Back in Place – Tricycle: A Buddhist Review

Unfortunately, few of us feel that we live in a “nature-culture” relationship. Most of us spend our days indoors. We are mesmerized by the black screen in front of us. We are largely ignorant of the natural systems around us. We have little sense of place. In the United States, people tend to move—in search of education, work, and love—and eventually settle and settle. Gary Snyder writes:

It seems to me that one of the key problems in American society right now is that people are not committed to a particular place—which is . . . it is completely unnatural and outside of history. They allow the degradation of city districts and the strip mining of landscapes, because there is no one to live there and take responsibility; they just keep going.

In some respects, however, our separation from a particular place is internal at least in history last history. Daniel Wildcat writes:

In the increasingly geographically mobile world that people live in at the beginning of the twenty-first century of Western civilization, fewer and fewer people have a tangible way of life with the places where they live. Humanity’s diet, clothing, housing, and daily life are increasingly shaped by social forces such as corporations and marketers that attempt to override the unique characteristics of the peoples and places of the planet.

This recent historical development “has left behind a monolithic global consumer culture that, in its homogenizing logic, renders sense of place—more specifically, natural landscapes—irrelevant. And because of this shift, we may not be paying attention to what is happening around us, whether pollinators are disappearing, songbirds are becoming scarce, or insect-borne diseases are spreading. In this way, they are disrupting our climate.

Rehousing

In response to our move, Snyder drew from his youth on a farm, much time in the wilderness, his Kyoto Zen monastic practice, his commitment to his Sierra foothills, knowledge of indigenous traditions, scientific knowledge, and a host of other sources to offer a vision of how we might live more fully in our place and care for it in community. He suggests that we recognize “the web of the wild world” and “establish an intimate connection with the real world, the real self.” Here he seems to be drawing on the Zen idea that we do not exist apart from the world and that we can realize our non-dual relationship with it in the depth of practice. Unfortunately, however, our mobility and mental disconnection from nature, according to Snyder, “made us a disorganized and disenfranchised people.”

This pattern of restlessness and detachment certainly applies to me. For one, I grew up in a house and spent most of my youth downstairs across the street. I loved the pools where I fished, the hemlocks and ferns on the banks, and the tall grasses and wildflowers in the abandoned cow pastures through which my brothers and I walked down to the river and back. My body had a strong connection to that place, as evidenced by the mosquito bites I put on my legs every summer. I marveled as I watched the trout in that river at night and the fireflies above the fields. My love for the place is in my bones, as is the grief I feel for the recent changes brought on by our topsy-turvy climate: dwindling trout populations as the river warms, the disappearance of fireflies, the inability of children to walk across grassy fields without getting a deer tick on their feet, and the harsh fact that my feet are full of mosquitoes. to go away now it can hit you with West Nile virus and Eastern equine encephalitis.

Although I fully inhabited that place with my youthful body and soul, my residence changed every year or two during the thirty years between finishing college and moving to Massachusetts. For most of the time I knew little about the watersheds I lived in and rarely interacted with the local community. True, at certain moments I felt connected to the nature around me, but my knowledge was limited.

To be more fully in nature than to experience rare moments of intimacy with our environment, we must “turn back to the earth, back to their place.” And do it for the long haul. Snyder once said, “First, don’t move, and second, find out what it teaches you.” As we remain, we must “respect the great antiquity of this land—the wildness—learn it—protect it—and work to pass it on to the children of the future (all beings) with its biodiversity and health intact. In my current semi-urban location, it’s been hard to settle down at times because there’s a part of me that wants to move out into the countryside with some land, maybe a few acres of forest to cut wood.” But here I am staying in our apartment on the outskirts of Boston, frustrated at times but aware of the carbon emissions from heating with wood and lighting fires, not to mention the effect wood smoke would have on my wife’s asthma.

When we return to earth, we must re-inhabit our local place. We need to understand how our homes fit into a particular ecosystem, a watershed, and more broadly, a bioregion. This requires a detailed understanding: “Bioregional awareness teaches us special ways. It is not enough to just “love nature” or “be in harmony with Gaia”. Our relationship with the natural world is a placeand it must be based on information and experience.” Through this information and experiences, we gain knowledge about our place as a special place of connection. As Snyder says, “You really have to know what the entire natural world is in your region and what it all interacts with and how you interact with it yourself.” Charles Strain argues that in this way Snyder “emphasizes the practice of conscious concentration, samadhiwhich directs attention to detailed changes in climate and soil, to what will and will not flourish. place. . . .”

To do this, we need to study the geological history under and around our apartment. We have to deal with the composition of the bedrock and the composition of the soil. My geological knowledge of the area where I live is limited, but I do know that it was under a mile thick layer of ice during the last ice age, and that nearby Walden Lake is a kettle lake, similar to Cape Cod, that formed when the ice melted back from south to north.

We non-Indigenous peoples can learn from the original peoples, who have complex knowledge systems derived in part from their enduring relationship with the land, waterways, animals and all forms of life, and who have their own ways of being in these places.

It is important to know what has happened here since the melting, including the lives of the different peoples who lived here, whether indigenous or invasive. We also need to identify the bugs and other animals that live on our block or in our backyard, as well as the plants that grow around buildings. We need to learn how water moves in this place in a hydrological cycle. Scott Russell Sanders writes: “When we figure out our addresses, we’d better forget zip codes and consider where the rain falls after it falls outside our window.” In the place where I live, known to its original residents as Pigsgussett—now Watertown, Massachusetts—much of the rain flows into the Quinobequin (the Charles River), as it does into other nearby towns, occasionally drawing sewage into the river, resulting in one of my favorite early summer activities on the Boston River: attending a race on the river. a dam by the Science Museum and into the harbour. We also need to learn how our local ecosystem changes with the seasons. We need to quickly prepare for how land in our city is being used and possibly damaged, and how local government is regulating – or not – what needs to be done.

As part of researching where we live, we non-Indigenous peoples can learn from the original peoples, who have complex knowledge systems derived in part from their enduring relationships with the land, waterways, animals and all forms of life, and who have their own ways of being in these places. Snyder writes that original peoples “can be great educators in some ways to tune in to what climate cycles and plant and animal communities tell us about where we are.” At the very least, as Daniel Wildcat (Yuchi, Muscogee) has pointed out, “the tribal way of life can remind us of the need to restore a life-enhancing nature-culture connection to the places we live.” I might add that white Americans like myself, who are descended from colonial settlers, also need to acknowledge the history of genocide that “happened” Earthin the places where we live.

♦

© 2025 – Christopher Ives, Zen ecology: green and committed living in response to the climate crisis. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications.