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Being at Home
- The University Press of Kentucky
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Being at Home Knowing the nature and behavior of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround us . . . we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves masters and possessors of nature.1 —René Descartes It is tempting, even for scientists, to get carried away by success stories. Science has popularized the view that humans are at the top rung of Earth’s evolutionary “ladder” and that with technology we have stepped outside the framework of evolution. . . . These views underestimate the Earth and the ways of nature.2 —Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan Once the Universe becomes a machine, no longer alive, once human beings are defined as the only intelligent life-form, a unique kind of isolation enters human lives, a kind of loneliness.3 —Stephen H. Buhner Homelessness . . . is both a physical and psychic condition. We are not so much at home on earth as we are home as earth.4 —Larry Rasmussen What does it mean to be at home? For most of us, being at home simply 78 This was originally a lecture prepared for the Journey’s Home lecture series, sponsored by the Washington College Center for Environment and Society, the Maryland Center for AgroEcology , the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, and Adkins Arboretum, March 24, 2004. 79 Being at Home means being in an apartment or house or condo where we usually sleep and where, once in a while, we eat meals with our family members or watch television. Home is mostly an enclosure that protects us from the rest of the world, sometimes with help from security personnel and technology. The “homeless” are those who are deprived of such amenities and find themselves sleeping under bridges, on sidewalks, in parks or in homeless shelters. But is the ownership of a structure or having contractual rights to reside in one really what it means to have a home? Some of us claim to be more “at home” in certain ecological niches. I often refer to myself as a “prairie boy” because for some strange reason I feel more like I belong on the prairies of North Dakota than I do in the mountains of Colorado or on the beaches of Florida. Could it be that we become conditioned to a place by virtue of birth or upbringing or evolutionary history, making us more “at home” in one ecological neighborhood than another? For that matter, are we, members of the human species, “at home” on planet Earth in any case? An old gospel song tells us that “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through,” and some religious traditions have taught us that our short tenure on planet Earth is simply a “pilgrimage,” a kind of tutorial to prepare us for another life in an altogether different venue, a “heaven” that these traditions tell us is our true “home.” Religious traditions, however, are not the only sources suggesting the existence of an elevated world superior to the one in which we dwell. According to David Abram, mathematicians going back to Pythagoras believed in a “higher world, untainted by the uncertainty and flux of mortal, earthly life.” The prospect of such an “ideal” world inspired Plato to expand this superior world from “just numbers and mathematical relations” to include “truth, justice, and beauty” in which “the ideal form of each such notion enjoyed the purity of an eternal and transcendent existence outside of all bodily apprehension.”5 Are such conceptions—in which we appear stuck in a somewhat bellicose physical environment while longing for a more ideal life in some “higher” world—pathological distortions or expressions of some deeply held precognition? From an evolutionary perspective, we may question whether planet Earth is truly “home” for the human species. We are latecomers and may not yet be well-adapted to the place. Furthermore, many species that came before us apparently did not find the planet much of a home either. Mass [44.195.23.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:22 GMT) 80 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience extinctions (five in the last 500 million years) killed off 10 to 50 percent of existing species each time. One suspects the planet didn’t feel very “homey” to those species while they were being wiped out. Evolutionary biologists tell us that 99.99 percent of all of the species that have ever existed on this planet are extinct now.6,7...