Harming the Place You Love
Without wisdom, love can be deadly to the places we live in
“What I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be a danger to it.”
Wallace Stegner - Thoughts in a Dry Land
To live in any place well you must love it. Not necessarily like it, for there are many places on earth that are difficult to like, let alone live a comfortable existence in: next to a dumping ground of modernity’s toxic excesses; in the shadow of a giant, raucous power station; within a neighbourhood riddled with unceasing gang violence. No one should be judged for lacking warm fuzzy feelings towards such places where the Curse’s sting is particularly potent.
Such warm feelings of endearment, however, are unessential for love. One can be confronted with abject ugliness — a place tormented by the ravages of sin and violence, or a place relentlessly pummelled by successive years of abuse and decay — and love it still. Or one can live in a boring, monotonous place where nothing of note ever seems to happen, or a “backwards” place forgotten and neglected by those sitting the halls of power — and love it still.
Love overlooks a multitude of faults and flaws. Loving a place means despite all a place’s shortcomings, mediocrity, or ugliness, that you wish to bless it, to beautify it, to persist with it. You view your place through the eyes of the future: perceiving what it has the potential to become under loving, steadfast care and attention. Or you see it through the eyes of the past: its rich but forgotten history waiting to be revived, its unique cultural heritage — impressed in its fields and brickwork — that needs to be conserved, and the precious stories of old that deserve to be retold. But most likely, you see your place through the eyes of the present: beholding the faithful, convivial folk who are the neighbours you have been given to love, the creatures of astounding beauty who are in need of protection, and the glimpses of hidden wonders uncovered only by those who faithfully and patiently take the time to seek, look, and marvel.
Fundamentally, you long for the best of such a place — whether it be overlooked, neglected, ravaged, or abused — because it is where you are. It where you have been placed, birthed, or have chosen to be.1 It is a unique, immensely precious spot on this wonderful earth. It is the place you call home.
There are other places — an abundance of places, even — which are far easier to love and like; places where affection wells up within us as naturally as refreshing water in a volcanic spring. Included amongst these are areas of astounding natural beauty where creatures great and small flourish alongside man; convivial, lively places full of friendly and trustworthy neighbours and thriving vocations; and localities with beautiful architecture and intriguing local history, culture, and heritage. For those of us blessed to live in such pleasant places, our hearts desire is to protect and defend what makes these places special — and make them even more so.
Most of us, that is. There will always be those few residents who take these precious places for granted, who live indifferently to their beauty and uniqueness, and who selfishly consume such places as entitled residents, rather than caring for them as responsible stewards. They don’t love their place for what it is — they only love what they can get and extract from it. They are shareholders not stakeholders, only interested in their place as long as it pays them a dividend of pleasure. Once greener pastures appear, or when pain and hardship arise, these fickle, self-centred residents relocate without a second’s notice and without ever saying goodbye. Those neighbours of ours who harbour this self-centred attitude are a detrimental influence upon our cherished places and will likely abuse or degrade them in some shape or form. Love is still essential to living well in paradise.
Love, though, is not enough. To live well in any place demands more from us than just love. Much more. Wallace Stegner alerts us to this in his essay, Thoughts in a Dry Land, when he says: “What I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be a danger to it.” Let Mr. Stegner’s words impress themselves deeply upon your consciousness for a while. Your love is not sufficient to prevent all harm, damage, and even destruction. Extrapolating Stegner’s pronouncement, I believe it is even warranted to say that not only may your love for your place not be enough, but it may also be actively dangerous. A bone chilling truth. Indeed, one that should make every localist quake in their boots.
Merely loving a place is not some protective emotional force field which precludes us from ever causing harm to the subject of our affection. We know this to be the case with the people we love. At times, we have been overbearing, overprotective, or acted in ways we thought were right, but which caused harm — all in the name of “love”. It is no different with forests, fields, and neighbourhoods. Tragically, those who love their place the most — localists, conservationists, local politicians — may be the ones who cause the most enduring and painful harm, by virtue of their extensive and significant involvement with it.
Wishing to be deeply and profoundly involved with a place, though potentially dangerous, is not wrong. It is natural in much the same way that a parent desires to be deeply involved with their child. But every action and every project we undertake in our place constitutes a risk. Our involvement is rarely, if ever neutral. Most often, we will either be a blessing or a curse. We will either act in ways which perpetuate and enhance the beauty, wholeness, and integrity of our place, or we will cause damage, decay, and ugliness — even if only on a small scale. Our actions, no matter how well intended, always lead to results — for good or for ill. It stands to reason, therefore, that those who are most greatly involved with their places face the possibility that they will be to it a great source of blessing or, conversely, a significant source of danger. This is the uncomfortable reality in a fallen world where decay and destruction occur more readily than beautification and healing.
Of course, some members of society who are deeply involved with our places are wholly malign actors who lack even the faintest resemblance of love. Included in this unenviable list are those who in order to extract value from the land deliberately abuse it by pillage and destruction. Profligate strip miners, greedy industrial farmers, and uncaring real estate developers; they all, by virtue of their profound and destructive involvement, are an existential danger to our cherished places.
However, another existential threat can be those who smother their places with their love; whether it be blind, naive love or a love that thinks it knows best. These “land lovers” who unintentionally harm and damage their places are deficient in an essential virtue for living and acting in a place well: wisdom. Affection and love, without the solid foundation and masterful guiding hand of wisdom, have the potential to be deadly. It may not all turn on affection after all.
One person who is keenly aware of this danger, through regrettable firsthand experience, is, perhaps, the person we would least expect to be named among the “land harmers”. Wendell Berry became painfully alert to the possibility of being a danger to the land he loved after his ill-fated attempt at digging a pond. His intentions were noble: to make good agricultural use of a steep hillside and perhaps also to enhance the biodiversity of the land under his care. In digging this pond, he was doing what he thought was best, in a way which he thought was good and proper. His intentions were loving and laudable. The outcome was dire.
“We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.
The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.”2
Through his actions, Mr. Berry made an enduring scar upon the ground he loved.3 It was his fault, no one else’s — the product of “too little knowledge”, too little wisdom. His love impelled him to act for his land; to improve it, to put it to good use. But it was this very love that caused a lasting and painful scar. If Mr. Berry, the foremost Wise Agrarian, became guilty of such a tragedy, how much more do we need to be attuned to the very real potential of danger each and every time we dig into the skin of the land we live upon or make a change to the fabric of the community we live within.
It is thus incumbent upon us to consider how we can avoid such a tragic fate. Unlike most of us, Mr. Berry was wise enough to seek outside and expert advice before undertaking his project. But even that was insufficient. The idiosyncrasies and particularities of any place — its geology, geomorphology, social history, climate, and ecology — are far too great and complex for any group of experts to fully search out and know, let alone completely understand. Its place-bound facts and figures would fill library’s worth of books, and hidden deep within this literature may be a seemingly insignificant factor that will confound our best laid plans — as which happened to Mr. Berry and his pond. Emergent effects and “unknown unknowns” seem to always rear their ugly heads no matter how many precautions we put in place. Profound humility is thus in order. A degree of ignorance, of stepping out into the ecological, social, and geophysical darkness, will always remain whenever we act upon our place. And in the darkness, there is danger — the danger of unintended harm. Only the humble and the wise should tread out into it.
To fully and competently care for our place requires perfect knowledge and wisdom — an utter impossibility for created beings in light of our fundamental and irrevocable limitations. But that perfect understanding is impossible does not mean that the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge is a vain and pointless endeavour. Far from it. Though possessing wisdom does not guarantee that we will act in a way which is good to the land, it dramatically raises the odds that our actions will cohere with the realities and needs of our place. And with each sage, expert, and book duly consulted, the odds rise further.
However, most of us, if we care to admit it, are not as prudent as Mr. Berry was when he built his pond. We do not earnestly seek out expert advice before we act. We are too susceptible to the virulent strain of prideful individualism that our modern western culture is chronically infected with. We think that we know best — and we act accordingly. We kid ourselves that because our intentions are good, because we love and want the best for our places, that we will only do them good. We forget that without wisdom, love can be deadly. We forget that wise is the man who seeks much counsel.4
Cultivating rich wisdom and seeking varied counsel requires time. Impatience, like individualism, appears to be another disease which we moderns are highly susceptible to. And it is our impatience that most often spells disaster for our places. When we observe that something is wrong, or that something could be improved, we want to fix it now. Love is impatient in the presence of its beloved’s suffering. But in our haste, we forget Mr. Stegner’s words that we may be a danger to our beloved land, and we all too readily jettison the need to acquire wisdom. Thus, in our haste, we act imprudently and tragically, may cause more harm than good.
Though there are plenty of times where immediate action is warranted — to stop an acute source of pollution, to rescue an imperilled creature, to extinguish a fire (sometimes)5 — at other times, the most expedient and loving thing we can do to our place is to stop and wait, watch and learn. We need to let our knowledge of our place be well marinated in the juices of wisdom, time, and experience. Only then should we act in any significant manner.
When Paul Kingsnorth bought the land he now lives on in rural Ireland, he wisely resisted the urge to immediately act.6 Instead, he did the most prudent thing possible: he walked, watched, and noted. He did this repeatedly for months on end, and only then did he begin to grasp what it was his land needed and how it might respond to his plans. He understood that only after taking this long apprenticeship of observation could he then act and be a blessing to his land. He needed to know it at a deep and intimate level before he could care for it — for to care for something rightly, we need to know it deeply as well as love it intensely. Mr. Kingsnorth humbly understood that without this apprenticeship the chances were that he would be a malign and not a convivial presence to the land he had the responsibility to steward. It was a thoroughly wise course of (in)action that he took.
Like Mr. Kingsnorth’s land, what your place may need at the moment is for you to resist acting and start learning as a patient, observant student. A student who will, in time, mature into a master who is able to instinctively work along the grain of his or her place, and not against it.
What, then, is there for us to do? An inappropriate response to Mr. Stegner’s wisdom would be to abstain from acting upon our places out of a paralysing fear. As members of a particular place, we are called to be its stewards and faithful residents for its good. This will often require us to act, especially when we are confronted with things in need of healing or protection. To refrain from acting is to renege on our duty like the unfaithful servant in the Parable of the Talents. Though every action is a risk, if it is undertaken in a wise, loving, and patient manner we will have done our loving duty.
Even if we get things wrong (and we will, for the law of unintended consequences is indeed a law), we should not fear acting. Our places are forgiving to those who seek to be a blessing but who make inevitable small-scale errors. Through the workings of time, nature will often heal and cover over our mistakes, as it did for Mr. Berry’s failed pond. Moreover, the members of a generous and convivial community abound in compassion and forgiveness to those who try their utmost for good but are hampered by unintended consequences, unforeseen circumstances, or things they did not or could not know.
What thus remains is for us to deepen our love and our wisdom for our place — and then to faithfully act. We need to seek out sages and rooted members who know our places intimately and have lived proven lives of faithfulness and blessing to it. By sitting at their feet, and watching how they behave, we can learn the practices of blessing and start the lifelong journey of becoming a master in the particularities of our place. We will never become a flawless, omniscient master — our limitations will make sure of that. But as time wears on, we will increasingly learn the dynamics of our place, will play along in synchronicity to its rhythm and slowly, but surely, our instincts will become in tune with what is good and right.
We will be a blessing to the place where we are, the place that we love.
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Of course, those who are forced or trapped to live where they are may understandably lack a sense of love to the place they are.
Wendell Berry, Damage.
Ibid.
Proverbs 11:14.
Sometimes, a fire is just what a place needs, especially those places where fire is part of the natural ecological cycle.
Paul Kingsnorth, Learning What To Make of It.
I highly recommend Louis Bromfield’s “Pleasant Valley” and “Malabar Farm” for another view of this land stewardship care vs. harm dilemma. Thanks for your thoughtful writing on this critically important topic, Hadden!
I love reading other peoples thoughts and going, “Wow, I’m thinking about the same things!”