Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [66]
A Sense of Place—A Sense of Self
IAN McCALLUM
“Know thyself.”
–Apollo
In 1973 the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I would like to suggest, in that same light, that nothing in psychology makes sense either. To me, it will be almost impossible to know ourselves without an understanding and appreciation of what and where we have come from and of how we have survived as a species. Has it ever occurred to you that we are living evidence of a little over two million years of hominin survival, that we share a common one-hundred-million-year bloodline with every mammal and that our ancestors are in our genes? All mammals—from bats and polecats to tigers and chimpanzees—share more than 90 percent of our DNA. Crocodiles and birds share more than 80 percent; fruit flies around 40 percent. A fungus is closer to being human (22 percent of the human genome) than a plant (10–15 percent). We are not only related, we belong. The animals are in our blood. But let us not forget that we are in their blood also—we too gnash and gnaw. We too have our alarm calls, our cries of territory, of sexual display and discovery. We experience fear, frustration, and rage, and we are not the only ones who die of a broken spirit. Let’s not forget that the landscape is in our skin as well—every element from silica and hydrogen to lithium, phosphorous and gold can be traced in the human body. The poets are right. We are the dust of the earth and of the stars.
I have a notion that our sense of self, our sense of who we are in the world and of where we belong, is intimately associated with a deep historical sense of landscape—an ancient memory of origins, of where we have come from and of the shared survival strategies of all living things. For some, this landscape is the desert and the open plains and everything associated with it—not just the sight of them, but the sound, the feel, the smell, the taste, the movement. For others it is the mountains and then there are those whose sense of self is intimately linked to ice and water. “This place is in my blood,” we sometimes say of these places or, more poignantly, “I feel as if I have come home.” To lose this sense of connection with the landscape is to suffer one of the most overlooked psychiatric disorders of our time. It is a condition that I call ecological amnesia. We have forgotten our wild heritage, of where we have come from and of who we are—the human animal. In his poem “The Panther,” Rainer Maria Rilke describes this amnesia brilliantly. Putting himself into the skin of a panther that has spent its life behind the bars of a cage, he reenacts an image of wildness that you and I can readily relate to, but which has long since been “barred” from our lives:
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
Characterized by a restless sense of displacement, this amnesia presents as a kind of homesickness, identity confusion, and a low-grade depression in which landscape, animals, geography, and a spirit of place are either completely absent from the vocabulary of the patient, or, when asked about, these very conditions of life are described as though they were mere aspects of it. When reminded, these patients are often caught by surprise by the emotional impact of the questions put to them: “When you were a child, did you have a tree in your garden?” “Were there mountains near your town?” “Was there a stream near your home that you used to play in and do you know if it’s still flowing?” “Do you miss it?” “How old were you when you first saw the ocean?” “Did you have pet animals?” “What is your favorite wild animal and why?” “What is your favorite landscape … and