The LOCAL and the local

Last week in class I mentioned something about whether or not the terms global and local are strictly limited to geography. I couldn't really vocalize it then, but after our class discussion and reading Heise, I realized that what I was trying to vocalize was the idea of scale and relevancy. Heise discusses in chapter three the problem of scale in the local: what is local can be as small as a corner of a room, or as big as a country (or bigger). So with the range of local being potentially huge, the implications of local in various (con)texts can lead to a greater understanding of what we mean when we say local.

For example, in Momaday's "A First American Views His Land" time seems play a integral role in the local, as we are given glimpses of sustenance spanning in time from Paleo-Indian survival to the Native American "conservationist" hunting. Momaday discusses the trust shared by land and humans of these times, suggesting both a timeliness and a timelessness of a relationship with the local. Also, a lot of the pieces we've read (Sanders and Berry come to mind) claim that a staying put is the only way to foster a sense of place--really we can only know the local. If we can only know the local, and as Momaday states, land is sacred in racial memory (580), then what is local certainly has the ability to be geographically distant, yet emotionally and mentally close.

For both hooks, what is local is/can be bodily. In "Touching the Earth" hooks, much like Momaday, recognizes feelings of locality in racial memory. However, she furthers this notion in her discussion of the connections between land (and displacement) with the body, stating, "Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white-supremacist assumptions about black identity. Learning contempt for blackness, southerners transplanted in the north suffered both culture shock and soul loss" (106). Such a large scale displacement and diaspora as the one hooks discusses equates the idea of local with a collective and physical body. The further one becomes from the geographically local, the more estranged the bodily local becomes. In a foreign place, the body becomes foreign.

Local takes on a more common identity in Di Chiro's "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice"--that of the city/neighborhood. But when considering hooks' and Momaday's emphasis of the local as being bred in the bone, we realize that there's much more at stake in Environmental Justice activism than even human lives. A sense of individual and community identity is woven through the local, and poisoning the inhabitants means poisoning a race, a culture, a body.

So, hopefully this exemplifies my questioning of the local from last week, which was spurred initially by Berry's claim that "practice can only be local" ("Preserving the Wilderness" 518). If we open up our perception of what it means to be local, then maybe this statement is less absolute than we originally thought.

Also, I've been noticing how much of my favorite music employs ecocritical tropes. If you have a few minutes to listen to beautiful music and are curious about what goes through my head while I'm washing dishes, here you go; the lyrics end around the 3 minute mark:

(How can I make it so it doesn't cut off the video frame? It's the smallest YouTube embedding size available.)