Finding a Sense of Place
When I first heard about community rights, I picture a bunch of urbanized activists holding signs, looking to do some good for their community. It just felt like a throwaway phrase, because what was a community anyway? In the Western world, the typical community is a collection of individuals and families collected together by the wild forces of economics and class. “Maybe,” I thought to myself, “’community rights’ is just another way of saying individual rights.” Just in a more collective way. So I thought of community like this: Millions of people, collected together because of jobs or personal circumstances or happenstances, unaware of each other and the land that has been shoved under pavement. These people are unmoored, living on the sputtering streams of culture: if jobs, friends, or circumstances move to another city, another state, another country, they float away; people’s loyalties lie far from their own physical location. What mattered in these communities was a paradoxical “collective self-interest” that made wrangling cats the norm in the face of exploitative forces.
But the story of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania opened my eyes to what a community can actually be, and has been for other cultures for thousands or millions of years. A community can be a collection of people connected by their ties to each other and to their geography. This community’s culture didn’t depend on television or radio waves or social media; it was built by the people and their relation to the natural ecosystems that surround them.
The question of geography was critical to my newfound conception of “community”, because it signifies a culture so different from our own: A culture with a sense of place and a binding agreement with Nature: You protect your home so long as you value your community’s culture. If you don’t value your community’s culture, you are free to give up your home.
The people of Tamaqua were given a choice to protect their place or leave it to the birds, and chose to protect it. Doing so, they are one of the very few communities that have transformed into something alien to us: a community that depends on a particular river’s shape and quality as the reminder that this is not Peru or Chechnya or Paris, but Tamaqua. The township’s residents, in law and spirit, established their sense of place.
I believe that you need to have a sense of place in this world so you can actually develop some skin in the game. The nationally-mobile Americans are at times proud of the cities and states they were born in but won’t bat an eye when their hometown is poisoned by paper mills and oil frackers. Our culture developed a type of performative pride over place that is more useful for social icebreakers than inciting people to act in protection of their homeland. Airlines tend to reimburse cancelled tickets due to “family emergencies” but won’t give a shit that you’re flying back early to stop sludge dumping near your home.
To our culture, land is an incidental object in our culturally-driven lives. The destruction of land can be defended by phrases such as “Don’t like it? Then move!” Apparently there’s land coming out of people’s ears—what matters if this one is radioactive? It’s only as inconvenient as the moving costs. Sometimes you read about a town with a “sense of place”. Typically small and quirky and hours away from the nearest megacity, these towns are looked at patronizingly, as cute getaways but never in a million years would I live there! Too far from the city, the civilization, the culture. It can almost be considered a personal failure to have set a familial anchor in an out-of-the way place. You might as well just be a country bumpkin for believing you belong there.
When you believe in your own belongingness to the land and Nature, you are more likely to defend what you have.