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December 13, 2005 - Is Ecology Fundamental To Sense of Place?

Is Ecology a fundamental to creating a sense of place? In a nutshell, I think it is. So often in our society, nature is viewed as something to be controlled, exploited and done away with when convenience dictates that it must be plowed under to make way for the SUVs and cookie cutter homes. However, it shapes our sense of Place, or at least has the potential to, if we work with it.

I'm not going to even entertain the idea of going with Ian McHarg's Design With Nature imperative. While all designs should respect nature and incorporate the advantages it may offer, we should not be uncritically bound to its diktats either. As humans, we can't help but impact on the environment anyhow, so we might as well plan around that and design accordingly. But natural features certainly can and should play a defining role in defining place. Think, for example of the cacti that populate so much of the southwestern United States, or the red soil of Prince Edward Island: these are distinctive, nay iconic, features of the landscape that people know of well beyond these localities. Already we can see how natural features can define part of a local identity.

"But wait!" You protest. "I live in a suburb where are all the trees and grasses are the same as the subdivision next to us. The landscape is all relatively flat, and there is nothing distinctive about it." Almost anyone of the millions of people who live in suburban North America could be uttering those words. There's a truth to them. Not many of us stop to think that the house we live in and the subdivision it is part of are increasingly influenced by standardization, the bane of Jane Jacobs' diverse city. The term subdivision even reeks of this standardization's response to the chaos of the neighbourhood.

If this is the case then, what does that mean? It means that increasingly, we are trading in our natural landscape for ones that are easy for developers to install, or that offer some supposed advantage to us. In Nature At Home - A Sociology of Postwar Landscape Design, Alexander Wilson shows how the economies of scale that were brought about by the appearance of large scale developers after World War II brought about practices such as the levelling of lands and stripping of their topsoil, and substitution of "weeds" that grew locally with breeds of plants that were ideal to almost all North American climates (such as the juniper, or evergreen) displaced local plantings, as well as local nurseries. Nurseries that maintained local planting varieties and hybrids, were forced out as large scale developers began to demand large scale nurseries that could give them the uniformity that they so desired. Not only did economies of scale kill local businesses, it struck a serious blow to the ecological diversity of place. Score two for the big guy, zero for the little guy.

This may not seem like a big deal, but for many it is. If you think of the earth as a system of checks and balances engaged in symbiotic relationships, the loss of that biodiversity is a very bad thing. Indeed, it can threaten the very things that brought us to a locality in the first place, whether that be the stands of mature oak trees or the abundant wildlife. What's more, it robs us of the opportunity to define ourselves in a sustainable way, as well as a distinctive way. If you look around you, you can very easily find some ecological feature that has helped define where you live. It can be anything from the gold-coloured brick found in so many Southern Ontario houses due to the colour of sand found in the area and used for the bricks, to the pine used on older houses in Ottawa from the Ottawa Valley.

Arguably, it would be impossible to not include environmental considerations in our definition of place. So many of our cultural practices that we use to define ourselves as groups, whether those be ethnic, national or cultural, have been shaped by ecological considerations. In Canada for example, the long winters have bred several sports that have little or no currency outside of Nordic countries, such as hockey. In Mediterranean countries, the Siesta has been a long-standing practice that arose in response to the oppressive midday heat. The list could go on and on.

So how do we do a better job of consciously integrate ecological considerations into our definition of place? I certainly don't have the ultimate answer, but a few ideas come to mind:

• We can lend our support to movements that seek to preserve and enhance the biodiversity of our local areas;
• Start demanding that developers and all levels of government support practices that use indigenous plantings and materials in human-built environments, rather than standardized products that have no historic relationship to local landscapes;
• Get out and actually learn about the ecological features of your area; and
• Once you've learned about it, teach it to others.

These definitely are not measures that will save the world, but maybe they'll at least enhance it.