At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology

by David Landis Barnhill

Nature writing, as Thoreau knew, can be deeply subversive because it points to ways of living that diverge fundamentally from dominant attitudes. Thoreau would have welcomed these essays by America's most important nature writers, for in exploring our intrinsic relationship with the earth, they also consider our alienation from nature and how that alienation is manifested.

The book's principal focus is on the possibilities of being at home on the Finding place, reinhabitation, and becoming native.The collection begins with essays by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, who accentuate the links between culture and nature. Other essays speak to the loss of place and to being stewards of nature and of bioregionalism, nativeness, and of interdependent communities, be they in rural areas or urban neighborhoods. Several essays address how our current ideologies of growth and individualism run counter to a sustainable relationship to the land and to each other. In the final three essays, Gary Snyder critiques various views of nature, Alice Walker articulates a vision of a responsive universe, and Linda Hogan celebrates the interaction of nature and human habitation. The contributors' views, writings, and contexts are variegated, but all share a sense that human identity is intimately tied to the land one lives on. And as in an ecosystem, the collection's great diversity yields abundant riches.

At Home on the Earth represents the cutting edge of environmental thinking in the United States today. Throughout, the interactions between humans and nature convey a politics of hope, one sustained by faith in place itself. As Gary Snyder writes, "We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit."

Genres: Nature, Philosophy

344 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 1999

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being at home on the earth. Being at home with the earth. Being at home on Earth. What does being, home, and earth mean to you? I brought this book with me and reflected on in in the mountains, a place that feels like home to me but still takes my breath away and creates euphoria. I was in a new part of the mountains, and just felt the lessons here dissolve in my bones with the snow and sunshine and green forest. I also listened to an On Being podcast episode with Dr. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and wisdom giver who reminds us why many people of color avoid nature because their ancestors were forced to be laborers on the land and the woods were never safe for them, and it broke my heart even more wide open. Drew Lanham – 'I Worship Every Bird that I See' | The On Being Project - The On Being Project



A book like this may be the key, I wish I could gift it to anyone who is absolutely against the environmental movement or indifferent. I don’t know what else to do or say or show to move the unmoveable. I am not feeling hopeless, just unable to envision what it would take. But I will continue to do what I do, and hope thinkers and writers like this can reach more people and update these ideas.

Most resonant quotes:

Classical theology saw nature as a book, reading its symbols in order to understand the mind of a heavenly author. Our culture reads nature like a map, defined by roads leading to roads leading to places of money, the land merely blank space…there is another kind of vision. The eyes feel the curve and slope of the earth as it flows, following the water to the sea. The mind follows as well, wondering what creek lies below, what stream below that, what river. It is a geographic vision. What is here does not end here; all is unbroken. David Landis Barnhill

So we are engaged in an ongoing struggle, a search for a new relation to the earth. It is also an old relationship: to be in and of place, to truly inhabit the land rather than just live on it. Why is it important? The answer is all around us in the destruction of habitats, species, and individual beings…the answer also lies inside us, in a psychological rupture from the physical matrix of our life-nature, and our bodies. And the answer is in the way we treat each other: our debasement and abuse of nature is linked with our debasement and abuse of people. To heal the social and the psychological, we need to heal our relationship with the earth. David Landis Barnhill

I tell my students that the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape. It is an investment that represents perhaps thirty thousand years of habitation…the Indian has been here a long time; he is at home here. That simple and obvious truth is one of the most important realities of the Indian world, and it is integrated in the Indian mind and spirit…the Native American’s attitudes towards this land have been formulated over…a span that reaches back to the end of the Ice Age. Very old in the Native American worldview is the conviction that the earth is vital, that there is a spiritual dimension to it, a dimension in which man rightly exists. it follows logically that there are ethical imperatives in this matter: Inasmuch as I am in the land, it is appropriate that I should affirm myself in the spirit of the land. I shall celebrate my life in the world and the world in my life. in the natural order man invest himself in the landscape and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience. This trust is sacred. N. Scott Momaday

From the Emergence Place: Pueblo potters, the creators of petroglyphs and oral narratives, never conceived of removing themselves from the earth and sky. So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. ‘A portion of territory they eye can comprehend in a single view’ does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and their surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory they survey. Viewers are as much part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on. There is no high mesa edge or mountain peak where one can stand and not immediately be part of all that surrounds. Leslie Marmon Silko

when we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. the ancestors taught me it was so. as a child, I loved playing in dirt, in that rick Kentucky soil, that was a source of life. before I understood anything about the pain and exploitation of the southern system of sharecropping, I understood that grown-up black folks loved the land… from the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Seminoles methods for rice cultivation. Native people taught recently arrived black folks about the many uses of corn. Sharing the reverence for the earth, they helped one another remember that, despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone. 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…if we can think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept the mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche. bell hooks

I think I am telling you that the animals of the planet are in desperate peril and that they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they are seeking sanctuary. But I am also telling you that we are connected to them as least as intimately as we are connected to trees. Without plant life human beings could not breathe. Plants produce oxygen. Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. “Magic,” intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life-itself- will no longer be able to breathe in us. One day it occurred to me that if all the birds died, as they might well do, eventually, from the poisonings of their air, water, and food, it would be next to impossible to describe to our children the wonder of their flight.

But what I am also sharing with you is this thought- the Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. I realize now that I did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world do our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come where it is sincerely invited. Love will overflow every sanctuary given it. Truth will grow where the fertilizer that nourishes it is also truth…Knock and the door shall be opened. Ask and you shall receive. Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me- and to yourself. For we are one. “God” answers prayers. Which is another way of saying, “the Universe responds.” We are indeed the world. Only if we have reason to fear what is in our own hearts need we fear for the planet. Teach yourself peace.

Pass it on.
Alice Walker

There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty; the spirit of creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know any certainty what was good for even us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world- to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity- our own capacity for life- that is stifled by our arrogant assumption: the creation itself is stifled.

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it…. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. Wendell Berry

Our place is part of what we are. Yet even a ‘place’ has a kind of fluidity: it passes through space and time. A place will have been grasslands, then conifers, then beech and elm. It will have been half riverbed, it will have been plowed by ice. And then it will be cultivated, paved, sprayed, dammed, graded, built up. But each is only for a while, and that will be just another set of lines on the palimpsest. The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of the swirl of forces. Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild. A place on earth is a mosaic within larger mosaics.

There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land, they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into “native americans.” For the non-Native Americans to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island. Gary Snyder

When we arrived, we brought with us an attitude that the region was here for our exploitation. Even though we broke our treaties with the Indian tribes, we did recognize their rights and made treaties with them. It never entered our minds that we should have also made treaties with the rivers and with the land and with the region as a whole…Such as treaty, or some such spiritual bond, between ourselves and the natural world is needed… the river and its valley are neither our enemy to be conquered nor our servant to be controlled…it is the ultimate psychic as well as the physical context out of which we emerge into being and by which we are nourished, guided, healed, and fulfilled. As the gulls soaring above the river in its estuary region, as the blossoms along its banks, the fish within its water, so, too, the river is a celebration of existence, of life lived in intimate association with the sky, the winds from every direction, the sunlight. Thomas Berry

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ode to a live I will never quite be able to live, but written in a way that still inspires me to live it. I recommend this to anyone who yearns for a connection to the land they inhabit. Whether you're a city dweller or a wild animal sleeping in earthen dens, this book is for you. Likely, while you're reading it, you'll stand up and go outside in a way you haven't done in a while. I'm rereading sections constantly--it's a great book to pick up and put down.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting collection of essays about nature, the earth, place and how we humans ought to relate to them. Unlike the religions that dominate our culture and sometimes seem to advocate for total use of earth and its resources, these authors speak of a spirituality that puts humans back in touch with mother earth and encourages us to work with nature instead of abusing it. SOME but not ALL of the authors are Native Americans. It is a very diverse list of authors. The book is very spiritual and philosophical.

Some quotes from several essays:
“The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly— an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.” Wendell Berry p. 48

“We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.” Wendell Berry p. 72

speaking of religion: “The heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions.” Wendell Berry p. 75

"Just now we are, as it were, returning to the valley, finding our place once again after a long period of alienation. At such a moment in our own history, as well as in the history of the region, we need first of all an extreme sensitivity to the needs of all the various components of the valley community—the needs of the river, the soil, the air; the needs of the various living forms that inhabit the valley; and the special needs of the human community dwelling here in the valley. We need to know how these relate to one another. Prior to our coming from abroad, all of these components of the region had worked out a mutually enhancing relationship. The valley was flourishing.”
Thomas Berry pp. 108-109

After finding in the woods the bones of a deer that died of a broken leg: “Then I realized that loving nature meant loving it all, accepting nature exactly as it is, not idealizing it or ignoring the hard truths, not reducing it to an imaginary world of peace and perfection. How could I claim the beauty of the flame without accepting the heat that it made?” Richard K. Nelson p. 140