NO SENSE OF PLACE or HOW TO ERASE HISTORY AND CULTURE

In one of our final courses we were asked for an analysis and reflection of major course projects and themes. Here was mine:

The Local Environmental Observation Network in Practice

For all time, who you were (sex, age, family, class…) and where you were (out hunting, at school, in jail; at the edge of the Holy Roman Empire or in downtown Tokyo…) had an exquisitely close relationship with what information and ideas you had access to and were able to share. In fact, each phenomenon was so tightly bound to the other that they were nearly synonymous, with one reliably revealing of the other. Yet over the last five centuries this critical network of relations (foundational to and defining of human existence) was first disrupted and then shattered by our communication technology (see Gleick, 2011; Meyrowitz, 1986; Roszak, 1994). So, in addition to some good, a key role of communication technology may be seen as disrupting people’s sense of place and with that their sense of community and self. But this disruption has also come to entire civilizations. As Kovarik (2013) suggests:

Every [communication] revolution comes at an unexpected price. Printing triggered centuries of religious and political struggle; visual communication diluted and (some say) degraded political discourse; electronic communication submerged unique cultures and sometimes fostered xenophobia [and genocide]; and the digital revolution seems to be undermining the political culture that was created by the printing press while pulling the world closer together. (p. viii)

Resultantly, while interesting, I see projects like Local Environmental Observation Network (LEO), regardless of the observations made, less as a sure antidote and more likely assisting in worsening the problems it aims to address (and in ways either unanticipated or, more likely, totally ignored). I anticipate this to be the ultimate, long-term meaning and cost of this network, others like it, and the work that goes on there.

In addition, and in just the same way, the LEO project and similar systems feel antagonistic to Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing. That may seem a wild claim but, while fully accepting local knowledge and the expertise of knowledge-keepers, the LEO project simultaneously rejects the traditional values and practices that give rise to these persons and systems of knowledge. It does so by default. As explained by Berkes (2008) and Lam (2014), traditional ecological knowledge is inherently embedded in a complex of local, culturally-specific beliefs, traditions, and spirituality, all of which are fundamentally alien to and do not traverse the spatial, temporal, and intercultural terrain offered and imposed by such a website. To be specific, just as Berkes (2008) and Lam (2014) suggest, traditional knowledge (ecological or otherwise) is almost always transmitted orally and is also highly guarded rather than being open. All of this runs counter to LEO. Moreover, as I understand, this privileged local information is also typically shared in a manner that is reciprocal rather than equitable and, of necessity, is also place-, sex-, age-, family-, clan-, class-, time-, and purpose-based. How does any of that jive with the LEO context? I don’t see how it does. Similarly, traditional knowledge was both arrived at and is about survival rather than stewardship or furthering the narrow scientific or broad public grasp of biological systems. Further still, as Boelscher (1988) explains of the Haida, clear distinctions between categories such as natural and supernatural, material and immaterial, animal and human do not always exist within traditional (and now renewed and ascendent) languages, worldviews, and cultures. Such ways of knowing and communicating may be at best abrasive to conventional academia, science, and any projects influenced by them. In fact, all of these traditional practices and principles feel (though perhaps only to me) perfectly antithetical to digital domains and specifically a website and project such as the LEO Network, regardless of doubtless good intentions behind it. At the very least, I’m reminded that elders and other knowledge-keepers don’t always have internet access, are unlikely to know how to use it if they did, and are commonly less interested in sharing what they know with the wide unknown world than with their own grandchildren. (That was certainly true of my parents and grandparents when they were alive. So my starting place would not be to expect anything different of others.)

Social-Ecological Worldviews

To dig into differing cultures and perceptions further, I feel worldview really is everything. Troublingly, even while using the language and framing of complexity, systems thinking, wholeness, and accepting a diversity of perspectives, I interpret Environmental Education and Communication broadly as systematically disregarding the above concepts. For example, we learn about (from books, journal articles, and websites reinforcing the supremacy of the detached academy), rather than with or from (in person or remotely through dialogue and shared experience). From there we erase nearly everything we know (truly vast swathes of anthropology, sociology, archaeology, linguistics, history, biology, and more), most definitely anything messy. And then with nothing and no context, we establish as axiomatic that which we all know can’t possibly be true. Scholars and students seamlessly expunge from their works and minds essentially all of human history and many of the most critical elements of their own and countless other cultures (really the majority of the gyrating, multidimensional, inter-tessellated ethno-ecospheres we are/inhabit).

While looking at a coastal First Nation for our major project, for example, we ignored and erased all of the myriad complexities and contradictions we came across. Specifically, and on the social/cultural front, we pretended that local peoples have an omnibenevolent approach to and relationship with all humans and all living things – a worldview said to be inspired by a tradition of the same going back to the dawn of time. In our group paper, we quoted the Haida Council who say this on their website. To write that we set aside leading scholarship including oral histories, personal accounts, archaeological evidence and more. Wengrow and Graeber (2018) didn't fit the narrative. Their work showed that since time immemorial the peoples of the Northwest Coast maintained population densities beyond that of other Indigenous agriculturalists; and that to grow and sustain such numbers, these fisher‐foragers (from the Tlingit in the far north to the Haida on the central coast, the Nuu-chah-nulth on southern Vancouver Island, and communities all the way down to the Klamath in northern California) practiced large-scale intergroup raiding and chattel slavery. We erased the millennia of knowledge that:

At any given time, captives on the Northwest Coast might have constituted up to a quarter of the tribal population (Mitchell 1985). These proportions, recorded in nineteenth‐century census figures, rival what could be found on the cotton plantations of the colonial South and are in line with estimates for household slavery in classical Athens (Donald 1997; MacLeod 1928). These were “slave societies,” where unfree labor underpinned the domestic economy and sustained the lifestyles of nobles and commoners. (Wengrow & Graeber, 2018, p. 244-245)

We pretended to not know that, as such, the social organization of Northwest Coast (while commonly framed as its antithesis) was far more like early medieval, Renaissance, or even early modern Europe than the running narrative permits. Here on the coast, as in Europe, clear lineages of elites (a leisure class of nobles with control over power and property) achieved and maintained status (along with highly stratified, deeply unequal societies) through hereditary ranking, competitive banquets, and other displays of conspicuous consumption made possible by the retention (or extermination) of household slaves who were commonly understood to be subhuman (see Ames, 2001; Arnold, et al., 2016; Coupland, 2006; Donald, 1997; Hajda, 2005; Kan, 1998; McMillan & St. Claire, 2012; Prentiss, et al., 2012; Wolf, 1999). This is both non-controversial within the scholarship (as the above list of diverse references spanning the last several decades implies) and foundational to how these cultures arrived at the present (extant and endemic within oral history and archaeological records for thousands of years) while also being exquisitely excised from our own and every discussion.

Similarly, but from an environmental/ecological angle, hunter-gatherers and fisher-foragers across the globe have always manipulated their local landscape and the flora and fauna therein in a wide variety of ways, often dramatically and even catastrophically so. On land, the mere arrival of humans resulted in extinctions and even mass extinctions from our earliest adventures around and out of Africa (just by accident and because fish, birds, and large mammals are often tasty). But we humans seldom merely arrive on the scene and just begin hunting or gathering, we also deliberately attempt to re-engineer our surroundings (see Arnold, et al., 2016; Fletcher, Hall, & Alexandra, 2020). Activities such as controlled burns, for just one example, are found to have occurred here in B.C. and across the globe going back eons and include truly vast areas, as mind-boggling as 60,000 hectares (see Blackburn & Anderson, 1993; Hoffman, et al., 2017; Kimmerer & Lake, 2001). And in the waters, damming and diverting rivers and streams and engaging in large-scale fish extraction and related activities were also common (see Barrett & Guderjan, 2006; Greene, McGee, & Heitzmann, 2015; Shaw & Sutcliffe, 2003). In the local context, for relevance and scale, screening off rivers with wooden weirs is said to have amounted to typical extraction rates of “at least 14,000 salmon” per family in a single season (Wood, 2021, n.p.; see also Atlas, et al., 2017; Ritchie & Angelbeck, 2020). Such a figure verges on the unimaginable even in the context of modern fishing. Further still, on Vancouver Island researchers have recently mapped vast complexes of salmon and herring traps. There, we find a network of 300 interconnected fish traps, including branches “extending 300 m[etres] in length … with as many as 200,000 individual hemlock and fir stakes” (Glavin, 2020, n.p.). Nothing of this sort or scale has existed since these practices declined and then disappeared, after European arrival.

These activities are not benign, as we so love to pretend. In fact, many of the landscapes we think of as ‘pristine, untouched wilderness’ (from British Columbia to Australia and the Amazon) are the opposite. The variety, numbers, and distribution of flora and fauna all over the world have been so profoundly disrupted, transformed, or even decimated and to such a degree over the eons that it is more accurate to refer to so much of what we think of as natural or wild as, in fact, anthropogenic (see Armstong et al., 2021; Maezumi, et al., 2018).

By an effective denial and erasure of the above and anything like it, I feel we're determined to be confused about or oblivious to all of this well-known history. Why is that? Certainly none of this is controversial or difficult to find within any number of domains and discourses, from botany or ecology, anthropology or archaeology, linguistics or communication, and on (see Chen, et al., 2019; Curry, 2021; Figueroa, 2016; Kerr, 2003; Malhi, et al., 2016; Saltré, et al., 2016; Van Der Kaars, et al., 2017). I think it’s extremely challenging and problematic to pretend certain people are radically different (either subhuman or superhuman), as we tend to, and to impose that fiction and expectation on ourselves and others. Still, I feel that doing so is made possible, even promoted, by our very environment, education, and communication – all of which result in us having little collective idea of who or where we are. In this light, with regard to climate change or anything else, what chance do we have of doing the right thing for ourselves or future generations if we start from such a deliberately wonky worldview?

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