Place: The Sense of Spiritual Home

Knowing place reflects an intimacy with the elements of that place, the trees, the animals, the human visitors and, in the case of this blog, the Brisbane River. American nature writer, novelist and preservationist Wallace Stegner (1992) says that: 'Your province is not the wilderness, where the individual makes contact with the universe, but the farm, the neighborhood, the community, the town, the memory of the past, and the hope of the future—everything that is subsumed for you under the word 'place'.

Along the river, away from the road and signs of the city, the tall trees shimmer with the song and dance of birds. Flashing past overhead, in colours of red and green, the King Parrots are being pursued by a small gang of Noisy Mynahs. Miniscule pardalotes parade daintily on narrow branches above the water, while the blue-winged Forest Kingfisher fossicks among the leafy bushes, purring and gurgling as it searches for tasty treats. And right in front of me, the jauntily-dressed black and white Willie Wagtail wiggles its tail feathers back and forth as it hops from branch to branch as if leading the way. Watch out! The Brush turkeys scatter as runners zip past. Dogs bark, straining on their leashes to follow them. The river is brimming with life and movement.

Getting to know place is a joyous adventure. It involves making friends with the locals, human and animal, observing the changes in the light, the colour of water, the shifting seasons, the cycle of flowers and seeds, and the changing tapestry of hues. All these events, sights and sounds effectively bring me home to place.

Steven Galliano and Gary Loeffler are landscape architects in the US who have studied the connection between sense of place and attitudes to the ecosystem. In their paper Place Assessment: How People Define Ecosystems (1999), they recognize the significance of place attachment, saying it acts as a link between human and ecosystem as well as between social experiences and geographical regions (bio-regions).

According to Galliano and Loeffler, the concept of sense of place is individualistic, a subjective yet shared experience at once emotional and symbolic, which can define an individual, a community or a culture. Sense of place brings meaning to the lives of visitors and residents alike, affecting them in various ways from the physical to the spiritual. Feelings of attachment, allurement and love emerge as people engage with local places, reflect on their memories of place, tell stories of their childhood connections - the cubbies they built, the fish they caught, the trees they climbed, and track their life changes through the changes to place.

Even if we've never visited a particular place we can still value it for its symbolic resonance, its wilderness quality and its spiritual attributes and join with others to fight for its protection and survival. Yet these values are often bypassed in resource management practices as such practices are geared to defining places as 'resources' rather than, or in addition to, places which have meaning and can make meaning.

Galliano and Loeffler call for a different way for resource managers to make decisions about place. Place management and place attachment seem poles apart when development, mining or logging intervene. Different groups of stakeholders value places from differing and often clashing worldviews but it's not worldviews that are weighed up in resource management decisions. Their focus is on the physical, the objective, the measurable. Thus concepts like affinity and attachment to place which embrace emotional, symbolic and spiritual dimensions are neglected, and in many cases, rejected as being unscientific, subjective and weak.

As a consequence, the social and spiritual impacts of decisions can result in a strengthening of social/community capital as whole communities may decide to join together to defend what they regard as their place, or our place. Shared meanings about place become shared meanings about attempts to despoil that place.

Meanings about place can be classified in four main ways: (i) scenic-aesthetic; (ii) activity-goals, based on conventional resource management practices (iii) cultural-symbolic, representing emotional and spiritual dimensions; and (iv) individual-expressive, reflecting personalised or individualised meanings about place. Galliano and Loeffler suggest these themes can be used to better qualify management decisions and the likely impacts of those decisions. Using holistic principles, resource managers can more effectively map 'the interactive unity of people and place' (Clark, 1971), taking into account the multiplicity of values about places, not only the economic and/or the ecological.

Resource management processes and environmental impact assessments as they are currently structured often fail to address the intangible non-empirical values and shared experiences of individuals and communities. Galliano and Loeffler mention that one of these unmeasurables is compassion for both natural and cultural qualities of the place.

The Brisbane River and its natural environs is a place of values in conflict where management practices are based on conventional rather than holistic methodologies. I call such approaches 'neo-conservationist' as they attempt to conserve with conservativism. Rather than applying the precautionary principle of first do no harm, the neo-conservationist stance conserves use values over their counterpart, the intrinsic, aesthetic, symbolic and spiritual values, even if these values are founded on scientific evidence, indigenous ecological knowledge or archeological research.

What matters most? Biodiversity or a river view? A place to fish or a place where fishers are repelled? A place to clear or a place to log sustainably and look after? Techno-managerial solution oriented approaches may overlook the nuances inherent to these questions. A sustainable community can have both biodiversity and aesthetics, fishing and rivercare, urban forests and sustainable development.

Knowledge and understanding are key characteristics of resource management but perhaps, following Galliano's and Loeffler's research into place attachment, qualities of wisdom, insight and compassion should be added, to forge a holistic method that embraces the interactive unity of people with place.

References
Galliano SJ and GM Loeffler, 1999, Place assessment: how people define ecosystems. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-462, Portland, OR, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. (Quigley, TM, Ed., Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project: Scientific assessment), http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/2980
Stegner W, 1992, The sense of place, a letter to Wendell Berry. In: Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs: living and writing in the West. New York, Random House, Inc.

Climate Change or Global Warming

The famous Watergate journalist Bob Woodward was speaking on the BBC today about his working life being an investigative journalist. He said that one of the most important things he and other journalists needed to do consistently is to be tough, to demand answers.

Over 30 years ago the hard questions he and his colleague Carl Bernstein asked about corruption in the Whitehouse landed an American president, Richard Nixon, in jail. But Woodward commented that over the years both he and other leading American journalists had grown too soft. For example, he had not asked those hard questions over weapons of mass destruction pointing out that WMD debates came not long after 9/11 so America's focus including his own, was turned elsewhere.

This week attention is focused on Bali where governments of the world have gathered to make tough decisions to curb climate change. Climate change?

The investigative media organisation IndyMedia is asking those tough questions trying to get to the bottom of why many journalists in Australia and elsewhere either ignored the plea to act on global warming or spent more space covering the sceptical view, thus raising doubt in the public's minds. This worked to limit their anxiety about the issue - and their lobbying power.

Climate change sceptics used ad hominem arguments to distort and disuade. Eco-activists and scientists like Professor Ian Lowe, the Wentworth Group, and many others globally including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continued to challenge the nay-sayers but the global media was often loathe to treat their science and their warnings seriously. With Al Gore's documentary, the truth was now out in the open. The time for debate and misreporting was over.

Drought came. The river basins and river flows began to retreat especially in inland Australia. The Murray River, the lifeblood of the country, was dying.

In his boook 'When the Rivers Run Dry' (2006) journalist Fred Pearce documents the parlous ecological state of rivers globally and says of the Murray that its death is evident in the giant river red gums that line its banks.

'The trees live up for a thousand years, hunkering down during droughts and then spreading their seeds after floods. But if the drought goes on too long, they die' (2006:249).

His book tells the story of rivers across the globe whose quality and flow are under severe threat. The risk is too great but the precautionary principle, it seems, is not being applied. For example, underground aquifers are being mined - drained - water is not being replaced.

Pearce calls for a water ethos - 'an ethos based ... on managing the water cycle for maximum social benefit rather than narrow self-interest' (348). It recognizes that in many religions rivers are revered as sacred, holy places for pilgrimage and baptism. Its significance in Aboriginal culture is found in 'waterholes and billabongs ... physical manifestations of the process of creation itself' (350).

A water ethos venerates water sources, cherishes water and respects all rivers - including the Brisbane River.

Reference:
Pearce F, 2006, When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens when Our Water Runs Out, London, Transworld Publishers.

Sacred Places

Are places sacred in their own right or do they become sacred when we (humans) develop an emotional relationship with them?

The poet and deep ecologist Gary Snyder quotes a Native American elder as saying, 'if people stay somewhere long enough - even white people - the spirits will begin to speak to them. It's the power of the spirits coming from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren't lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.' (Crow elder, cited in Snyder, 1990).

Do spirits of place reveal themselves at first glance or does it take a while to get to know a place, its contours, its moods, its colours, its habitats and inhabitants? Every time I connect with the riverplace, there is something more to see, more to learn. About beauty, about the movement of the tides, about the creatures who dwell along the river valley and about the river.

Today as I looked up at the sky shimmering through the leafy canopy I spied a raven flying in with a long slice of grass in its beak. Its partner was waiting on a branch sitting on a half-constructed nest. The nest was situated towards the end of the limb and seemed not to be as positioned as well as it could be to withstand the stormy weather that has been part of Brisbane for the last couple of days. But despite rain on and off during this time the soil beneath the surface is still very very dry.

The birds were frolicking around the house today as well. Nest building and family building. A Kookaburra flew in. It sat near the backdoor and waiting patiently for a feed. Ravens, Butcher Birds, Currawongs and Magpies joined the feast. Living with wildlife is one of the joys of this place. But the rush to cut down 'bird houses' (read trees) is fast and furious. Loving a place one risks having one's heart broken.

References:
Snyder G, 1990, The Practice of the WIld, Berkeley, North Point Press.

In Place

How do we get to know place unless we submerge ourselves in it?

People's ecological concern is related to their affinity to both nature and places (Kals, Schumacher and Montada, 1999). They immerse themselves in special places, get to know particular beauty-spots in the outdoors environment, sink their hands into the soil while gardening, dive deep into the sea's blueness and find love.

Affinity, atunement, allurement, love. Nature unearths these emotions. We are attracted and through this attraction comes attachment and care.

'Place attachment' is the scholarly term to describe this sense of connectedness with natural and wild placesl. Kyle et al (2004:439) term this feeling 'the phenomena of human-place bonding'. As we bond with place, as we develop an emotional or 'affective component' in our relationship with special places, we begin to value those places. Kyle et al say this has important implications for resource management as: 'An understanding of these bonds and the meanings that gird them, provides insight on why stakeholders value particular settings.'

In their discussion of the concept of place attachment, Kyle et al outline that an individual's response to natural settings is 'not determined by the attributes of the setting per se' (p.441), and they mention trees, rivers and mountains. They say that the places an individual prefers are those which they/we have experienced previously. For example, they cite a study by Bixler, Floyd and Hammett (2002) who found that children who had previously experience of wild places, were more competent in those places and preferred them.

In contrast, in an earlier study quirkily titled ‘Nature is Scary, Disgusting and Uncomfortable’, Bixler and Floyd (1997) found that these days, urban children in America are more likely to fear wild nature. The researchers documented how children raised in urban areas are afraid of being in the woods; they are scared of wildlife, insects and spiders; they are disgusted by the dirtiness of the outdoors; and they don’t like experiencing extremes of weather. Instead they prefer their adventures in the tame and predictable city, in manicured parks and shopping malls.

As children begin to lose contact with the natural world, they replace it with indoor experiences which are often linked to car travel, where adults use their cars to ferry children to and fro. This keeps children dependent on adults, not to mention the added environmental consequences that go with increased car use and the lack of physical exercise.

The inspirational nature writer and seed saver Gary Paul Nabhan (Nabhan and Trimble, 1994:85) comments that the numbers of children who have ‘frequent exposure to wildlands and to other undomesticated species is smaller than ever before in human history’. He laments this decline saying (citing Pyle, 1992) that it is an ‘extinction of experience’. Nabhan continues:

'While many children may visit zoos, watch nature films, or cuddle with pets and stuffed animals, their responses to other species have become more “politically correct” but less grounded in their own visceral experiences' (p.86).

The river in Brisbane provides a haven, not only for birds and animals, but for children and adults to develop place attachment, curiosity about the natural world and ecological processes, and a desire to engage with and protect such places. Merging with the flow of the river can provide myriad experiences, touch the sensual affective side, evoke a sense of wellbeing as well as a sense of care - and spark our own visceral experiences.

References
Bixler RD and MF Floyd, 1997, 'Nature is Scary, Disgusting and Uncomfortable,' Environment and Behavior, 29, 4, 443-467.
Bixler RD, MF Floyd and WE Hammett, 2002, 'Environmental Socialization: Quantitative Tests of Childhood Play Hypothesis,' Environment and Behavior, 34, 795-818.
Kals E, D Schumacher and L Montada, 1999, 'Emotional Affinity toward Nature as a Motivational Basis to Protect Nature,' Environment and Behavior, 31, 2, 178-202.
Kyle GT, AJ Mowen, and M Tarrant, 2004, 'Linking Place Preference with Place Meaning: An Examination of the Relationship between Place Motivation and Place Attachment,' Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24, 439-454.
Nabhan GP and S Trimble, 1994, The Geography of Childhood. Why Children Need Wild Places. Boston: Beacon Press.
Pyle RM, 1992, 'Intimate Relations and the Extinction of Experience,' Left Bank, 2, 61-69.