The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

1. All Finite Things Reveal Infinitude

       ฀    All฀Finite฀Things฀Reveal฀฀ Infinitude฀ ฀ Place,฀Space,฀and฀ Contemporary฀Ecopoetry What we require, then, is neither disparagement nor celebration of place-sense but an account of those specific conditions under which it significantly furthers . . . environmental humility, an awakened place-awareness that is also mindful of its limitations and respectful that place molds us as well as vice versa. —Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination 8 All Finite Things Reveal Infınitude ฀฀฀ in the New Yorker, Jerry Brown answered a question about his move to Oakland by saying: Cheap land. I wanted to build a live-work facility. I wanted to live in a grittier place than San Francisco. That’s a problem today: people don’t live in place, they live in space. The media used to accuse me of that— living in space. But it wasn’t true. Now too many people just live in their minds, not in communities. They garage themselves in their homes and live in market space. It’s an alienated way for human beings to live. It’s the difference between a native and an immigrant. A native lives in place, not space. Without roots, there is no morality. Brown’s position—that humans need to reconnect with a sense of place, rather than living in some sort of abstract (cyber- or market-) space—is familiar within environmental circles, where the concept of “place” is discussed a great deal these days.1 And while the essence of his statement is certainly in keeping with much current environmental sentiment, it also demonstrates a key linguistic disorientation regarding the terms “place” and “space,” a confusion that often appears in references to contemporary nature poetry (and, indeed, to most forms of nature writing). A primary objective of this book is to problematize this bias toward place and against space, demonstrating the usefulness and importance of understanding the significant and interdependent relationship between the two terms. Having done so, we can use these relational terms to attain a fuller understanding of developments in what is coming to be called ecopoetry. Put simply, ecopoets offer a vision of the world that values the interaction between two interdependent and seemingly paradoxical desires, both of which are attempts to respond to the modern divorce between humanity and the rest of nature: (1) to create place, making a conscious and concerted effort to know the more-than-human world around us; and (2) to value space, recognizing the extent to which that very world is ultimately unknowable . Without being overly rigid, I want to suggest that most of the project undertaken by contemporary ecopoets falls somewhere within these two objectives, to know the world and to recognize its ultimate unknowability. Using the work of the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, along with other thinkers from different disciplines, we can come to a clearer understanding Place, Space, and Contemporary Ecopoetry 9 of the concepts of “place” and “space” and the way they relate to contemporary ecopoetry. ฀ ฀  Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Tuan explains that the concepts “space” and “place” “require each other for definition . From security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom , and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6). Place and space are therefore interdependent and necessary for a full and healthy vision of the world around us. These key Tuanian concepts offer the means to better comprehend what ecopoets are doing in their work. First, before examining space, the lesser-discussed component of the dichotomy , let’s consider the concept of place and its relation to ecopoetry. As Tuan puts it, “‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undi fferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). For example, a neighborhood “is at first a confusion of images to the new resident; it is blurred space ‘out there.’ Learning to know the neighborhood requires the identification of significant localities, such as street corners and architectural landmarks, within the neighborhood space” (17–18). Thus, “enclosed and humanized space is place” (54), for “place is a type of object. Places and objects define space, giving it a geometric personality . Neither the newborn...