 "We
are a generation weighed down by a sadness we don't know we feel,"
writes Melissa Holbrook Pierson in The Place You Love is Gone, the latest book to lament the loss
of the importance of place in our lives.
[Orion has an excerpt.]
"An accounting of home is an inventory of loss", and this book is
Melissa's personal and poetic inventory of the loss of three places in
particular: The Akron OH of her childhood, the Hoboken NJ of young
adulthood, and the towns of New York state leveled and flooded to
create reservoirs to slake the insatiable thirst of New York City.
"What we are is where we have been. That is all there is."
The book is an interweaving of three things: poignant reminiscences
from her past of things that have been destroyed to make room for
'progress', angry tirades at human foolishness and thoughtlessness, and
horrifying statistics at what we are losing to make room for more
people and their possessions:
America has paved
3.9 million miles of road, equivalent to 157 times around the equator;
for every 5 new cars we make, a football-field-sized bit of land gets
covered with asphalt; 3 million acres of open space are 'developed'
each year in this country; farmland is lost at the rate of 2 acres per
minute; someone just entering middle age now who grew up in, say,
Rockland County NY lived in a place with 17,360 acres of farmland --
now there are 250 left, but check back in a few minutes. We can only
compile the statistics and get out of the way, dumbfounded. No one
knows what to do about it. There is nothing to do about it.
Melissa also reveals what is spent each year to convince us against all reason that all this is
on the right track, illustrated in the graphic above. As Josh
Buermann puts it "It costs almost nothing now to produce a pair of bluejeans but an astronomical amount to convince me to buy them."
Our
sense of place is what orients us, and provides context for our lives,
from birth: "Here the baby traces the map of mother's face with his
fingers, over rills and crevasses and seismic disturbances. He feels
them with an intensity that does not even recognize their separateness
from his own regional being." We are all a part of the places we live
within, and when those places are destroyed, a part of us dies with
them. "You might have an easier time of it if someone would just
acknowledge the fundamental existential tragedy of more driveways, of
what is lost and how it hurts to know that it will never come
back...Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, really don't like to be changed, as scientists who have studied the way we find our way have learned."
Although
Melissa's stories are touching, and will probably resonate with some of
your own stories of places lost, the real power of the book is in its
poetic laments for what all of this means, writ large, multiplied by
six billion. After all, while loss of place at the local, personal
level is (literally) unsettling, even devastating, loss of place at the
global level is catastrophic:
We
are trying to be what we are not: every other species that has
inhabited the same ecological niche for hundreds of thousands of years
without the need for an eight-bedroom house where three used to do. We
alone do not emit those mysterious pheromones that slow procreation
when the carrying capacity of the land has been reached. Our neural
pathways were formed by millions of years of existence in communities
of our fellows where daily congregation and rituals and exercises made
us what we became, and thus whole...
Something gets into you,
and you want to yank on the collars of people in the street until their
eyeballs make noise. You mean to horrify them with the news, amply
documented if they cared, that the earth is pretty much a goner. What
you do instead is convince them of your lunacy...Suddenly now it hits,
bizarrely easy to grasp. We are inexorably headed for the Big Goodbye.
It's official. The unthinkable is ready to be thought. It is finally in
sight, after all of human history behind us. In the pit of what is left
of your miserable soul you feel it coming, the definitive loss of home,
bigger than the cause of one person's tears. Yours and mine, the
private sob, will be joined by a mass crying: whole cultures, ways of
life, languages, beliefs, landscapes, climates, now falling at a
cataclysmic rate along with millions of trees in the Congo basin and
the Brazilian rainforest and along the Mongolian border. The echo of
their crashing is a prelude to the final kiss-off, the extinction of
our species along with every other that is made to suffer by us...
There
is not a power upon the earth that will stop progress. Except progress
itself. When the air can't be breathed, when the psyche starts running
amok from too many others crowding the elbow, when the spring comes
four weeks too soon, when the floods come, when the trees wither, when
the billion diverse creatures that weave together in ways we cannot
comprehend to make the net that holds us up die, when selfishness calls
the chickens home to roost, then it will stop. Too bad we won't be around to celebrate our triumph over ourselves at last.
She is saying, of course, what John Gray says in Straw Dogs,
but arrived at from a different train of thought and feeling, and
expressed in a different voice: That our civilization has entered its
final century, and that there is no stopping it from bringing about its
own demise, as all civilizations before have done, smug in their belief
that they are somehow different, unique, immune to the inherent
failings of empires built on the presupposition and need for endless
growth.
Melissa talks about the sense of "weird happiness" she
feels at each piece of news that reaffirms the validity of these
feelings of "lunacy" -- that the terrible reign of human animals on
this planet is nearing its end. We feel it first in our bones, an
instinctive sense of dread and foreboding. Then we feel it emotionally,
the sense of loss and grief and anger and guilt, that wells up with
each March of the Penguins, when what Gray calls our biophilia, love
for all life on Earth, smashes into the growing realization that all
that life is dying at an accelerating and unstoppable rate. And
finally, we make the rational case, which we keep to ourselves, because
what is the point in pointing out what is obvious to those ready for
such awful truth, and unfathomable to those who are not yet ready, who
still think the cure for the addiction is more of the drug?
Women
seem to be further along this curve of understanding than men, if more
reticent to articulate it publicly (do they talk about it among
themselves, in private? -- I suspect not). Perhaps this is because most
women are more intuitive, more grounded, less abstracted, and more in
touch with their emotions than most men. They are also, mostly, more
accepting than men, better suited to make the best of what is, instead
of trying to radically change it. I used to think that was meekness,
but now I see it more as canniness, 'knowing better' than to expect to
change what cannot be changed (though it doesn't stop them from trying,
and hoping) -- pragmatic instead of idealistic. That is not rewarded
much in this world, but it makes sense.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
