An Exercise in Local Awareness
Stand in the Place Where You Live: Now Describe It
By Joan Opyr, 7-10-06
On his blog, Help Wanted, Kevin Kelly presents an interesting and provocative exercise called The Big Here. It's an exercise that Kelly describes as "hacking" into "the biggest interactive game there is." He writes:
"You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome . . . . At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix."
On the surface, the questions Kelly asks seem simple. Point north. What time is the sunset today? I can point north because I know that the sun rises in the east. The morning start shines, first thing, right into my bedroom window and thus right into my eyes. I am not a morning person. I awake each day with a "damn it" on my lips. As for the sunset, I can make an educated guess. Tonight, it will set sometime after 8:30 PST. I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, which means I love summer and hate winter. On my birthday in late November, the sun will set about three minutes after it rises -- or so it will seem. As I'm turning 40 this year, I think I must either fly to Hawaii or buy myself enough strobe lights to recreate Studio 54. I need light; I need noise; I need action. What I don't need is a blanket of white snow, a half-mile long gravel driveway, and the feeling that the frosted shrubbery is going to begin dancing. I'm a write with a book due on deadline. I don't need any more enticements to become Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
I've got north; that's good. I've got the sunset. Fine. Kelly doesn't stop with the easy stuff, however. I have to know "where the solids go" when I flush the toilet. "Straight into the septic tank," say I, and then I try to think no more about it. But can I trace my drinking water from rainful to the kitchen tap? What do I know about the previous inhabitants of my land? From what direction do storms generally come? What's the composition of the soil beneath my feet? I can answer many of these questions without the aid of Google, but I really do have to think. The Nez Perce lived here for thousands of years; the Nez Perce still live here. They ate salmon and wild game and camas root. So do I -- and, yes, I eat camas root whenever I can get it.
We have a thick layer of topsoil on our farm, amazingly thick. Where I grew up in North Carolina, the topsoil is very thin, and erosion was a tremendous problem. Here, the topsoil seems to go down forever. We live in a valley, and storms seem to come from every which way. Most often, however, I think they blow in from the west, from Pullman. So far, I'm feeling pretty good about Kevin Kelly's challenge. I can name five edible wild plants; a few years ago, I fell and twisted my ankle collecting elderflowers for a failed experiment in natural wine-making. Thanks to my six-year old's addiction to the Canadian show, Survivorman, I've eaten every wild plant within a two-mile radius and several tasty bugs. I'm aware of my surroundings, thanks very much. I know where my garbage goes. I'm doing okay.
Except . . . I don't know how many people live in my watershed, and I don't know who uses the recycled materials Moscow collects. I don't know how deep my well is, I'm not sure what our total rainfall was last year, and as for naming our migratory birds, I have no idea. Whatever they are, I know that I spend a lot time trying to keep our barn cat from killing them.
Check out Kevin Kelly's The Big Here. See how you do. Once upon a time, the theme song of The Auntie Establishment and Brother Carl Show was REM's Stand. I think we'd better start playing that song again. Embedded in those lyrics is a lesson I don't want to forget:
"Stand in the place where you live, now face north
Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before
Now stand in the place where you work, now face west
Think about the place where you live, wonder why you haven't before."
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Comments
I've got a knee-jerk reaction to KK from those same CEQ/WER days (and still have the collection, too). His writing always feel holier and cleverer-than-thou to me, and I have a hard time keeping from being distracted by that.
Modern civilization has taken most of us away from the outdoors, the night sky, the rhythms, sounds, smells and temperature of sunrise. The most important questions for most of us have to do with the people in our lives, for better or worse.
That's a measure of success; our ability to specialize allows us to focus more particularly, to invent, to innovate, to discover. It comes with some risk, too. If we forget where we came from, where we live, what sustains us, we will be lost, sooner or later.
I should have been a bit more accurate: KK was a CEQ editor at the time; Peter Warshall, one of the originators of the bioregionalism concept, was the author of "Where You At?".