Understanding “Place”

This is a photo of a trail that I’ve walked with my family many times.  It’s called The Meadow Trail, and it’s part of a network of trails at Attleboro Springs, a Massachusetts Audubon Wildlife Refuge. This network of trails features several vernal pools and a large pond. As a child, I spent a lot of time in ponds, streams, and vernal pools, driven by a curiosity to explore the world that frogs and salamanders lived. I still feel a playful sense of wonder when I’m within a wood. So, since my children have been old enough to walk, we’ve taken walks, and later, hikes, through these trails and trails like it. It is important to me that my family is connected to nature, in a boots-on-the-ground kind of way, and since our current lifestyle doesn’t support days spent homesteading, hiking our local trails will have to do.

As Barbara Kingsolver said in her essay Knowing Our Place, “people need wild places” (2002). Her analysis of our sad departure from the land reminds me of the vast acres of timbered forests in my home state of Vermont. When I returned to walk the trails of my childhood, many years later, I was deeply discouraged by the naked, pilfered spaces. Along quiet roads in Swanton, the trees are disappearing. Meanwhile, my peers and colleagues crave remote work and walkable cities. “This exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad,” Kingsolver writes, and I struggle to return home these days.

Instead, I make the most of the home I have here in Massachusetts. I feel the crunch of packed snow on my boots every winter weekend, I grow vegetables in my backyard in the summer and fall, I teach my kids about science and wilderness and the circular nature of things. I donate to conservation organizations that protect the lands I love. This week I read Terry Tempest Williams’s Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, which discusses the need for preservation of wild spaces in the American West. Here in the Northeast, there are many missions to preserve the wilderness, piney and humble as it may compare to the West, but I often feel like no one is doing enough. “Haven’t you heard,” I want to ask everyone, “haven’t you heard the world is dying, the air is thinning, and we need every last tree and rock and crumb of dirt to keep on spinning?”

I am a student of Economics, which is great for someone like me who wants to make sense of infinite needs and finite resources. Early on in my undergraduate career, I took a course on sustainability, and learned about “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which states that when we have access to a shared resource, like water or timber, we over-use the resource because we can’t see beyond our own needs. This leads to destruction of the resource and widespread hardship. I remember feeling frustrated when I learned about this concept, because it seemed like a problem with a simple solution: don’t use more than you need. But as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people anticipate a shortage or feel otherwise entitled to more than their share, they hoard resources. Is this a survival technique? Perhaps, albeit one that ironically is leading to our own destruction.

“This is all there is,” Terry Tempest Williams writes in closing of the first chapter of Red, and I am reminded of the care we put into the things we know are precious. We take care to pay special attention during the early childhood years, when our babies are squishy and sweet-smelling. We make sure to save the best bottle of champagne for a special celebration. We save our best outfits for first impressions. Finite resources, including all land, needs special care and attention. My place in the world, the location that gives me a sense of empowerment and well-being, is in the woods with my family, in deep appreciation of the woods around me. I take care of this place, for this is all there is.

Kingsolver, Barbara, and Paul Mirocha. Small Wonder: Essays. New York, Perennial, 2003.

Terry Tempest Williams. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. Vintage, 30 Dec. 2008.