Every place, no matter whether it is wild, rural or urban, has an ecosystem. And ecosystems, rather like places, extend across a range of scales from woodlots to the entire planet. This post is a summary of publications that reflect diverse ideas about the ecology of place, beginning with the importance of place for site-based field ecologists, then considering the ecology of imagination, and suggestions about ecology in place-based planning and environmental management. References are at the end.

Place for Ecologists
The chapters in The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding, edited by Ian Billick and Mary Price (2010), are written by ecologists who have spent much of their research career working in specific places. In this they are not unlike many other field scientists – geomorphologists, biogeographers, botanists, entomologists – who can spend years investigating natural processes in a small area.

In the introduction to their book Billick and Price write: “We reserve ‘place’ to represent all of those idiosyncratic ecological features – including spatial location and time period – that define the ecological context of a field study.” They emphasize that the ecology of place assigns to the idiosyncrasies of place, time and taxon, a central and creative role in both the design and the interpretation of research. In other words, place is not a problem to be overcome or circumvented. It is a source of invaluable information that requires deep understanding of organisms and processes in a specific setting, and is something to be celebrated .

Nevertheless most science publications do not encourage place-based accounts, and favour research that deals with the diversity, complexity and contingency of ecological systems by searching for broad patterns, or uses empirical data to test theories about general processes. However, the contributors to Billick and Price’s book argue that the results of place-based research are rarely parochial and the ecological specifics of a place contribute invaluable insights to general scientific understanding about ecological processes. In short, specific place research and general scientific explanations are complementary rather than incompatible.

In one of the chapters D.M. Waller and S. Flade claim that: “Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is…grounded in both ecological understanding and love of place.” It seems that Leopold’s work serves as an inspiration for many of those writing about the ecology of place, especially his observation that the motivation for conserving the ecological health of the land, and the knowledge of how to do this, arises from deep personal involvement in the natural history of a particular place. In their conclusion Billick and Price suggest that it is this motivational power of place that draws ecologists back to their specific field sites year after year, and that this power has the capacity to draw citizens and scientists together in the collaborative effort needed to solve environmental problems.

The Ecology of Imagination
Edith Cobb’s remarkable book on The Ecology of Imagination (1977) is an indirect reinforcement of the motivational power of place. For her the ecology of imagination has to do with “the genius of childhood”, by which she means the spontaneity and creative imagination of children in the their relationships with nature. “Experience in childhood,” she writes, “is never formal or abstract… the world of nature is not a ‘scene’, nor even a landscape. Nature for the child is sheer sensory experience.” An experience that combines the cultural and the natural, self and world.Cobb suggests that the ecology of imagination implicated in this nature-mind-body-society continuum is actually a phenomenon of evolution at bio-cultural levels, a phenomenon that begins with the natural genius of childhood and the spirit of place. Although the character of individual experiences in the ecology of childhood imagination can influence environmental attitudes for the rest of a person’s life, it is the case, that with maturity the child (which is to say all of us) effectively evolves out of nature into culture and “experience of environment becomes thought about environment.” I don’t doubt the general truth of this, but I do think that the essays in Billick and Price’s book indicate that at least for place-based ecological scientists the motivational power of the ecology of place is never lost.

This also may be the case for others who seek to uncover the imaginative ecology of place. For instance, Carl Lavery and Simon Whitehead are respectively a theatre scholar and a professional dancer who meet regularly in West Wales to discuss shared interests in place, ecology and embodiment. They draw in part on a critical reading of Heidegger’s ideas about dwelling in order to develop what they call “an ecology of place performance research” (2012). Whitehead says: “As I see it, home doesn’t start with language, as it does in (Lavery’s) explanation of Heidegger, it starts with the body. The body is an amazing ecological resource…In a sense, the body is the first home, and the place or territory where you live is the second home.” Ecology, he suggests, teaches that everything is connected and brings into question the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power. Place has specificity yet is relational. It is part of network in which, as in ecology, everything is connected. These qualities he then attempts to disclose through dance and in works of performance art.

Ecology, Place, Design and Planning.
An altogether more prosaic understanding of the ecology of place regards it as an approach that can lead sustainable, healthy plans and designs for urban development. Kim Dovey, (a leading contributor in a books and essays to ideas about place and design), wrote a paper in 1985 about the ecology of place and placemaking in which he claimed that: “The more we understand of the concept and meanings of place…the more we realize the interdependencies of people, form and meaning.” His diagram indicates that what he understood by ecology was primarily the interaction of social processes rather than natural ones, an indication reinforced by his propositions for making what he called “healthy places” with a self-sustaining dynamism. These propositions include: Embodying an emotional connection; Bringing people together; Creating a tangible image and distinctive character; Acknowledging both constant change and connections with the past and the future.

A rather different interpretation is offered approach is provided by Beatley and Manning in The Ecology of Place (1997). They offer a “vision” of how we might plan for places (which means built/urban places) by attending to the interconnections of ecological and social processes. They draw especially on the ideas of Ian McHarg, a landscape architect, about designing with, rather than against, nature, attending to natural cycles, minimizing waste and resource demands, greening cities, building community resilience, and studying the character of the bioregion. They are especially critical of low-density, environmentally damaging urban sprawl, and regard the ecology of place as a foundation for the types of sustainability and environmentally sensitive design approaches that are advocated in new urbanism. These approaches, they argue, offer a vision of a future in which land is used sparingly, landscapes are cherished and cities are compact, vibrant and green. “This vision of place emphasizes both the ecological and social, where quantity of consumption is replaced with quality of relationships.”

Home Place and Parochial Ecology
If it could be widely applied this ecological approach to urban development might allay the concerns of Stan Rowe, an environmentalist from the Canadian prairies, who, in his book Home Place: Essays on Ecology (1990), argues that in cities the instinctive sense of ourselves as related ecologically to the land has slipped away. Though he writes about many local places, Rowe’s ‘home place’ is actually Gaia, the Earth as an ecosphere, and his book is a plea for environmental awareness that echoes Leopold’s call for a land ethic.  He concludes his book dramatically the statement that the “Human history will end in ecology, or nothing.”

Michael Northcott is a theologian with, I think, not dissimilar views. In his recent book Place, Ecology and the Sacred (2015) he invokes Leopold’s notion of “land pathology” (which is similar to Rowe’s concern about the ecological blindness of city life) and argues that the loss of sense of place, which he thinks began about 1800 with industrialization and industrial agriculture, is central to the modern ecological crisis. The thrust of his book is that the sense of the sacred that emanates from local communities of faith in Christian and Jewish tradition amounts to what he calls a “parochial ecology.” In pre-modern ages this was a powerful force, and if it can be rediscovered it might again be the foundation for creating places that are “politically just, economically productive and ecologically sustainable.” He writes that: “Places of dwelling become places, and indeed sacred places, as they are shaped by human experience in interaction with local and specific ecological qualities.”

Comment
The books I mention here are, as far as I am aware, the most substantial and explicit ones about the ecology of place. There are not many of them and they offer a striking range of interpretations. While I like to hope that the place-based ecological arguments of Beatley and Manning, Dovey, and Northcott  might have some influence on future place-making and place-adaptation, intellectually what I find most important are Edith Cobb’s ideas about the ecology of imagination in childhood, and the demonstration in Billick and Price’s book that place-based research can involve emotional attachments to places without compromising scientific integrity. The great majority of writing about place is about human-made places. They are excellent reminders that every place is part of a nature-mind-body-society continuum and that the nature part should not be overlooked.

References
Beatley, T. and Manning K. 1997 The Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy and the Community, Island Press
Billick, I. and Price, M.V. (eds) 2010 The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding, University of Chicago Press
Cobb, Edith, 1977 The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Columbia University Press
Dovey, K. 1985 “An Ecology of Place and Placemaking” 93-109, in Dovey, K., Downton, P, Missingham, G (eds) Place and Placemaking, Proceedings of Paper 85 Conference, Melbourne.
Lavery, Carl, and Whitehead, Simon 2012 “Bringing it all back home: Towards an Ecology of Place” Performance Research 17(4), 111-119
Northcott, Michael S. 2015 Place Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities, Bloomsbury Press
Rowe, Stan, 1990 Home place : essays on ecology NeWest Press

 

My previous post on the Future of Place was triggered by a conference that focused on placemaking and the importance of creating small urban spaces to foster community participation. This is a commendable initiative. However, I think that a much larger challenge for the future of places lies in the uncertain local impacts of economic inequality, climate change, loss of stable jobs, urban growth, water shortages, escalating house prices, gentrification, and all the other social and environmental challenges that seem to be hallmarks of the present century. Cities, neighbourhoods, rural communities and towns, are, and will continue to be, in the front-line of the impacts of these challenges, which will have to be addressed, at least in part, through what I think of as a pragmatic sense of place.

A Definition
By a pragmatic sense of place I mean a locally based, yet outward looking attitude that combines an appreciation of the complex unity of a particular place with an understanding of the diffuse global character of the social and environmental processes that affect it. I wrote about this several years ago (references are at the end) but I want to restate and update some of the ideas I had then, partly because of the very unsettling character of recent political events and partly because these global challenges seem to intensify every year – the ultra-rich get richer, each year is warmer than all previous years, neo-liberal globalization continues apace.

Historian Jonathan Glover has written: “Most of the time what matters most is the personal and the local. But great public disasters can strike the most unlikely places.” He was referring primarily to the world wars of the 20^th century but his comment applies equally well to the fact that even though, for example, climate change may have widespread and diffuse origins, its effects are felt in diverse ways in different places. Miami floods as sea level rises, California withers in persistent drought, ice and tundra melt in the Arctic. Particular places have to respond as best they can to problems that have remote causes, and those responses need to be as varied as the places themselves. One adaptation to climate change does not fit all, and there is no universally appropriate response to economic inequities, epidemics of emergent diseases, or ragged wars and terrorism.

In practical, political terms what this means is that responsibility for dealing with these uncertainties will lie increasingly at the local, municipal level rather than at the national level. Climate change deniers may blather on as international agreements set the tone and establish directions for action, but the real, precautionary work of adaptation will have to be done in places where the immediate effects are most likely to be experienced.

A Note on Pragmatism
A pragmatic sense of place has its philosophical roots in pragmatism, the movement founded by William James and Charles Pierce in the late 19^th century as a philosophical approach that looked away from what they regarded as pointless theoretical discussions towards consequence and facts. As our own era slides into post-fact politics this is something that resonates. Pragmatism has been reinterpreted by subsequent philosophers (for instance, Rorty, Toulmin, Putnam, Davidson) as a basis for making decisions about social and political issues in age when there are deep ideological and epistemological disagreements. I particularly like Stephen Toulmin’s idea of reasonableness that suggests a middle way between abstract theory and personal opinion. He argues that “we need to return to the world of where and when, get back in touch with the affairs of everyday life,” and he offers Médecins sans Frontières as an example of pragmatic reasonableness, doing what is possible to save lives and to prevent things getting worse, acknowledging that root causes are important yet dealing with immediate needs.

Balance versus Extremes
A pragmatic sense of place is about getting things done to deal with global challenges, by finding some sort of balance between distinctive local conditions, and universal or global processes. This derives from my understanding of place and placelessness as two inversely related continua rather than an either/or opposition. Everywhere, no matter how placeless, has some degree of distinctiveness; and everywhere no matter how distinctive, shares some standardized characteristics with other places. This diagram gives an indication of what I mean.

Distinctiveness pushed to the extreme results in parochialism, exclusionary attitudes, even ethnic cleansing. Such attitudes have to be regarded not just as narrow-minded but as naïve in a world now interconnected by electronic communications, air travel and intermittent epidemics of emergent and other diseases. They will not keep out the next flu pandemic nor protect against tidal surges and ideas communicated on the Internet.

Standardisation pushed too far leads to non-places and the sorts of universal designs advocated by modernists for social housing, many of which have had to be demolished because they proved to be unlivable. Modernists and the neo-liberal agents of globalization may believe that standardized, universally applied approaches are the most efficient and profitable ones, but cities and communities caught up in the global economy have discovered that too much standardization is a bad thing and a distinctive brand identity provides a competitive edge.

Between the extremes of exclusion and universalism lies a pragmatic sense of place that seeks a reasonable balance between maintaining the distinctiveness of local identity, and doing what it takes to survive in social, economic and environmental systems that are globally interconnected. It requires thinking about what solutions and adaptations will work best here, in this place, to deal with changes and challenges originating elsewhere. It offers no magic solutions, no rule-books, no grand theoretical answers; it does involve a continual effort to find ways that balance distinctiveness and standardization, that aim to reduce social injustices and to reverse ecological deterioration, and to facilitate a locally-based precautionary approach to address emerging global challenges.

Elements of a Pragmatic Sense of Place
There are at least four elements to a pragmatic sense of place:

• like all forms of sense of place, it is ontological, because to exist is always to be somewhere, to be in a place.
• it is focused on the particularity of a place, a quality that is associated with belonging somewhere, being embedded, knowing and being known there.
• it is open to other places because everywhere, in various degrees, is inevitably affected by and contributes to what happens elsewhere.
• it is active rather than passive because to live somewhere inevitably involves taking some practical responsibility for it, and transforming it in some way. This can involve such modest gestures as recycling or cutting the lawn, or more substantial ones such as facilitating or protesting developments, protecting heritage, volunteering to help the homeless, or celebrating place by organizing festivals or installing artworks. These may not be explicitly regarded as aspects of a pragmatic sense of place, but that term does embrace the many acts of place responsibility that happen all the time in everyday life.

The Openness of Places

A pragmatic sense of place requires thinking beyond the confines of a particular place, beyond the bubble of self, the walls of home, the boundaries of city and region, in order to grasp the differences, similarities and interconnections between places. It regards this place and every other place as distinctive , yet simultaneously open to the world and an opening to the world.

An understanding of the openness of places has probably always played a role in religious and aesthetic experience, even when lives were narrowly confined. The sheer mobility of people nowadays should serve as a foundation for its considerable enhancement. In 2016 there were 3.7 billion Internet users around the globe (Internet World Stats); and in 2015 there were slightly over 1 billion international air passengers (IATA) and 1.2 billion international tourist arrivals (UNWTO). In other words, a substantial minority of the world’s population, presumably the most affluent minority, is either directly familiar with a range of different places and landscapes or electronically linked to them (though I acknowledge that much of this is tempered because it channeled through the non-places of airports, hotel chains and manicured resorts). This range of place experiences needs to be brought to a greater degree of awareness in order to find locally appropriate, balanced and sustainable ways to respond to global changes. A pragmatic sense of place should contribute to this.

Maps of global interconnections. Left, flights in a single day, 2014. Right Facebook in 2013, 

Local responses to global problems
Places are territories of local experience that open into the world and are open to global change. Nowhere is an island entire unto itself. The UK Stern Report on Climate Change (2006, Summary of Conclusion, vi) was explicit about this… “Such a radical change in the physical geography of the world must lead to major changes in human geography – where people live and how they live their lives.”

In other words, specific places have to be the foundations for resilience and adaptation to economic, social, political and environmental challenges that already confront us in the 21^st century, because no matter how diffuse or remote the causes may be, their geographically diverse consequences will be experienced locally and will have to be dealt with locally. For this I believe a pragmatic sense of place is necessary. Whether it is actually called that is unimportant. What matters is the recognition that challenges and changes that originate elsewhere will require policies and courses of action that reflect the distinctive circumstances of particular places yet do not lose sight of the cosmopolitan, interconnected character of the world.

[A Footnote:  a week after posting this I came upon the following article about place attachment, sense of place and climate change in the Canadian Arctic that I think reinforces my argument well – Willcox, Ashlee et al, “From this place and out of this place: Climate change, sense of place and health in Nunatsiavut, Canada” Social Science and Medicine, Vol 75, No 3, pp.538-547. Because the impacts of climate change in the Arctic are so advanced what is happening there should serve as a precursor for what might happen in more temperate regions.]

References
• Jonathan Glover 1999 Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Random House).
• Edward Relph, 2008, “A Pragmatic Sense of Place” in Frank Vanclay et al (eds), Making Sense of Place, National Museum of Australia, 311-323
• Edward Relph 2008 “Senses of Places and Emerging Social and Environmental Challenges”, in John Eyles and Allison Williams (eds) Sense of Place, Health and Quality of Life, (Ashgate, 31-44).
• Nicholas Stern 2006 The Economics of Climate Change (The Stern Review)
• Stephen Toulmin 2001 Return to Reason Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press