On the Importance of Place

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We live in an increasingly globalized world where every thing and every one and every place is supposedly expendable, unimportant, and interchangeable. The company your dad works for moves the factory to China to save a few bucks and kills a small town in Idaho. The New York movie you’re seeing tonight was shot in Toronto, and the dystopian DC show you watched last night on Netflix was shot in Montreal. The malls in Missouri look just like the malls in Ontario, and, though you’ll never admit it, you went to McDonald’s when you were in Italy because—goddammit!—you know what you’re gonna get!
22042160_10155186958447683_7892111500148023546_oSo much of our global culture—the very same way of life that’s systematically destroying the living systems upon which we depend—is based upon a radical denial of place. As such, one small way to struggle against this global culture is to stubbornly insist upon the placeness of place. It may seem odd at first, but it’s really no different than saying: “I don’t love humanity in general, I love you. And I don’t love cities in general or rivers in general or mountains in general. I love this city, this river, and this mountain.” Never before has the real been so radical. Place matters. Reality matters. Now more than ever.
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In one of those amazing essays that made her famous—the one that made Claude Lévi-Strauss a household name in the English-speaking world—Susan Sontag rightly observed that: “Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness.” These feelings of homelessness are understandable but not insurmountable. We no longer have to live like royalty in exile. We can take back the Kingdom: fall in love with the earth beneath our feet. We can make any place home if we wish to, if we choose to. But to do so we’re going to have to slow down and get to know, really know, the living things around us. We need to shut up and listen to them. Give them our full attention. Then, like Adam in the Garden, we have to call them by their rightful names. Perhaps it’s then that we’ll realize, at long last, that the world’s still enchanted. And we never really left the Garden.

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