December 2009 Archives

The Environmental Justice Foundation estimates that by 2050, 150 million people will have lost their homes as a direct result of climate change, from drought, flooding, desertification, rising sea levels and extreme weather events. How many millions more will become political or economic refugees because of indirect effects—social instability and unsustainable agriculture, military incursions, ethnic and tribal conflicts that arise in conditions of stress and scarcity, among other factors—is difficult to assess. (Not to mention any of the other mundane, ongoing causes of forced migration.[1]) How will the rest of the planet absorb these people?

Since the beginning of industrial development, rural villagers have crowded into cities—sometimes voluntarily, but often as a result of combined environmental, economic and political pressures (in some cases abetted by dubious advertising, sleazy promoters suggesting wonderful opportunities). Not that rural poverty is the best possible life, but concentrating 70 percent of the world’s population in increasingly uninhabitable cities is clearly not the best alternative.

At Tule Lake

“The Modocs’ grief was for a whole relationship to the natural world and to a specific place, for their culture and community, while the grief of those who produced and profited from their loss was purely personal.”[2] In this statement, Rebecca Solnit describes both parties to an indigenous displacement in terms of grief—the military conquerors who forced the Modocs from their ancestral homeland (in 1873) suffered both private losses and their own ancient inheritance of exile, a separation from place and connection to land that in some ways enabled—or at least coincided with—European technological advances and colonizing impulses. The trauma of their early, mostly forgotten, displacements survived as the willing suspension of empathy that fueled the engine of conquest.

The Modocs were driven from the land of their birth, the center of the world where they had always lived, the place that had nourished and supported them from the beginnings of time. The place was the heart of their culture and the basis of meaning in their universe. To be pushed even a few miles away was irreconcilable. A complete rupture. Recovering that land someday could, perhaps, repair some of the damage, but so much specific knowledge is lost when this sort of intimacy with a place is destroyed that it seems unlikely ever to be fully restored.

The deepest loss is of that intimacy, which is the core of indigenous experience in a place, of a place. Even if old stories are remembered, even if the language survives (or is revived), without the deep everyday experience of the specific subject of the stories, there’s a degree of understanding that is simply unavailable. Who knows how many dozens or hundreds of generations it takes to develop?

And yet, change is inevitable, and developing strategies of engagement, of honestly learning to meet a place, seems preferable to simply lamenting its demise.