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