Place, the place we call home, the place we belong to, defines us. When we have lost our sense of place, we have lost our soul.
Last Christmas I wrote a piece about homelessness, and suggested that the homeless and the addicted are a perfect metaphor for all of us living in modern civilization. I wrote:
Civilization is our Pusher. It's The Man who keeps us hooked on
consumption and debt, The Man who holds the key to our prison and gives
us our illusory rush of elation when we buy and use His addictive
product. The Man who seduces us back even when we have decided that
life in His prison is insane, self-abusive, worse than death. The
monkey is our addiction, without which we cannot live. And we wander
the streets of civilization's artificial world in a daze, never really
home, wondering what is missing, why we feel so lost. Civilization is
our ghetto, a whole world of six billion homeless people, setting fires
on every corner for warmth, ganging up and stealing everything we can
get our hands on to pawn for our fixes, breeding babies already
drug-addicted at birth.
So the next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don't be
frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the
mirror. It is we who are homeless, and addicted. What will it take before we break the habit, walk away from The Man, and find our way home?
On another occasion I wrote:
Know your place. We are all part
of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, but ultimately we have our own
place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and
every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If
you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. A house is not
a place, though if it's open it can be part of one. A mind is not a
place.
The wonderful books of biologist Bernd Heinrich are about birds and
animals, but most of all they are about the places that the creatures
he studies call home, and about the importance of those places. In his
latest book The Geese of Beaver Bog
he talks about another biologist, David Ehrenfeld, who writes about
animals and the importance of place to them. I've ordered Ehrenfeld's
1994 book Beginning Again, but I've already read the amazing first chapter
from Amazon's 'search inside' page for the book. The chapter is called
'Places' and here is an extract that shook me to the core of my being:
Because the turtles [I was
studying in Costa Rica] come out to nest after dark, much of my work
was done at night. There was a great deal of waiting between turtles,
plenty of time to sit on a driftwood log and think. In the first years
of my research I was often the only one on the beach for miles. After
ten or twenty minutes of sitting without using my flashlight, my eyes
adapted to the dark and I could make out forms against the brown-black
sand: the beach plum and coconut palm silhouettes in back, the flicker
of the surf in front, sometimes even the shadowy outline of a trailing
railroad vine or the scurry of a ghost crab at my feet. The air was
heavy and damp with a distinctive primal smell that I can remember but
not describe. The rhythmic roar of the surf a few feet away never
ceased -- my favourite sound. I hear it as I write in my landlocked
office in New Jersey. And then, with ponderous, dramatic slowness, a
giant turtle would emerge from the sea.
Usually I would see the track first, a vivid black line standing out
against the lesser blackness, like the swath of a bulldozer. If I was
closer, I could hear the animal's deep hiss of breath and the sounds of
her undershell scraping over logs. If there was a moon, I might see the
light glistening off the parabolic curve of the still wet shell. Size
at night is hard to determine: even the sprightly 180-pounders,
probably nesting for the first time, looked big when nearby, but the
400-pound ancients, with shells nearly four feet long, were colossal in
the darkness. Then when the excavations of the body pit and egg cavity
were done, if I slowly parted the hind flippers of the now-oblivious
turtle, I could watch the perfect white spheres falling and falling
into the flask-shaped pit scooped into the soft sand.
Falling as they have fallen for a hundred million years, with the same
slow cadence, always shielded from the rain or stars by the same
massive bulk with the beaked head and the same large, myopic eyes
rimmed with crusts of sand washed out by tears. Minutes and hours, days
and months dissolve into eons. I am on an Oligocene beach, an Eocene
beach, a Cretaceous beach -- the scene is the same. It is night. The
turtles are coming back, always back; I hear a deep hiss of breath and
catch a glint of wet shell as the continents slide and crash, the
oceans form and grow. The turtles were coming here before here was
here. At Tortuguero I learned the meaning of place, and began to
understand how it is bound up with time.
Ehrenfeld goes on to describe the cruel and careless treatment of the
turtles by local fishermen, and how the witnessing of such atrocities
by the President of Costa Rica so enraged him that he took steps to
protect the green turtle's Tortuguero breeding ground in perpetuity.
Often, at night, I sit out on the back hill behind our house,
overlooking the 1100-acre Albion Hills Conservation Area, with Chelsea
the dog, just paying attention to the sounds and the smells and the
shadowy sights in the moonlight. I soon forget there is a house behind
me, and behind it a community of 34 houses interspersed with wilderness
wetlands, and beyond it a city of 6 million that is forecast to grow to
as many as 40 million by the end of this century. To us for a few
moments there is only the wilderness, the sounds of owls and wood frogs
and wind through the trees that have been here for a hundred thousand
millennia -- the dogwood and the balsam poplar and the maple and the
trembling aspen and the white birch and white cedar and bur oak and
ironwood and pussywillow, and the smells of rain and muskrat and
decaying leaves. And I long to see and feel how this, my adopted home,
this place that has welcomed me and allowed me to be a part of it and
to share in its wonders, looked before man arrived to change it quickly
and utterly. For even here, where nature is respected and where the
actions of conservation authorities and lack (for now) of development
stress has allowed some of this land to remain unaltered, and some more
to start the slow path back to something like what it was like before
we arrived, it still bears little resemblance, to the trained eye, to
what it must have been, in the eons of silence and darkness before man
arrived with his noise and artificial light and carelessness and
altered it beyond recognition.
If I am to believe the biologists, the area I call home once probably looked like these photos:
I can imagine living in a place like this, but only because I do live in a place vaguely
like this. If I were to have spent my whole life living in a city, or
even on a farm, I don't think I could imagine it. And even if I could,
I don't think I could conceive of it as my place, the place to which I
belonged. While this is my adopted home, it is only, naturally, the
place of a rare and scattered minority of humans, the First Nations,
who learned, in ways that we never have and which I cannot hope to
comprehend, to live with the bears and wildcats and mosquitos and black
flies and bitterly cold winters and lack of year-round food supplies.
Without my protection from these dangers and discomforts, I could never
call this place home.
So in order to make places like this habitable to us, as we destroyed
the places in the cradles of human civilization that were habitable to
us naturally, we had to reform them with our cities and farms, until
they became unrecognizable, nothing like the pictures above --
terraformed, civilized, converted to a dreadful sameness all over the
planet. These cities and farms were as alien to us as they were to the
creatures that retreated in their wake. When we try to imagine how
bizarre it would be to live on a space station, or on the moon, we
should consider that we have already made a much more profound and
barren adaptation here on our suffering planet.
But these cities and farms are not natural places for humans. They are
not where we lived and thrived for three million years before their
invention. Then we lived in the warm climates of Africa, of South Asia
and of the Southern edge of Europe, when all those lands were heavily
forested. We were and are, like all primates, creatures of the forest,
and specifically of the tropical forest. And while three million years
is but an instant compared to the hundred million years that the giant
green turtles of Tortuguero have called that place home, that tropical
forest is still the place our DNA tells us is our home, our place.
Most of that tropical forest is now destroyed, cleared for cities and
farms, and we have been gone from there so long that the thought of
returning there even if there was room for us, which there is not, is
too terrifying to countenance. So we moved from there to less
hospitable and more dangerous lands and remade them into cities and
farms as well: Since we could not live in these hostile environments we
destroyed them and built ourselves artificial landscapes, vast alien
prisons which protected us from the terrors of nature and weather but
detached us completely from any sense of place.
So now we are all homeless, six billion of us living in an artificial
world of our own making. We have destroyed our own three-million year
home and most of the homes and places of every other species on Earth,
making them mostly homeless, too, those that we haven't yet made
extinct.
I bow my head to the turtles of Tortuguero. They are so much wiser, so
much more alive than we shallow newcomers to this planet can ever hope
to be. They know the importance of place. They know how to live as part
of a world to which all life on this planet once belonged. They show
respect for the grand design of our fragile, troubled world, and know
their part in it.
While we are merely astonishingly fierce, wondrously adaptable, utterly
homeless, arrogant beyond reason, hopelessly lost and addicted to the
perpetuation of our own folly.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
