places whose better days, economically speaking, are far behind them and receding ever further. They are places where grain elevators are silent gray giants, or places that were once sites of booming industry, but which are now made up of abandoned store-fronts and aging populations. They are places that you encounter and can’t help but think, “I’m glad I don’t live here.” And can’t help but ask, “Why do people stay?”

Indeed, what does it mean to inhabit an increasingly forgotten place? To live in a place where habitation first and foremost involves simply choosing not to leave?

In his book, Becoming Native to This Place (Counterpoint, 1996), Wes Jackson speaks of the need for the return to local, integrated, and agricultural modes of living and inhabiting. We must, he argues, “search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, [where] community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture” (p. 103).

For Jackson, the Anthropocene is replete with practices of consumption driven by the desire for wealth and economic growth. What’s more, we’re entrenched in practices of a removed, scientific logic which yields an objectified understanding of the world in order to more precisely deconstruct it–intellectually and physically. As Aldo Leopold said: “Everybody knows…that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead…there has been an ecological death, the significance of which is inexpressible in term of contemporary science.” (A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, 1949.)

The teeny (and getting teenier) town of Steinauer, Nebraska, where my family is originally from.

As human activity continues to impact our earth and impinge on its habitability, these economic and scientific practices continue to fundamentally and dangerously alienate us from nature. We have forgotten the “ecological arrangements that shaped us” (Jackson, p. 60), and instead “have sent our topsoil, our fossil water, our oil, our gas, our coal, and our children into that black hole called the economy” (p. 12).

And so, Jackson writes, our alienation is a call to a transformation of consciousness, to a fundamental change in our current practices of habitation. We must return to our native practices of integration and interpenetration with our earth and its ecosystems. A cadre of “homecomers” and “new pioneers” must re-inhabit these rural, forgotten places and tend the land, because “we cannot avoid participating in the creation, and it is in agriculture, far and away our largest and most basic artifact, that human culture and the creation totally interpenetrate” (p. 103).

Whether or not Jackson’s call for a great reverse-migration from urban population centers back to the countryside is a viable one is a question for another essay. Jackson does, however, raise important insights about the ways in which transformations in our perception of place can transform our practices of habitation. As he says, “either all the earth is holy or none is. Either every square foot of it deserves our respect or none does” (p. 67). If we are able to see all land as holy, as something to be respected — in sum, as sacred — we will be more inclined to treat it with respect.

Storytelling as a Deliberate Practice of Habitation

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth. – Wes Jackson

I witnessed small instances of the ethos Jackson articulates along my route. Places like Garfield County, Montana, which initially seemed undesirable in my (unfair) judgment, were — as the result of even a brief conversation and interview — made more desirable, given greater value. All it took was having people who lived there tell me a story that conveyed their relationship to that place.

These small moments, these snatches of memory, these transfers of imagination were simple and real and powerful. They brought the places they were told about to life, certainly in the minds of those who were telling these stories, but in my mind as well.

Narratives of Change, Choice & Imagination

So back to our foundational questions: How do perceptions and knowledge of a place affect the habitability of that place? If we transform how we perceive and imagine a place, how will that affect our lived practices of habitation there?

In the moments I just shared with you I understood why people choose to stay, choose to continue to inhabit these places which, at first glance, might appear to lack culture, lack pizazz, lack things to do. Perceptions of a place as loved, cared for, as a place to be rooted in – have a profound role in making those places habitable, even if from outside perspectives they do not seem to offer much of a life.

Sometimes, of course, people stay because they do not have the means to go elsewhere. Habitability in the Anthropocene rings strongly of privilege. The walls close in more slowly and less dramatically when you can easily make the choice to inhabit elsewhere. We’ve long known that the poorest among us will fare the worst in the face of our changing climate.

But habitability can also ring of love and relationship. People stay often because of this deep bond that has grown strong because their ancestors and then they and then their children farmed the land. Because the skies and the grass and the way the air smells like sage in the rain are old and dear friends.

We live in a time when our perceptions of place will change whether we want them to or not; when we will have to find new practices of habitation whether through ‘becoming native’ or otherwise; when the stories we have and tell about where and how we live will take on new plot twists and less predictable endings.

Inhabiting the Anthropocene will mean that we will be continually faced with choices which will continue to affect the habitability of our planet. As we come to grips with that fact, what can we learn from those who approach their homes first with an attitude of love and care, of tending the land, of staying put? What can we learn from the practice of telling others our stories about the places we live in and love? What can we learn from listening to these stories?