More than 'environment', 'place' exists only after people have imagined it. These
imaginative structures create a sense of place and unify land and its peoples in
powerful ways. Sense of place is linked to meaning and permanence. Places
have a way of claiming people within the context of notions associated with them.
They are the essence of conservation, because people come to value the
biophysical elements of town and country scenery as visual triggers to relive the
past.
To understand sense of place, the geographic concept needs to be defined. One
definition of place, is that a place comes into existence when humans give
meaning to a part of the larger, undifferentiated space. Any time a location is
identified or given a name, it is separated notionally from the undefined space that
surrounds it. Some places, however, have been given stronger meanings, names
or definitions by society than others. These are the places that are said to have a
strong "Sense of Place."
Cultural geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and urban planners
study why
certain places hold special meaning to particular people or peoples. Places said
to have a strong "sense of place" have a strong identity and character that is
deeply felt by local inhabitants and by many visitors. Sense of place is a social
phenomenon that exists independently of any one individual's perceptions and
experiences, yet is dependent on human engagement for its existence. Such a
feeling may be derived from the natural environment, but is more often made up of
a mix of natural and cultural features in the landscape , and generally includes the
people who occupy, or have occupied, the place.
The sense of place may be strongly enhanced by the place being written about by
poets, novelists and historians, or portrayed in art or music, and more recently,
through modes of codification aimed at protecting, preserving and enhancing
places felt to be of value (such as the 'World Heritage Site' designations used
around the world, the 'English Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty' and the
American 'National Historic Landmark' designation).
Many early studies on the relationship between culture and ecology were focused
on the indigenous peoples of North America, and links between culture and
environment defined as 'culture areas.' The two dominant ideas are that culture
determines culture, and environment determines culture. The latter viewpoint
says that the natural environment sets certain possibilities for establishing a life
style from which cultures, conditioned by their history and particular customs, may
choose. Environmental possibilism in many ways marks an important shift
towards an interactive view of the survival relationships between cultures and their
environment which is central to cultural ecology. A cultural core of subsistence
patterns is seen as having developed largely in response to particular local
natural resources. Furthermore the cultural core may shape other culture features
of social organization. The cultural core thus plays an interactive role for both
environment and society, to shape culture change for a different future. In this
sense, the study of culture and ecology is orientated towards an understanding of
the processes or causes of the 'evolution' of culture. This occurs by explaining
the choices made by cultures presented to them by their history as well as by their
environment, and the way in which these interactions may produce different and
unpredictable paths of development. Sense of place is a thus binding agent for
community members, and also signposts to the future. When a place claims very
diverse kinds of people, then those people must eventually learn to live with each
other; they must learn to inhabit their place together. All these links of culture to
place may be regarded as behavioural features of survival value.
The other attachments of people to place relates to the imaginative concept of
landscape, which comes from painting and literature. Irrespective of any historical
connection of an individual has with 'landscape', particular places have the ability
to bring an emotional response, because we come to recognize, through
education in its broadest sense, that certain localities have an attraction which
gives us a certain indefinable sense of well- being and which we want to return to,
time and again. This preoccupation of artists with landscape for its own sake
may be said to have been begun in China during the tenth and eleventh
centuries. Several landscape painters of great skill and renown produced large-
scale landscape paintings, which are today considered some of the greatest
artistic monuments in the history of Chinese visual culture. In earlier times
landscapes were more often the settings for human dramas than primary subject
matter. These landscape paintings usually centred on mountains. Mountains had
long been seen as sacred places in China--the homes of immortals, close to the
heavens. Philosophical interest in nature could also have contributed to the rise of
landscape painting. Daoism stresses how minor the human presence is in the
vastness of the cosmos, and Neo-Confucian are interested in the patterns or
principles that underlie all phenomena, natural and social.
With respect to place, the question 'Where do you come from?' again has to mean
something. These days people live everywhere, which is the same as living
nowhere. Like a vitamin deficiency, a contact deficiency with one's ancestors
weakens the body, the mind, and the spirit. The great challenge of our times is to
rebuild connection into our self-conscious lives, by reaching out to others and by
being part of something larger than ourselves.
Connectedness has to be the key to living a full and rounded life. The problem is
much larger than family. Modern physics recognizes the whole universe as a web
of dynamic relationships of which humans are but a tiny outcome. It is within this
grand cosmic perspective that a capacity to signal to special places to make
connections, was crucial to launch the primal religions of indigenous peoples. In a
practical sense, choosing meeting places to make connections is part and parcel
of healing the fundamental disease of our time - the fragmentation of the world
and knowledge about it into isolated parts. Piecemeal knowledge is not useful at
a time when the real task is to understand and redress the extensive destruction
of the life systems of planet Earth brought about by human single- mindedness.
By putting ourselves in the perspective of the rest of reality, human self-
consciousness enables us to discover the humiliating truth that the entire world
does not revolve around us as human beings, and never has. The moment of
recognition comes when we realize that for almost all geological history
humankind has not existed, and has thus been irrelevant to the rest of the
universe. If in addition we begin to see ourselves, not just as other people see
us, but as all the other species of the natural world view us, as just another animal
relative, we suddenly find ourselves in a very broad biological perspective. From a
religious, and especially a Christian viewpoint, this recognition of our real place
in a grand scheme of things, provides a dramatic moment of humility and of
possible conversion, to a way of thinking about ourselves as part of the body of
the universe, showing reverence to all life. Above all, we belong to places and
places do not belong to us.
Three vital ties to place that give our days meaning, focus on places in the present
where we can make connections with our ancestors, and fit these people in the
wider context of global history and the cosmos. For example there are:-
We are by nature a migrant species, and we should mark and celebrate our
places of arrival and departure.
There are some places in every country that have a particular significance for
particular groups of people, because they are where their ancestors have
built kinship networks. Places of settlement are where we meet up with
nature, by destroying ecosystems and displacing or exterminating wildlife
-
Places of interaction between peoples
So many of our places of historical encounter are hidden in the landscape,
with little more than a sign to point to them. Many of these are places of
conflict, telling stories that we need to know to understand grievances that
have been handed down from generation to generation, but there are
others that symbolize cooperation, productivity and friendship.
-
Places of spiritual significance
Sacred or holy places are found in different cultures, past and present, all over the
world. Such places are frequently marked or embellished by architectural
structures and art. In most cases, it can be shown that the sacredness of a place
is linked in some way to natural objects, and features such as trees, stones,
water, mountains, caves and forms in the landscape. It can further be shown that
these natural objects and forms lie at the root of the forms and shapes
employed to mark or embellish a sacred site. The development of modern
science, has made incredible much of the content of traditional belief of religions
based on a supernatural god. Sacredness and spiritualism without God means
that the quest for transcendent living is satisfied in nothing else but genetic
demand for inner and outer order, hat evolved the concepts of '
intelligence', 'love'
and 'free being'. Silence and contemplation are not just for monks and nuns, they
are natural functions of human biology. Places become special where there is
space for silence and contemplation of the land.
The concept of land was approached by Victorian educators through five cultural
ideologies (systems), and fourteen associated behaviours (processes), which still
facilitate social change.
Land Processes Land Systems
1 Annexation of land 1 Agrarianism
2 Attachment to land 2 Colonialism
3 Conservation of land 3 Environmentalism
4 Depiction of the land 4 Ethnicism
5 Cession of land 5 Industrialism
6 Conquest of land 6 Conquest
7 Enhancement of land
8 Eviction from the land
9 Exclusion from land
10 Exploitation of land
11 Migration from the land
12 Reclamation of land
13 Rights to land
14 Settlement of land
The Systems
•Ethnicism
We emerged as a 'human' species through a system of ethnoecology which
involved the integration of family groups with seasonal cycles of biological
production. As hunter gatherers, we first developed ethnic skills to adapt our
basic needs to the pace of local ecological production, and its vagaries of climate
and terrain.
•Agrarianism
The advent of agriculture transformed our relationships with natural resources.
Nature was equated with 'land', which became a focus of possession through
settlement, and alteration through cultivation, and the selective breeding of crops
and livestock.
•Colonialism
Colonialism has always been a foundation of economic development wherever a
settled society could command foreign lands, and, or, their people, to produce
raw materials for home consumption. Land became 'territory', and the means of
domination were always the same, the fleet, the army, violence and, if necessary
cunning and even treachery. Colonialism, and its ultimate development, through
conquest, as imperialism, are as old as history, and have carried world
development along in their wake for the past 5000 years.
•Industrialism
Industrialism was brought about by capital investment in factories and machines,
fed by large stocks of natural resources, tended by a stable, dense population,
with assured routes to consumers who wanted mass produced goods. The pace
of urbanisation was vastly increased by the global spread of industrialism during
the last two centuries. There is no country on earth that has not experienced the
flood of rural people into towns and cities, lured by visions of partaking of
industrialism's apparently limitless wealth. Land upon which towns and cities
were built has a uniformity that generated a culture of 'placelessness'. Land,
which supported industrialised agrarianism, became 'countryside'. Town and
country have distinct cultures despite modern mass communications, which are
sometimes nationally divisive. However, 'placelessness' is universal, because in
both cultures it is common for families not to have any connections with the social
and spiritual roots of the land upon which their dwelling is built.
•Environmentalism
One of the most important ethical questions raised in the past few decades has
been whether nature has an order, or pattern, that we are bound to understand,
respect, and preserve. This is the question prompting the environmentalist
movement. Those who answer "yes' also believe that such an order gives an
intrinsic value that can exist independently of us; it is not something that we merely
bestow.
'Reactive environmentalism' sees environmental problems, issues and
challenges as mistakes arising from ignorance foolishness or venality, and
regards their solution as increased governmental regulation, and application of
expertise to industrialism.
'Ecological environmentalism' conceives the problems as being culturally
interconnected, and rooted in more fundamental mistakes in the structure of
social decision making. Ecological environmentalists judge that major social
changes are necessary to resolve ecological problems, that if unchecked, will be
socially destructive.
Moral environmentalism' seeks justification, through Darwinism, as to how we
should live. Morality evolves into something more than usefulness and
expediency. It becomes a self- transcending sense of mercy, sympathy, and
kinship with all animate existence, including Earth itself, and focuses on
questions, such as 'By what right do we elbow aside countless species in our
pursuit of resources, and presume to remake nature according to the desires
of just one of its life forms?.
•Conquest
Involves aggression activated by kinship, political ideology, and emotional
responses to the behaviour of other groups and individuals, exemplified by
'revenge', 'fear', and 'covetousness'.
