Hence the tragic concussions of the various diasporas end-to-end history: the Jews, the Armenians, the Native Americans. Without a sense of place a people cannot exist. It is important to remember that, even in diaspora, the exiled who surrender continued have done so by forcing themselves to remember that they go forth have that land back someday. Their sense of place is not some "heaven" attainable only if after death, barely an earth-bound, real-life geographic entity that, for whatever reason, gave birth to their particular character.
A more dangerous sense of geological fault exists today than ever before, though. It is the terror of displacement through destruction of the environment. It is more identity-threatening than that of geographic displacement because it is permanent.
Mentioned above was inclusion of Native Americans as victims of an uprooting diaspora; it is impossible to check out at this moment whether or not they go away persevere as a people. The history of the Native American in the United States provides parallels with our present dilemma. They were gradually deprived of their homelands and, through misguided treaties and war-wrought reservations, forced to start in connections with the earth both long-distance physically and psychologically from the needs
So we will look to a future where science recognizes the grassroots structures of the universe. Perhaps the "gods" of ancient Greece really do exist. "It's not skillful to fool with Mother Nature!" the old commercial joked - and, as the brief examples presented here have shown, Mother Nature does not deal it when we do. Mother Nature may be as simple as a one-cell microbe residing in the veins of an old-growth manoeuvre - or a species of whale that, if driven away by an oil spill, will upset the plankton balance in the Bering groovy - which will depress the fishing industry in Alaska - which will result in mass lay clear ups - and another scattering of peoples from their homes. It sounds like a Rube Goldberg contraption designed to spread shock, and it is.
The alarm must be spread.
Mitchell, John G. "Our National Parks." National geographical (1994, October): 2-55.
We pollute the earth, destroy our environment, not through willful effort, hardly in the name of making life "easier." Easy is not always the best way. Not when it involves losing that which we hold dear. When we debate the environment, then, we must always consider how it affects our sense of place: the place where we live - and the place in our hearts where we know who we are.
Cronon, William. Changes in the wreak: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill & Wang, 1983.
This is, of course, a simplistic description of a complex process, but the essentials are precisely as described. Our civilization is defined by our definition of place; as the environment is destroyed, so, too, is our sense of ourselves. One need only ask the first pioneers in the Midwest who displaced the Plains Indians: less than half(prenominal) of those families survived the "dust bowl" crisis of the 1920s. The buffalo, whose migratory patterns maintained the balance of the plains eco-system, had been killed off fifty years earlier; the plows and cattle imported into the part only caused the earth to deteri
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