Today, over on my personal blog Therioshamanism, I posted a call to bloggers to write about their small, sacred places, the little patches of open fields and scrubby woods that many of us explored when we were younger, and which often were our introduction to the wonders of the natural world. I thought I would crosspost it here as it may be of interest to the readers of No Unsacred Place. Please feel free to pass it on to other interested folks as well!

As those of you who may have been following me on my own blog, Therioshamanism, may have seen, I recently adopted a half mile stretch of the Columbia River to keep clean and otherwise tend to. It’s downstream from Portland and a bunch of industrial areas, never mind all the towns and cities and factories upstream from Portland as well. So there’s plenty to clean up, and no doubt when I start doing water testing this spring I won’t be surprised to find a cocktail of pollutants in the water itself as well. As I wrote last month, the Columbia is the heart of this region, and it carries a great deal of the environmental stress here on its back.

I live in the middle of urban Portland, and I do what I can to reduce my environmental impact here. I reduce, reuse and recycle, and I try to keep my water and electricity usage low. I pick up garbage, and I vote for pro-environment candidates and bills, along with contacting elected officials about important issues. My neighborhood has been developed for over a century, though it has lots of nice greenspaces and people tend to be pretty earth-friendly here. So I have a pretty good place to have a green life (even if I don’t have a yard yet!)

What I didn’t have until recently was a stretch of waterway to care for. I used to live near Johnson Creek in the southeast portion of the metro area, but these days the only water within walking distance is the pond at Laurelhurst Park, which has a solid group of dedicated volunteers taking care of it throughout the year. I’ve volunteered with them before and they’re well worth it, but when I heard about Oregon’s Adopt a River program, I realized how much I missed having a connection with a moving waterway. I asked them where they needed help the most, and of the spots they offered one on the east side of Sauvie Island seemed the most appealing.

So now I have my own riverside beach to take care of on a volunteer basis, and I’ve already been out there a couple of times in the past two weeks, and I’m making plans to go more. I’ve been enjoying my increased volunteer work this year, and this solves the problem of “Well, where should I go *this* week?” More importantly, it’s a place that I can develop a deeper, long-lasting connection with, instead of bouncing around the metro area planting trees in one place, and picking up litter in another. There’s the downside that it’s a 30 minute drive from my home and not accessible by public transit, but my car has good mileage and it’s a good excuse to take people out into the great outdoors!

I’ve felt a very deep resonance with this area since I moved to Oregon. Perhaps it’s a particularly good fit, or maybe I’m just ready to settle down finally. Either way, I feel a responsibility to this place on many levels, to include that of the Land. It’s a bit unusual to feel this, since I moved around so much in my life. I was an Army brat growing up, and while we settled into one town when I was six and stayed there, we lived in two different houses between then and when I moved out. And since moving out twelve years ago, I’ve moved an average of once a year in three different cities; even in Portland I’m on my fourth apartment.

This is in contrast to people who have lived in the same place all their lives, who grew up with specific locations and landmarks, who hunted or farmed on the same grounds as their ancestors, or even more recent people who have never left the town or city they were born in. For many, their homes are something they live and breathe, that they know as well as the placement of their own bones. I can never hope to achieve that instinctive understanding of this place, for it was not woven into my mind and my understanding from birth. But I’ve done my best to make up for that time away through reading and exploring on foot this place I now call home.

I want to care for this place, as much as it has taken me in. I want to feel grounded, but moreover I want to take care of this place, as much as I want to take care of my partner. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more aware of what I am capable of doing to be responsible for the Land, and my desire to fulfill that responsibility only grows with time.

I think that’s something that’s missing for a lot of people. There are people who aren’t particular where they live; some can connect wherever they are, but there are others who drift because no place feels like home. And there are people who love a place only for what they can get out of it and experience it, but feel no particular need to give back. Then there are those who want to actively be a part of their community, whether in a very intimate and personal way (especially in smaller communities), or being a tiny bit of something much, much bigger than they are.

I feel like this lattermost sort. Portland isn’t the biggest metro area by far, which is one of the reasons I like it. It’s my “Goldilocks place”–just right. But it’s still a city, and while I have little pockets of people I know and interact with, to most I’m an anonymous face in the crowd. I’m okay with that. I have my neighborhood, and my friends, and now I have my piece of the river to care for, too.

That’s a particular challenge, finding that connection to place when there’s so much distraction. And perhaps a good solution is to focus on one little bit of it. I can’t save Portland, and I can’t save the Columbia River. But I can be a good steward to the place where I live and the beach I’ve adopted. Those are my ins, my connections, my ports into Oregon.

Having the stewardship of a place isn’t a cure-all. It won’t make all the pollution go away or stop climate change. But it can be enough to keep us going as we keep tackling those bigger pictures, too. Sometimes the environmental crises we face seem huge and overwhelming, and they can be if we take them all at once. We are each just one person in the great big world, and it would be impossible to carry it all ourselves. But maybe if we each find our own neighborhood, or beach, or park, or open field, or fixer-upper house–if we each find a little place to be the steward of we can feel more capable and successful. We’re more likely to feel successful and encouraged if the task we set ourselves to is neither too easy nor too difficult, and that can motivate us to do more over time.

So where’s your place? What do you care for and tend to? To what place are you a valuable steward and caretaker?

First of all, thank you to everyone for your diversity of responses on my last post, We Do Not Return to Nature. We Are Already There. And especial thanks to John for his thoughtful response post and the continuing discussion there. The issues of urban sustainability and the overall human infrastructure are things that I feel deserve more attention, both in relation to spirituality and connections, and in the broader discourse of the human condition. (Or, in short, “this is important, y’all”.)

I feel I didn’t make myself entirely clear, despite my best efforts, and so I want to pull out a few ideas for further elaboration and clarification. These are in no particular order, and are more a series of rambling talking points than a cohesive essay.

–I feel it was assumed that because I was only speaking of non-human entities as connections in this ecosystem, that that is all I was discussing, as though these living beings were a lifeline to a more “pure”, non-human nature. That is not so, and I want to make that clear right now. I brought up the maple tree and the scrub jays because they are fellow living creatures that have adapted to this urban ecosystem, and I thought they might be easier for readers to relate to. However, I also learn from the buildings and the pavement and how they change (and are changed by) both the microclimate and the weather, as well as affect the larger systems of waterways, animal migration routes, erosion, and so forth. I call cities ecosystems because they are supports of a network of living beings, and non-living land masses, some of which are human-created.

–Humans are animals. Our cities and other creations may be unique, and our ability to both conceptualize and create may be wholly unlike anything else achieved by any other known species on this planet. But they are still created by humans, and I feel it is divisive and dis-connecting to think of humans and our creations as “not natural”. It is in part our perception that we are separate from nature that has caused many people to ignore the impact we have on the rest of the world, because we feel we don’t have to pay attention–it’s “not our problem”, or so we think. So many people have no idea where, for example, their food comes from. If we recreate the story of the city to include how it is connected to other ecosystems, we start rebuilding those perceptions of connections that have never entirely gone away, and we can then foster more responsibility all around. But as long as we keep telling people that cities are dis-connected from the rest of nature, they’re going to keep acting like it–and we see where that’s gotten us all.

–Telling urban dwellers that they’re bad people for living in cities, or that they can’t be as good a bunch of environmentalists as rural people, or otherwise playing who’s superior to whom, is counterproductive. Insulting someone or insinuating that you’re better than they are is a great way to alienate them. Not a good idea with potential allies. If you assume that cities are full of people who are self-centered, materialistic, corrupted, etc. then you’ve already started on the path to alienating them. Same thing with assuming all rural areas are full of nothing but small-minded hyper-conservative bigots. And so forth.

–There are crappy things about both cities and rural areas. I am fully aware of the negative impacts of cities as they currently are constructed and run, as well as the greater issues of human overpopulation, resource mismanagement, and environmental degradation. However, I do have to thank Pashy for pointing out that rural areas still do benefit from the harmful infrastructures that also support cities–over the road trucking and other non-sustainable resource transport, fossil fuels, commercialized agriculture by way of Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland and the like, and so forth. Neither cities nor rural areas in the US (with very, very few and very small exceptions) are self-contained pods where all the food, water, shelter, electricity, and heat come from closed-circuit, sustainable sources, and I’ve yet to see a rural area that didn’t have some form of landfill or other waste disposal and that didn’t consume plastics and other non-biodegradables. All of us are contributing to the problems, one way or another, all communities of all sizes have people working toward sustainability, and the solution is not to demonize one form of living over another, but to entirely rework the entire human infrastructure to a sustainable point.

–There are also good things about both cities and rural areas. There are restorative properties to wilderness places that are unique to them, wholly unlike anything found in cities; even I head out to the Gorge frequently for refreshers. The country is a lot quieter, auditorily and otherwise. Trees and other living beings can make urban areas more comfortable and friendly places to be. Cities offer a wider variety of people on average, and so can offer more support to some minorities (depending on the city and the area), and more people means more human resources available for problem-solving and large-scale manufacturing of things like medications. Every community, large or small, has its own personality, and some of these are nicer than others regardless of population size. We have good things we can learn from all human communities, and these are great starting points for fixing the rest.

–We have seven billion people on the planet. This is not likely to change any time soon without a severe epidemic, drought, comet, etc., and a longer-term de-population involves a lot of education, availability of and education about the use of birth control, changes in attitudes toward population and repopulation, improvements in the general lot of women worldwide, and a whole slew of other things that will take a LONG time to change. So for the time being we have to figure out where to put all these people. Just spreading us out isn’t the answer. Many non-human species rely on places far away from even a few humans to be happy, and will avoid even the most sparsely human-populated areas. If we dispersed all seven billion of us into rural areas, each with acreage, we would be so spread out that many more species would feel too crowded. Most people lack skills to be able to live off the land, and that’s not going to change quickly. So for many reasons, we do need cities as places to concentrate a large portion of the human population.

–This is why I am a huge supporter of reworking human communities of ALL sizes to a sustainable model, such as those proposed in Green Metropolis. There are ways to address issues of overcrowding, pollution, social injustice, and other problems inherent to all human infrastructure. Cities can be made so that they are more walkable to cut down on the need for fossil fuel transportation; manufacturing and other resource production can be localized to avoid the long-distance transport that all communities, large or small, rely on. Public transit can be improved in rural areas so that not everyone has to have their own car to drive twenty miles to a grocery store or drive in to work five days a week. As to social justice? While there is certainly bigotry everywhere, I know that I have found it easier to find support as a queer, progressive, pagan person in cities where I am more likely to find people who support and agree with me than in conservative small towns, though certainly there are more progressive small communities as well. So we look at ways that minorities in both cities and rural areas have survived and thrived, to create a more socially sustainable human infrastructure across the board.

–So. Restating my main point after all these varied and scattered thoughts: To change the human infrastructure overall for the better, we first have to reclaim the most obvious manifestations of it–cities. And it all starts with our perceptions of them. If we perceive them as blights, then we abandon them to their fates, and they just get worse and worse. If we perceive them as just another part of nature, albeit one that is heavily and uniquely human-dominated, then we start the shift back to seeing us and what we create as connected to everything, and increase our sense of responsibility to the All.

Please, if something seems unclear, ask me for clarification rather than making assumptions.

Last week Lupa wrote an excellent piece titled “We Do Not Return to Nature. We Are Already There.” If you haven’t already read it I encourage you to do so. The title is self-explanatory, and in the first paragraph she says:

I would bet that the majority of people who think of “nature” are thinking of open areas that have a minimum of human impact, where the signs of humanity are reduced or even almost entirely eradicated. And I feel that’s a grave shortcoming in our perceptions.

My initial, gut-level reaction was not favorable – when I read the title, I instinctively thought “no, you’re wrong.” But when I carefully read Lupa’s essay I couldn’t find anything to disagree with. Why? Why did I have this emotional disconnect on such an important concept? From reading the comments, I see I wasn’t the only one.

After thinking on this and letting it incubate for almost a week, I’ve come to the conclusion that my disconnect is the result of a no-longer-helpful evolutionary impulse.

The human brain has evolved to classify things into a few discrete categories – usually two. Forget computers and the internet – the real information overload is in the natural world. Look at a tree: how tall is it? How many branches does it have? What color and shape are the leaves? Does it have fruit? Is anything living in it? What does it smell like? What is the bark like? There are hundreds if not thousands of qualities of the tree for you to notice – and they’re all changing slowly but continuously.

While you were contemplating all the miraculous, continuous details of the tree, a lion ate you and removed you from the gene pool. Our early ancestors learned to focus their powerful but finite brains on the “critical few” instead of the “trivial many.” Nature may work continuously, but we instinctively divide Nature into good/bad, helpful/harmful, friend/foe, animals-I-can-eat/animals-that-will-eat-me and so on. On a deep time scale we aren’t very far removed from living in trees and many of us are instinctively dividing environments into “Nature” and “not-Nature.”

And if “Nature” is good, then “not-Nature” must be bad, or at least inferior.

One of the purposes of religion – any religion – is helping us overcome the limits of evolution. The traits that served our ancestors well for millions of years of living in the wild don’t always serve us well in the modern world. A biological urge to eat more than you need is a good thing when food is scarce. When food is always plentiful it’s not so helpful, as I and millions of other Americans can attest. The urge to divide everything into two diametrically opposed categories is similarly unhelpful in a world that grows more complex by the minute.

Modern Pagan and Earth-centered religions have developed in part as a response to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution: pollution, deforestation, and the mass migration from rural environments to urban ones. We are creatures of the Land, the Sky, and the Sea – remove us from that environment and our bodies and souls tell us something is wrong.

But the solution is not to go back to pre-industrial subsistence farming. For all their ills, modern industry and technology have made our lives longer, easier, and less risky. As I’ve said many times, I wouldn’t want to live in Texas without air conditioning… or at any time in history before the development of general anesthesia. Cities and suburbs have advantages over rural areas, mostly due to economies of scale: a city can support libraries, museums, hospitals, markets and businesses that support and employ their populations. Cities are inherently more energy-efficient than rural areas, primarily due to their density. We recognize this or so many of us wouldn’t live there.

The challenge of our lives as we live them here and now and are likely to live them in the future is how to live in cities and suburbs in a way that is responsible and sustainable and that maintains our spiritual connections to the Land, Sky and Sea. We can’t do that if we see these environments as “not-Nature.”

It’s easy to connect to Nature in the wilderness. It’s harder to maintain those connections in urban environments. But if we’re going to live there – and most of us are – it’s necessary. It requires intention. It requires mindfulness. It requires a commitment to regular spiritual practice.

And it requires an understanding that there truly is no unsacred place.

You notice how the URL for this section of the Pagan Newswire Collective has the word “nature” in it? Of course. It’s specifically for nature-based pagan religious and spiritual discussions and ideas. I would bet that the majority of people who think of “nature” are thinking of open areas that have a minimum of human impact, where the signs of humanity are reduced or even almost entirely eradicated. And I feel that’s a grave shortcoming in our perceptions.

I want to share with you one of my very favorite quotes. It’s a statement by Richard Nelson, quoted in The Sacred Earth: Writers on Nature and Spirit, edited by Jason Gardner (emphasis mine):

It’s dangerous to think of ourselves as loathsome creatures or as perversions in the natural world. We need to see ourselves as having a rightful place. We take pictures of all kinds of natural scenes and often we try to avoid having a human being in them…In our society, we force ourselves into a greater and greater distance from the natural world by creating parks and wilderness areas where our only role is to go in and look. And we call this loving it. We lavish tremendous concern and care on scenery but we ignore the ravaging of environments from which our lives are drawn.

This is a perfect image of how we have separated ourselves from the rest of nature. Not separating ourselves from nature, but separating ourselves from the rest of nature. That’s been the entire problem all along. Numerous factors ranging from religion to the Industrial Revolution have systematically convinced many portions of humanity that we are “above nature”, that “nature is to be used”, and otherwise referring to “nature” in the third person—nature the It as opposed to nature the Us.

This whole idea that we have to go out to the woods or the desert or the coast in order to “be with nature” just continues that disconnection, whether it’s disconnection through devaluing nature as “beneath us”, or disconnection by hyper-romanticizing nature and only looking for its supposedly “pure” manifestations—those that are relatively untouched by humans.

Nature? Nature is everywhere. Nature is the flora in our gut and in the sewers. Nature is the moss growing on old house shingles. Nature is the wind blowing through skyscrapers, in cities whose presence changes the microclimate. Nature is the sun that shines and the rain that falls on every place above ground. And humans? Humans are nature, too. Our big brains and bipedal stance are the adaptations we evolved in order to survive the challenges of being ground-dwelling, omnivorous, hunter-gatherer-scavenger apes. Our cities and buildings are exaggerated manifestations of our nest-building instincts, tempered with aesthetic self-awareness.

And remembering that we are nature reconnects us to everything else. If we remember we are nature, that we cannot separate ourselves from nature, then we come to realize that our cities and other habitations are part of ecosystems—dramatically changed ecosystems, but there nonetheless. We may find that suddenly the issues that affect the environment are immediate—not out in the woods somewhere where we can ignore them, but right here, in our bodies and homes and streets. We can still value the wilderness, but we no longer ghettoize nature as being “out there somewhere that we escape to”.

That’s a very valuable point: the idea that we “escape to nature”. Isn’t it sad that we in the cities feel we are escaping from something that isn’t nature, when in reality nature is all around us? I instead propose that when we are speaking of relatively human-free places, open, quiet areas, we speak of “wilderness” instead of “nature” as a defining term. Wilderness contains an element of primal quality, but without the overarching completion of “nature”. It gives us some way to delineate between the Hoh rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula, and paved-over downtown Seattle, without denying that these places are still family to each other, the blood connecting them embodied in the intertwining waters of Puget Sound and surrounding ways.

I question the reliance on wilderness as the primary representative to humans of nature. If we are convinced that we can only connect to nature in places away from other humans, then not only are we betraying our poor, disconnected species, especially those who have no choice but to live in cities, but we are also betraying the urban ecosystems as valid representatives of nature. We have abandoned any attempts of making cities healthier places to live for everyone, not just the people rich enough to be able to afford to “escape” on the weekends. We privilege rural animals and plants while taking the urban ones for granted—“dirty pigeons”, “disease-carrying rats”, and “weeds”.

My Therioshamanism blog has had the John Muir quote “In the silence of the wild, we find the home we lost in the city” at the top of it ever since I started it in 2007. I don’t agree with it any more, though I’ve not yet found a good substitute for it just yet. I don’t feel I have lost anything in the city, at least not anything that I can’t find here as well. While I love my trips to the Columbia River Gorge and other wilderness areas, I don’t value them above my talking with the maple tree across the street from my apartment or the scrub jays that vweeeeet though the neighborhood. And it is here in the city, not in the wilderness, that I have found, discovered, returned to the knowledge that I am nature. I joyously embrace the fact that this place is nature as much as Mt. Hood, as much as the Columbia River Gorge, as much as any of the wilderness places I have fallen in love with over time.

For like me, the maple and the scrub jays and all our neighbors are continuing the cycles of nature in this human-strong place, with all its benefits and challenges. I can’t get that experience when I am sitting next to Wahkeena Spring, or at the top of Devil’s Rest. The trees and the jays and I must learn the lessons of nature in this unique place, remember that there are lessons of nature to be learned, and share that remembering with others. If we can accomplish that remembering together then we have more hope, not of destroying cities and losing what is valuable in them, but of bringing our urban nature places back into greater harmony with the rest.