Becoming Native To This Place (The Blazer Lectures for 1991)

Ideas seem to advance in waves upon the modern mind, and one of the concepts cresting at present is the notion of place. This recent swell could be charted back to Daniel Kemmis's 1992 book Community and the Politics of Place as well as his more recent meditation on the inhabitation of cities (The Good City and the Good Life). Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth continued the theme, as has Alan Thein Durning's recent book This Place on Earth. Wes Jackson, a bioligist by training, applies the notion of place to a rethinking of ecological and agricultural policy. His hope is that the concept of place will seep deeply into our thoughts and affect the very way we inhabit the world. In effect, Jackson argues for inverting the slogan "think globally, act locally": when we think of the whole Earth on a local level as a group of loved places rather than territory or resource pools, then we will be headed in the right direction.