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5 A Sense of Place
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5 A Sense of Place Scott Russell Sanders English In a speech delivered in 1952, Rachel Carson warned: ‘‘Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.’’ Carson voiced these worries before the triumph of television or shopping malls, before the advent of air-conditioning, personal computers, video games, the Internet, cell phones, cloning, genetic engineering, and a slew of other inventions that have made the artificial world ever more seductive. Unlike the earth, the artificial world is made for us. It feeds our bellies and minds with tasty pap; it shelters us from discomfort and sickness; it proclaims our ingenuity; it flatters our pride. Snug inside bubbles fashioned from concrete and steel, from silicon and plastic and words, we can pretend we are running the planet. A Sense of Place ⭈ 73 By contrast, the natural world was not made for our comfort or convenience. It preceded us by some billions of years, and it will outlast us; it mocks our pride, because it surpasses our understanding and control; it can be dangerous and bewildering and demanding; although it supplies every atom of our bodies and nourishes us so long as we live, it will reclaim us when we die. We should not be surprised that increasing numbers of people choose to live entirely indoors, leaving buildings only to ride in cars or airplanes, viewing the great outside, if they view it at all, through sealed windows, but more often gazing into screens, listening to human chatter, cut o√ from ‘‘the realities of earth and water and the growing seed.’’ By comparison with nature, the world presented by the electronic media is disembodied, stripped down, anemic, and hasty. The more time we spend in the ‘‘virtual’’ world, the more likely we are to forget how impoverished it is. A screen delivers us a patch of something to look at, and speakers or earphones deliver sounds to us from a couple of locations. Compare the experience of walking through a woods or a town square: not only do visual impressions and sounds come to us from all directions, but also smells, textures, tastes, sensations of wind or mist or heat against our skin, and the kinesthetic sensations from the movement of our body. In a woods or a town square, we are also surrounded by fellow creatures, our own kind or other species, and these, too, are centers of perception . We evolved to learn from and be stimulated by the full range of our senses. By comparison, the world given to us by television, video games, or computer screens is depleted—like a diet of bleached flour. To compensate for that impoverishment , the virtual world must become ever more hectic and sensational if it is to hold our attention. The actual world, the three-dimensional array of sights and textures and tastes and sounds that we find in a vibrant city or landscape, needs no hype in order to intrigue us. This retreat into the manufactured world has practical as well as moral implications . It deludes us into thinking we can substitute our own inventions for the intricate, ancient, and essential processes of nature. It hides from us the consequences of our actions. It tempts us to think exclusively of our own personal needs, or at most those of our human contemporaries, without regard to the needs of other species or future generations. By spreading toxins, altering climate and ocean currents, loosing engineered organisms into the biosphere, destroying wild habitat, and disrupting natural processes in countless other ways, we endanger every species on the planet, and not merely our own. By fouling air and water and soil, squandering irreplaceable resources, and driving millions of species to extinction, we are handing on to our descendants a severely diminished legacy. The more time we spend inside human constructions, the more likely we are to forget that these bubbles float in the great ocean of nature. A decade before [3.85.63.190] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:35 GMT) 74 ⭈ scott russell sanders Carson issued her warning, Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac recognized this danger as the central challenge facing the conservation...