Beginnings, Pt. II

My advisor in graduate school once said that cultural geographers generally come from one of two kinds of upbringing, either a peripatetic childhood with many different "homes" over the years, or a childhood rooted in a particular place, often a rural area undergoing some sort of urban or industrial change. I am of the former type, having lived in Washington, DC, Tennessee, Georgia, (far upstate) New York, Illinois, and Montana during childhood and adolescence. But in both cases, the experience of place is especially salient. As for me, I was a perennial outsider trying to understand the locale and its inhabitants; I was the "new kid" from another place. In childhood my family vacationed at my grandfather's rustic cabin in western Tennesse--I became lost in the deep southern woods -- and later we moved to a rather remote section of land in the forest-primeval north of the Adirondaks where I spent hours clambering over deadfall, trapsing around muskeg, exploring the hidden places. And then the rural West captured my attention. What was it like to live in such remote locales? What was life like in far northern Canada, or eastern Montana, or northern Idaho? I vividly remember the class in which my advisor instructed us that these questions were part of cultural geography -- so I was hooked, and became a cultural geographer.

I started the process of becoming a professional geographer as an Anthropology/English double-major in college, and over time the degrees, research, and (thankfully) jobs required more relocation: from Illinois to Lawrence, Kansas, then a year and several summers living in an Aboriginal community in northern British Columbia, then back (briefly) to Illinois where my first son was born, a move to my first job at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, and finally now, for the past six years, in Columbia, Missouri where I teach in the University's Department of Geography. Having moved so much, and traveling besides--and perhaps getting older plays a factor, too--I have increasingly felt the need to settle somewhere, get to know the region and develop ties in the landscape, and in so doing become part of the place. And besides, what a great way to teach a class: have the students learn Geography by doing it, tracking down and interpreting the myriad cultural landscapes in Boone County and beyond.

These thoughts and nascent motivations were percolating when I met Bob in a Departmental seminar. I learned about his ideas for Habitation, The Next 100 Years, and immediately intellectual and other connections began forming. During the course of my academic career, I have been especially interested in the ethical possibilities intrinsic to a strong (yet tolerant, or "open") sense of place. Isn't place the context for all our experiences, encounters, and knowledge? If so, could this existential perspective on place reveal some groundlines for ethical relationships and action? A number of philosophers (Emmanuel Levinas, Jeff Malpas, Ed Casey) and bioregionalists have answered in the affirmative to this question. So if we could use a digital medium to stimulate interest in (and care for) the local environment, perhaps it would contribute to more ethical outcomes here, in this place. Bob was probably thinking along these lines when he designed the project for a minimum of 100 years, which I believe was intended to diffuse the power structure inherent to the division between designers/managers and others (contributers, actual and prospective; community members). The New Media make such open access and participatory exploration possible within a networked multiplicity of actors all contributing to common purposes and communication, but without power concentrated an overarching director/manager, a structural center, or a logical rubric. In this sense, cultivating a collective sense of place could become a kind of anarchist bioregional politics...

By way of conclusion - my approach to this project comes first out of a childhood of hiking the woods and vacationing in rustic cabins; my ethnographic research with Aboriginal peoples in North America (and the related literature; especially powerful for me were Hugh Body's Maps and Dreams and Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits In Places); later, from my study of existential phenomenology (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, Sartre); and most recently, my reading of the literature on place-based education and critical pedagogy (Freire, Cajete, Linda Tuhawaii Smith, Sobel, Orr, Louv).

Beginnings

Habitation is a long-term project that I have recently returned to.  I first tried to start this at Columbia College in 1999, with the less-inspired name, Into the 22nd Century.  But there was no real support for it in those days.  It seems more possible now, in connection with the Geography Department at UMC.

Part of the problem has always been concisely describing what this project is, without sounding too crazy.  Key terms--a bioregional archive, focused on Boone County, Missouri.  By that, I meant a collection of information about how people live, work and think about the natural and social worlds they live in and construct here.  More than that though--I wanted to set this up as an interactive collection, an interactive, public database that people could add to, comment on, expand--and one that would not at all strive to be a "neutral" data collection.  I hope this might become a source of community direction, a cyber version of the elders' wisdom, or, through its human parts, its own sort of conscious, artificial intelligence...

Ah, I grew up with The Foundation Trilogy.  Humor me.

"Bioregion" is quite a loaded term in itself.  There is an extensive literature to back that up.  My favorite is Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land, though his vision of political organization around the bioregion, and his condemnation of urban areas ["ecological parasites"], both might have to be qualified.  Wendell Berry is a good, grounding voice in all this, as is Gary Snyder, and further back, Lewis Mumford.  Deep Ecology appeals to me, and seems to me to be only the broader vision of bioregionalism.  I would also look to communities like Gaviotas, in Colombia--with the difference that Paolo Lugeri started on the barren, empty llanos/grasslands, and built what he wanted.  Here, we have already built cities and roads and traditions.  And we need to work within, not against, what already exists here.

Place-based education is a thread to explore.  There are links to be made to studies of indigenous education models, as well as the critical pedagogy of Paulo Friere.

A research focus, for me, might be how identity is constructed now, in our hectic, globalized world.  Traditional communities operate and sustain local commons and collective beliefs because they are generally face-to-face societies--tribes and their small-town successors.  That just isn't the case for anyone in Columbia just now.  Whatever "we" are, we are pulled in dozens of directions, with identities split among nation, state, employer(s), politics, religion, sports teams, facebook links, video game obsessions, consumer groups, and on and on.  This even before we apply all those statistics about how much and how often Americans move.  I suspect that our selves are so fractured that very little is left for even wisps of identification with the immediate landscape or the people we bump into day to day.

And with little place-based identity, what happens to our role as stewards, caretakers, of the land we inhabit?  If "inhabit" can mean anything for us...  Do we have any ethical center in relation to place anymore?  And if not, will we simply use and destroy the land around us?

Well, all this is what I want to study, make self-conscious in this community, collecting anything/everything about the way we live in this place, and engaging as many people as possible.

Oh--and I propose this project should continue for the next hundred years.

bob